Actually, granny rage against the machine….

Somewhat unbelievably (to me at least) there is still wireless in my mother’s backyard and it has only gotten better and stronger. But let’s face it, writing in garden lounge chairs among the frogs, birds, sun, rain and wind are sub-optimum for thinking and writing, so I am always looking for good and, most especially, gratis wireless.

I was pretty psyched to find a new cafe, Camilles Cafe that had decent looking food and proudly advertises Free WiFi. So I went there this afternoon, ordered my cafe con leche, sat down, and ran dhlcient to get my IP address and it served me one in a jiffy. I opened my xchat, said hello to my fellow chatters, and then proceeded to login to my email and I never got further than that because they disabled access to any page that requires a password.

I went up to the counter to ask why and the answer I got was “porque un hacker nos ataco.” It is totally retarded that the can’t reenable whatever they turned off after adding some basic security measures. They are losing tons and mean tons of business. One quick visit to the “other” cafe down the street with free wireless Me. Starbucks shows there is much business to be made if you provide free wireless.

It is Sunday and there are 12 people here with computers and people of all stripes and backgrounds and they come because the wireless is cheap and fast.

Be warned: logging on to the wireless here is totally non-obvious. When you try to log in, you are routed to a corporate Centennial web page that asks for an user-id/password or asks you to create one. So you of course think that it will cost money to do so. But in fact you just create a name, password etc. and then the site never asks you for mullah (nice). There is no sign, instructions, giving you these instructions. You gotta know or you gotta ask one of your neighbors.

This odd system has been in place for years and I just wonder when the only free wireless in a coffee shop (at least that I know of) will be snatched away. Hopefully never and hopefully someone else will get the bright idea that if they open another coffee shop and also provide free wireless, they will make a killing. This place is always always, and I mean always, packed.

p.s.: make sure to bring headphones/music too unless you are great at working with plently of background noise, which includes the usual starbucks music (about as good as its coffee, not), people chatting, people video-chatting sans headphones, and people watching shows like South Park. It is downright cacophonous..

After 6 weeks of teaching and over 2 months in my new apartment, I am making a short escape from NYC to visit my mom and sister in PR. In my Impacts of Technology class, we just finished a week on large-scale and complex technological systems, with a focus on industrial farming. We read a few sections of Micahel Pollan’s fanstastic book, The Ominvore’s Dilemma, which combines the odd qualities of being seductively alluring (thanks to his exquisite writing) and repulsive (thanks to the content, well at least the part on factory animal “farming”). I can’t recommend it enough and look forward to reading the rest, when I find the (magical) time to do so.

Now that I am at the airport, I am struck at how little I know about this place, which is also a large and complex technological system and I bet revealing its technological and cultural innards would provide as fascinating (although not quite as gross) of a story as that of factory animal farming.

There are many questions I would love answered: How exactly is coordination secured and what are the toughest elements to airport coordination? Where are the lines of cooperation and those of competition between airlines? What factors and values go into the design of the airport? (I know that for one thing, in American airports, there rarely seems to be enough electrical jacks; I am now sitting under the telephones, the only place with jacks in terminal 8 at JFK, and the funny thing is that there are a row of 7 unused phones and only one jack and I am sure it would be more useful to have 1 pay phone and a row of 7 jacks, instead). What sorts of airport technologies have put people out of jobs? What technologies have created new job opportunities? What sorts of social hierarchies are there in airports? Like who runs the big show? Is it a CEO? Or is something more like a university provost? What is standardized by the FAA, and what elements are more flexible, and thus different airport to airport? Is there a sense of camaraderie among airport employees, or are loyalties built primarily among employees of one airline or among the classes of workers? Given that unions are quite strong among airport employees and from the top (pilots) down (food workers), what is the political culture of airports/employees like? (I remember once overhearing a group of machinist and ground crew talking about the ugly face of globalization and NAFTA over coffee and I was dumbfounded and pretty psyched too). Are airports one of the few last remaining places in th US that provides for decent job security? Why do so many of the ground crew have such athletic, bulging calves? Is it a result of the physical demands of the job? Or is it that the type of job (“outdoors” with lots of heavy lifting), attract the athletic types? Do they have to pass certain physical standards as to pilots? Was there always first class seats? Or did that come about when flying became cheaper? Are employees trained to deal with irate passengers? In what ways do pilots bitch about the long waits/delays they also have to endure? What can they do when they are waiting, as we did for an hour last night, during the massive traffic jams that are especially noxious in NYC-area airports? Do pilots have any say in the way airports are run? Why do they consistently provide less chairs than are needed in lounges, even in new terminals, as the one I was in tonight? Do air traffic controllers ever meet face-to-face with pilots or do they largely have a virtual relationship? Are programmers who patch, improve, and build traffic control systems housed in the airports, or elsewhere?

Airports are not only fascinating for technological and sociological reasons but I reckon there is a lot of interesting psychological work that must happen in airports. I imagine that during those long, endless waits in the lounge, on the security lines, on the tarmac, people must often take the time to reflect, on where am I going, where am I coming from, and not in the literal sense but the metaphorical one. I know that I have spent many hours in airports letting my mind wander to places and thoughts in ways that don’t happen as easily or often elsewhere. And in many instances, I don’t think that this propensity to indulge in some reflective thinking, is a matter of time, that is waiting. For me at least, it is the fact that many times when I fly, I am moving between worlds.

