I received this message on the 6th but didn't notice it until today. this seems like a fantsic community internet asset and I wanted to pass along the info.

Hi Paul,

I am writing because I came across your site estrip.org a long time ago and recognized that it is an important community portal in the Elmwood area. Currently I am starting another community project in the area that I thought you might be interested in, based on your interests in technology and community.

Recently I set up the web site The site, and the list serve that I set up, are aimed at getting people together to create a community wireless network. As opposed to projects like Buffalo Wifi (http://www.buffalowifi.org), which just seems to provide free access points in areas convenient for businesses, Buffalo Wireless (http://www.buffalowireless.org) is modeled after projects that descend in some way from MIT's Roofnet project. Currently some of the most successful community wireless networks include Portland's Personal Telco Project and Seattle Wireless.

Basically, the project in Buffalo would aim to provide Internet access that is run by local communities and users, rather than large corporations. It would do this by the construction of a mesh network running protocols like OLSR (http://www.olsr.org). As we start the project, we need users interested in having access to the Internet that they control. I have already contact the local Linux Users Group and have several very technical users interested in helping to set up access points (although more certainly won't hurt).

The primary thing that we need right now in order to get the network off the ground is to find individuals who are willing to share roof real estate on which to locate an access point, and especially those who are willing to buy the access points that we will install on their roofs. I am trying to spread the word in the Elmwood area in particular because of geographic density and the large portion of the population in this area that already uses the Internet on a daily basis.

If you are interested, please check outlink and sign up on the list serve in order to receive project updates. In addition, I would appreciate if you would spread the word to anyone in the area whom you think might be interested in helping out in any way.

Please let me know if you have any questions or advice for the project, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Best,

Justin S. Leitgeb

Email: justin AT buffalowireless.org

Buffalo Wireless
Personal Web Site

Now that i have discovered all these journals from elementary school I can't think of a better place to put them than here. The thing is they were written in 1985.

I am debating how to handle this situation. The purist in my wants a system where they can be entered in for the appropriate dates back in 1985. Another part of me wants to write journals today, as I found the old ones now, and talk about it that way as part of my current existence.

It is such a hard decision. Does anyone else have old journals they want to migrate over?

--paul

I fixed the bug that (e:mike) noticed when trying to go back or forward after clicking on a date in the date cloud. You can now safely travel through time.

Paul
Well posted 1 blog so far, seems you group is rather unfriendly.
What you cannot promote yourself?
Two unkind remarks already, maybe your group is not worth hanging around.

(e:fairyastara) ,
Sorry that you feel that way but maybe you should have checked the terms of service agreement before posting your first journal (e:fairyastara,39209) about a commercial service.

Let me demonstrate what you would have seen if your read it:


Conduct
By becoming an (e:peep) you agree to not create and/or display (e:content) that:

1. is for commercial purposes, including but not limited to the sale of merchandise ...

Paul

I refuse to let people sell shit on the commercial free web space I worked so hard to shield from commercial influence. I myself spent thousands of hours working on this and have made no money from it. If you want to go ahead and talk about your life and spiritual beliefs people would take it a lot different than when you start out trying to sell something.

Just imagine it like this. A group of people in a club meet at Delaware park to talk about their lives, etc and someone they don't know comes up and says, "hey I sell crystal balls if you are interested." What do you think their reaction would be?

Well this is more of a pre-announcement but I am getting rid of the date drop down in favor of the date selection cloud. Months with more journals are bigger.

Here is an example from the development server showing my journal with the new style of date selection. Each month is a link. Looks like I was a much busy blogger around this time in 05.


I have lots of other updates coming soon as time warner can get my internet straight for more than 10 hours and I have some free-time from the big project at work.

Same as always, we lost again. Maybe next year (e:lilho) will vote. The food was tasty again. I particularly liked the ribs.

I still can't upload anything on my time warner connection or even access my gmail.

Be sure not to miss the Best of Buffalo party, Monday April 30 at the Town Ballroom (681 Main St) from 6-9pm, with complimentary food from Buffalo's best restaurants, and live music with the Skiffle Minstrals and the Steam Donkeys. quoted from artvoice

Ya, so we are nominated for best web site in Buffalo. Let's see if we win this year, of if it will have to wait till next year. Food is great though.

--paul

In order to make the site more intriguing and welcoming to new members in our push to expand to at least 500 writers we are going to put the top 20ish categories right on the front page so people can click on a category that interests them and see all the journals relating to that category.

Up until now you could create any category you wanted for your journal and you still can but we combined some categories for the rating purpose. You may notice some of the categories on your journals were changed to match this new system. For example, we combined the categories of phtos and photo and put them all under photo. You can still create any category you want but if you want it to be linked on the front page, try to keep it in one of the categories that already exists. The greatest part is the top 20ish list will always be changing to reflect what people are talking about. For instance, if there is some sort of freak disaster in Buffalo and everyone starts writing about that, that category would move up the list.

Here are the first categories we combined

PHOTOS took over for photo, photos2005, photos2006, photography, photography2005, photography2006, pic, pic post, pics, pic time, pictures

WORK was combined with jobs

POLITICS was combined with political

PEEPTALK was combined with peeps and epeeps

POETRY was combined with poems and epoetry

there may be more in the future we will keep you updated.

IMPORTANT: for miscellaneous we are choosing to go with (e:jason) 's category of POTPOURRI.

Remember, it is important to put a category on your journals so people can find categories they like later on. It also makes it easier for you to go back and find a certain journal you are looking for.

Any categories that have more than 30 journals assigned to them get displayed in the top categories cloud on the front page.

We will also be releasing a new system for quickly updating categories. Currently there are still 12,700+ journals that do not have categories and hundreds that have a category which is more like a subtitle.

--(e:mike)

So I wrote them this letter. I hope they are willing to sell it as I am so tired of explaining that we are not estrip.com. I might ask for some donations again depending how much it costs.

Hello,
My name is Paul Visco and I have operated a non-profit blogging called estrip.org since 2003. I noticed that estrip.com is no longer around and was wondering if you would relinquish the domain name registration so that I could use it for our site. Because we are non-profit I don't have very much money to work with but I would gladly offer you $200 to allow us to have the domain name.
Thank you for your time,
Paul

I re-wrote the userpic maker as a surebert app. If you want to crop userpics from images you found on the internet, you may find it useful. Click on the image below to test it out.