I Love the Internet

So Eston Bond spotted one of my articles on the website of an Australian graphic designer. From our AIM chat from this morning: Eston Bond (10:48:06 AM): he posted to a design forum I frequent FarivarCJ (10:48:40 AM): random Eston Bond (10:48:44 AM): yeah Eston Bond (10:48:50 AM): I was like whoa, that’s kinda crazy Eston Bond (10:49:14 AM): I told him about it, and he said “Really? There was a selection of about 4 texts that a lecturer gave…

Dear Councilwoman Maio, My name is Cyrus Farivar and I am a technology journalist who learned my trade while a student at UC Berkeley. I wrote for The Daily Californian and watched the City Council take stands against various issues. Sometimes those decisions are made with conviction and well-thought out reasoning, and sometimes those decisions are made with half-baked ideas that come from somewhere else. When I found out that the Berkeley City Council was considering building a citywide WiFi…

Thanks for subscribing to Burritoeater.com’s Intestinal Apocalypse Monthly newsletter. We hope you find it enjoyable, useful, and above all, not worthy of knee-jerk deletion. If you ever decide to unsubscribe, simply send an e-mail to ch@burritoeater.com requesting just that. You’ll never hear a peep from us again. If you’d like to switch the e-mail address at which you receive the Apocalypse, follow the above unsubscription guidelines, and be sure to include the new recipient e-mail address. We’d send you a…

I just discovered this site via NYT (TimesSelect), in an article about the Mission. “The Mission is the burrito vortex,” said Charles Hodgkins, who has visited every one of the city’s more than 150 taquerias – nearly a third of them are in the Mission – rating each burrito for his Web site, burritoeater.com. (Taqueria San Francisco, an unassuming neighborhood hole-in-the-wall on 24th Street, boasts the highest-rated burrito in the city.)

Wired: By Joshua Quittner October 1994 I’m waiting for a call back from McDonald’s, the hamburger people. They’re trying to find me someone – anyone – within corporate headquarters who knows what the Internet is and can tell me why there are no Golden Arches on the information highway. It’s true: there is no mcdonalds.com on the Internet. No burger_king.com either. Yet. “Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?” asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald’s media-relations person,…

Marjane Satrapi (of Persepolis fame), has joined the NYT as an online cartoonist/columnist, drawing mini vertical comics for the web. They’re pretty damned sweet. Unfortunately, you have to be part of the TimesSelect thing to see them.

Hats off to my co-worker Curt Poff and my editor Jason Snell for telling me about Sealand. The Principality of Sealand is a micronation (a self-declared, unrecognised state-like entity) that claims as its territory Roughs Tower as well as territorial waters in a twelve nautical mile radius. Roughs Tower is a former Maunsell Sea Fort located in the North Sea six miles (10 km) off the coast of Essex, United Kingdom, at 51° 53′ 40″ N, 1° 28′ 57″ E.…

AP: This tiny Baltic republic is breaking new ground in digital democracy. This week, the country nicknamed “e-Stonia” because of its tech-savvy population became the first country in the world to hold an election allowing voters nationwide to cast ballots over the Internet. Less than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated online in elections for mayors and city councils across the country, but officials hailed the experiment held Monday to Wednesday as a success. “Everything has gone…

NYT: One evening earlier this summer, I asked Masood Farivar, a former Khalis officer who had fought in Tora Bora during the jihad, to tell me why the caves were so important. “They’re rugged, formidable and isolated,” he said. “If you know them, you can come and go with ease. But if you don’t, they’re a labyrinth that you can’t penetrate. They rise in some places to 14,000 feet, and for 10 years the Soviets pummeled them with everything they…

Slashdong: Amazon Sells Sex Toys: A Sex Toy Modder’s DREAM 79 CENT VIBRATORS. 7 FUCKING 9 CENT VIBRATORS. Who CARES if you fuck it up, the motor inside the thing is worth more than 79 cents! Buy a bunch! Mod your brains out! AND YOU CAN BUY BACON THERE TOO! Bacon and Sex Toys, together at last! Also of note: SF Chron (Aug. 19, 2005) on Amazon selling sex toys. Regina Lynn on Slashdong. (June 3, 2005)