While I have flown hundreds of times, I never have been shed of the sense of awe I feel about planes and their ability to shrink space and time so quickly. For me, it is less the act of flying itself (that feels boring, tiring, annoying, mostly because of the insane waits and delays and I never seem to get the right amount of sleep the night before) but the visceral contrast it brings. In the morning my life is of a particular tone and rhythm, currently situated in NYC and by evening, I am back at home in PR, surrounded by thick humidity and the loud sound of coquis. Once there, my as currently configured in NYC, has little direct bearing to those around me. Planes don’t just transport, they shift and convert your inner and outer world…

So, if anyone (who got this far) knows of a good social history of the airport, do tell. I would love to read it.

I have a number of friends who are finishing PhDs and then I have those “special” friends who are wrapping up their dissertation and manage to do something else quite extraordinary right at the same time. Shay David is one such friend who is currently wrapping up a fascinating dissertation on the social implications of openness and collaboration in various contexts (software, biology) but is also pushing the boundaries of what we mean by collaboration by helping to create a new vision, platform, medium, tool, and site, Kaltura.

As you can read about more on their about page, Kaltura basically lowers the technical bar for video editing bringing the power of editing to anyone, at least anyone who registers for an account. Kaltura provides an easy-to-use tool kit that allows you and others to hack away to create, edit, & mashup videos. In lowering the bar, they are significantly expanding the mind (and actual space) for video collaboration.

Some more good news is that Kaltura is soon going to GPL its technology, and they are looking for developers who want to contribute to this exciting project. The project is in PHP and Flex/ActionScript3, if anyone is interested, they should email contact@kaltura.com !

Happy (video) hacking…

There are many amazing things in Puerto Rico and one of them is the technologically (and I would add, aesthetically) stunning Arecibo Observatory, which was featured prominently in the Jodi Foster movie, Contact. Due to massive funding cuts, its future is threatened. This is a site of great scientific and cultural importance for PR, so I really hope they manage to find the funding that will make it survive far into the future.

There is a facebook group
(by the name of “Do NOT close the Arecibo Observatory: Earth’s largest radiotelescope”) opposing the closure but I don’t yet know of any other site for halting the cuts. I will post one once I do.

And if we lose the observatory, we might sadly lose another fine creature, the mysterious chupacabra who apparently was first called into his goat sucking action thanks to the great observatory of ours, which does send signals to find alien life.

So sans Arecibo, we lose a great scientific instrument and may lose the beloved mascot of goat terror, the Chupacabra

Fair use is a small oasis in copyright law that allows you to quote, copy and engage with small bits of copyrighted information usually in the service of education, learning and critique. Despite what I think of as an oasis that is far too small, the economic impact is far reaching, at least according to this report, the first of its kind.

Since I am now running Freedom on a MacBook, it reminded me of one of my favorite Internet videos of all time. It is nice to re-visit the classics from time to time.

I spent much of my early childhood at the video arcade. I was fortunate enough to have a best friend who 1) Lived in the old quarters of San Juan where you could walk everywhere 2) Had three older teenage sisters who would take us when we were still quite young to the arcade, which also doubled as a fantastic ice-cream parlor.

My favorite game there was galaga, and I played it incessantly (and had to use a foot stool too!!) As a result of all that childhood gaming, I am still pretty half decent at it. For example, I more often than not beat my partner (except under less than auspicious conditions, like being sleep deprived), which is pretty unbelievable as he is much more of a video game wizard than I and otherwise beats me in everything.
Back in my first year in grad school, a cohort of us would play Galaga after our large theory class, and I would also always win (and by a lot and then get crushed at foosball).

So of course when I heard that there was a documentary on the very genre of arcade games that consumed so much of my early childhood, King of Kong and a movie that was rumored to leave you at the edge of your seat (which seemed like an impossibility to me), I decided to fork over the cash and check it out in the movie theatre last night.

And it was well worth every penny. The movie somehow managed to capture a story and set of subjective experiences that I think are incredibly hard to portray via film: the individual and social intimacy that comes with machine interaction. The story lines revolves around two very different characters who are masters at conquering one of the hardest video games in the world, Donkey Kong and are trying to clinch the world record. The tale of rivalry between them is really good in and of itself and probably without this drama, the movie would have not worked. But what I also found amazing was how the movie conveyed the persistence of the (older) game. They live on in the lives of individuals and collectives, despite the rise of a whole, new class of games that are much more popular today. I am not sure how much longer they will live on, or if the movie was also inadvertently portraying the rise and slow decline of an era that will, in another 50 years, become part of the archive of dead history.

Whatever the case, if you had a loving relationship with these games (or your friends or parents did), check out the movie. It really has some incredible footage and moments and will make you want to run to that old arcade, once again.

Peter Suber provides a nice summary of the debatesaround Open Access for books vs. journals.

The debate started when Karl Fogel posted a comment on my blog asking about the licensing terms for the recently released Decoding Liberation. Tonight Karl, Scott, and Samir will meet for the first time at my house. I imagine the conversation will continue to be lively!

Collective Communications Campus is a very handy new blog covering news and information on NYC area communication, journalism, and media graduate departments, programs, lectures, and classes.