Dave Mancuso dot Com

I think Warchalking is a potentially powerful idea, but who provides the access? Do they know or approve of the people connecting to their network? This idea has spread like wildfire over the net in the last few days (yes, Brad and Mike, it would qualify as a meme). Warchalking is on websites all over, but this link is from The Shifted Librarian:

Matt Jones Births WiFi Markers.

Warchalking

“Okay so here is the first draft of a warchalking symbol card. Having not very much experience of war-walking or war-driving, I’m really looking to others for suggestion as what would be useful to represent in the warchalking symbology. Hopefully we can get the card to V1.0 pretty quickly and start chalking up the city!

I’m going to talk to some folk tommorrow and try and get the discussion going at “PRIVATE REVERIES, PUBLIC SPACES” and hopefully, DIS2002.

You can download:
A PDF of the card to print out and use [31k]
An EPS of the card to download and improve [800k]“

First Picture

“Ben gets the inaugural warchalking pic – he’s chalked up his kynance mews access point, and damn – it looks good even though I say so myself…

[click the picture for a bigger version, 74k]

He’s also written a little piece over at his O’Reilly blog, which explains why warchalking your town or city is a good idea much better than I ever could.”

This meme is really rolling right now, but I think it has staying power if enough folks hop on board, especially libraries. If your library is providing public WiFi access, put up a rune! If you’re not and you’re at a public library, look at this phenomenon and realize how you could contribute to it, the benefits to the public, and the benefits for you!

You can also read the comments about this over at Slashdot.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Today is my brother Joe Mancuso’s birthday. Please send some happy vibes to him over in Guam!

Yes, even the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile isn’t immune from suspicion of terrorist attack. Not that the Wienermobile was in danger of being atttacked. Actually, it’s the Wienermobile that was the potential terrorist tool. I guess you can’t be too careful these days!

9/11 Suspect Lived Lavishly. They’ve traced the 9/11 trail to a man in the Phillipines who lived a pretty hedonistic lifestyle as he plotted to kill the decadent Americans. A hypocrite as well as a terrorist.[AP World News]

TechXNY: Tablet PC OS slated for November. Microsoft also details next version of Office [InfoWorld: Top News]

Okay, now we know why he was gone for a week. I hope he’s feeling a lot better and speeds to recovery. I wonder if he would’ve been a good candidate for a stent? Too late now, I guess. My dad’s had two stents and runs around like a twenty year old.

Here’s hoping Dave kicks his nicotine habit, too. Cigarettes are powerful stuff.

Is Microsoft losing it? Why are they being so arrogant to the court? They were convicted already–they’re being sentenced for a crime. Yet they act like they should still be acquitted.

I guess they don’t have much of a choice at this point. With things looking this grim for Microsoft, what do they have to lose, right?

This one pretty much says it all, folks. Great story. One quote:

“The OS X install program started. The techie who worked there pressed the continue button once or twice, agreed to the license agreement, and the installer did it’s work. The installer didn’t thrash at the disk for half an hour detecting hardware. The installer didn’t have to reboot the machine three or four times. There weren’t a lot of involved menus where you picked which pieces of the operating system you wanted to install or leave out. There was just a progress bar for a while, and then a dialog asking you to restart. The installer simply installed the operating system without a lot of theatrics.”

Just a Quick Note–it looks like my passing out is due to a condition called syncope. It’s not a coronary condition. The triggers that everyone has to speed up or slow down their heartbeat are exaggerated in my case–specifically, my heartbeat can slow down a lot if I tense my diaphragm (lauging too hard, coughing too hard, getting up from a crunch position). If I continue to lose weight, the triggers could reset themselves. Pretty good news. I still have a test to go to–a tilt table test next Wednesday. Like the astronauts. Weird.