Today Google officially announced that it will be bidding for wireless spectrum in an FCC auction in January. The 700 MHz spectrum is going to be up for auction, and if Google is able to snag a part of it, it could mean a truly open wireless network. It doesn’t seem to be any coincidence that this announcement comes right on the heels of Google’s Android announcement. With the development of a mobile OS created for open development and communication, the ability to back it with an open wireless network would be a huge boost for Android’s success, and make Google even more appealing as a wireless provider.
As part of my training at Mass Maritime, I will be spending the better part of January and February 2008 onboard the T.S. Enterprise, Mass Maritime’s training ship, traveling around the Caribbean and the South Pacific. Since I get to have experiences that few people ever will, I have decided to set up a blog for the purpose of recording these experiences, and sharing them with readers. I plan to post pre-Sea Term news and information prior to departure, and then provide an update at least every other day during the trip. You can access the blog by going to seaterm.christiaanconover.com.
Tuesday, November 13th 2007 7:03 PM in Wordpress Themes (0)
I’ve updated the Orange Basic theme. I’ve modified the colors and fonts to make it more visually appealing, and I’ve added support for the tagging system introduced in Wordpress 2.3.
The Mass Maritime Green Club took a tour today of the solar power system the school has installed. The system cost about $1 million to purchase and install, and will provide a peak of 81kW to the school. It should complement nicely the 660kW wind turbine that the school put up in 2006.
One of the members of the club put some pictures of the solar installation online, which you can see here.
In the past few days since the official Android announcement, the Internet has been exploding with speculation, debate, and excitement over the new OS’ potential, and its significance in the mobile phone industry. Most people seem to think that it looks cool, and it does: touchscreens, 3G support, freedom to create and add whatever apps you want…what’s not to love? Plus, with the backing of more than 30 major technology and telecom companies, it’s sure to get good placement in the market. However, will the vision of a fully open source mobile OS be maintained once the software is put in the hands of the cell phone carriers?
I’ve created my official YouTube channel, for use in conjunction with my blog.
Skribit is a new blog widget created by Startup Weekend Atlanta to allow readers to suggest topics to bloggers to write about. You simply place it on your site, and readers can post ideas for topics. It’s currently in closed beta (it was only created this weekend, brainstorm to product), but I’m anxious to be able to try it out.
Sunday, November 11th 2007 10:23 PM in Photography (0)
I went to New York City this weekend, and took a lot of pictures while I was there. I’ve posted some of them below:
I take a lot of pictures, and I like to upload them to my blog. My camera takes large resolution photos though, so preparing the pictures for upload can be annoying. I used to open up each photo I wanted to upload individually in GIMP, resize it, and once all the pictures were resized I’d upload them one by one. I then decided I would go looking for a batch resizer, and found a very basic one that got the job done. It still wasn’t ideal since I was resizing and then uploading, adding (I felt) unnecessary steps to the process. Finally, today I decided I’d see if somebody had been smart enough to write a Wordpress plugin to resize images when you upload them. Lo and behold, somebody was, and the results more than fit the bill.
Hurricane Noel (technically no longer a hurricane once it reached us) came through Cape Cod on Saturday, bringing winds in excess of 50 MPH, a couple of inches of rain, and 25-30 foot seas offshore. Mass Maritime had its fair share of issues as a result of the storm, including minor flooding and power outages. I took some pictures and videos during the storm, which I’ve posted below.