The Casimir Effect: v. 2.0

Some quick updates from the campaign trail.

We had a great turnout at our fundraiser tonight and last night, which brings us right to the end of the first quarter of 2006.

A quick glance at my calendar says we have scarcely five months until the election. (Sept. 5 is our Superbowl) I’ve been working for the campaign for three months already. There are never enough hours in the day, nor enough days in each month to get everything accomplished, though we are moving forward every day and tomorrow always brings new and exciting challenges.

If you haven’t seen it yet, take some time to visit FarrellForFlorida.com and see what I’ve been doing lately.

There is a slight chance that in the near future, posts to “The Casimir Effect” might become scarce for a short period.

The reason? Money.

I’m (finally) being paid large sums of money in exchange for that ever elusive commodity, my free time.

I know. Believe me, this announcement pains me more than it does you. I’ll do my best to keep everyone informed of my adventures in the world of monetary gain, and look for regular posts again in a few weeks.

Hillsborough must have exported its hills early in its history, along with Zephyrhills. Where did all these hills go? East Pasco County, that’s where. Site of the Annual St. Pete Times Bike Tour. You remember, the one I mentioned this morning?

In case you missed it, you can leer at the rugged, unspoiled country roads from afar, via the magic of my camera phone: the biggest camera I dare carry on my bike.

Prior to the ride, we were completely unsuspecting.

The early flats were also misleading.

Then we met with some rolling Florida hills. They are scenic from the top, if you’re not panting too hard.

After 30 miles of rolling hills, I lost interest in the scenery and focused doggedly on my front wheel.

After 40 miles of grueling hills, one can roll across the finish line victorious.

My favorite quote of the day:

“These hills aren’t that hard compared to the ones in Italy.”

I think most of my complaining stems from the fact that this was my first ride of the season. I can hardly wait for the Strawberry Century.

Like gawking at lots of fit people in Lycra? Don’t lie now.

In any case, the streets of East Pasco county can be your gawking ground this morning. Come on out, it’ll be fun, and I’ll be able to say that I have a cheering section.

As you know, I like to exploit my readers in the name of beta testing, especially when I’ve done something I consider neat.

Like atomic energy, some technologies can be used for good or evil. With that in mind, I’d like some of you to test out a new AJAX-enabled, MySQL-backed mass-mailer.

Before you throw rotten fruit, any suite of web-based campaign software worth its salt needs one of these, and used properly, it sends messages only to opted-in database contacts in a mailing list format.

I’m kind of hoping the AJAX will be so snappy that you won’t realize what the script is actually doing. So (and you’ll only hear me say this once) check out the test link and send me some spam.

From an economic perspective, I am a fan of the mixed-market economy. Free markets are great for innovation, but there comes a time when too fierce competition creates a destructive kind of competition that stifles innovation. To use Richard Stallman’s analogy, capitalistic competition is like a race: as long as those competing stick to the business of trying to run faster than their fellow runners, the fastest person is awarded the prize; however, if one or more runners decide to win by pulling out a gun and shooting all the runners faster than them the race is no longer doing its job of rewarding the fastest runner. To take the analogy further, the race can often degenerate so far that running is no longer the objective, the finish line is never crossed, and instead the racers just play last-man-standing with their guns. In this all-too-capitalist scenario, the consumers don’t win; the only winner is the runner with the most guns. Get where I’m headed?

Telcos are proposing pulling out the big guns with respect to the Internet. One of the best things about the Internet from a purely capitalistic perspective is the low level of barriers to entry for new innovators, combined with the most level playing field around. If you have some good ideas, there isn’t a great deal stopping you from hacking together some code, getting a server, and trying your luck at building the next Google; the tools are there for anyone who wants them, and the network (that amorphous in-between stuff) treats all services equally. We’ve seen it over and over again. Skype and Vonage are stealing phone revenues by offering lower rates, it was only a matter of time before the Telcos realized they could choke people’s access to these services by selectively throttling their bandwidth. I can’t be clear enough on this: if the network isn’t content-provider-neutral, you won’t see free web-applications like Tadalist, the price to access a large market share will be driven up by Telcos trying to monetize their pipe in every available way. Internet Service Providers are free to charge for the service of routing data from one paying customer to another, according to terms of service. They should not be in the business of deciding which data is routed to whom. Doing so is anti-competitive, and you should tell them so.

Thanks to Catherine, who is Out In Left Field for bringing this to my attention.

AJAX is the thing. All the cool kids are playing with it now. Implementing it from scratch can be an exercise in masochism, especially from a debugging perspective. Enter SAJAX a PHP library that makes AJAX applications accessible to the masses of web developers still using boring, synchronous, form-centric POST and GET. (I know what you’re thinking: how passe!)

In any case SAJAX (in the developers’ words) “makes it so simple to do this that your friends will make fun of you if you don’t.”

So. What are you waiting for? Go there. Use it or I’ll make fun of you.