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December 31, 2004
Introducing my iTalk Microphone
I just got back from the local Apple Store with my new iTalk microphone. It's a small adapter you plug into the top of your iPod, turning it into a recording device. As you can see from this quick podcast, the recording quality isn't the best in the world; Apple has its iPods configured so it can't record at a high bit rate so you could capture live music.
Fortunately, there's a Sourceforge project working on the problem: they've created a version of Linux you can upload into your iPod and reset the bit rate so the recording quality increases tremendously. The only problem is that I have a new fourth-generation iPod, and they haven't gotten the software to work on the new model yet.
For now, the iTalk device will be great for capturing interviews and random comments on the fly, but otherwise, I'll probably stick to using my laptop for recording higher-quality podcasts... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:05 PM
December 30, 2004
Tsunami News Digest Now Available, Seeks New Feeds
I've just set up a tsunami news digest using the news aggregator Kinja.com. The page contains latest news feeds and first-person blogs related to the tsunami disaster from around the globe.
I'd like to see others add their own tsunami-related feeds to the site. If you have a news feed or blog that's focusing on the tsunami, or are reading one that you'd like to add to the digest, please visit the website and log on with the following info:
login: tsunami-info
password: southasia
Once you've logged in, you can add a news source to the digest by pasting it into the "Add a Favorite" form field in the right column. Or, you can follow this shortcut.
I hope this digest is useful to those of you eager to follow tsunami relief efforts.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:05 PM
December 29, 2004
DDN, LearningTimes Launch Online Community for Tsunami Relief Efforts
In response to this week's devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I've created an online community workspace on disaster relief and emergency preparedness.
This virtual community can be used for posting online resources, documents, news, and articles about tsunami relief efforts. Users also may take advantage of the site's Web bulletin board and post their own blog entries. For the time being the space will focus on tsunami-related relief efforts; in the long haul we hope the space can be used for discussing the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in emergency preparedness and disaster relief.
Additionally, LearningTimes has generously donated an e-conference tool to aid coordination and discussion of local relief efforts. This means users with a microphone and speakers connected to their computer will be able to talk to each other over the Internet, or host their own virtual meetings and webcasts. I'm hoping NGOs will use the e-conference tool to help coordinate their efforts, as well as for tsunami survivors to share their stories.
To introduce users to the website and the e-conferencing tool, we will host a live webcast twice on Thursday, December 30. The first webcast will take place at 7am ET (12:00 GMT) to accomodate users in Asia and Europe, while the second webcast will occur at 12pm ET (17:00 GMT) to accomodate North American participants. Both webcasts will be conducted in English, while recordings will be archived for future online listening and podcasting.
To participate in the live webcast, please visit our e-conferencing tool. Next, type in your name; the e-conferencing tool will then be downloaded to your computer and log you into the webcast. We recommend you do this at least 15 minutes prior to joining the virtual tour. You may also log on now if you would like to experiment with the e-conferencing tool, as it is being made available 24 hours a day.
This new DDN community is free and open to the public, but participants must first join the Digital Divide Network website in order to post content or chat on the bulletin board. If you're not already a member of DDN, please create an account.
Once you're registered and logged in to the website, please visit the community's homepage and click on the button in the center column that says "Join this community." This will give you posting privileges and allow you to participate in the bulletin board discussions.
We are just beginning to post content to the site, so by the time you read this email there should be several tsunami-related resources published already. Meanwhile, you are invited to join DDN, log in and post your own resources and content to share with colleagues around the world. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:13 PM
For the Woman With the Green Eyes and the Children of Mahabalipuram
The last several days have been extraordinarily difficult, watching the news coverage of the devestation across South Asia. It seems only yesterday that Susanne and I were in Mahabalipuram, India, along the coast of Tamil Nadu, marveling its amazing Shore Temple.
Walking from the Temple, we met lots of children, eager to show off the latest stone carvings made by local artisans. Here's what I wrote in my journal that day:
It was getting very breezy and the salt spray was strong, so we headed inland past the temple and down a street lined with small restaurants and stalls of stone cutters. Stone carving and masonry is still alive and well in Mahabalipuram, and each shop would show off its artisans' work, from small soapstone paperweights to massive marble shrines of Hindu gods, which were sold to temples around the world. As you walked down the unpaved road, it was impossible to not notice the constant clicking of stonemason's tools patiently pounding on rocks of all sizes. There were so many sculptors chipping granite, the staccato sounds of their work continuously swirled around you like some strange John Cage performance art piece. But such hard work would never get in the way of the hard sell - from within every shop, the carvers would yell out to you, "Mister, please, come and see my statues. Very good work...." Often they would have their children come out and try to bring you inside, but unlike in other cities, these kids would just as soon give up their charge and spend their time playing and running around rather than escorting dumb tourists like us back to father's showroom....
