Shad

(In your best announcer voice) Here he is, Bushies new press secretary… you’ll remember him from TV’s “big boy and the hustle corps”… your friend and mine… Fox News’s very own Mr. Tony Snow!!

[Note: the show was not actually called "big boy and the hustle corps"... I just made that up]

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There’s an important bill going before congress this week. It would allow internet service providers (ISP’s) to choose which traffic gets priority. Providers would be allowed to, for instance, make it so that Skype doesn’t work as well (unless Skype pays them lots of money). However, the ISP’s internal phone product would work perfectly.

Currently, the internet is a free market of ideas. This legislation undermines that in a major way. It is only there to protect the ISP’s. It seems that they believe it’s not fair for Google to make all of the money when they’re the ones providing service. As a solution to their money woes, they’re throwing money at Congress to make it legal for them to get “protection money” out of service providers (like Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Ebay, etc.) You can almost hear them say “I’m taking my ball and going home unless you let me be quarterback” It’s blackmail.

“Buy why?” you ask, “How can they think this is good?”. The providers claim that they want to give companies like Skype and Yahoo the ability to get priority service so that their services will work better. But think about it… do you really want AT&T making deals that affect how well your favorite service works? And where is there room in this new world for entrepreneurs? In order to compete, companies would need to make deals with individual ISPs.

Please help spread the word, the internet is not broken so please stop trying to fix it.

Here’s what you can do:

• MoveOn petition - every person who signs will get future actions they can take to keep the heat on Congress: link
• Call Congress today: link
• Original MoveOn email describing the issue: link
• How gutting Net Neutrality affects regular people (Ipod users, Google users), and proof that telecom companies abuse their power: link
• Coalition website: link
• A key committee is voting this week. Click here to see if your Representative is on this committee: link
• Find out where your Member stands: link

Good articles on coalition kick-off:

“Gun Owners, Librarians Unite Against Bells,” Telephony Online, April 24, 2006
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“New Group Aims to ‘Save the Internet’” Cnet News, April 24, 2006
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“Average Joe And Saving The Internet,” Webpronews.com, April 24, 2006
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This is important.

Telecom companies are teaming up to get a law passed which will allow them to give priority to certain packets as that pass across their networks. This runs counter to everything that the internet stands for. It would make it legal for these companies to allow traffic to corporate websites be super zippy, while someone’s blog could be very slow. This is due to the fact that the corporations can afford to pay the net ransom.

The internet is NOT broken, do not allow them to try and fix it!! I’m sure the EFF is on it, so be sure to check their site for more info as well.

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This guy can keep his website (Fallwell.com) which seeks to oppose Jerry Falwell’s stance on homosexuality.

In related news, Jerry Falwell is a giant homophobe.

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Google creates a logo celebrating the works of Spanish surrealist Joan Miró to commemorate the artist’s 1893 birth.

A group “representing the artist” forces them to take it down due to copyright restrictions.

Huh? You represent a dead surrealist and you don’t want that artist’s work promoted… um… huh? I think he needs to find new representation.

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Siam Reap, Cambodia, originally uploaded by Shad Reynolds.

All of these photos were taken November 28, 2001 in a small fishing village just south of Siam Reap, Cambodia.

Check it out. Google earth can now show you the current location of flights all over the country (US only most likely, but I haven’t checked). Wanna know if that Oslo-Newark flight is running a bit late? Just look on the map and see!

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Google Calendar is finally out.  I’ve been playing with it for a while now and I have to say that it’s pretty good.  They’ve really improved the user experience in way’s that are quite nice.  For example, you have a “search” like box where you just type in a description of the event and they parse it out and create an event.

For example:
“Dinner with Bill Friday @ 6pm”

This will get parsed into an event on the next Friday at 6pm called “Dinner with Bill”.  No forms, no hassle.  It’s also very well integrated with GMail (though I think there is still room for improvement there).

If you’re a gmail user, definitely recommend checking it out.

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The Ring, originally uploaded by Shad Reynolds.

Manue and I have decided to get married.
There’s no date set, but we’ll be trying to work that out over the next few months as we go through the process of getting her visa. Check back for more details (or click here to see photos of our trip to Austin).