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The journey was the reward

October 5, 2011 in Business, News, Past, Personal, Quote, Technology | 24 comments

I was in the midst of late edits on The Intention Economy this afternoon, wondering if I should refer to Steve Jobs in the past tense. I didn’t want to, but I knew he’d be gone by the time the book comes out next April, if he wasn’t gone already. So I decided to make the changes, and stopped cold before the first one. I just couldn’t go there.

Then the bad news came a few minutes ago, through an AP notification on my iPhone. Tonight we all have to go there.

Thirteen years, one month and one day ago, I wrote an email to Dave Winer, in response to a DaveNet post on Steve’s decision to kill off Apple’s clones. (Dave had also posted notes from an interview with Steve himself.) Dave published the email. Here’s the part that matters:

So Steve Jobs just shot the cloners in the head, indirectly doing the same to the growing percentage of Mac users who prefered cloned Mac systems to Apple’s own. So his message to everybody was no different than it was at Day One: all I want from the rest of you is your money and your appreciation for my Art.

It was a nasty move, but bless his ass: Steve’s art has always been first class, and priced accordingly. There was nothing ordinary about it. The Mac “ecosystem” Steve talks about is one that rises from that Art, not from market demand or other more obvious forces. And that art has no more to do with developers, customers and users than Van Gogh’s has to do with Sotheby’s, Christie’s and art collectors.

See, Steve is an elitist and an innovator, and damn good at both. His greatest achievements are novel works of beauty and style. The Apple I and II were Works of Woz; but Lisa, Macintosh, NeXT and Pixar were all Works of Jobs. Regardless of their market impact (which in the cases of Lisa and NeXT were disappointing), all four were remarkable artistic achievements. They were also inventions intended to mother necessity — and reasonably so. That’s how all radical innovations work. (Less forward marketers, including Bill Gates, wait for necessity to mother invention, and the best of those invent and implement beautifully, even though that beauty is rarely appreciated.)

To Steve, clones are the drag of the ordinary on the innovative. All that crap about cloners not sharing the cost of R&D is just rationalization. Steve puts enormous value on the engines of innovation. Killing off the cloners just eliminates a drag on his own R&D, as well as a way to reposition Apple as something closer to what he would have made the company if he had been in charge through the intervening years.

The simple fact is that Apple always was Steve’s company, even when he wasn’t there. The force that allowed Apple to survive more than a decade of bad leadership, cluelessness and constant mistakes was the legacy of Steve’s original Art. That legacy was not just an OS that was 10 years ahead of the rest of the world, but a Cause that induced a righteousness of purpose centered around a will to innovate — to perpetuate the original artistic achievements. And in Steve’s absence Apple did some righeous innovation too. Eventually, though, the flywheels lost mass and the engine wore out.

In the end, by when too many of the innovative spirts first animated by Steve had moved on to WebTV and Microsoft, all that remained was that righteousness, and Apple looked and worked like what it was: a church wracked by petty politics and a pointless yet deeply felt spirituality.

Now Steve is back, and gradually renovating his old company. He’ll do it his way, and it will once again express his Art.

These things I can guarantee about whatever Apple makes from this point forward:

  1. It will be original.
  2. It will be innovative.
  3. It will be exclusive.
  4. It will be expensive.
  5. It’s aesthetics will be impeccable.
  6. The influence of developers, even influential developers like you, will be minimal. The influence of customers and users will be held in even higher contempt.
  7. The influence of fellow business artisans such as Larry Ellison (and even Larry’s nemesis, Bill Gates) will be significant, though secondary at best to Steve’s own muse.

Turns out Steve’s muse was the best in the history of business. No one-hit wonders. We’re talking about world-changing stuff. Again and again and again.

Watch this clip from Robert X. Cringeley’s “Triumph of the Nerds” public TV special, filmed back when Steve was still running NeXT. This one too. Then look at what Steve did after coming back. Not just the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Pixar and the laptops we see with glowing apples all over the place. Look at the Apple Stores. I’ve been told that Apple Stores are top-grossing retail shops in every mall they occupy. Even if that’s not true, it’s believable.

I’ve also been told that Apple Stores were Steve’s idea. I don’t know if that’s true either, but it makes sense, because they succeeded where nearly every other attempt at the same thing failed. To get there, Steve and Apple had to look past the smoking corpses of Gateway, Circuit City, Computerland, Radio Shack and all the other computer stores that had failed, and do something very different and much better. And they did.

I was wrong about one thing in my list above. I don’t think Steve regarded customers and users with contempt, except in the sense that he believed he knew better than they did. As an elitist, he also knew that calling the smartest and most employable Apple users “geniuses” was great bait for employment serving customers at Apple Stores.

There is no shortage of quotes by and about Steve Jobs tonight. But the best quote is the one he uttered so long ago I can’t find a source for it (maybe one of ya’ll can): The journey is the reward.

His first hit, the Apple II, was “The computer for the rest of us.” So now is his legacy.

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Truly public radio

September 6, 2011 in Broadcasting, infrastructure, Journalism, Life, Links, News, Photography, Places, problems, radio, Technology, Travel, weather | 3 comments

Rochester, Vermont

My favorite town in Vermont is Rochester. I like to stop there going both ways while driving my kid to summer camp, which means I do that up to four times per summer. It’s one of those postcard-perfect places, rich in history, gracing a lush valley along the White River, deep in the Green Mountains, with a park and a bandstand, pretty white churches and charm to the brim.

My last stop there was on August 20, when I shot the picture above in the front yard of Sandy’s Books & Bakery, after having lunch in the Rochester Cafe across the street. Not shown are the 200+ cyclists (motor and pedal) who had just come through town on the Last Mile Ride to raise funds for the Gifford Medical Center‘s end-of-life care.

