Too-Much-TV

Morbid? Nah...

I enjoy checking the obituaries. Not a complete morbid nut, obituaries celebrate life rather than death [hackneyed...] example Norman Heatley. Here's a guy I had no idea about, but clearly I / we all owe much. So thanks to him.

The Times obituaries, before they went behind the irritating pay for subscription wall, are by far the best (Telegraph's fine, but they do like their war heros and military men. Stories of great bravery that remind me of my childhood comics.) But for me obits are a slice of history: a scientist, next to a sporting great, a school teacher, actor, civic leader. Often seemingly quite ordinary people who have helped shape (usually British) life.

The Telegraph's been running obituaries since the early 1960s, The Times much longer. Might be an interesting use of UK Lottery money to put them all online, a catalogued archive, searchable, indexed. The Telegraph produces books of its best (e.g. "The "Daily Telegraph" Book of Obituaries: Heroes and Adventurers"), but a full archive online would be interesting.

(I do pay for online sites, but The Times is just too expensive for my needs -- when so much is free, like this wonderful new site Digital Guardian)

Broadband and political pork

My colleague Takahiro Miyao has just written a short report about a municipal broadband project in a small Japanese town called Haramachi City, a few hundred miles north east of Tokyo. Haramachi has built a high speed local access network using fixed wireless (40Mbps both way), on top of spare capacity in the town's municipal fiber network. Financed partly by central government subsidies. Haramachi City is not the only rural Japanese town building this kind of network, and one interesting aspect of these new communication infrastructure subsidies is speculation that they are being promoted by politicians who are directing funds to help their constituencies and home regions in much the same way as they brought engineering or agricultural subsidies and public works projects in the past. Now this political power may be being directed at ensuring local regions have the best broadband communications available, i.e. it's political "pork" for the Internet age.

See http://www.glocom.org/tech_reviews/jt_review/20040106_s53/ for Prof. Miyao's report on Haramachi City.