David Akin

Scouting the scouts

I've been subscribing to one or several of the e-newsletters published by the Internet Scout Project since I had my first e-mail address back in 1992. The Scout project, based at the University of Wisconsin in beautiful Racine, simply scouts out new Web or electronic resources and comments on them. The group has just redesigned their Web site, prompting me to visit -- it looks good -- and I just found that it too has a blog for all the sites and new resources that project members find that don't make it into one of the newsletters.

I'm syndicated! . . . but not here.

I'm trying out a new blog publishing tool from the folks at Canada's Tucows Inc. (NASDAQ OTC: TCOW). Tucows, many Net veterans will remember, originally started out as "The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software" (did you get that acronym?), a great place in the early days of the Net to get the software you need to connect to the network. Tucows still maintains that software repository but today it's big in the wholesale domain business. Its Blogware tool is an offshoot of this business. I'm privileged to be trying out the alpha testing version of this tool and so far, I'm pretty impressed. There's a robust feature set that gives a user much of the flexibility of a system like Moveable Type's without having the added user-side complexity. And, for me, the exciting part about Blogware is that I can syndicate comment. Now, as I mentioned, Blogware is still in testing so I'll continue to maintain this site as my main blog site but I'll try to mirror any posts here to my Blogware blog. If you're visiting here, I'd encourage you to head over to the Blogware version of this blog if you want to get more interactive and post your thoughts aboout anything I end up posting.

A national tower grid?

Canada's federal government is embarking on a "National Antenna Tower Review Policy", a good idea, it seems to me, as we see more and more wireless broadband providers take to the air. Wi-Fi proponents have already warned that really good tower spots are a scarce commodity and, if there's any role for a government authority, it might be in regulating the physical access to these tower point. Anyone interested in this issue is invited to contribute to the review but time is tight. Submissions must be in by October 17. Canada's tower review policy is being led by David Townsend, a law professor at the University of New Brunswick. The government says: "This ... Review's objective is to lead the development of new, modern procedures for placing antenna towers, which embrace community involvement and expand the economic and social benefits of wireless broadcast and wireless broadband technologies across Canada."

Henry Camden Akin

Henry Camden Akin arrived in this world on September 16, 2003, weighing in at 7 lbs, 13.5 ounches. He, mom and dad are healthy and happy. Interestingly, Henry arrived on his big sister's birthday. Anne Leith Akin was born September 16, 2001. We plan to search out a lot of two-for-one birthday deals and it looks like I'm going to be asking my boss for that day off work for a long time.