A good number of my friends know my love of the Basque tradition of communal meals. I was first introduced to Basque in Urbana, Illinois and immediately became a core member and instigator. While Basque is about fun and camaraderie and food -- there's usually a good bit of experimentation as well (though rarely with liquid oxygen and nitrogen.

When I moved to the East Coast, I worried that I might be leaving behind the notion of fantastic foods and epicurean gatherings. Boy was I wrong. Dinner conversation gave way to small gatherings, which ended up with further pondering, and last month, to the continuation of the tradition.

Here's menus & commentary from the past two Basques:

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This morning I went in to vote in the Maryland primary election. I had a photo ID, just in case. The poll workers were professional and helpful. It seemed like things were heading for another successful vote. Yet when I went to sign in, I was told that my name was not popping up on the machine. We did a few permutations of my name, hoping things would clear up. My wife, who registered at the same time as I did, had her name pop up without any problem. Eventually, the poll worker said that I may not be registered because the system didn't have my name in it.

That's when I busted out my voter registration card. The poll worker was surprised and called over the chief judge (who was both friendly and more than happy to go to bat to get to the bottom of things). Meanwhile, I sat down to fill out a provisional ballot. The chief judge called up the main office, I spent a bit of time on hold, gave them various identity-checking/confirming information, and waited patiently for folks to clear things up.

Eventually, I was told, "You're not registered." This was a fascinating statement to hear, so I said to the woman on the phone, "You sent me a voter registration card, doesn't that mean I'm registered?" Apparently not.

But now we had another problem, I'd already filled out my provisional ballot. Now comes the even crazier part. I was told that I needed to spoil my own ballot. I objected -- not only was I a registered voter (and had the voter registration card to prove it), but I was now being told that I had to purposefully spoil my own ballot. There seemed to be something highly undemocratic (not to mention a bit disconcerting) about the notion of purposefully spoiling a ballot that you really wanted to cast. So I objected and was told that they needed to void my ballot. I said that I did not want to spoil my ballot and that if it needed to be spoiled that the poll workers should be the ones to do it. They said they could not and that I had to do it -- which I objected to again.

We went back and forth several times -- it wasn't an argument, more of an absurd performance piece in front of a gymnasium full of voters. Eventually, realizing that I'd already been attempting to vote for an hour, I filled in every bubble on the ballot (as instructed). In the end, score one for Diebold -- apparently, a voter registration card in Maryland isn't necessarily indicative of being registered to vote. I did fill out the necessary forms to (re?)register -- but the whole episode strikes me as highly irregular -- how can it be that a database counts more than a tangible document? Clearly something is quite broken with Diebold's system here in Maryland -- I'd like to think that I was the one voter in the state to face an unassailable wall of Diebold illogic, but I worry that others have suffered similar fates.

Taking a page from my own play book -- for those of you with a penchant for blogging, an interest in joining the dark side, or an unquenchable thirst for advice on how to get started, here's a few ideas for how to blog (even on such exhilarating topics as telecommunication policy):

1. Good posts are pithy and chocked full of info, informal and accessible. Meandering prose and dissertation-length postings have their place, but many of the most important and influential readers don't have the time in their schedules to read a thesis. That said, when getting started, I'd recommend working on some in-depth analysis, critique, or other insightful work and sending synopses and links out to a bunch of relevant lists. When you're starting, it's fantastically important that you're adding to the knowledge base, not just the debate. Take the time to create resources that people value, there's enough pundits and talking heads -- demonstrate your expertise and depth-of-knowledge and your readership will rapidly grow.

2. Ping your friends so that we can put pointers up on our sites to your blog. Interconnections are important and bouncing readers among relevant postings on others blogs can elevate both. Readership isn't a zero-sum game.

3. Relatedly, carve out a niche and stay in contact with your niche-mates. In terms of telecom bloggers, several (though certainly not all) of the key ones are in my blog roll -- make friends with the folks blogging in your area so they know you're working in the area and stay informed about what other folks are writing. Folksonomies, tag clouds, category listings, etc. help quickly situate your blog for new readers. Don't try to be everything to everyone. I love it when folks contact me with leads on new blogs and other information sources -- and I'd rather point folks to another blog covering a related issue than attempt to cover something outside my area of expertise myself. The interconnectivity within the blogosphere domain you inhabit helps everyone.