After Hurricane Irene came through, one might have wondered if Rochester itself might need the Center’s services. Rochester was one of more than a dozen Vermont towns that were isolated when all its main roads were washed out. This series of photos from The Republican tells just part of the story. The town’s website is devoted entirely to The Situation. Here’s a copy-and-paste of its main text:

Relief For Rochester

Among the town’s losses was a large section of Woodlawn Cemetery, much of which was carved away when a gentle brook turned into a hydraulic mine. Reports Mark Davis of Valley News,

Rochester also suffered a different kind of nightmare. A gentle downtown brook swelled into a torrent and ripped through Woodlawn Cemetery, unearthing about 25 caskets and strewing their remains throughout downtown.

Many of the graves were about 30 years old, and none of the burials was recent.Yesterday, those remains were still outside, covered by blue tarps.

Scattered bones on both sides of Route 100 were marked by small red flags.

“We can’t do anything for these poor people except pick it up,” said Randolph resident Tom Harty, a former state trooper and funeral home director who is leading the effort to recover the remains.

It was more than 48 hours before officials in Rochester — which was cut off from surrounding towns until Tuesday — could turn their attention to the problem: For a time, an open casket lay in the middle of Route 100, the town’s main thoroughfare, the remains plainly visible.

I found that article, like so much else about Vermont, on VPR News, one of Vermont Public Radio‘s many services. When the going gets tough, the tough use radio. During and after natural disasters, radio is the go-to medium. And no radio service covers or serves Vermont better than VPR. The station has five full-size stations covering most of the state, with gaps filled in by five more low-power translators. (VPR also has six classical stations, with their own six translators.) When I drive around the state it’s the single radio source I can get pretty much everywhere. I doubt any other station or network comes close. Ground conductivity in Vermont is extremely low, so AM waves don’t go far, and there aren’t any big stations in Vermont on AM anyway. And no FM station is bigger, or has as many signals, as VPR.

One big reason VPR does so much, so well, is that it serves its customers, which are its listeners. That’s Marketing 101, but it’s also unique to noncommercial radio in the U.S. Commercial radio’s customers are its advertisers.

VPR’s services only begin with what it does on the air. Reporting is boffo too. Here’s VPR’s report on Rochester last Thursday, in several audio forms, as well as by transcription on that Web page. They use the Web exceptionally well, including a thick stream of tweets at @vprnet.

I don’t doubt there are many other media doing great jobs in Vermont. And at the local level I’m sure some stations, papers and online media do as good a job as VPR does state-wide.

But VPR is the one I follow elsewhere as well as in Vermont, and I want to do is make sure it gets the high five it deserves. If you have others (or corrections to the above), tell me in the comments below.

Some additional links:

Remembering Hurricane Bob

August 26, 2011 in Geography, News, Places, Strange stuff, weather | 2 comments

Got an interesting email from sister Jan, retired Commander with the U.S. Navy, who was stationed in Newport when hit in 1991. With her permission, here it is:

It was almost exactly 20 years ago that I rode out the direct hit Bob made on Newport.  As I recall, Bob had flirted with the entire East Coast, waving at Miami to Cape May while eluding the weathermen who wanted the story in their backyard.  When it turned ENE away from  NJ and the I-95 corridor the story died out.  That was on Friday evening.  The Weather Channel, and Cable, were still young; so if the networks didn’t see a story, most of us didn’t hear the story because to them  there was no story.

Sunday afternoon, as I was getting ready to leave Mom in Providence, we heard on the radio that Bob was coming back toward NE, and Cape Cod looked like it might be in the cross-hairs.  By the 6 PM news, we were in the larger target area, and the run on supplies had started.  Since I lived in a huge 150-year-old mansion (at the highest point in town) I told everyone to come on over, and we’d ride it out there.  By 5 AM monday, we knew that Block Island, the Narragansett Bay and Newport would probably be at ground zero.

Funny, the day of Bob was downright weird.  The storm was tight — there wasn’t a breath of wind at 9 AM. We were stressed waiting, but around noon we were hearing that Block Island was probably going to get a direct hit, and so would we.  And boy, did we ever.  All my New Jersey memories of hurricanes were that they came at night.  But because Bob came through in the middle of the day, I think the experience was very memorable, and a lot more impressive and nerve-wracking. As I remember …

  • 21 people and a cocker spaniel at my place, eating everything in our cumulative kitchens that might spoil.  Wired from adrenaline and drinking gallons of coffee.
  • When the eye went over, everyone, including the dog, fell asleep for at least 5 minutes.  It was the flower fields outside Oz all over again. Pressure change, we were told. Happened to a lot of folks. But talk about weird.
  • We watched the 15′ of top of a pine tree zip down Old Beach Rd. like a cruise missile at an altitude of 20′ max.
  • We watched  the huge 100+ yr. flowering chestnuts whipping in the wind, flinging their spiky nuts like mini-balls all over the place. Some were later found embedded in the stucco of the house.  (Later in the fall, the tops of those trees were celebrating a false spring while the lower part were fully autumn.
  • After the eye went by (came in directly over the house — we saw blue — the storm petered out quickly and we went out to walk around.  There wasn’t a spot of pavement to see – everything was covered in leaves and limbs and debris.
  • No power, of course, but the outage was everywhere.  Restoration was in an ever decreasing circle and my place was last. Eight days after the storm, the radio said all power was restored with the exception of the Rhode Island Ave/Old Beach Rd. intersection.  That was me.
  • They had to use snowplows in some cases to clear the streets and for the rest of Aug and Sept the streets of Newport were like country lanes — lovely packed leaf and twig crush for a roadbed.
  • The collected debris was piled in the parking lot on the beach at the bottom of Memorial Boulevard, and it was about 20′ high and 40′ wide, running the full 1000′ length of the lot.  After waiting for what seemed like weeks for the right off-shore winds, they started the burning and it seemed to go on forever.
  • Someone forgot to cash in, so we never saw an I Survived Bob tee shirt.

