Following that first successful cycle, we decided to wait through New Year’s, 2007 to open a new cycle.  This gave me a nice, solid month to work away at the site, polishing away the last few bugs, and generally getting things locked down for production.

I settled in, the second week in December of ‘06, to start patching up these past few bugs.  What I quickly found, however, was that this software was nigh-unpatchable.  Every time I’d try to add or remove a feature, everything would break.  I don’t mean a couple error messages would show up – I mean the page would simply not appear.  Locked up.  No errors in the log.  Dead.

The Oklahoma software, you see, was built over several years, by people who were not professional programmers.  They were students and foodies – and they did admirable work.  Yet, there was not a consistent design standard or vision, and the result of that was a big ball of “spaghetti code” – code that’s great when the sauce is on it, but is awful if you need to change out specific noodles.  (So that metaphor doesn’t work right.  Oh well.)  Plus, even they still considered the whole package “beta” – and not the “works really well Google-style” beta, either.

On top of that, the OK software had features we didn’t need to support.  Their system is state-wide, and involves a whole transportation network.  This means that farmers can drop off on one side of the state, volunteers then take apart the deliveries and load them onto trucks destined for other cities, and finally a day later everybody picks up their assembled orders from all over Oklahoma.  Cool?  Yes.  But even then, we knew we weren’t going in that direction.  We’re the West Michigan Co-op – not the Lower Peninsula Co-op.  Not the All-of-Michigan Co-op.

This turned out to be a huge part of their software – drop-off points, pick-up points, destination preferences, etc.  And that code was intertwined in every single file of the site – again, spaghetti code.  On top of that, some of the source files were nearly a thousand lines of code individually!  Not maintainable, and thus not sustainable.

It took me about a day of futile busywork on this jumble before I finally threw the code in the trash can.  Bear in mind – we had already used this software.  It kinda worked.  And it was “finished.”  Here I was, ready to start again, from scratch.  What was I doing?

At the time, I had recently stumbled upon a PHP framework called CakePHP.  If you’re a web programmer, you may have heard of it, or the framework it’s modeled after, Ruby on Rails.  If you’re not a programmer, I’ll just say this: CakePHP is essentially a library of code that you can build websites with.  It’s designed to interact with databases similar to the one we had built with the Oklahoma software.  It’s also designed for rapid development – meaning you can build an interactive site fast.

I didn’t tell any of the other founders that I had done this – in fact, I left the old code up on the server just in case I couldn’t get it done.  Farmers need the site to still be up anyway, just so they could update their product information.  But at home, on my local server, I was crunching away, ten hours a day, rebuilding the Co-op software, piece by piece.  I worked a solid three weeks on the new software.

It was definitely a stressful time.  But at the end of the three weeks, I had 95% of what the Co-op needed already implemented.  So I took the plunge, and announced to Jerry, Gail, and Tom that I had killed the old code and started from scratch using this framework as a base.  I published the site – which to the naked eye, looked exactly the same.  Ordering wasn’t ready to go yet, but you could log in, farmers could maintain their product listings, and best of all, the back-end code was organized and solid.  In fact, I even had RSS feeds of new products – something the old code wouldn’t have been able to do, probably ever, without writing a whole RSS library and SQL query from scratch.

By the time we opened for ordering in January of ‘07, the last few features had been implemented.  There were certainly a few bugs that first cycle with the new code, but over all, the ordering cycle went far smoother.  Compared to the previous software, this was definitely less capable overall.  Personally, this was a blessing, because it actually did what it was supposed to do – and nothing more.  There weren’t any confusing options we weren’t using getting in the way.  Best of all, of course, was that I had nice, stable, organized code to build on.

I really don’t believe that I touched the code for the rest of January.  It was exactly the same code in February – which was my test to make sure I hadn’t screwed up some strange time-related function.  The January and February cycles went pretty well, considering the volume – which was rapidly increasing.  I think we broke $1000 that February.

Jerry designed some very nice looking PDF invoices, which we quickly adopted.  I’ve found on numerous occasions that it’s practically impossible to get different browsers on different systems to print the same HTML page the same way.  Why this is, I have no idea, but that’s how it is.  (It can be done, but it takes an incredible about of debugging.  Generating a PDF, on the other hand, is trivial by comparison.)

Since then there have been lots and lots of features added to the software – product photos via Flickr, forums, a product search API, and lots of minor changes – but getting these new features has never caused a significant break in the software or restructuring.  I’ve also open-sourced the code, to help others like the Purple Porch Co-op in South Bend, Indiana get started.  Like Oklahoma, I want to get others building their own local, online marketplaces.

The story will continue in “Structuring the Co-op.”

I don’t think that the real story of how this adventure began has ever really been documented, so I’m going to attempt to do so here, at least from my point of view.  I’m don’t intend to put this on the Co-op Wiki, simply because I will undoubtedly present a biased view, based on my perspective and knowledge, but I will try to stay away from bias when it seems obvious.  As our mothers used to say, if you can’t say something nice… etc.

This also happens to chronicle my life, to some extent, for the past few years.  My involvement in the Co-op has led to about half the jobs I currently do, which have definitely helped me grow as an individual.  I sometimes get asked if I go to a church; though I am a person of faith, I don’t attend a church at present.  I perceive my involvement in the Co-op as an equivalent; I have been tried and tested,  I have made sacrifices, and I have given my time (and money) for a cause I deeply believe in – and it has rewarded me in kind, though almost never directly.  If that’s not bordering on church or religion, I don’t think you know what church or religion really are.  (And if you don’t feel personally and spiritually rewarded by your involvement with your church, you’re doing it wrong.)