As we strolled along the street, we stopped at a small cafe run by a beautiful young woman with striking green eyes and European facial features, but dark black hair and Tamil coloring. "The Pepsis were cheap and they were playing this odd westernish music that sounding like Prince performing lounge standards," I wrote that day. "The woman who ran the cafe was striking, yet not particularly Indian. She must have a significant amount of Portuguese or French blood, for both cultures dominated parts of the south for many centuries."
Mahabalipuram lies on the shore of the Indian Ocean, just south of Chennai (Madras). Watching the news the last several days, I couldn't stop thinking of the Shore Temple, the children, the stonemasons -- and more than anyone else, the Woman With the Green Eyes. According to an AP wire story about Mahabalipuram, at least 15 townspeople were killed, around 100 total in the surrounding villages. That charming strip of shops, cafes, and stonemason shops were washed completely away. Amazingly, all that is left standing is the 1,200-year-old Shore Temple, thanks to an engineering project initiated by Indira Gandhi.
Compared to so many other villages that lost everything, Mahabalipuram may have gotten off lucky; nonetheless, livelihoods have been ruined, families destroyed. I have no idea what happened to the children we met in Mahabalipuram, to the Woman With the Green Eyes. I suppose I will never know. I can only hope they survived. No matter their fate, I dedicate this blog to them.
I've made my contribution to the Red Cross -- have you? -Andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:14 PM
December 25, 2004
My First iPod!
 |
| My new iPod, posing with my laptop and Beethoven the golden retriever |
She got me the 20 gig model, which can hold around 5,000 songs. I'm particularly excited because I want to use it for storing digital photos while I'm traveling, and for recording podcasts. As strange as it sounds, I actually posted my first podcast before owning an iPod, so having one will make podcasting even more productive -- and more fun.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:15 PM
December 23, 2004
Making Podcasting Accessible to All
Drumroll, please: I've just posted my first podcast. The topic of this five-minute audio is the growth of podcasting and the subsequent accessibility challenges faced by the hearing impaired. I'm hoping it's the first in a series of podcasts from me on a variety of issues related to the Internet, the media and the digital divide, among other topics.
If you have a good Internet connection you can download the podcast; it's just over five megabytes in size. Otherwise, a transcript of the podcast can be found below.
For those of you who want to subscribe to my future podcasts using software like iPodderX, please use my blog's RSS feed.
-ac
Hi everyone, Andy Carvin here.... Welcome to the first official podcast for my blog, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth. I'll be posting occasional podcasts on a variety of issues. I don't plan on having a single theme to this podcast; it won't strictly be about the digital divide or Internet culture or travel or the media. There really aren't rules for this; I'm just going to play it by ear and see where the muses lead me.
Today, though, I'd like to talk about podcasting. No, I don't mean for this to be yet another podcast about podcasts. Instead, I want to talk specifically about podcasting and accessibility.
This past week on the Digital Divide Network email list there was a great discussion about the advent of podcasting and its potential as a tool for giving a voice to disenfranchised communities.
A few days into the conversation, Grant Laird of the Texas Deaf Network posted a brief response to the thread. He said,"Don't forget that podcasting probably doesn't support transcripts for the deaf community."
My first reaction was, "That's a fair point.... I'm more than happy to post transcripts of my podcasts." For me, at least, that makes a lot of sense. But will other podcasters feel the same way? Unfortunately, I think the answer is generally no, I think many would argue that the whole notion of posting podcast transcripts actually runs counter to the ethos of podcasting.
A case in point: last month, Web accessibility activist Matt May posted a rather provocative essay in which he lamented that many pioneering podcasters are actually going out their way not to transcribe their podcasts. As evidence to this, he cited a statement by Steve Gillmor at the recent BloggerCon conference saying that he'd never post transcripts -- and actually got applause out of it.
Posting transcripts, it seems, would defeat the whole purpose of podcasting: pushing the envelop of personal multimedia publishing. I mean, why bother spend all of this time trying to be a bleeding-edge Internet radio pioneer when you'd have to type up everything you've just said, just so that people who don't even know what an iPod is can read what you had to say in the first place?
But Matt May, who works for the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative, finds this position unacceptable. He writes:
What if a deaf user sees a topic that interests him or her, and wants to know what these subject-matter experts have to say about it? Should he or she go without simply because the moderator thinks it would disrupt the natural feel found in the panel's voices?
