If you are from the Greenville / Upstate area you would have to be living as a Quaker to not know about all that is going on with the effort to bring Google Fiber here. Heck, even Quakers probably are aware of the community effort to catch the eye of Google. It is not just localized either. Greenville is showing up in discussions on blogs all over the world, and in online and print publications you will find mentions of this grass roots effort. Just a few moments ago, we received word that a Time Magazine writer confirmed there will be an article published about Google On Main.
To give you an idea how things happen here… It was mentioned to Fairway Outdoor Advertising that another city had put up some billboards… Within minutes, Fairway Outdoor (@FairwayOutdoor on Twitter) had programmed two of their digital billboards on two very major streets to support the Google On Main / We Are Feeling Lucky movement! People are meeting with the Mayor and City officials, the news media like Amy Wood (@TVAmy) are in touch with what is happening. And those who were involved in last Saturday’s Google On Main event are getting recognition by the community as well. My wife @PamelaHoyt and I have received phone calls, text messages, emails, tweets and facebook messages saying “HEY! I saw you on TV”.
And in some of the most surprising events, those who are active on social networking sites are being contacted by supporters of other city’s initiatives and told how we don’t stand a chance, etc! hahah All I can say to them is, Greenville wishes you the best of luck! This is all in fun, though we are serious about wanting it for our area. We want to keep it positive!
If you want to get involved, please sign our petition at www.wearefeelinglucky.comand join the various social networking discussions taking place on Facebook, Twitter, and an interesting one, the Google Wave forum that has been setup… A link to that can be found at the www.wearefeelinglucky.com website. If you would like an invite to Google Wave, please contact me and I will invite you.
Last night my wife Pamela, daughter Megan and her friend Christina attended Google On Main along with hundreds of others and formed the letters that spelled out “Google” while swinging LED glow sticks over our heads and posing for photos and videos as a helicopter and plane flew over. What a blast!
What does it all mean? It means that the community of Greenville depends on high-speed internet, and feel strongly that if Google were to roll out their ULTRA-High-Speed Fiber Internet to the Greenville, SC area, it would help us to thrive…
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30832021&op=1&o=all&view=all&subj=350492394591&aid=-1&oid=350492394591&id=1569863676 for one of the first overhead shots…. My wife and I were in the big G, while our daughter Megan and her friend Christina were in the red “o”.
Here’s a video of the staging area and some of the setup… Taken with a Flip Mino Ultra HD, which www.HomelandSecureIT.com will be giving away soon. Well not that one, but a brand new one! (See the other blog post about that).
Here’s the video from above…. Thanks to Bobby Rettew this:
An article on NetworkWorld.com made me chuckle today… Apparently the Bad Guys are now using Radio Direction Finding (RDF) to locate hidden notebooks because their 802.11* wireless was enabled.
It seems amazing to me that it has taken this long for anyone to realize that if a ntoebook or any other device is “wireless”, that it is transmitting a signal, which can be located. RDF is actually a sport and ham radio operators have been doing it for years… We use high gain, directional homemade and sometimes professionally made antennas, receivers and sometimes doppler systems to zero in on a hidden transmitter. This is called “foxhunting” in the USA for the casual participant.
The original article can be found here: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/030210-wifi-finders.html?hpg1=bn
A friend posted this YouTube video on a County Hunter forum. I found it very well done and thought I would share. This is a demonstration of a Yagi beam antenna and shows how adding a reflector and directors to a driven element increases the signal strength in front of the antenna by focusing the power bounced off the reflector and through the “director” element/s.
Today I spent about an hour or more showing Scott what an Amiga A-4000T is all about. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any disks with me to show him the awesome 80s & 90s graphics. Nor did I get it online to show him what that machine was used for.
What was it used for? I’m glad you asked! It was used to run Amiga Connection (AmiCon.Net) BBS for years and years. At the time that I pulled the plug on it about 2005, it was likely the oldest CNet Amiga BBS still online. I hope to be bringing it online again in the coming weeks, and let it live out its life serving up those wonderful ascii/ansi graphics via a telnet connection. Don’t worry, I will announce the grand re-opening because I know you want to see messages and uploads that posted 10 years ago.
AmiCon has over 800 registered members still that have not been weeded out (I turned off the “weed” for inactive users to preserve the database). Some awesome people used this board over the years, maybe they are still alive?
While I’m on the subject of forgotten technology, what about IRC? It’s around still, in fact, there are thousands of IRC servers and if you log onto some of the larger networks, you will find thousands of people online, however, if you ask 100 people if they know what it is, a dozen will have heard of it, one might still use it. I still run an IRC server at irc.SuperHosts.Net, which was part of the irc.ExodusIRC.Net network until we lost all the other people. Want to join in the fun? No problem, shoot me an email, I’ll tell you all about it… IRC is actually pretty fun. You can find live discussions going on just about any time of the day, in any language, and on any subject.
Maybe I should leave out my OTHER forgotten technology…. Ham Radio… Uhmm yeah, I still use that too!