Could be Newport will be in the cross-hairs again with . That’s what one model currently predicts, but the others all vector in west of there. (Here’s a current map.)

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Obama’s circular firing squad

August 21, 2011 in News, Politics | 41 comments

I normally avoid talking politics here, but it’s hard to stay quiet while partisans on the left help with the demolition project that partisans on the right started the moment Barack Obama arrived in the White House.

One example: Hillary Told You So in The Daily Beast. Here’s how it begins:

At a New York political event last week, Republican and Democratic office-holders were all bemoaning President Obama’s handling of the debt-ceiling crisiswhen someone said, “Hillary would have been a better president.”

“Every single person nodded, including the Republicans,” reported one observer.

At a luncheon in the members’ dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, a 64-year-old African-American from the Bronx was complaining about Obama’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the implacable hostility of congressional Republicans when an 80-year-old lawyer chimed in about the president’s unwillingness to stand up to his opponents. “I want to see blood on the floor,” she said grimly.

A 61-year-old white woman at the table nodded. “He never understood about the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy,’” she said.

Another is Obama in the Valley, by Charles Blow in the New York Times. Concludes he,

The country needs the president to rise to this crisis in word, spirit and deed. We need him to reach out of his nature and into the nation’s need. We are on the precipice. There’s growing concern that we may slip into a second, more painful recession. There is little optimism that the housing crisis will loosen its grip on the economy anytime soon. The unspeakable truth is that we may well be on the leading edge of a prolonged period of national stagnation, if not decline.

A robotic Sustainer-in-Chief with an eerie inhumanity will not satisfy. At this moment, we need less valley and more mountaintop.

Oh please.

He’s not Moses, and that’s not his job. He’s the President. He presides. He doesn’t rule. We gave him an awful job, and he’s doing it with dignity, sobriety, intelligence, and a variety of other personal and administrative virtues that were absent or compromised in the prior two administrations.

On November 8, 2008, The Onion ran Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job. It was prophesy:

In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.

A goof with truth.

It doesn’t matter if there’s a right-wing conspiracy (which there is). The right wing doesn’t need a conspiracy while it remains what it became in the age of Fox News and talk radio: an uncompromising partisan bloc devoted utterly to defeating its political opponents, as a Prime Directive. The GOP is hardly unified in all its positions, but as a partisan bloc all its guns have been aimed since 2008 at President Obama, and they haven’t stopped firing. Meanwhile folks on the left have convened a circular firing squad, with their Main Man in the middle.

If Hillary had won, she’d be there now too, because she’d be disappointing the left just as much as Obama is. She’d have to, because she’d be President, and not just a candidate.

The Republicans have also hated Hillary far longer than they’ve hated Obama, and for all the same reasons: she’s a tax & spend Liberal who prefers Big Hands-on Government to the smaller Hands-off kind (that lives as an ideal in the collective Republican mind, even though we’ve haven’t had it in anybody’s living memory, or maybe ever). It wouldn’t matter if she was “tougher.” Her opposition would be just as uncooperative, hostile and determined to drive her from office. Absolute unity and intransigence on Core Principles is the GOP’s chemo for the body politic: it will kill off the cancer of leftism before it kills the country.

So the Republicans are succeeding, with help from Democratic outlets like Daily Beast and HuffPo, whose constituencies are tiny fractions of populations that Murdoch outlets and their amen corners on talk radio preach to every day.

Not saying folks on the left should shut up about Obama; just that they should look at the hand he was dealt in the first place, plus what the guy is up against and what his job is. Pleasing his core on the left isn’t Job One, or even Job Ten. Running a country that risks devolving into misery and chaos is Job One.

Personally, I don’t think anybody can do it, because our system is rigged against it. (And, for what it’s worth, I’m a registered Independent whose usual inclination is to vote for None of the Above.)

Anyway, if you want to help the country, go after Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. Because that’s who you’ll get in 2012 if Obama loses.

 

 

On the short good life George Desdunes

August 7, 2011 in Life, News, Past, School | 8 comments

I didn’t know George DesdunesGeorge Desdunes, though now I wish I’d had the privilege. He was a friend of acquaintances who sent out emails in March to lists of people who might want to know he had died and to provide details about his funeral. Those emails were among many others I barely noticed at the time. This afternoon I ran across those emails again while looking for something else, and I became curious. The emails said nothing about who he was and why he died, so I looked him up.

Turns out George was a nineteen-year old sophomore at Cornell when he died during a fraternity hazing event. The university has since rescinded recognition of the fraternity, and George’s mother has sued the fraternity for $25 million, naming twenty fraternity members in the lawsuit. According to that last story, in The Cornell Daily Sun,

Desdunes participated in a mock kidnapping before his death, court documents state. He and another SAE brother were taken to the townhouse apartments on North Campus by several pledge members, and they had their hands and feet tied with zip ties and duct tape. The two were quizzed about “fraternity information and lore,” and when they answered incorrectly they did exercises or were given drinks, such as flavored syrup or vodka, the documents state.

After his death, authorities discovered Desdunes’ blood alcohol level was 0.35, according to court documents related to the criminal charges. However, Andres’ lawsuit states that her son’s blood alcohol level was 0.409. By comparison, the legal limit to drive in New York State is 0.08.

By all accounts (here’s one) George was the kind of kid anybody would like to have as a son, a friend, a mentor: smart, caring, friendly, a good student and athlete… the list goes on. (My second-degree acquaintance with him comes through the camp he attended for a number of years before serving as a counsellor in the last summer of his life.)

