The Baghdad Blogger, Salam Pax, is Real

The Baghdad Blogger, Salam Pax, also known as Dear Raed, is real, according to this Slate story. "Salam Pax" is the Slate reporter's interpreter. But lack of broadband access meant the reporter didn't know this before returning to his New York cable modem:

"My slow-speed satellite phone all but precluded Web browsing, which meant the only non-Arabic media I was exposed to, from mid-March until just a few days ago, consisted of snatches of the BBC. The fascination and controversy over Salam Pax-when he stopped posting for a brief period, his Web fans worried he might have been arrested or gone into hiding-completely escaped me."

(Later . . .) The Slate reporter deserves kudos for some well-turned phrases that just make you smile, including: "nom de blog," "a virtual felled forest of postings on war blogs" and "There was a kerfuffle." Don't miss this laugh-out-loud detail about Salam, who apparently blogs better than he drives: "He got behind the wheel. There was just a foot or so between the Hyundai and the cars in front and back. Salam grimaced. "I don't think I can do this without causing damage," he said.

Cutting the Landline

Abandoning one's wired home telephone for one or two wireless phones seemed a good idea until I had to call Aquila for some natural-gas customer service. Called on the wireless and hung up shortly after the sweet-voiced female computer reported, "Your estimated wait is . . . 10 . . . minutes." And a good thing, too. Calling the number from a landline this morning, that same sweet female computer (does she ever take a break?) told me my estimated wait was nine minutes. Nineteen minutes later, I got a helpful human who wrapped things up by minute 25.

That's 8.3 percent of my 300 anytime minutes. Aquila has 24-hour customer service (probably consisting in the late hours of two people in a lonely call center, one of whom is at the door paying the pizza delivery guy), so I could use my free night and weekend minutes. But what to do for those places that open just 9 to 5? Will this mean employees conducting even more of their personal lives from work than they already do?

Reblogging the Past

Having chosen to maintain just one blog here at johnfulwider.com instead of three (this one, ThesisBlog and Fulwider's Food & Travel), I'm worried posts from the latter two BlogSpot-hosted might disappear in a Blogger server move or suffer some other misfortune. So I've moved ThesisBlog to my server and will soon do the same with Fulwider's Food & Travel.

I'm also "reblogging" some greatest hits from those two old blogs. Readers across the globe (all three of them) voted by telephone and SMS in a hard-fought popularity contest that saw the announced margin of victory change just two times. To soothe those whose thumbs remain sore from frantic Texas-style "vote early, vote often" balloting, I'm posting the greatest hits in reverse chronological order instead of by popularity. Here's the first one.

Airlines are on the right track testing whether customers will pay for in-flight food.
Delta is the latest to try this concept, following America West and Northwest. The airlines should have done this long ago. Long gone are the days when air travel was a luxury, and passengers dressed in their Sunday best. Airplanes are flying buses. But they do make much longer trips, so some concession to the traveling public's collective growling stomach is necessary. One hopes they can turn a profit off their overpriced "Mrs. Fields cookies, Entenmann's cinnamon rolls and Pizzeria Uno sandwiches" and funnel the money into smoothing out their fare structures into something like Southwest's excellent $299 maximum one-way fare.

There's a drawback, though, to eliminating or sharply cutting back full meals on airlines: Less material for the hilarious AirlineMeals.net, the global repository of photographic proof that airline meals stink.
(Reblogged from February 5, 2003.)

You're Not Getting Smarter

Among the numerous theories lolling around in my messy office cubicle of a mind is this: Reading the Web won't make you smarter.

Dead-tree-edition books, magazines and newspapers will, in that order of efficacy. Jumping hither and yon on the Web, I get the effect of scanning a printed newspaper: I remember the headlines, but not the stories. I grasp the trivia, but not the meaning. Were you to quiz me on the day's events following a Web-surfing session, I would be able to regurgitate headlines. But could I comment intelligently on the items I'd seen using information I'd just acquired? I doubt it.

By contrast, I'm still thinking deeply (no pun intended) about a book on water policy I stopped reading over a week ago, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water. Reading the words in a book, with no hypertext or graphical distractions, seems to have planted thoughts in my mind with roots deeper and stronger than thoughts planted by Web readings would develop. Further, when I'm ready to blog those thoughts, I'll only need to flip to my margin notes for supporting material. By writing in the margins, I preserved either whole thoughts or links to memories of whole thoughts that I can access at will. In a way, one could call margin notes hypertext links to content stored in the original personal server, the brain. While this blog serves in part as a reminder of things I've seen on the Web and may want to examine again, I won't have any margin notes (save the linktext) when I return. I could create a kind of margin note by laboriously copying and pasting each meaningful paragraph of a Web document into my blog and commenting upon it. But when describing a task requires an adjective like "laboriously," one can effortlessly guess how likely that task is to be performed.

Now one could raise this objection: It's even more laborious to blog one's book-initiated thoughts because that requires typing in the book's text and then commenting upon it. All too true. But if I have established that the quality of my blogging increases when the printed word prompts it, rather than the electronic word, the labor may be worth it. And if adding printed content to the blogosphere adds to the diversity of material contained therein, all the better.
The key here may be that doing things slowly means doing things better. (All the people I've pestered to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up may scoff at this "revelation," but what are you gonna do?) Reading books takes more time than reading the Web, at least for me, and produces better outcomes. Writing this post slowly -- it's the first I've ever saved for later editing in w.bloggar -- has in my estimation also produced a better outcome.

