Aside

Obama: But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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!

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…

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…

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…