One reason I went to a college without fraternities was that I had already endured enough hazing at the boarding school I attended as a teenager. While I know fraternities can be a lot of fun, and that they yield lifelong friendships and support networks, I also believe they formalize social exclusion and (in some cases) cruelty rationalized by tradition.

All I said in the last sentence is arguable, of course; but that’s not what I’m after here.

What I’m after is remembering something more than the story of a young man who died for no good reason (plus a number of bad ones). What I want us to remember is the moral philosophy of Kurt Vonnegut, the author and soldier who survived the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of War during WWII (and whose forced labor required pulling burned bodies from the smoking rubble). Vonnegut summarized that philosophy in just two words: “be kind.”*

Being kind is not at the core of most academic curricula at the college level, much less of fraternity hazing ceremonies. But among our many contradictory human natures, no moral imperative is more essential to our well being, and to the persistence of all that is good in the world.

Kindness is a grace without which George would not have become the good guy he was. That he died for lack of it is less important than what he had of it, and what the rest of us still need to enjoy, and to practice.

* Kurt Vonnegut’s full dictum (from God Bless You Mister Rosewater, his funniest book) is “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” Elsewhere, however, he boils it down to those last two words.

 

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Free ways

July 16, 2011 in Events, infrastructure, News, Strange stuff, Travel | 6 comments

The first time I heard the term “Sepulveda pass,” I thought it was a medical procedure. I mean, 405I was still new to The Coast, and sepulveda sounded like one of those oddball body parts, like uvula or something. (Not speaking of which, I no longer have an uvula. No idea why. It used to be there, but now it’s gone. Strange.)

Anyway, Carmageddon is going on right now, and the Sepulveda pass, a section of the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles, is shut down. My fave links on the matter so far are here, here and here. One of which is that to which Tony Pierce points.

It’ll all be over on Monday. When it comes to fixing freeways, L.A. doesn’t fuck around. No ‘fence, but the Bay Area does.

We had a controlled study of the difference with a pair of earthquakes. In 1989 the Loma Prieta quake dropped a hunk of freeway (called the Cypress Structure) in Oakland, plus a piece of the Bay Bridge. It also damaged several freeways in San Francisco, including the Embarcadero Freeway and the 101-280 interchange. So, what did they do? They got rid of the Embarcadero and the Cypress Structure, took more than a few days to fix the Bay Bridge… and then took years to fix the 101-280 interchange. Years. Lots of them. Meanwhile, when the Northridge quake dropped a hunk of the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles, they got the thing back up in a month or something. (If I have time later I’ll add the links. Right now I’m in Florence, where traffic is Cuissinart of pedestrians, motorcycles, taxis, bicycles and stubby busses. Kind of like the rest of urban Italy, only with a higher ratio of tourists to everything else.)

By the way, the best video you’ll ever see about The 405 is called 405, and was done in 2000 by Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt, who also stars in it. The whole thing is just three minutes long, and it’s perfect. Especially right now. Dig.

Keep North Carolina’s broadband market free

May 17, 2011 in Business, Family, Future, Geography, infrastructure, Law, News, North Carolina, Past, Personal, Politics, problems, Technology | 33 comments

While arguments over network neutrality have steadily misdirected attention toward Washington, phone and cable companies have quietly lobbied one state after another to throttle back or forbid cities, towns and small commercial and non-commercial entities from building out broadband facilities. This Community Broadband Preemption Map, from Community Broadband Networks, tells you how successful they’ve been so far: Broadband Preemption Map Now they’re the verge of succeeding in North Carolina too.

This issue isn’t just close to home for me. I lived in North Carolina for nearly two decades, and I have more blood relatives there than in any other state. (Not to mention countless friends.) Not one of them tells me how great their broadband is. More than a few complain about it. And I can guarantee that the complaints won’t stop once the Governor signs the misleadingly-named “Level Playing Field/Local Gov’t Competition act” (H129), which the cable industry has already been lobbied through the assembly.

The “free market” the phone and cable companies claim to operate in, and which they mostly occupy as a duopoly, is in fact a regulatory zoo where the biggest animals run the place. Neither half of the phone/cable duopoly has ever experienced anything close to a truly free market; but they sure know how to thrive in the highly regulated one they have — at the federal, state and local levels. Here’s Ars on the matter:

Let’s be even clearer about what is at stake in this fight. Muni networks are providing locally based broadband infrastructures that leave cable and telco ISPs in the dust. Nearby Chattanooga, Tennessee’scity owned EPB Fiber Optics service now advertises 1,000Mbps. Wilson, North Carolina is home to the Greenlight Community Network, which offers pay TV, phone service, and as much as 100Mbps Internet to subscribers (the more typical package goes at 20Mbps). Several other North Carolina cities have followed suit, launching their own networks. In comparison, Time Warner’s Road Runner plan advertises “blazing speeds” of 15Mbps max to Wilson area consumers. When asked why the cable company didn’t offer more competitive throughput rates, its spokesperson told a technology newsletter back in 2009 that TWC didn’t think anyone around there wanted faster service. When it comes to price per megabyte, GigaOm recently crunched some numbers and found out that North Carolina cities hold an amazing 7 of 10 spots on the “most expensive broadband in the US” list.

And here’s what Wally Bowen and Tim Karr say in the News & Observer:

North Carolina has a long tradition of self-help and self-reliance, from founding the nation’s first public university to building Research Triangle Park. Befitting the state’s rural heritage, North Carolinians routinely take self-help measures to foster economic growth and provide essential local services such as drinking water and electric power. Statesville built the state’s first municipal power system in 1889, and over the years 50 North Carolina cities and towns followed suit. In 1936, the state’s first rural electric cooperative was launched in Tarboro to serve Edgecombe and Martin counties. Today, 26 nonprofit electric networks serve more than 2.5 million North Carolinians in 93 counties. Strangely, this self-help tradition is under attack. The General Assembly just passed a bill to restrict municipalities from building and operating broadband Internet systems to attract industry and create local jobs. Although pushed by the cable and telephone lobby, similar bills were defeated in previous legislative sessions. But the influx of freshmen legislators and new leadership in both houses created an opening for the dubiously titled “Level Playing Field” bill (HB 129).