Interestingly, not long after Matt posted his blog, Steve Gillmor posted a response:
I have to admit I was not thinking about accessibility in relation to the subject of transcripts. Of course it makes sense in that context, and I appreciate your perception that the Gillmor Gang material is worthy of that additional effort.... As the network grows and technologies for auto-transcriptions become affordable without the cost of training that holds back current technology, the accessibility problem will be overcome.
These comments by Matt and Grant and Steve are probably the first round of what may be a rather contentious battle between podcasters and accessibility activists. Just as we've seen fights over the accessibility of websites and streaming media, it's no surprise that podcasting has opened a new theatre of operations in this battle. But fortunately podcasters like Steve Gillmor are now thinking about accessibility, and are open to addressing these concerns. Will others take notice? I imagine many won't, but I'm sure the accessibility community won't sit on their hands either.
So Matt's absolutely right when he says that the deaf community shouldn't be forced to "go without" simply because podcast producers have better things to do than cater to the disabled. I mean, so what if podcasting wasn't invented to target the disabled community? Isn't it absolutely reasonable to assume that many podcasts will contain insightful and entertaining commentary that would be just as interesting to a deaf person as it would be to anyone else?
Granted, transcripts in themselves will never convey all the nuances of the human voice and spoken interaction, but that's hardly the point. Podcasting has enormous potential as a tool for independent media, civic journalism, education and other purposes, and it's just a matter of time before we see millions of podcasts being produced, from the biggest media conglomerates all the way down to some kid in her bedroom with a story she wants to tell the world.
Of course, life will be a lot easier when voice recognition tools like Dragon Naturally Speaking get better at transcribing everyday banter rather than dictation. Someday we'll get there, I'm sure, but don't expect it overnight.
So is it too much to ask podcasters to offer a transcript of their audio? Even a detailed summary is better than nothing. Otherwise, podcasting will be yet another media juggernaut that will zoom by the lives of millions of people without giving any of them a chance to benefit from it as well.
And who knows; maybe someone who uses speech-recognition software to communicate to the outside world needs to start their own podcast as well. Wouldn't that send a powerful message?
Maybe we should all just email Stephen Hawking and see if he wants to be the first.
Anyway, that's all for now. Until next time, thanks for listening to my Waste of Bandwidth....
(Note: open/closing music courtesy of Subatomic Glue, used under the rules of their Creative Commons license.)
Posted by acarvin at 10:17 PM
Marnie Webb's Top 10 List on Why NPOs Should Use RSS
Marnie Webb of TechSoup has just posted a great blog entry on the Digital Divide Network entitled 10 Reasons Nonprofits Should Use RSS. She intends it as a public brainstorm for an article she's contemplating. I hope she goes for it, because she's got some great insights in the blog.
Here's what she's come up with so far. (And thanks for using the Creative Commons license so I could reprint this in full, Marnie!)
- It's a ridiculously easy way to read the web. So, how many bookmarks do you have in your browser? How many of them have new information? Does it make you sick to your stomach to think of clicking through all of those to discover whether or not the website owners have added new, interesting content? Via RSS, you can subscribe to many websites and very easily find out whether there is new relevant content. My bookmarks no longer scare me. In fact, I rarely use them.
- It's ridiculously easy to discover relevant information. For people without a desire to spelunk on the web, finding things and checking back has been a chore. Many folks approach Google like it's a library card catalog. I want to find out about X and so I'll search on Google and then trust in its algorithm and click through the links on the first, oh, two, let's say, pages. RSS allows you to tap important, relevant, even mission-critical information by enabling the creation of feeds based on keywords (how this happens varies but there are a variety of tools -- PubSub, technorati, feedster -- that you can use and many aggregators integrate with those tools in way that allows you to create searches). So, let's say you work for an organization that is following issues pertaining to same sex civil unions and/or marriages. You can set up some keyword searches and then subscribe to those searches. This can allow relevant information to come to you.
- It's ridiculously easy to share the information you get. One of the nice things about RSS is that information comes to you in manageable chunks: a NYTimes headline with a sentence-long article summary; a complete weblog entry; a teaser for a longer weblog entry; the pointer to a newsgroup posting; an email announcement list; events. You can push that information out to communities who may interested -- simply send it via email or put it on your own blog.