What implications does this have for blogging, a kind of publishing where speed mostly rules? That's a topic for another post, considered slowly.

CSS Zen Garden

The CSS Zen Garden shows the flexibility and beauty of CSS design by displaying the same content in eight user-selectable designs. My favorites are Meliorism and Golden Mean.

This site uses CSS, but I'm not good enough at it yet to get CSS validated.

Thanks to Xeni for 'Worksafe'

Thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing for reassuring office workers everywhere with her "yes, worksafe" parenthetical addendum to image links. Is she the first?
The worksafe image is of an Asian woman with SARS mask tan line. Fascinating.

SlowBlogging

Doc Searls turns a nice phrase describing "SlowBlo," aka blogging over dialup: "When the going gets wide, and I can post with ease, posting happens -- usually between other things I'm doing, such as real work. But when going gets narrow, and every link I click on involves a two-minute wait, posting becomes a progressively more arduous and unlikely eventuality."

There's also DoughBlo -- broadband blogging that's arduous and unlikely because you're paying for it by the minute at an Internet cafe in Europe.

Summarizing Weblogs' Impact

Dan Gillmor summarizes weblogs' impact nicely: "Weblogs brought to life an aspect of the Web that had been mostly submerged -- the idea that this is a read AND write medium, that we should be able to write on the Web as easily as we can read what's in our browsers."

Objective Journalism?

"The Rockford College family debated Tuesday what went wrong at its spring graduation ceremony that featured New York Times reporter and antiwar advocate Chris Hedges."
"Reporter and antiwar advocate." In the world of objective journalism, those terms should not abut one another. Does that world still exist?

Archives Now Working

Finally got my archives working.

Thanks, Rebecca Blood

Thanks to Rebecca Blood for posting this link to the "Top Twenty D&D Pickup Lines" on her blog. I already respected Rebecca, but if she played Dungeons & Dungeons when she was a kid -- well, that would make her cooler than a +2 Vorpal Blade.

Condemning America's School System

A well-written condemnation of America's school system can be found here. Reading this in conjunction with "Why Nerds Are Unpopular," a heartbreaking analysis of school social structure, could quite possibly scare a person out of having children. Why intentionally put another human being through this?

Pocket Wireless Personal Server?

Pocket wireless personal server from Intel? Could this be true? I wonder whether public-access screens and input devices will be any easier to find than Wi-Fi hotspots (especially in The Land That Time Forgot, Western Europe).

Water Rocket-Powered BarbieMobile

On a day of hilarious happenings, this site about a water-rocket-powered-BarbieMobile is the funniest happening on the Web.

Carfree.com: Car-Free Cities

carfree.com is an excellent introduction to an urban design concept for a city of 1 million people where there are no cars and every possible destination can be reached in 35 minutes or fewer via walking and public transportation (bicycles optional). Numerous objections can be raised to the ideas presented on the site, but the authors deserve credit for presenting their ideas well. The introduction page is even available in seven languages.

We'll Miss You, Ari.

We'll miss you, Ari.

"Under what the Senate is proposing, the president would have more authority to help protect the homeland if potatoes attacked America in the Department of Agriculture than he would if terrorists did under the Department of Homeland Security." -- Ari Fleischer, commenting in October 2002 about President Bush's desire for control over hiring and firing practices in the Department of Homeland Security.

(From this Washington Post article.)

Back from Europe

Back from Europe. Internet access there is more expensive to use and more difficult to find than I had ever imagined. Thus the lack of updates.

Venice is Beautiful

Venice is beautiful.

Top 10 Tips for a German Vacation

1. You don't have to worry about running out of beer on a volksmarch (a group walk for an entire town; there's one every weekend somewhere close by). A beer company truck will drive into the middle of a large forest to deliver reinforcements to the rest station.
   
2. The beer, bread and wine are the best in the world. No, don't argue. They are.
   
3. Don't believe the travel guides, which make German hotels sound like something from the 18th Century. They all have toilets and showers in the room, comfortable beds, telephones and satellite television. They cost 40 to 80 Euros, most under 60 Euros. Breakfast is included.
   
4. Driving in Germany is a challenge. Germans are amazingly skilled drivers and like to display their skills going 100 kph on narrow, winding roads. There will always be someone right behind you pressuring you to go faster.
   
5. Deutsche Telekom phone cards are not the right way to go. It's hard to find phone booths that take the cards, and it costs about 10 Euro cents for 10 seconds calling the United States. Tear the AT&T access numbers advertisement out of your in-flight magazine and use a credit card to pay.
   
6. The map you'll get with your rental car doesn't show small towns or even some semi-major roads. Since small towns (500 or 1,000 people) are where you'll find the best Germany has to offer, buy a better map.
   
7. German forests smell wonderful. Be sure you aren't congested when you're out for a walk.
   
8. Gummi Smurfs do still exist and they're just as yummy as they always were. But they're called Schluempfe, thus your friends' difficulty in finding them for you when they took a trip to Germany before you.
   
9. The stores close really, really early.
   
10. Buy gas in Luxembourg if you're around Trier. It's 30 Euro cents cheaper per liter. There's a huge gas station right at the border. But don't drive past the pumps and park so you can go use the bathroom first. You won't be able to get back without driving the wrong way on three one-way streets and almost getting smooshed by a truck.
    

Here in Germany at an Internet Cafe

Here in Germany at an internet cafe in the back of a bakery/coffee shop. Access is Euros 1.60 for 15 minutes. Yummy smells are free.