No one disputes the importance of broadband access for economic growth and job creation. That’s why five cities – Wilson, Salisbury, Morganton, Davidson and Mooresville – invoked their self-help traditions to build and operate broadband systems after years of neglect from for-profit providers, which focus their investments in more affluent and densely populated areas. Not coincidentally, all five cities own and operate their own power systems or have ties to nonprofit electric cooperatives. (While the bill does not outlaw these five municipal networks, it restricts their expansion and requires them to make annual tax payments to the state as if they were for-profit companies.) How does a state that values independence, self-reliance and economic prosperity allow absentee-owned corporations to pass a law essentially granting two industries – cable and telephone – the power to dictate North Carolina’s broadband future? This question will be moot if Gov. Beverly Perdue exercises her veto power and sends this bill where it belongs: to the dustbin of history.

We don’t need more laws restricting anything around Internet infrastructure build-outs in the U.S. That’s the simple argument here.

We need the phone and cable companies to improve what they can, and we need to encourage and thank them for their good work. (As I sometimes do with Verizon FiOS, over which I am connected here in Massachusetts.)

We also need to recognize that the Internet is a utility and not just the third act (after phone and TV) in the “triple play” that phone and cable companies sell. The Net is more like roads, water, electricity and gas than like TV or telephony (both of which it subsumes). It’s not just about “content” delivered from Hollywood to “consumers,” or about a better way to do metered calls on the old Ma Bell model. It’s about everything you can possibly do with a connection to the rest of the world. The fatter that connection, the more you can do, and the more business can do.

Cities and regions blessed with fat pipes to the Internet are ports on the ocean of bits that now comprise the networked world. If citizens can’t get phone and cable companies to build out those ports, it’s perfectly legitimate for those citizens to do it themselves. That’s what municipal broadband build out is about, pure and simple. Would it be better to privatize those utilities eventually? Maybe. But in the meantime let’s not hamstring the only outlet for enterprise these citizens have found.

Here’s a simple fact for Governor Perdue to ponder: In the U.S. today, the leading innovators in Internet build-out are cities, not phone and cable companies. Look at Chatanooga and Lafayette — two red state cities that are doing an outstanding job of building infrastructure that attracts and supports new businesses of all kinds. Both are doing what no phone or cable companies seems able or willing to do. And both are succeeding in spite of massive opposition by those same incumbent duopolists.

The Internet is a rising tide that lifts all economic boats. At this stage in U.S. history, this fact seems to be fully motivating to enterprises mostly at the local level, and mostly in small cities. (Hi, Brett.) Their customers here are citizens who have direct and personal relationships with their cities and with actual or potential providers there, including the cities themselves. They want and need a level of Internet capacity that phone and cable companies (for whatever reason) are not yet giving them. These small cities provide good examples of The Market at work.

It isn’t government that’s competing with cable and phone companies here. Its people. Citizens.

No, these new build-outs are not perfect. None are, or can be. Often they’re messy. But nothing about them requires intervention by the state. Especially so early in whatever game this will end up being.

I urge friends, relatives and readers in North Carolina to Call Governor Perdue at (800) 662-7952, and to send her emails at  governor.office at nc.gov. Tell her to veto this bill, and to keep North Carolina from turning pink or red on the map above. Tell her to keep the market for broadband as free as it’s been from the beginning.

Bonus link.

[Later, as the last hour approaches…]

Larry Lesig has published an open letter to Governor Perdue, Here is most of it:

Dear Governor Perdue:

On your desk is a bill passed by the overwhelmingly Republican North Carolina legislature to ban local communities from building or supporting community broadband networks. (H.129). By midnight tonight, you must decide whether to veto that bill, and force the legislature to take a second look.

North Carolina is an overwhelmingly rural state. Relative to the communities it competes with around the globe, it has among the slowest and most expensive Internet service. No economy will thrive in the 21st century without fast, cheap broadband, linking citizens, and enabling businesses to compete. And thus many communities throughout your state have contracted with private businesses to build their own community broadband networks.

These networks have been extraordinarily effective. The prices they offer North Carolinians is a fraction of the comparable cost of commercial network providers. The speed they offer is also much much faster.

This single picture, prepared by the Institute for Local Self Reliance, says it all: The yellow and green dots represent the download (x-axis) and upload (y-axis) speeds provided by two community networks in North Carolina. Their size represents their price. As you can see, community networks provide faster, cheaper service than their commercial competitors. And they provide much faster service overall.

2011-05-20-broadbandgraph.png

 

Local competition in broadband service benefits the citizens who have demanded it. For that reason, community after community in North Carolina have passed resolutions asking you to give them the chance to provide the Internet service that the national quasi-monopolies have not. It is why businesses from across the nation have opposed the bill, and business leaders from your state, including Red Hat VP Michael Tiemann, have called upon you to veto the bill.

Commercial broadband providers are not happy with this new competition, however. After spending millions in lobbying and campaign contributions in North Carolina, they convinced your legislature to override the will of local North Carolina communities, and ban these faster, cheaper broadband networks. Rather than compete with better service, and better prices, they secured a government-granted protection against competition. And now, unless you veto H. 129, that protection against competition will become law.

