I will be traveling abroad starting tomorrow and will not be blogging until early April. However, feel free to email me if need be. Thanks.
Archive for March, 2008
March 17: Cyrus on Morning Edition (NPR)
Dear Friends,
I’ve been informed that my radio piece on mobile text message spam will air on Morning Edition today (March 17)!
It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams).
New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 6 am to 9 am Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 3 am to 9 am Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org
It will also be archived at npr.org and at my site if you miss it.
Lemme know if you hear it!
Update: Audio is here!
Who wants a postcard?
I have a bunch of postcards of San Francisco that I bought for cheap from Cody’s moving sale yesterday.
Want me to send you one? Email me your mailing address.
AFP: Estonia fears English too dominant in its schools
Agence France Presse:
TALLINN (AFP) — Education authorities in Estonia Thursday warned that the hands-down dominance of English in its schools is depriving the Baltic state of the language specialists it will need in the future.
A hefty 84 percent of pupils in this country of 1.3 million people opt to study English, according to official statistics.
Some 41 percent take Russian as a foreign language. Russian is also the native tongue of around a third of the population.
German and French, meanwhile, come in a distant third and fourth, studied respectively by just 18 percent and three percent of pupils.
“As a result, Estonia is now lacking and also likely far into the future to lack a sufficient number of specialists able to work in other official languages of the European Union,” Kersti Sostar, head of the language department of Estonia’s state examination and qualification centre, told AFP.
Chico Enterprise Record: Starving Student: The cultural significance of taco trucks
Starving Student: The cultural significance of taco trucks:
It is not a secret that the highest-income earners in Chico are white people. So let’s go ahead and stop trying to pretend I’m being racist. Everyone is racist. And every journalist is biased. If you do not agree with the previous two statements, you probably understand the world much differently than I do, and will find this column at least partially offensive.
Therefore, people who stick their nose up at taco trucks are probably exactly the kind of people who need to be eating at them. Hispanics are a huge part of our community, but it seems most white folks in this town have no interaction with people of another race and this is sad because most white people are annoyingly white. If you use energy-saving light bulbs, refuse to shop at Wal-Mart and think you have done something important for Africa in your lifetime, then you’re probably annoyingly white.
I have received e-mails warning me to stay away from taco trucks because they are “roach coaches.” I’m not even Hispanic and I find this offensive. If white people ran more taco trucks, I am fairly certain other white people would not refer to taco trucks in such a derogatory way.
There are so many Hmong in Chico that during their New Year celebration in 2007 they stuffed the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds with more people than I had ever seen at an event in that location. But most people are surprised to hear this. I get the feeling Hmong people might feel a bit alienated from the community.
Inevitably, every time I go to Tacos El Pinolero there are a host of Hispanics, a few blue-collar white people and that one white guy on his cell phone wearing khaki pants who gets a burrito to go so he can tell all his gelled-hair buddies back at the office about how he slummed it for lunch.
Monday afternoon was exactly this way.
“inhaling democracy”
IM conversation with an Iraqi friend now living in New York:
Friend: are u following spitzer’s resignation now
Friend: ?
Friend: crazy
Cyrus Farivar: yeah
Friend: cool
Friend: his wife is so pissed
Friend: man that’s so cool
Friend: they just resign like that
Friend: when they make awful mistakes
Cyrus Farivar: why is that cool?
Friend: in iraq
Friend: that never happened
Friend: no one resigned
Friend: no matter what they did
Friend: they outlived the people
Friend: i’m relishing the democratic process
Friend: kind of inhaling democracy
For Sale: My MacBook – $800 (SOLD)

It’s less than a year old, and if you buy it before March 20, you can extend the AppleCare on it.
Specs are here.
I’ll drop the price $40 if you’re a blog reader/friend.
Update: It’s been sold, thanks!
March 10: Cyrus on Morning Edition (NPR)
Dear Friends,
I’ve been informed that my radio piece about gadgets of “the future” will air on Morning Edition tomorrow (March 10)!
It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams).
New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 6 am to 9 am Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 3 am to 9 am Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org
It will also be archived at npr.org and at my site if you miss it.
Lemme know if you hear it!
Update: Audio is here!
Wired: Free Municipal Wi-Fi Has Hit the Streets — Mostly in Places You’ve Never Heard Of
Wired:
By Cyrus Farivar
To read the headlines, you’d think the dream of free, citywide wireless was dead coast to coast. One after another, big municipal Wi-Fi projects — San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta — have hit the skids. But check out the rest of the map: Dozens of lower-profile locales are launching government-sponsored networks. Most are smaller cities and counties, where bureaucracies are less onerous and costs are lower. (Philadelphia, the sixth-largest US city, is the biggest urban area to get a network running, with about 100 square miles of coverage.) Road trip? Here’s where to jump online. Download the pdf (224k)
Cyrus on The World — TODAY!
Dear Friends,
I’ve been informed that my radio piece on overseas electronic voting systems will be airing today.
It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):
New York – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 4 pm Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 2 pm Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org
Other stations are available at www.theworld.org.
Will be available on The World’s site later in the day and on my site if you miss the broadcast.
Lemme know if you hear it!
Update: Audio is here!
Vallejo and Napa Taco Trucks
January 24 2008
Tacos Garcia
Soscol St. at McKinstry
Napa, CA
Note: Advertised “Burrito Diablo de Camarón $8.50″

Tacos Dos Hermanos
Sonoma St at Soreno St.
Vallejo, CA

Tacos Jalisco
Texas St. at Broadway
Vallejo, CA
Note: “Tacos de Birria”

La Perla de Jalisco
1 block north of Kentucky St. at Alameda
Vallejo, CA

San Bruno & Millbrae Taco Trucks
I finally finished uploading photos from my two most recent solo crawls.
March 1 2008
Tacos Panzon
Campbell and Grand Ave.
Oakland, CA

Tacos Toñito
Herman and Huntington Ave. (Under I-380 overpass)
San Bruno, CA

Tacos El Ranchito
El Camino Real at Jenevin Ave. (Across from the Fire Station)
San Bruno, CA

Tacos El Ranchito #2
El Camino Real at Center St. (near McDonald’s)
Millbrae, CA

La Conchita
El Camino Real and Hillcrest Ave.
Millbrae, CA

Note: Pastor was *really* crispy
Overall notes: San Bruno/Millbrae trucks seem to sell sopes, Oakland trucks don’t.
Harper’s: Google’s Addiction to Cheap Electricity
[via Alan Wiig]