4. Be humble -- blogging is all about being willing to put information out quickly and getting it right most of the time. When we get something wrong, be thankful when folks take the time to correct you -- 99% of the time your readers are looking to help you out. Acknowledge the mistake, give credit where it's due, and correct it. Never flame your readers (even if they flamed you first ;) -- you should expect that some your readers will know far more than you do about some of the stuff you're covering (often, they're your greatest allies but would rather not be publicly front and center). Reply to folks that take the time to contact you -- I can't tell you how many times folks have e-mailed me to clarify information, correct something I've posted, or educate me about an issue I'm covering -- blogs are a fantastic outreach and educational tool for their owners, not just their readers. A good dose of humility will go a long way -- while blog owners wield supreme dictatorial power, the best blogs maintain open forums and transparent commenting processes. Likewise, my favorite blogs have a sense of humanity to them -- a sprinkling of the personal buffered by immensely useful and insightful critique.

5. Maintain privacy -- you can put out whatever you want on your own blog, but always err on the side of caution when it comes to releasing other people's names, identifying information, or private correspondences. You can always go back and add in a name if someone would like to be credited, but once you put information out there, it's near-on impossible to expurgate it. Once you've garnered people's respect, they will leak sensitive information to you. Rarely is this done anonymously -- take the time to understand what you've been given and the potential consequences of its release. Not disclosing highly sensitive information publicly encourages sources and helps shield them from potential backlash. A vast majority of the time, I don't publicly post about the information I've been handed -- I can often make the same points without the public disclosure (knowing that you've got documentation to back up your perspective if push comes to shove).

6. Combine efforts -- if you find yourself drafting up a useful e-mail that might be interesting to a wider community, think about how you can revamp it for a public posting. If you're working on interesting projects, initiatives, analyses, etc. keep in mind how you might make a blog post about it. I rarely have time to draft up a blog post -- but I can carve out a few minutes to tweak the work I'm already doing.

7. Keep it interesting -- whether through insight, multi-media integration, exploration of new topic areas, or the occasional personal posting -- don't let your blog become stagnant. Mine has an amazing amount of quasi-public pages that folks occasionally stumble upon -- a lot of Easter Eggs awaiting discovery.

8. Keep your interface clean and accessible -- give folks the option to get exactly what they want quickly or stay awhile and mull through your postings.

9. Finally, and most importantly, is regular posting -- especially when you're getting started and/or want to build your readership. If people know there will be something new every day, they'll come back to your site on a regular basis. If you go more than a few days without posting, either let your readers know (e.g., I'm on vacation, in Antartica, suffering from Ebola) or folks will get bored and move on.

Hope folks get inspired. Personally, I still blame my good friend Steven Mansour for leading me down the road of blogging darkness.

I'm attending the Broadband in Cities and Towns Conference that Jabari Simama hosts each year, having just arrived back stateside from a speaking tour and series of strategy workshops in Austria and Slovenia. My friend Helga Schmidt documented one of the (many) highlights of my trip -- Andreas Marksteiner's open source based quad copter. Imagine deploying solar nodes to rooftops in 2 minutes -- the quad copter currently only has 1-2kg of lift, but as a proof of concept it's quite interesting -- plus, it was incredibly cool to see this tool in action.

Blog tag is a lot like the various games played on various social networks -- the rules are simple and the idea is you get to know a bit more about the folks behind the blogs. Depending on how seriously you take it, it can be enlightening or useless. Harold Feld tagged me over at Tales of the Sausage Factory (if you're not reading TOTSF, you're missing out on one of the most insightful portals into what's really going on when regulators create national telecommunications policy. I was tagged along with friends Tim Karr, Esme Vos, David Isenberg, and Art Brodsky (many of whose blogs I read regularly).

The pedigree is, as far as I can tell, something like this:
Dave Gale tagged Avinash Kaushik, who tagged Jonathan Mendez, who tagged Marshall Sponder, who tagged Lee Odden, who tagged Eric Ward, who tagged Glenn Fleishman, who tagged David Weinberger, who tagged , who tagged Harold Feld, who tagged me!