- It's ridiculously easy to participate in conversations. Okay, RSS is just an enabler here. Why should you care what people are saying about the issues you're interested in? Well, if it's the New York Times or own local paper that interest can be self-evident (we certainly have framed NY Times articles gracing the entry way to our offices). But what about what people are saying on weblogs or on community sites like Tribe? Knowing what they are saying -- and where they are saying it -- gives you the opportunity to participate in the conversation. You make a comment on someone's website or participate in a message board thread. This helps to further the conversation and distributes your content (you'll sign your comment right? and include your organization's web presence?) around the web. This makes the web a richer place but it also helps to generate attention to the issues you are working on.
- It's ridiculously easy to control your own subscriptions. Here's the truth: unsubscribing from some mailing lists, announcements, or other outreach is, how do you say, a chore. You have to click a link that, about half the time, merely confirms that you are a real, live body receiving email. You can't remember how it is that you elected to receive the information and, most critical to me, it ends up mixed in with the ebb-and-flow of your inbox and, hence, gets in the way of getting work done. RSS gives you complete control. You can easily segment your feed (it's hard to set up an email filter for something you don't know you are receiving) from your regular email. You can even use a non-email client aggregator.
- It's ridiculously easy to allow people to trade your good content like it's a baseball card. It may sound like I'm being flip. I'm not; I swear. Hook yourself up with an RSS feed (to see an organization trying to talk through that read this thread on TechSoup, TechSoup newsfeed please!). It allows people to very easily trade your good relevant content and that's exactly what you want right? It happens at almost no cost to you.
- It's ridiculously easy for other people to lend you a bit of their web real estate. Okay, this one is a little harder. But RSS does offer up the possibility of allowing other organizations to display some of your content on their website. This is good. It gets your content out to a variety of audiences and it can greatly enhance relevant partnerships. The best part? They don't actually have to talk to you for this to happen. Painless content partnerships. What more could anyone want?
- It's ridiculously easy to avoid being a spammer. Opt-in, double opt-in. Allowing people to subscribe via RSS puts complete control into their hands and gets you completely off the spammer hook. Okay, so some email publishers (as Bill Pease says in this TechSoup thread, Is email dead?) hate that. It's hard to track traffic and click thrus, and it puts control completely in the hands of the subscriber and not the publisher. I just don't agree. If you are creating good content people will subscribe and they will stay subscribed. That means that, ultimately, the control is really in your hands. Compelling content works better than anything else. Oh yeah, not being a spammer isn't just an ethical (and increasingly legal issue) not being a spammer also means that you message will get to your intended audience and not dumped into a spam filter.
- It's ridiculously easy to contribute to web-wide conversations. Okay, if you're using RSS to track what people are saying about important issues and what people are saying about you, so are other folks. By making your content available via RSS, you're allowing other people to discover you. And they'll be commenting on your site, linking to it, and (here's the kicker) subscribing to your RSS feed and not just stumbling across you in their own keyword searches.
- It's only just beginning. RSS is in relatively early stages. The tools are still pretty raw but it pays for nonprofits, in their efforts to gain mindshare for the change they are trying to make, it get in on the ground floor of these types of communication technologies. It'll better position you to take advantage of them as they mature and additional uses become available.
Marnie is looking for comments on the top 10 list, so visit her blog and let her know what you think. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:18 PM
December 21, 2004
Slate Slated for Washington Post Purchase
This morning, the Washington Post Company announced it's buying Slate Magazine from Microsoft. Slate, founded almost nine years ago by Michael Kinsley, was one of the first news magazines to be created for the Internet. As part of the deal, the Post will retain most of Slate's editorial staff, including editor Jacob Weisberg.
"Microsoft has been a great place for us for the last 8-1/2 years," Weisberg said, but "it was a tough place to develop our business because it wasn't a media company and doesn't want to be a media company. They're really big and we're really small. The joke was always that we're almost a rounding error, but a rounding error probably exaggerated our status."
Slate, for its part, wasted no time in reaffirming its editorial independence by publishing an article criticizing a recent Washington Post investigation on the number of expectant mothers who die violent deaths.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:20 PM
December 20, 2004
Redefining the French Horn
For those of you who doubt the important role that French musicians have played in the history of classical music, I offer you this retort, courtesy of the Icelandic website hugi.is. The French horn is forever transformed.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:21 PM
Beginning to Look A Lot Like Moscow
It's only 15 degrees fahrenheit outside, so I decided it was appropriate to break out the faux-fur hat I bought in Russia a couple of years ago. Walking to the Longwood T-stop along the forested Riverway I felt like I was strolling through Moscow's Ismailovo Park in the dead of winter. I even had a plastic bag in hand.
By the time we got on the T, several people on the train were staring at me, including Susanne. She was biting her lip, trying not to laugh.
"Are you sure you're not embarrassed being seen with me in this hat?" I asked her.
"I married you knowing that you owned that hat," she replied, smirking.