Opponents of community broadband argue that it is “unfair” for broadband companies to have to compete against community-supported networks. But the same might be said of companies that would like to provide private roads. Or private fire protection. Or private police protection. Or private street lights. These companies too would face real competition from communities that choose to provide these services themselves. But no one would say that we should close down public fire departments just to be “fair” to potential private first-responders.

The reason is obvious to economists and scholars of telecommunications policy. As, for example, Professor Brett Frischmann argues, the Internet is essential infrastructure for the 21st century. And communities that rely solely upon private companies to provide public infrastructure will always have second-rate, or inferior, service.

In other nations around the world, strong rules forcing networks to compete guarantee faster, cheaper Internet than the private market alone would. Yet our FCC has abdicated its responsibility to create the conditions under which true private broadband competition might flourish in the United States. Instead, the United States has become a broadband backwater, out-competed not only by nations such as Japan and Korea, but also Britain, Germany and even France. According to a study by the Harvard Berkman Center completed last year, we rank 19th among OECD countries in combined prices for next generation Internet, and 19th for average advertised speeds. Overall, we rank below every major democratic competitor — including Spain — and just above Italy.

In a world in which FCC commissioners retire from the commission and take jobs with the companies they regulate (as Commissioner Baker has announced that she will do, by joining Comcast as a lobbyist, and as former FCC Chairman Powell has done, becoming a cable industry lobbyist), it is perhaps not surprising that these networks are protected from real competition.

But whether surprising or not, the real heroes in this story are the local communities that have chosen not to wait for federal regulators to wake up, and who have decided to create competition of their own. No community bans private networks. No community is unfairly subsidizing public service. Instead, local North Carolina communities are simply contracting to build 21st-century technology, so that citizens throughout the state can have 21st-century broadband at a price they can afford.

As an academic who has studied this question for more than a decade, I join many in believing that H.129 is terrible public policy…

Be a different kind of Democrat, Governor Perdue. I know you’ve received thousands of comments from citizens of North Carolina asking you to veto H.129. I know that given the size of the Republican majority in the legislature, it would be hard for your veto to be sustained.

But if you took this position of principle, regardless of whether or not you will ultimately prevail, you would inspire hundreds of thousands to join with you in a fight that is critical to the economic future of not just North Carolina, but the nation. And you would have shown Republicans and Democrats alike that it is possible for a leader to stand up against endless corporate campaign cash.

There is no defeat in standing for what you believe in. So stand with the majority of North Carolina’s citizens, and affirm the right of communities to provide not just the infrastructure of yesterday — schools, roads, public lighting, public police forces, and fire departments — but also the infrastructure of tomorrow — by driving competition to provide the 21st century’s information superhighway.

With respect,

Lawrence Lessig

To contact the governor, you can email her. If you’re from North Carolina, this link will take you to a tool to call the governor’s office. You can follow this fight on Twitter at @communitynets
You can follow similar fights on Twitter by searching #rootstrikers.

Well put, as usual. Hope it works.

KDFC wounded, KUSF killed (almost)

January 19, 2011 in Art, Broadcasting, Business, Future, music, News, Past, problems, radio | 26 comments

This week the Bay Area loses two of its radio landmarks. On 102.1fm, , which has been broadcasting classical music since 1946, will be replaced by a simulcast of (“K-FOX”), a classic rock station in San Jose. And on 90.3 fm, KUSF, which has been one of the most active and community-involved free-form college radio stations in history, has gone silent. When the signal on 90.3 comes back on the air, it will carry the KDFC call letters and classical music programming. Meanwhile the old KUSF will continue in some form online. The new KDFC will also broadcast on 89.9, which is the former home of , a station licensed to .

This graphic, combined from three coverage maps at Radio-Locator.com, shows the before-and-after situation. One red line is KDFC’s old primary coverage area on 102.1. The other two are its new primary coverage areas on 90.3 and 89.9:

(More about signals below at *)

Since the 90.3 signal is tiny, and the 89.9 signal is far away, KDFC will be losing a great deal of coverage. Neither of the new signals serves the Peninsula, the South Bay or the East Bay beyond Berkely and Oakland. KUSF needs to start over online. On the FM band, it’s dead.

What happened was a three-way deal between , the and the . Entercom is the one of the largest owners of broadcast properties in the country, and an aggressive buyer of broadcast properties. So is USC, which has expanded its classical network from in Los Angeles to five stations spread from Morro Bay to Palm Springs. USF, like many universities, held a broadcast license that had monetary value on the open market while producing no income for the university itself.

According to Radio Ink and other sources, here’s how the deal went down:

  1. USF sold the 90.3 frequency to USC for $3.8 million.
  2. USC also bought KNDL for $2.8 million.
  3. Entercom, which owns KDFC, bought KUFX from the Clear Channel Aloha Trust, and will simulcast KUFX (still as “K-FOX”) over KDFC’s old 102.1 facility. Entercom will also give KDFC’s call letters and record collection to “A new San Francisco-based nonprofit.”

The press releases:

While it’s nice that KDFC has stayed alive, its move to much weaker signals is a far bigger loss for Bay Area classical music listeners than losses suffered by listeners when New York’s WQXR and Boston’s WCRB made similar moves. WQXR stayed on the air with a smaller signal from the same antenna, and WCRB moved to a same-size transmitter a couple dozen miles from the center of town, but most listeners could still get the stations. KDFC’s new facilities only cover a fraction of the population reached by the old signal. Essentially the new station covers San Francisco, and that’s it. More about coverage below*.

KDFC’s listenership is not small. The raw numbers are actually outstanding. According to Radio-Info.com (which leverages Arbitron), KDFC had 632,000 listeners in the most recent ratings period (December 2010), a notch above news-talk leader KGO (624,100). KDFC’s 3.2 average quarter hour (AQH) share was tied for #8 in the market, one notch above “sports giant” KNBR, which scored a 2.8. (KGO was #1 overall for most of the last six decades, and KNBR is an AM powerhouse that covers at least half of California by day and the whole West at night.) In fact, KDFC had better overall numbers than any other Entercom station in the Bay Area.