Contrary to the running commentary in lots of the blog posts,
Jeff Pulver did not start this (he just imported the idea from somewhere else), nor does he appear to be directly involved in this particular pedigree -- but check out the blog-tag tree here.

So with that said, here's 5 things about me:

1. I'm getting married on June 30, 2007 to Faith Swords (and no, she's not a comic book character or super-hero). We've been together for going on 4 years and known each other for about twice that. We've got more info up here which is the first official link to the page from my blog.

2. I've actually been put on "double-secret probation." Due to my community activism and local political organizing, my old department put me on a non-academic, non-behavioral probation that didn't exist on any books or in any rules or regulations. For anyone who believes that academic black lists went out of style with the McCarthy era, I encourage you to take a closer look at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (and while you're at it, take a closer look at the University's mascot -- yes, UIUC actually has a white man dress up as a Native American and dance around to "honor the Indians").

3. My background is in psychology, not computer science, engineering, etc. Though I'd focused on quantitative statistics, my master's thesis was a qualitative assessment. Officially, I'm on sabbatical from the psychology PhD program, having completed all classes and passed the qualifying exams; however, "little known fact numero 2" helped convince me to put more time into media activism, wireless, and other pursuits

4. I graduated from Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, CT. It was a fairly rough place and we had shootings in the school every year I was there. My senior year several classmates and I conducted a survey of the student population asking them about their drug use, sexual habits, whether they brought weapons to school, etc. The principal confiscated our research findings. Even though 25% of the students being tested for HIV were coming up positive, the school refused to distribute condoms (claiming that condoms would cause sexual activity). meanwhile, a group of students formed the Wilbur Cross Student Union, got onto National Public Radio, and ended up getting both the school's principal and the superintendent removed from their positions. I guess that sort of sealed the deal for me when it comes to the efficacy of community organizing and social action.

5. I spent 2 years of my life backpacking through Eastern and Western Europe, North Africa, Turkey, etc. While living on an average of $15/day was, at times, tough (it sure doesn't buy much in the way of transportation, food, housing, etc., much less supporting all of them), it did teach me a lot about simple living. Around Christmas time, my friends often tell me I'm hard to shop for.

So who am I going to tag???

How about:

Angela Stuber, Dana Spiegel, Hannah Sassaman, Josh Breitbart, and Ross Musselman.

"Daddy, how did we used to light charcoal before we got liquid oxygen?"
-- Connor, Age 7, August 2006

Yes, it's been another one of those Basque months... remember, we're professionals -- never do this at home. Following the Popular Science article on creating ice cream with dry ice we thought we should revisit the old standard -- liquid nitrogen ice cream. All you need is a Dewar of liquid nitrogen:

some ingredients (chocolate, cream, sugar, vanilla, etc.), a bit of caution, and about 120 seconds.

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I've been here in Boston at the Alliance for Community Media Conference and met up with Hannah Sassaman from the Prometheus Radio Project and Faith Swords to build a small microtransmitter. This microtransmitter allows one to legally transmit everything from your computer, Ipod, or other device to any FM radio within several hundred meters.

See pictures...

I've been hoping to get out to help my friend Andrew Reynolds work on restoring his 1964 Chevy stepside pickup truck:

We cooked up a hearty breakfast, drank some coffee, grabbed a few liters of water and headed out around 9:30am to the farm for (what I was assured would be) a three-hour reassembly job.

About 5 hours later we decided to stop for lunch and a quick run to the parts store.

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I don't tend to put up more personal things on my blog, but I've been getting a number of inquiries about Basque and what it is and does. I've been on the road constantly this month and am only now getting a chance to catch up on personal correspondences (and figured I'd knock them out all at once). For those who know me, you know I'm an avid chef and love to both cook and eat fantastic foods. The recent Buzz covered one of my (now not so) secret weekly rituals -- one of the rare moments to leave the policy and technical worlds behind.

Rather than explain everything, here are some quick glimpses (through their menus) of the last few Basque gatherings I attended:

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