Hopefully it won't get this cold too often, so I can go back to wearing my knit cap, in my poor imitation of a Portugeuse fisherman... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:22 PM
Boston Globe Podcasting Story
Today's Boston Globe has a nice story on podcasting and some of the locals who are pioneering the medium. The article notes Dave Winer and Adam Curry's iPodder and interviews local video blogger Steve Garfield. It also covers WGBH's Morning Stories, one of the first podcasts to come out of the public broadcasting community. For those of you who aren't familiar with podcasting, read the article.
Expect to hear lots more about podcasting through the mainstream media in 2005, not to mention some of my own podcasts from my blog as well... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 6:23 PM
December 19, 2004
Ishtar Gate Video
Susanne and I went to see the movie Alexander the Great this weekend, knowing full well that it's supposed to be one of the worst epics ever made. In this regard, the film did not disappoint; it's giving us fodder for days of conversation on the hundreds of egregious missteps that Oliver Stone made in this trainwreck of a film.
Having said that, we were pleasantly surprised to see his depiction of Babylon and its famous Ishtar Gate: the souring blue-tiled gate leading to the heart of the Babylonian palace. Some of you may not know that the gate still exists, reconstructed in spectacular fashion in Berlin's Pergamon Museum. Here's a video of Ishtar Gate I took last month during my trip to Berlin. You can see Susanne at the beginning of the clip, gazing up at the gate. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:24 PM
December 17, 2004
Leave My Blog a Voicemail!
I've just spent some time exploring AudioActivism.org and it gave me some great ideas for improving my blog's audio features. For starters, I've set up an voicemail box for my blog. If you're reading my blog and would like to leave an audio comment, simply call 1-206-888-2762 and leave me a message. I'll then receive a voicemail in my inbox, which I can then post to the website if the comments if I want to share them publicly. (I'm using a free voicemail tool called K7.net to make this all happen.)
If you'd like to hear what the quality of these audio comments sound like, check out this voicemail I just left for myself. It introduces the audio comment feature in a brief .wav file message.
Next experiments: seeing if I can use an email-to-blog tool so I can forward audio comments and have them posted automatically to my blog. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:26 PM
Vicarious Snowball Fight
This morning I woke up to a pleasant surprise: a sizable dusting of snow had covered the neighborhood during the early morning hours. As beautiful as it was, the dusting wasn't enough to make snowballs, so I'd like to offer up this vicarious snowball fight: a group of kids in Tallinn, Estonia, having a snowball fight outside their school, which I caught on my digital camera last month. Enjoy! -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:27 PM
A Quick Experiment
I'm just testing my site's RSS feed and its ability to include multimedia.
Here's a link to an audio file.
Posted by acarvin at 8:37 AM
December 16, 2004
New DDN Tutorials on Blogging, RSS, Creative Commons and Online Communities
For those of you who are experimenting with our new Digital Divide Network website -- or are interested in checking it out -- I've written a series of tutorials on some of the exciting things you can do with the website.
How to Create a DDN Blog. Ever wanted to create your own blog? You can try out our free, noncommercial, easy-to-use blogging tool.How to Create Your Own DDN Community. DDN users can create their own online communities, featuring bulletin boards, document sharing, news and events listings, blog entries and RSS feeds.
What's RSS and Why Should I Care About it? RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way of having new content from websites, blogs and newsletters come directly to you. If you're a blogger or a online publisher, RSS feeds make it a lot easier for your readers to keep up-to-date.
A Quick and Easy Guide to Creative Commons Licenses. DDN incorporates Creative Commons licenses, a powerful tool for assigning personalized copyright rules for your content.
All of the tools described in these tutorials are available to DDN members, and membership is free. Join today!
Posted by acarvin at 6:38 PM
December 14, 2004
WSISblogs.org: An Idea Worth Developing?
Last night on a whim, I went online and bought the domain names wsisblogs.org and wsisblogs.com.
As many of you know, we're less than a year away from the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Organized by the United Nations and the ITU, WSIS will try to wrap up the work of the first WSIS summit in December 2003. During that summit in Geneva, world leaders gathered to tackle bridging the digital divide, Internet governance, online freedom and other important issues. There was a small contingent of bloggers in Geneva, including myself and the amazing folks at DailySummit.net.
Undoubtedly there will be many more at the next summit, including delegates, professional journalists, civic journalists and others. Additionally, there will be two major planning meetings, or prepcoms, between now and then; these meetings are the places where the bulk of the summit's policy outcomes will probably be decided. Should we expect much of media presence? Precedence suggests otherwise. At the last prepcom meeting in Tunisia last June, I was one of three or four bloggers present, all of whom represented civil society; there was practically no mainstream media present, nor any noticeable media coverage after the fact.
