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LazyWeb: WiFi sky spy?

Today, the NYT covers the growth in wireless internet access hotspots, pointing out some websites used to collate and track hotspot locales. I missed wi-fihospotlist,com leading up to the DC trip but did find the cited jiwire.com – not that it helped much. Neither of these sites provide much in the way of ad-hoc hotspot listings of the type that I primarily saw on that Alexandria-to-Mt. Vernon wardrive I mentioned the other day.

So here’s the LazyWeb thing: 802.11b and 802.11g are reserved radio frequencies with a very well defined spectrum, right?

Shouldn’t a radio-sensing geographic surveillance satellite be able to develop a frequency-specific map of any given area such that a direct visualization of wi-fi coverage could be developed and presented with relative ease?

Furthermore, isn’t it possible that the data allready exists and just needs to be extracted from somewhere within NASA?

Finally, if the data exists currently, couldn’t a historical map could be developed and maintained such that over time one one could watch the coverage grow?

Inquiring minds want to know!

(As an aside, when did the Times start linking in the body of a story? I mean, about time and all, but I’m still surprised to see it.)

Posted on by mwhybark

Craig Thompson piece up at TABLET

Ink and Pixels for Tablet’s 82nd ish is based on a long, long, loooong telephone conversation I had with the gifted creator of Blankets and Goodbye, Chunky Rice.

It seems pretty clear to me that the publication of Blankets could be the most important thing that happened in American independent comics this year, because it presents a potential direction for the genre that could appeal to a very wide range of firmly book buying readers. It’s essentially the Great American First Novel, delivered as a graphic novel, and Thompson’s chops are up to the task. Both in his assured, inventive, and extraordinarily fluent use of the medium and in his plotting and story construction he delivers something that’s really never quite been seen in English.

Some of Beto Hernandez’ work is similar in scope; but because the stories that Hernandez writes about cover the warp and woof of a village’s life over several generations, it’s necessarily less focused if not less rich. Thompson’s book focuses primarily on a brief, first-love relationship – and his exploration of that event employs about 600 pages of drawings.

As a reader who has grown into the practice of literary reading – of examining stories, books, and the entire body of work of an author for themes that repeat and echo – I found the book genuinely unlike any other work in the medium I had ever read, and am confident it will appeal to others who indulge in a similar use of their time.

I will run the entire transcript of my conversation with Thompson here before the end of the year.

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DC Eats

And finally regarding our DC trip, here are the places we ate worthy of note.

Gadsby’s Tavern – next door to the Gadsby’s Tavern Museum in Old Town Alexandria. We ate right where the cheesy picture was taken on the restaurant page, in front of the fireplace. No strolling lutists, though. The entertainment was provided by the maitre d’, who regaled us with tales of buying his tie from a haberdasher in New Yawk, clearly his hometown.

Phillips – this chain has a DC store; my dad told me it was a Baltimore-based biz. I dunno. The draw here is all-you-can-eat seafood, including both small whole crabs and large sea-crab legs, and even, I was delighted to see, crayfish. The food was passable, nothing amazing except in quantity; the most striking aspect of the restaurant scene was that is was clearly the only place that ‘real people’ ate at regularly that we ate while we were in DC. The crowd was large, boisterous, and diverse, contrasted to the nearly pure white crowds we’d been seeing at the museums all week. I noted African-Americans, Asian Muslims, Filipinos, Middle-Easterners, Hispanics, and a man who looked just like Wayne Newton. Interestingly, the employees all appeared to be having a great time and were warm and attentive. The decor was mid-seventies theme restaurant. I loved this place but not because of the food.

Le Gaulois – In many ways this was the most memorable of the meals we ate. The restaurant serves country-style French food, and does a beautiful job. I had the cassoulet mentioned in the review I link to and I guess they must have worked things out, because I ate the whole thing. It was delicious. Viv had pike quenelles, fish dumplings of a sort, and I think her dish was better than mine. My family entertained ourselves by swapping huge samples of the various dishes onto each others’ plates and finished, a bottle of wine and an apertif to the good. Dinner for four was less than $150, including the wine, and man, for French food in DC, that is astounding. Oddly, they stop seating at 8:30 pm, of a piece with DC’s early-to-bed-in-defense-of-power ways.

Casting about for a final meal, I had a hankering for German food, which is the hardest cuisine to find diversity in around the Puget Sound region. We discussed options at length as my family is wont to do. We found an option which none other than Donald Rumsfeld had pre-selected for us, back in the heady days of the early war by indicating his disdain and hatred for it.

