I’m on vacation for a week in Saskatchewan; lots of family here, so we do this regularly. Anyhow, my Mom in Regina uses dial-up, which mail volume has made impracticable for me. So, I was pretty well resigned to being mostly Net-free. Except for, I’m sitting in Mom’s living room here in a nice ordinary residential neighborhood and I turn on the computer to check something and here’s this WiFi network named “jamaville,” the signal is only really stable in one corner of the living room, but hey, I’m on-line. I told my Mom the name and she drew a blank on all the neighbors and even called one who’s kind of high-tech, no idea who it is. The word doesn’t even show up in Google (that is, it didn’t until today). So whoever you are, Jamaville, thanks and my apologies for leeching a little bandwidth for the next couple of days. Hmm, if WiFi is showing up in random locations in small Prairie cities, doesn’t that mean it’s pretty soon going to be basically everywhere? [Update: Follow-up on Google propagation weirdness and content-replication lameness.]
This update on Aug. 10th and the Google result may be highly transient; today, Rijk van Geijtenbeek from Opera wrote to point out that “jamaville” is now in Google, but the results are a little weird. First off, they got one my aggregator pages, but neither my front page nor the “jamaville” page itself. Second, there are lots of other references to my page that rank higher than mine. Third, it appears that there are several other sites out there that are replicating every word of ongoing; I guess that’s OK, albeit lame, but I really wonder at Kjartan Mannes, whoever he/she is, replicating all my content and attaching his/her own copyright notice to it. I think that’s stepping way over the line; Kjartan and whoever else out there is doing this, please stop now.