Just 10 days ago, Rebecca MacKinnon lamented in her blog on the lack of mainstream media coverage regarding Internet governance, which was discussed at a recent ICANN meeting in Capetown. The event was covered by numerous bloggers, she noted, "But no meaningful mainstream media coverage so far. Maybe it's not as easy to understand or as exciting as the FCC, but isn't it just as important (if not more so) for our global communication future?"
So all of this got me wondering about WSIS, the upcoming prepcoms and other WSIS thematic meetings, and the dearth of quality media coverage. From my perspective, it's incumbent upon civil society -- including civic bloggers -- to embrace a bigger leadership role in publicizing the policy outcomes that are currently at stake, and mobilize the online public to take interest in the issue.
With all of this swirling through my head last night, I purchased the domain names WSISblogs.org and WSISblogs.com. I haven't thought through what should be done with it, but I can envision something like Dave Winer's ConventionBloggers.com, which aggregated all the bloggers covering the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this past summer. In other words, a site where you could find all the latest posts from all the bloggers participating and/or observing the WSIS process. The site could be organized by major policy outcomes and related WSIS topics, so users could explore the latest blogs on Internet governance, the digital divide, protest activities, human rights issues, etc, as they occur. It would also be great to allow bloggers to add their RSS feeds to the site, since it's not always possible to get an authoritative list of who'll be blogging prior to WSIS-related events.
Even if we do nothing, chances are there will be bloggers galore at WSIS: dozens of bloggers, blogging on a variety of issues, in a variety of styles and languages, giving the public unfettered, unfiltered access to the WSIS process. Imagine if we could organize them all in one place.
Anyway, it's just an idea. Would love to hear what others think. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:39 AM
December 13, 2004
When C-Span Rules the Universe
So I was watching the Scott Peterson sentencing recommendation come in on CNN late this afternoon.... Just as the foreperson was about to read the verdict, the channel suddenly changed to C-Span. Susanne and I looked at each other to see who'd capriciously manhandled the TV remote, but soon realized that the remote in question was sitting quietly on the coffee table. Neither of our cats had interfered as well.
Before either of us could say anything, the channel switched back to CNN, just in time for the sentencing recommendation. (Death Penalty, but you probably already knew that.) For the next 10 minutes we forgot about the weird interruption -- that is, until it happened again.
Just as Wolf Blitzer was about to start offering Hard News to the world, the channel switched to C-Span. The channel was showing a rather dry speech by an academic about the history of the Electoral College. This time, the channel didn't switch back to CNN. I picked up the remote and tried changing the channel back to CNN, only to realize that the channel hadn't actually changed; rather, the C-Span signal had jumped to CNN's usual spot on the digital dial.
My next instinct was to channel surf, so I started pressing the remote. Up we went, channel 18, 19, 20, and so on. All the usual programming was gone: nothing but C-Span on every channel, that same dry academic and his Electoral College. I skipped ahead to channel 201 and higher, just to see if C-Span's takeover of the world was complete; indeed, there was nary a competing station left in my 500-channel universe.
We shut off the TV for 30 minutes, quietly reading and surfing the net while "Barcarolle" from Tales of Hoffmann played on the stereo and two cats lounged at competing ends of the couch. Just for kicks, I turned on the TV again. C-Span. C-Span. C-Span. A policy wonk's dream, a couch potato's nightmare.
At least my only choice wasn't Fox News -- but Rupert Murdoch is working on that. Stay tuned.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:40 AM
Digital Divide Network Launches New Online Community
It is my great pleasure to announce that the Digital Divide Network has just launched its new website:
Five years ago this week, we created the first Digital Divide Network website and email discussion group. Since then, DDN has grown into a network of over 3,000 people in more than 75 countries.
I invite you to visit the site and try out all the new features we've created for digital divide activists around the world. As a DDN member, you'll have access to a variety of powerful tools that will allow you to:
- create your own blog
- host your own online community workspace featuring document sharing, online publishing and bulletin board discussions
- access DDN content through RSS feeds
- publish your own news headlines, event announcements and articles
- participate in live webcasts hosted by DDN staff
Membership is free, and is open to all people interesting in bridging the digital divide.
To get started, please visit the Join DDN page. After you've filled out the form, you'll receive an email asking you to confirm your membership. Click on the link provided in the email and your membership will be activated. Then return to the DDN homepage and log in.
Once you've logged in, please edit your personal profile so other DDN members can learn more about you.
