It appears the SBC/AT&T merger that I commented on a few days ago, has been approved by the FCC. In addition, a merger between Verizon and MCI has also been approved.
While the details are not 100% clear, currently it seems that SBC and Verizon will be required to offer naked DSL (i.e. customers could get DSL without first having standard, voice phone service), and freeze prices on their wholesale access to other providers (this should help keep rising DSL costs, low). Some other terms seem to require that MCI will not break any peering agreements, and some vague language about network neutrality is in there, somewhere.
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Call me crazy, but I find it interesting to watch the news stations around 7:00am central, especially on Monday mornings. You get to see all of the big news from the weekend, and all of Friday’s news repeated. You get a great lock-up on which news agency leans which way in the political spectrum.
For instance…
We’ll start with the obvious one, first.
Fox News. It should be fairly obvious to anyone that Fox News tends to toe the conservative party line, quite well. Fox is, and pretty much always has been, conservative. On occasion, you’ll find a liberal host, or show… but they’re usually not that popular, and are often stuck in the middle of the night.
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I’ve recently started a minor attempt to drive additional traffic to this site. I’ve been using BlogExplosion. They’ve started a campaign, fairly recently, called “Rent My Blog.” This enables viewers to rent space on a other members’ blogs. This is money-free rental, folks. No money is required. The entire rental process is done with BlogExplosion “credits,” which you can earn by surfing blogs (or a myriad of other ways). If you look down my right sidebar, under the “Blog of the Moment” heading, you’ll see the thumbnail of my first renter, OneManBandwith.
So far, I’ve been relatively impressed with BlogExplosion. While they don’t drive a lot of staying (or return) traffic, I do manage to convert a few people into return visits.
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Long live paper and scissors.
(seen on the ‘net)
Keith Devens – XML-RPC Library for PHP
Thanks to Keith Deven’s XML-RPC library, I should be able to integrate the blogger API (at the least) into my system. While it’s not as extensive as the MT/MetaWebLog API, it’s still a start, and really all I need.
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If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History
What would it have been like if Fox News had reported on major historical events? Someone’s gotten a time machine, and has gone back in time to capture these screens.
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You know, it’s getting rediculous when people are hauled before a Human Rights Tribunal, simply for writing a letter to the editor.
Okay, here’s the low-down:
A Christian minister, with a staunch anti-homosexual stance (hmm, “staunch stance,” interesting wordplay. An ex-girlfriend of mine would love that combination), wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper expressing concern that children were being exposed to pro-homosexual literature within the school environment (well, okay, at all). He used terms like “psychologically damaging,” and has called the equal rights movement under which the literature falls, a “guise,” and “fradulent.” Therefore, he has been called a “bigot,” and “hate-monger” by various people, and is – evidentially – being hauled before a human rights tribunal in Alberta, Canada.
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Ma Bell has returned, kiddies. It’s time for the phreaks to come out and play.
SBC Communications (formerly SouthWestern Bell) announced, today(from USA Today), that it will take the name of “AT&T” (American Telephone and Telegraph) after the aquisition of the company is complete.
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I was looking through my access logs, today, with Urchin (skitzo.org provides Urchin logs on every account), and found some unusual referrers.
inktomisearch.com – This isn’t even a resovable domain. Neither is it with a www. in front.
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There are so many things that I want to do with FlameBlog.
For those that are new to my blog, FlameBlog is the backend that drives this site. I’ve written the entire backend and blogging interface for this site, myself, in PHP. I’ve put a lot of work into it, although not nearly as much as I had anticipated. I had hoped to have a public alpha release by this time (approximately one year after I began work). Unfortunately, time, personal issues, and other things have not been on my side.
My biggest gripe, currently, is the lack of a templating system, although someone who knows PHP can easily piece together their own site. My second biggest gripe is the lack of an XML-RPC system for “offline” blog editors like Qumana, Ecto, etc…
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