The problem for Entercom was the format. It’s hard to sell advertising for classical music stations, which have less inventory to offer (sports, news and popular music stations carry many more minutes of advertising per hour), and serve an older audience as well.

Judging from the KDFC statement on its website The Classical Public Radio Network () will hold the license, even though it closed down a few years ago, sort of. It also says,

The new KDFC has already begun to look for new signals to offer reception in the South Bay and the entire Bay Area for our around-the-clock classical programming.

We are happy to let you know Dianne Nicolini, Hoyt Smith, Rik Malone, and Ray White will continue as your on-air hosts, and KDFC’s partnerships with the Bay Area arts and culture community will continue to grow and thrive.

KDFC is the last major commercial classical station in America to make the transition to public radio. This move ensures that classical radio is sustainable for our community into the future. Since 1947, Bay Area classical fans have shown their passionate support for KDFC. Now more than ever, we’re grateful for that support as we begin the new era of Classical KDFC. Comments can be made to  comments at myclassical.org, or by phoning 415-546-8710. If you’d like to send a check as a Founder for the Future of KDFC, please send a check to:

The Classical Public Radio Network, 201 Third Street, 12th floor, San Francisco, CA 94103.

It’s signed by Bill Leuth, Vice President, KDFC. Bill and the other names he mentions are Bay Area classical radio institutions as well.

As for KUSF, maybe going online will be a form of liberation. As signals go, 90.3 barely covered San Francisco. The Internet covers the world. And Internet radio is growing fast. Aribitron now includes online streams in its ratings, which it wouldn’t do that if those streams were not signifiant. In San Francisco, KNBR’s stream had more than 50,000 listeners in November. In Los Angeles, KROQ’s stream had 67,900 listeners in December. Many more people every day are listening to radio on phones and other portable devices. Even Howard Stern, when he renewed with Sirius in December, said the future of satellite listening isn’t over satellite — it’s over the Internet. (Which Jeff Jarvis and I both told him, back when he was still making up his mind. Latelr Howard kindly gave a hat tip to Jeff on the air.)

And hey, KDFC can benefit from the same thing.

Here’s more from The Bay Citizen and the San Francisco Chronicle. And a rescue mission report at SF Weekly… And here’s the audio from a KQED Forum program on the matter. It says that KUSF is slated to become “an online-only training station for students.] Here’s a San Francisco Chronicle story on a gathering at USF at which “almost 500 backers” of KUSF came to confront Stephen A. Privett, the University President. The part that matters:

Privett said he made the decision because the station, dominated by outside volunteers, “was of minimal benefit to my students.”

“This was not a crass business decision about dollars,” Privett said. “This was about ensuring our programs involve our students. … Our primary mission is to our students, it is not to the community at large.”

Privett said some of the $3.75 million would be used to fund the student-led online station, with the rest going to other unspecified educational projects.

Well, “student-led” suggests that the community might still be involved.

For frequent updates follow @KUSF. and at SaveKUSF on Facebook. Feelings are not weak on this matter. KUSF is much loved by its community.

On January 20, I put up a new post suggesting that the KUSF community go for 87.7fm. I think it’s available.

It also amazes me (it’s still January 20) that this post and the next one have not yet received a single comment. Meanwhile my earlier post about Flickr now has 86 comments, and even the highly arcane Geology by Plane has 6. Could it be that the total number of people who care just isn’t that large? Not saying this is a bad thing, just that it’s an isolated one. So far 3,384 people say they like SaveKUSF on Facebook. But liking and doing are way different. As I suggest here, the best bet for doing isn’t trying to make a university turn down $3.8 million for something they clearly wish to unload. It’s to start something new.

* Signal stuff, for the technical:

How should we pronounce 2011?

January 11, 2011 in Journalism, Life, News | 19 comments

Is it “twenty eleven” or “two thousand eleven”?

I’m hearing more of the former, I think. By that I mean “twenty eleven” is more commonly used than was “twenty ten,” an the “thousand” thing is wearing off.

Sooner or later it will have to. I doubt we’ll be saying “two thousand thirty two” when 2032 rolls around. “Thousand” persisted through the ’00s (the “aughts”), but is getting a bit stale now that we’ve turned the caledar up to eleven.

I haven’t bothered to check, but is one more correct than the other? Does the AP have a position on this, for example? Just wondering.

News at the speed of death

January 8, 2011 in News | 16 comments

Five minutes ago the AP pushed a report onto my phone that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been shot. So I went to the AP’s news site. Nothing there. Then to Google News. Nothing yet. Then to Twitter, where it was the second-top story. The top item there was this one, from @KRNV, passing along an NPR report that Ms. Giffords had died.

Her Wikipedia entry already includes the date of her passing: today. Here’s that edit.

She was doing a “Congress on your corner” at a grocery store. Her last tweet (from @rep_giffords) was an invitation to the event. (Or so I read. It doesn’t come up right now.)

Her husband, Mark. E. Kelly, is a Desert Storm veteran who has survived trips to space as an astronaut, and is slated to command the upcoming final Space Shuttle flight. Turns out being a congressperson doing her job in a public marketplace proved more hazardous.

They have two kids, who now join their dad in a living hell.

Of course the comments under news postings are full of assumptions. Nothing yet about the other victims, that I can find. Correction: between the last refresh and this one, NPR now says six have died.

Arizona Public Media’s KUAZ has regular programming.

The TV station sourced most on Twitter has the unlikely name KGUN. It still hasn’t reported on its website that anybody was killed.