DDN Highlights
Once you've logged into DDN, you can take advantage of the website's many features, including blogs, bulletin boards and other tools. Here are some great places to start.
Browse our articles and headlines. On the homepage, you'll see some of the many feature articles and news stories published on DDN. As a member of DDN, you are encouraged to post your own articles on the website.
Create a blog. Web logs, or "blogs," are online journals. Post your own thoughts and announcements on issues related to the digital divide. Think of it as a public diary or your own personal newsletter!
Join a discussion. We've set up bulletin boards for DDN members to discuss a range of issues related to the digital divide. In fact, every community within DDN has its own discussion board. Feel free to introduce yourself on our Welcome Wagon discussion board - it's a great place to break the ice!
Join a community. DDN is more than just a website; it's a collection of online communities in which you can discuss the digital divide, Internet literacy, community technology, economic development and other interesting topics. Each community is like an online workspace: you can post news, articles and event announcements, upload documents, share favorite Web resources and chat in a bulletin board room. You can start by browsing the communities hosted on DDN. When you see one that's interesting, go to the community's homepage and click the link at the top that says, "Join this community." This will allow you to participate in that group.
I hope you enjoy the new website. Please consider it a place where you can share your best ideas with colleagues from around the world, so we may work together to develop new real-world strategies for bridging the digital divide.
Posted by acarvin at 8:01 AM
December 3, 2004
A Very Vanderbilt Christmas
Yesterday, Susanne and I took our new car for its first weekend road trip, heading down to Newport, Rhode Island to visit some of its famous 19th century mansions. While Newport may be most popular in the summer, December is a great time to visit, because several of the mansions are decked out in full Christmas regalia.
It's only a 90-minute drive from Boston to Newport, so we arrived there just before lunch. We bought a multi-mansion pass that would allow us to visit the three mansions decorated for the holidays: The Elms, The Breakers and Marble House.
Our first stop was The Elms. Built at the turn of the 20th century for coal magnate E.J. Berwind, The Elms is a replica of Chateau D'Agnes in Asnieres, France. Entering the mansion, we were giving an audio guide, a small digital recorder with a room-by-room guide to the mansion. The audio tour took just over 30 minutes, leading us through the mansion's grand bedrooms, drawing room, kitchens and dining room, which was decorated with an enormous painting of Alexander the Great. I particularly enjoyed the part of the tour that led us through the kitchen and pantry: magnificent, spacious rooms that could cook a feast for hundreds of guests at a time.
After The Elms, our next stop was The Breakers. Perhaps the most famous mansion in America and the most visited tourist attraction in Rhode Island, The Breakers is the grand dame of Newport mansions. Constructed for Cornelius Vanderbilt in the 1890s, the mansion drips with opulance, extravagance, grandeur, excess. The Breakers is built around a two-story Great Hall, a magnificent space that could entertain hundreds of guests. At the far end of the Great Hall was a Christmas tree constructed entirely of poinsettia plants. To the left of the tree, a regal red staircase led to the second floor; from the base of the stairs you could see a huge painting of Mrs. Vanderbilt, just below a magical green skylight that had originally resided in the Vanderbilt's New York estate.
We didn't have an audio guide for our visit to The Breakers, which was a shame; the pamphlet given to us simply didn't convey the stories contained in the digital player we used at The Elms. Nonetheless, the mansion was magnificent, particularly the dining room. Inspired by Versailles and reminiscent of The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the dining room is perhaps the grandest eating hall in all of North America.
The third mansion on our tour was Marble House, another Vanderbilt estate. Constructed entirely of marble at a cost of more than $10 million, Marble House is a stunning site. The styles of the rooms varied greatly; in one corner of the house we found a monastery-like Gothic Room, complete with stained glass, while Mrs. Vanderbilt's bedroom looked like a suite suited for Marie Antoinette herself. While not as over-the-top magnificent as The Breakers, Marble House was actually more interesting because it came with an excellent audio guide. The guide conveyed the personality of Mrs. Vanderbilt and her daughter quite dramatically, particularly since it made it apparent that the daughter resented the mother's controlling nature.
After a brief stop at a local pub, we paid a return visit to The Breakers for a special treat. The mansion was open that evening as part of a holiday tour program that only occurs on Saturday nights each December. It's one of the few chances visitors get to experience the mansion at night. Top it off with live music and festive snacks, it was an opportunity we didn't want to miss.
