Web/Tech

We are in danger from information overload. The modern world overwhelms people with data, and this overabundance is both confusing and harmful to the mind.

City Councilman Mitch Harper is inviting local government officials to get together to apply to be one of the communities in Google's planned ultra-fast and open fiber network. From Google's Web site:

Count me as one who looked forward to the iPad but felt disappointment at seeing the actual device, for some of the same reasons "Working Mom" Katie Granju mentions:

 I won't and really can't consider buying one until it has these missing features. And that's a bummer, because if it did have a webcam, a USB port and Flash capability, I would have been first in line at the Apple Store. 

Another right you didn't even know you had, probably because you've been wasting your time reading that musty old Constitution -- the right to broadband access:

The Obama administration named 18 projects Thursday that would receive a portion of the $7.4 billion in stimulus funds set aside to bring high-speed Internet to poor and rural areas that have been overlooked by Internet service providers.

I haven't seen a lot of zombie movies, but I still remember with fond dread the original "Night of the Living Dead" -- an ever-dwindling band of heroic real people withstanding the relentless march of the undead. I swear, it feels more and more like that in the newspaper business these days. Today was an especially bad day.

I love magazines. When I was in high school, my parents always had a couple of subscriptions -- sometimes Look and the Saturday Evening Post, sometimes Life and Reader's Digest. Cracking open the newest issue of one and devouring it cover to cover was one of my favorite things. (I usually read all the short things first, then went back for the long ones one at a time until I had read them all, too. That's still the way I read a magazine today.)

"Privacy ain't what it use to be" department. First I read this story on our Web site about how to find the old folks who wander off:

The state doesn't need to require adults with dementia to wear tracking devices because voluntary programs already offer electronic monitors for those likely to wander away, advocates told state officials looking into the matter.

[. . .]

Bummer:

This is one of the best pieces I've seen on the chatoic state of journalism -- appropriately titled "Not an upgrade -- an upheval." No one can predict what's going to happen -- as this piece notes -- but the writer does a good job of describing the forces that are in play and so lets us imagine some of the possible contours of change. "The news," he observes, has always been subsidized. Of late it's been by advertising, sports fans and coupon clippers.

City Council President Tom Smith: Let's try not to use our electronic devices during council sessions; people find it distracting and disrespectful.

Council member Tim Pape: Shut up and quite bothering me while I'm reading my text messages.

That's what he was doing, too. He even seemed amused that, during Smith's request, he got a text from a constituent expressing disapproval of such an unreasonable request: