Archives for April 2001

A couple of weeks ago

April 9, 2001 by Michael Boyle

, Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World was about the OAS/FTAA Summit, being held in Quebec City in a couple of weeks. Large protests are expected, and Federal, provincial, and local forces have been in a frenzy preparing for the huge event.

One of the tactics being employed to [keep the peace | stifle public debate] is to build a huge fence surrounding the core of Quebec City – you can see Blinky the Dog standing by the fence in the cartoon. On Saturday, the Gazette published more info about the fence and the other so-called security measures being taken.

But not so fast. A Montreal-based lawyer has gone to court to bring the fence down, calling it a violation of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms – specifically, that it limits the ability of law-abiding citizens to freely assemble. I’m with him – and more to the point, I think that if the organizers had gone out of their way to accomodate and work with the protesters, a great deal of the potential for trouble could have been avoided. Alas, I think it’s too late now. And, yet again, the maxim that “the police cause riots” will be proven true in Quebec.

The 2001 5K competition

April 9, 2001 by Michael Boyle

closed yesterday, and it looks like the submissions will be available for viewing tomorrow – April 10. I didn’t get an entry in this year (for the second year running!), but I can’t wait to see what people have cooked up.

Someone’s finally

April 8, 2001 by Michael Boyle

doing real tests on providing net connections using the power grid. This time it’s in Germany, not in the UK where they did some widely-publicized tests a couple of years ago. I wonder if, and how, drastically increased connectivity in Europe (not in terms of the number of access points but in terms of bandwidth and the possible removal of per-minute metering) will affect things in North America?

Playing a little catch-up

April 5, 2001 by Michael Boyle

MetaFilter Board Game
Go to a garage sale or a flea market and get a vintage toaster. They toasted hotter, thus faster and better.
Triangles.
No triangles at all in this lovely photo.

Oh my

April 5, 2001 by Michael Boyle

. The third item down (as of this writing) is a piece about whispers going around that Automatic-Media is in trouble. Of course Automatic-Media is the year-old umbrella that includes Suck and Feed, plus Plastic.

The sad thing for me is that it’s not really a shock. We’ve been hearing stories like this for ages now – even though this one doesn’t seem to include the otherwise required extravagance. That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be a tremendous loss, though, either.

It’s not fashionable to say, but a whole lot of the web can be traced back directly to Suck, for instance. If it were a rock and roll family tree, Suck would be Robert Johnson or someone – not always remembered, but totally fundamental. Feed would be… who? Well except for the temporal inconsistency with the above, maybe the Velvet Underground or someone – geeky, art-schoolish, but at the very heart of things in important ways.

Newer web people (and old ones too) might think I’m over-stating it, and maybe I am. But still. It’s the old fogey thing to say, but you had to be there when Suck launched. It was a wild time – no names (though Carl and Joey’s authorship was a poorly-kept secret, which was certainly intentional), no lame business model to muddy things. No ugly colour scheme, no gee-whiz graphics save for the title itself.

I hope these are just rumours and that they can work it out if not.