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| The Great Hall of The Breakers. Click the photo to see a video of the "12 Days of Christmas" singalong. |
Meanwhile, the singers led all of us in a series of Christmas Carols, the highlight of which was a tag-team rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas. The singers had the crowd break into different groups, each having a singing assignment. Susanne and I found ourselves in a the group singing "10 lords a-leaping" and "11 pipers piping." Some groups were better than others, several of them clearly taking their job quite seriously. The best group was the team singing "five golden rings"; the only group on the second floor of the Great Hall, the singers were loud, out of tune, and thoroughly entertaining. It was a wonderful way to kick off the holiday season.... -andy
Tags: 12 Days of Christmas | caroling | Christmas | mansions | Newport | Rhode Island | The Breakers | The Elms | Vanderbilt
Posted by acarvin at 8:42 AM
Lighting Up Boston Common
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| Mayor Mennino gets ready to light the Boston Christmas tree with assorted Red Sox players, the World Series Trophy, and Peter Cetera |
The lighting ceremony was a fascinating throwback to 1970s Christmas specials. A showcase of sub-par musical performances, uninspired caroling and melodramatic appearances by Mrs. Santa Claus, the event struggled to hold the interest of many people in the crowd. Peter Cetera from Chicago even showed up, singing a couple of songs rather ackwardly. Fortunately, there were a few fun moments. Grover from Sesame Street showed up and chatted with Mrs. Claus; for all of her kitschiness, Grover was downright hilarious. A group of Nova Scotian gaelic musicians also ripped through a great set of bagpipes, drums and dancing. A traveling troupe of Radio City Music Hall Rockettes added to the festivities, kicking their way through a couple of numbers. The weirdest performance, though, involved a bunch of people in penguin costumes singing about a penguin who hates the cold and exiles himself on a tropical island.
Eventually, the time came for Mayor Mennino to light the Christmas tree. Perhaps fearing he couldn't incite a critical mass of holiday cheer on his own, the mayor brought along some friends: a bunch of Boston Red Sox players, including Curt Schilling on crutches, and the World Series trophy. Putting up with 90 minutes of mediocre performances became thoroughly worthwhile as they held up that golden trophy and flipped the switch, lighting up the Christmas tree and decorative lights throughout the Common and the Public Garden.
So was it worth it? Sure -- particularly since we got to see the Rockettes, Grover and the Red Sox trophy in a span of 90 minutes. But would I do it again in colder weather? Probably not.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 7:44 AM
December 2, 2004
Winnie the Pooh: Or, Getting Your Cats into the Holiday Spirit
Last weekend while Susanne and I were at Disney World in Florida, we purchased a medium-sized Winnie the Pooh doll. Unlike the vast majority of people who've bought the same doll, we didn't buy it just for its cute looks or charm. We bought it for its orange sweater, misguided by the hope that it might actually fit our cat Winston. The results, to say the least, were mixed.
The temptation of getting Winston a Winnie the Pooh sweater had been intolerable. I mean, he's a fat orange tabby nicknamed Winnie. If there's any other creature, fictitious or otherwise, besides Winnie the Pooh that deserves to wear an orange sweater with the word "Pooh" emblazoned across the front, it's our boy Winnie.
After we got home from Florida, we waited a couple of days before trying to put it on our chubby orange tabby. Though Winnie is always glad to see us when we return from a trip, sometimes he holds our travels against us; on more than one occasion I've been scratched by him during a surprise attack from behind. He's probably just trying to remind us that he's the boss in our apartment -- either that, or he simply doesn't like us being away from him for extended periods.
ANYWAY, we didn't want to raise his ire by returning from a week-long trip and immediately decorating him with clothing, so we let 48 hours pass before giving it a shot. The first step was waiting for a moment when Winnie was really, really groggy. Winston is a 21-pound (nine kilo) cat, and he's strong as all get-out, so it's best not to put clothes on him when he's very alert. Fortunately, being a cat, he sleeps 18 hours a day, so it didn't take long before we found an opportune moment and stretched the sweater over his head.
As you can see from this picture, the sweater didn't fit. Back in Florida we'd even taken the sweater off the doll to guess whether it would fit him or not, but we misjudged his unusual girth. Of course, the sweater was designed to fit a doll and not a cat, so we shouldn't have been shocked when we discovered the sweater's arm holes weren't in the right place for his front paws. And when he wore the sweater without his paws fitting through, he kinda looked like he'd been in an industrial accident. Not the look we were going for.
Fortunately, our other cat, Dizzy, is much smaller than Winnie, and it was much easier to get the sweater on him. Unlike Winston, he hates wearing anything -- collars, hats, vests, sweaters, you name it. So even though he looked adorable in the sweater, we had to take it off after a few seconds before it'd drive him crazy... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:45 AM
