There was a goat who lived in the yard at the end of a rope. All his days he spent eating grass and walking in circles and jealously eyeing the vegetable garden that was just beyond his reach.

Then one day the goat chewed through the rope. Upon realizing his freedom he headed straight for the vegetable garden, where he gorged himself blind upon the once forbidden treasure. "This is it" he thought. "At last I am free to eat as I please!"

And there the goat remained, eating and wallowing in his own filth. Fatter and fatter the goat became, until all he wanted to do was eat and sleep. Without the tug of the rope at his neck he forgot all about the freedom he had so longed for.

All through the nineties I read article after article expounding upon the fantastic possibilities presented to us all in this wired new world.

Napster changed all that. Now it seems all anyone wants to do is gorge themselves in the garden that has always been just beyond our reach. Never mind that we lived for centuries upon grass, prisoners of the rope, and now are free to do all those things once only dreamt of...

We seem to have forgotten we can live just fine on grass and there's a great big world out there for us to explore. Most of us just keep walking in the same familiar circles, eating ourselves silly in the garden grown by masters who still control us simply because we are too lazy and spoiled to do for ourselves.

Inspired by a song of revolution by some who should know...

After making this comment in a discussion on digital radio I have decided I finally have something to write about in my journal. See, I live way out in the sticks (well, fairly much anyway) and I've been choking without broadband since I left LA. I had the intention of wiring this place for nearly three years now, but there are so many practical considerations (hills, scads of trees, intense humidity and frequent violent storms) 802.xx communication is pretty much useless for anything other than home networking.

The last couple of weeks I've been reading up on Gnu radio and the planned peripherals, and I do believe this project could be just the ticket - not only here, but in thousands of villages across the world. Once a standard, low cost platform could be built it would be fairly easy for community projects to make use of this open technology with the (hopeful) result of rapidly advancing development of a new generation of "wireless."

Or maybe it's just nostalgia. I grew up with radio -hanging around the local college station, chatting on the CB (yes, I'm of that era) and, later, actually working as a hired gun doing field engineering on my associate's first class tag. I've not been able to stand listening to the radio for years now because of what's become of the broadcast band (and because CB is just lame and the band is so full of pirates running KW rigs it's all but useless to anyone not gripped with DX fever). But this - applying to personal networking all the wonderful technology made extremely affordable by a world filled with cellphones and wireless NICs... well, I think it's time to go request some new samples from Maxim

Oh, Dominique...