Old Europe is a relic, a survivor of the postwar wave of restaurants that opened in cities all over the United States, reflecting the reality of the experiences of American soldiers in occupied Europe. These restaurants created an Americanized fantasy of the European experience with the vim and vigor that would later lead to Las Vegas and Disneyland; being individually-run enterprises, however, the florid imagination of the proprietor is played out on on a smaller scale.

The walls of the restaurant are placarded with genuine oil paintings depicting idealized European scenes of castles, villages, landscapes, and people. Deeply yellowed with decades of cigarette smoke, the paintings are quite kitschy but to me appear to have taken on an artifactual status. Atop the scenic works is a row of heraldic paintings by many different hands, all dated and signed in the mid fifties; the heraldry is captioned with the names of countries, cantons or old European nobility and is not in any apparent order. Approximately ten wooden models of sailing ships hang from the ceiling, smoke-gilded and furred with dust and restaurant fuzz.

The place was about half-full when we arrived and remained that way. The people who worked there obviously knew many of the people eating. the restaurant clearly sustains a loyal and consistent base of regulars. I was charmed. Then, a short woman made her way, cane tapping, to a stand-up piano in the corner and began to sing a mix of German and American holiday songs in a clear soprano. Quite blind, she was also eager to converse with any nearby table. Doubtful at first, I quickly realized that she completed the ambience. With all this atmosphere I began to wonder if the food would be any good.

I had nothing to worry about. A decent selection of German beer and the food that I had, a trout filet, was quite delicious. As an extra added treat, the beer came in glass steins labeled ‘Old Europe’, conveniently available for order on the website.

This concludes my explanation of the additional four pounds I brought home with me from DC.

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BLIMP WEEK update: BLIMP CRASH!

Goodyear blimp drifts into truck; cameraman injured (SF Chronicle)

The “Spirit of America” got away yesterday. Here’s a pic.

Somedays, I miss borrowing wire photos and running them here. But I’m trying to respect creators’ rights so, uh, no pic here, darn it.

While I’m referring to Blimp Week, I should link to the category page. Several of the entries associated with Blimp Week have become hit magnets on the site as well:

  • Getcha Blimp Rides Heah! reliably draws inquiries from those who believe I am able to provide just such a commodity, presumably via Seattle Pacific Zeppelin Airlines.
  • The Wreck of the Shenandoah and the followup have become hubs for recollections of both the wreck of the airship itself over Ohio in the twenties and for anecdotes that have some relationship to the tragedy, one of the great under-reported events in the history of flight. After our visit to DC, I was frustrated, yet again, by the short shrift that LTA gets in most air museums, the notable exception being the Tillamook Air Museum, housed in a former blimp hanger at a decommissioned Navy LTA base.

There’s a ton more interesting stuff in the category, including information on toy blimps, other blimp wrecks, the bankruptcy of Cargolifter, and of course, the Blimp Week theme song.

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Warpoking

So, while traveling recently, I grabbed the iBook to wardrive from Arlington, Virginia (effectively a part of downtown D.C., but outside the district proper) to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. It’s a sixteen mile drive, and runs from dense urban core to suburban Virginia.

I had no idea what I was going to see. From our hotel I was able to see a wireless network called ‘rubberchicken’ but it was password protected. I didn’t have any heavy-duty hacktools and didn’t propose to crack others’ security anyway.

Here in Seattle, if I take the iBook outside, I can see up to five unsecured wireless access points, just standing on my back porch. I figured that in the D.C. region, people would be likely to be somewhat more security conscious and that the overall density of the coverage would be less.

In the event, both assumptions were borne out, although the density was not really that much lower.

The first place I located a different wireless node than ‘rubberchicken’ was as we passed the Iwo Jima memorial, about a block beyond the densely constructed neighborhood of high-rises where our hotel was located. It was a default name – ‘linksys,’ I think – and I believe it was an open node, although we drove by it quickly enough that I was unable to verify that I had good access.

From then on, the nodes came so thick and fast, and we traveled by them so rapidly, that I was unable to either enumerate or test them all. The whole distance to Mount Vernon, with the exception of a mile or two stretch along a river and at the historic site itself, we were never out of coverage. The one time we hit a stop light – in a small community just outside the site, possibly the town of Mount Vernon – I was immediately able to connect to the web and this web site.

Sadly, there was no coverage at Mount Vernon proppah – I was quite hoping I could in fact see the web from George’s very door. I must admit that I did not carry the laptop about the premises, and so my remarks can truly only apply to the parking lot.

Additionally, it allows me to cherish my illusions. As I stood before the tomb, I found the idea that the bones of George and Martha vibrate to the wash of 802.11b radio waves somehow satisfying.

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What?

On November 25, this site hosted 764 visitors. Was it the stuffing, or Ellen’s paintings? We shall likely never know. Good thing the new machinery was in place.