I’m listening now to KQTH/104-1The Truth, where the callers and the host are making sure not to blame right wing talk radio, and the second amendment. (Guns don’t kill people, wackos kill people, is the spin.) One caller just said that Rep. Giffords is still alive and in surgery.

The other local news station, Fox-affiliated KNST/790, is playing a TV station’s audio. They are saying a Fox source says she is still alive and in critical condition. They note that she is a Jewish gun-owning wife of an astronaut. They also just say that Gawker reports that the shooter was young and male, and said nothing while shooting or being held down. And four are dead, including one child, and one aide. Puma County Sherriff’s department will have a news conference at 1:30 local time in Tuscon. (Moved to 2pm later.)

KQTH has call-ins. The current caller knows one of the people who was shot, but not killed. He didn’t like Giffords’ politics, “but…” Others are calling for the perpetrator “getting what he deserves.” The host is quick, correctly, to put down callers who speculate on motivation. “I’m not going down this path of tyrannical governments and arming citizens…” The host is actually doing a good job. The caller now is a woman who knows Rep. Giffords, and has nice things to say about her. She’s also saying the perp must be mentally ill.

Are there no non-right wing and/or Fox affiliated news/talk stations in Arizona? Just asking.

Listening to the press conference live now. (2:06pm Tucson time) As I get it… one dead: a nine-year old girl. Rep. Giffords was shot through the head (“through the brain” and “through and through” with “one bullet”), but was responding to commands before she went into surgery. She is out of surgery now and in the ICU.

An AP report on my phone says a federal judge was fatally shot in the attack.

KQTH’s host Jon Justice (the station morning guy came in to handle the shift after the shooting) said that the Sherriff of Pima County blamed right-wing talk radio, and called that irresponsible. Justice (the host, not the noun) is right about that.

The alleged perp, according to KNST, is Jared Loughner, who has a YouTube channel and a MySpace page, which has just been taken down. His final words were “Goodbye friends.” A Twitpic: http://twitpic.com/3o8ajp

Business Insider on Loughner. Has one of his videos, which makes no sense. Something about “accurate information of a new currency.” Says he, “In conclusion, my ambition – is for informing literate dreamers about a new currency; in a few days, you know I’m conscience dreaming! Thank you!” Oh-kay.

KNST says two are dead: the judge and the child. KQTH says just one is dead. They’re at the “Where were you and what were you doing when it happened” stage.

The one obvious media gaffe, at least from where I sit, so far, is NPR’s report that Rep. Giffords was dead. I don’t blame that on their politics (which some are). AP might be wrong about the judge, too, if he’s alive.

The judge is John McCarthy Roll. He was nominated by George Bush on the recommendation of John McCain, for what that’s worth. A bio.

KQHT’s news department says the suspect for sure is Jared Loughner, 22 years old. He’s the guy in custody. The station reports that Loughner was tackled and held down by citizens, until police arrived.

A blah, somewhat religious statement from John McCain.

KNST (@790knst) is saying the judge is indeed dead. Editing of his Wikipedia page is currently halted for new and unregistered users. Many updates today.

Andrew Sullivan and his readers, live-blogging.

Now President Obama is speaking. “At least five people lost their lives.” Among them Judge Roll and a girl “barely nine years old.” Gabby Giffords is a friend of the President’s. “a tragedy for Arizona and for the country.”

That’s it. Brief. KQHT: “We got some information from the President… that contradicts the information we got about 20 minutes ago from UMC.” (That’s the University Medical Center.)

MSNBC video from the archives: Gabrielle Giffords says “Sarah Palin has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.” And yet so far it doesn’t look like the perp was a tool of the Mama Griz. Interesting: Judge Roll had death threats, two years ago, almost certainly unrelated as well.

I gotta get back to work. Been following this while walking around, exercising indoors between sit-down writing sessions.

Parting thought… Interesting that I can’t name a canonical single-source on this thing, except maybe the local radio stations. I can only find tweets for one of those, and they’re kinda low-volume. I believe this is a good thing. The old media still matter, and the new media do too — and both are provisional. Neither will be the same six months or a year from now.

[Later…] In the evening, working in the kitchen, I listened to CNN over Sirius satellite radio. The audio stream was basically the TV one. I’d say the work was excellent. They had an extensive interview with a doctor who barely missed getting shot, helped subdue the gunman, and did his best to treat the wounded. One of the things the doctor said stuck with me. If you don’t feel the pulse of a gunshot victim, the chance of reviving that victim is small, especially if emergency medical help and equipment don’t come quickly — which was the case here.

[Later still, Sunday evening…] Late in the early stages of what will be a long and crazy game, I like what Dan Gillmor says about #slownews. Still, in the meantime, items:

  • The 9-year old girl killed in the assault was Christina Taylor Green. She was born on 9/11/2001 (yes, that 9/11), and was what they called then “faces of hope” baby. (Firedog Lake) Her grandpa was former Mets and Yankees manager Dallas Green. (NY Daily News)
  • Ages of the dead victims are 9, 30, 63, 76, 76 and 79. (myFoxPhoenix, NY Times)
  • In a tweet on 4 November, @SarahPalinUSA wrote, “Remember months ago ‘bullseye’ icon used 2 target the 20 Obamacare-lovin’ incumbent seats? We won 18 out of 20 (90% success rate;T’aint bad). And one of the other two was just shot in the head.
  • An ad for Jesse Kelly, Gabrielle Giffords’ opponent in the most recent congressional race, once ran an ad that read, “Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully a automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” (Daily Beast)
  • Keith Olberman, whom I usually consider an insufferable gasbag, says agreeable stuff (at least to me) in his latest rant. In it he owns his own overboard remarks of the past.

I’d like to think this will change things, but I doubt that’s the best way to bet. Still, as Dan counsels, it’s best to wait and see.

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