I'm downtown at what's being called an historic event: a real time, intercontinental collaborative construction of an Internet Bill of Rights which is taking place in New York and simultaneously in South America. This collaborative effort to create a consensus of agreement on a set of essential rights for the Internet was done using custom software that allowed the participants, working in small groups, to make suggestions for inclusion in an Internet Bill of Rights, edit each other suggestions, and then 'endorse' any groups contributions by adding their group's icon to any of the suggestions. The collaboration was also faciliated by simultaneous machine translation between English and Spanish.

I'm at the HD Expo today. It's the first time it's been held in New York (it will also be repeated in LA next month<>) and is happening at the Waterfront, which you seasoned NYers may remember from it's halcyon days as The Tunnel, and scene of more than a few filmings. Whenever a TV show (or film) needed to have a scene in a club, they invariable filmed it in The Tunnel.

The first test beam was shot through the CERN Large Hadron Collider this weekend (and the universe apparently wasn't destroyed, haha.) The accelerator goes live in 30 days, and thanks to robot I'll probably spend most of them dancing to the Large Hadron Collider rap:

Today Verizon officially rolls out FiOS TV here in New York City. They're having a schmancy ceremony at Grand Central which will be webcast (not on MNN.) As you may known, NYC granted Verizon a television franchise in the city back in May which was just confirmed on July 16th by the New York Public Service Commission. As part of the deal, Verizon will pay franchise fees for use of city infrastructure, a portion of which goes to fund MNN, which provides universal access and programming to all Manhattan residents (other burroughs each have their own networks.)

Verizon has also indicated they will quickly be moving into web video: Web video over FiOS

At this evening's Unigroup meeting 'll be giving a quick summary of name-space and dns news including ICANN's Paris announcement on gTLDs, the recent hijacking of ICANN's own domain (and what insight this gives us into IANA operations) and of course the current flapdoodle over the critical DNS vulnerability discovered by Dan Kaminsky. Immediately following will be the main presentation on Deploying and Scaling Rails.

Next Wednesday, July 30th at 11:00am there will be a briefing
from the Mayor's Office and Diamond Consultants for the Broadband
Advisory Committee regarding the Bloomberg Administration's plans for
bridging the digital divide in New York City.

The Broadband Advisory Committee was established in 2005 with the
passage of Introduction 625-A creating a joint public broadband
commission to advise the Mayor and the City Council of New York on how
the resources of City government can be used to stimulate the private
market so that residents and businesses of New York City have more
options in terms of high-speed Internet access. The goal of the
committee is to educate the general public about broadband and the

First thing this morning our new and most xlnt SA tells me he found the biggest offender on the staff file share-- meaning a single directory that's using up 10% of the available space (which is pathetically small to begin with, but that's another story.) It's a folder in our own department. "Oh that's just some stuff from Jacob" says our support dude, and before I can even take a looksee SA's blown it out.

Because it's not like we really *need anything* from the guy who who designed the whole network infrastructure and current development plan, right?

Thank ye gods for Restropect.