According to C-Net, New Orleans Louisiana is planning to build a Wi-Fi network to provide internet access to the citizens. I have seen some articles that suggest that a municipality is in an extreamly good position to build such as system as they already have the necessary locations for towers (light poles and so forth) and easements (roads) that they need for much of the installation. I have also read studies suggesting that a city may save enough in connectivity costs alone to fund the Wi-Fi. Private carriers argue against such systems, mainly because it will hurt their opportunities to sell in that market.

It will be interesting to see if in the short run the internet access becomes increasingly like broadcast television, freely available. If so, it may over time become more restrictive. If you provide free access to your citizens can you then control what they are able to access, blocking sites that may be deemed inappropriate?

I enjoyed this post from the Google Blog showing the doodles of some school children from England. The winner by an eleven year old girl enjoyed a day on the front page of Google in the UK. It really is very creative and very “professionally” done. I really like her use of color. Neat stuff.

A new site of mine Storm Trumpets is receiving some attention for the expanding / collapsing site menu. Visit the site and click on the menu items “Trumpets” and “Trombones” to see the menu in action. It creates the illusion of movement as if driven by DHTML or JavaScript, however to the contrary it works in CSS and is really quite simple. I have been asked to explain how it works, so thought I would provide a brief tutorial for it here.
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An article in C-Net confirms something I saw first hand last week, the Sober worm is again in full swing. One of the biggest problems with big time proliferation on emails is that it clogs bandwidth, and can consume alotted disk space rapidly as inboxes and sent mailboxes fill. It will be interesting to see how many commercial users return from the four day Thanksgiving Holiday to email systems needing a serious dose of help due to overload. Even more of concern, perhaps, will be the rush of new emails as people return from the holiday, infect themselves and then share the fun in one big rush about mid-morning Monday when they all get back to work.

Some tips for safe email:
1. turn off html formatted email – read your email in plain text only
2. never open an attachment unless you know exactly what it is – resolve any doubt in follow-up communication with the sender before opening it
3. use Thunderbird or another alternative to Outlook or Outlook Express

I happened on to a very nice feature for WordPress that is available as a plug-in called Draftlettes. What it does is notify other users or non-users selected by you that a draft has been posted so that they can take a shot at it before it goes public. Very nice idea.

The age old issue comes up. What should I get my wife for Christmas?

Here are some ideas:
1. Get her a couple of nice hair cuts. She is a very pretty woman, but the last thing she spends money on is herself. For a couple of years she went to a high end haircut place (at the insistance of a friend) where some guy who has boyfriends primped and polished her do. The result was usually excellent, but expensive. Now she more typically uses one of the local people and it isn’t bad, but it is also not “that”. Does giving this gift say “Honey, you don’t look good?”

2. A digital thermometer? This thing looks pretty handy. I cannot tell you how many overdone burgers I have had to be sure that the thing is absolutely, positively done. Most thermometers don’t do much for thinner things like burgers.

3. A gift certificate for a massage or two? I did this a couple of years ago and she really enjoyed it. My wife works hard. She actually has troubles sitting still (and that sometimes annoys me because it then bothers her if I do — even though I might be working on this site or something actually productive.

4. Something else that I have yet to think of?

5. A digital camera. I have a Sony Mavica, but it doesn’t seem to work well with her Windows XP computer, even though I got the newest drivers. It won’t connect via the USB cable, so you have to finalize the mini-cd every time you want to put a picture on the computer. She has started selling a few extra items on Ebay, so she might find this convenient and might enjoy having a nice camera in her purse as well.

As always, if you found something on our site helpful, we welcome donations (button at the bottom of every page) and if you donate, I might actually have enough money to get her one of these things :-).

What I really want, however, is for you to leave a comment sharing your thoughts. Please let me know if you are male or female as well. I suspect that the answers by female readers should be given a little more weight in scoring, but then again, you guys may have the pearl of wisdom I am looking for.

p.s. What got me thinking like this you might wonder? Well today is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. Thanksgiving is really a great holiday in my book because you actually slow down a minute and tell people that you appreciate them. You think about what is important in your life. You assess. What the day after has become is however annoying to be honest. It is a great big shopping day when people go get deals on Christmas presents. It is the day that many people have based a personal bankruptcy on. So I almost decided to venture out to get a free computer or $199 Toshiba laptop at Circuit City. Fortunately I read the small print. Free is with a one year AOL subscription. Sorry, but that isn’t free. And of course it is $650 with $650 in rebates (tax not rebated), so if you mess up and don’t process a rebate just right … well you have probably had that experience in your life sometime along the way I imagine. Anyway, I am very thankful.

This is kind of fun for a minute. You generate a warning label that you can then print out and put on your sister’s forehead or something else you choose to label.