So although I am tempted to begin this story in a Zeeland hospital, June of 1981, I’ll skip ahead to the true beginning of the Co-op’s (and my) story.  The idea of an online co-operative in West Michigan had been floating around for some time before and in 2006, as I understand it, between Gerard Adams, Tom Cary, and Gail Philbin, each of whom has their own role in this story.  The idea formed shortly after the Co-op storefront in East Grand Rapids closed up.  I don’t believe any of those three had any real connection with that Co-op aside from being members, but they did feel it was a loss for the city as a whole.

I became involved through Gail; or, I should say, through Gail’s husband, John.  John was my Film professor (and mentor) at GVSU at the time.  I had very recently graduated, but I spoke with and saw John regularly.  Gail, Tom, and Jerry had tracked down some software from the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, who were willing to share their software as open source.  However, none of them were technically savvy as programmers or web developers.  John knew I was a programmer at one time, and called me one night to ask if I could help.  I agreed, and Gail offered to pay me $100 out of her pocket to set up a server and get the software installed.

Shortly thereafter – June of 2006 – Gail, Tom, Jerry, and I all met at WMEAC to discuss setting up the software, and getting everything moving.  We met several times over the next few months, figuring out how the ordering, pick-up, and drop-off would work.  Although there was some discussion at that time of creating a real structure – that is, an incorporated, not-profit business structure – we often shunted those questions to a later meeting.  Our focus for the first few months set the tone for the next three years of co-op operation: Make It Work.

Most of our discussions at these meetings centered around the farmers we wanted to bring in.  Would it be too much work for them?  Could we convince them that we had a marketplace they could realistically use to make money?  Was this more complicated than a Farmer’s Market, and how much more?  Would they do it?  Strangely, I don’t think we ever really approached anybody to pick their brains.  In retrospect, I think we were worried that they would reject the concept before it even was implemented, unless we simply put it together and let them try it.

I also remember startlingly long conversations about the names and groupings of categories.  What were important categories to give our producers?  How did their products fit into them?  The biggest one I can remember is “Eggs & Dairy.”  Why are they together?  Well, they’re always together at the supermarket.  But why on an online co-op?  Because you’re shopping for food, let’s make the metaphor work.  It’s still set up that way: and the only two subcategories of “Eggs & Dairy?”  Eggs, and Cheese.  We should have just called the category “Omelet Ingredients” – we could have had more subcategories that way.

It became quickly obvious that Gail was going to be the communicator of this bunch.  From our first talking in June of ‘06 until today, I have almost 1000 conversations (with multiple emails each) in my Gmail archive from her alone.  In fact, early in the process, I set up a filter for her incoming emails so that I could group all the Co-op related info together in one place.  (I still use this trick on clients that like to client-spam my inbox.  That way, other projects don’t interfere with what I’m working on at the moment, and when I am working on their project, all the info is in one box.)  We nicknamed Gail “The Cat Herder.”

Jerry had assigned his intern at Media Rare to come up with a design, which was given to me fairly early into the work.  I got down to business between June and November of 2006 taking the OK Food Co-op software and grafting our look onto it.  I spent a decent amount of time trying to fine-tune the site’s product entry process for our farmers – they were going to be using the site to input their products directly.  Tom used his connections with the Local Food Guide to recruit farmers. In order to help them out, Gail collected information from all the farmers and our select few test members, and Jerry and I got their accounts set up in the system for them.  By the end of November, we had the farmers entering their products, and prepping for our first attempt at making this work.  The software was a mess, but it worked for the time being, and it had a bizarre kind of organization that I had gotten to know by this time.  The farmers were pleasantly receptive; there’s nothing like a horrible economy to make folks open to new markets, no matter how difficult or experimental it is to get there.

We used the OK Food Co-op software the first and only time in December of 2006 – our first order cycle.  The first morning of ordering, I fixed no less that thirty bugs – their software was simply not meant to be portable, and we only had time for limited testing.  If worst came to worst, we’d cancel all the orders and start over.

However, after that morning, things were very smooth, and such drastic measures were never needed.  If I recall, we did about $600 worth of business that first month.  It seemed like a lot at the time, having never done this before; we now do over $12,000 a month.  The exchanging of goods took place in the back room at Alger Heights Foods, a small neighborhood grocery store.  The store was trying to move in the direction of local and organic food; I don’t know that the owner ever took that idea seriously, but his wife did, and she had enough pull with her husband to let us use their stockroom for two nights a month.

This first goods exchange was a one-day process.  The farmers all dropped off in the morning, Dec. 9, and the customers all picked up that evening.  It was, for lack of a better word, chaos.  Invoices were printed strangely – everybody’s came out differently.  Some had the correct prices, others didn’t.  Already, we had one or two folks who had forgotten to pick up.  I know Tom stayed a good three hours after the last customer had gone to try to reconcile the books – and at this time, we hadn’t even collected membership fees, or surcharge, so any money that we were short was going to come out of our pockets.

All in all, though, it went alright.  I met quite a few new people, in a totally different social setting than I had ever been in before.  We weren’t short, and the farmers and customers seemed pretty happy.  Later that month, the Philbins held a Christmas party, at which Gail gave me an extra $100, again, out of her own pocket, as a present for helping with everything.  It was not expected – but it is still appreciated.  For the record, this $200 I received from Gail, $100 from the start and $100 from Christmas in 2006, was the only money I received for doing work on the Co-op until March of 2009, and I believe I used $35 of it to purchase the domain name, westmichigancoop.com.

After that first ordering cycle, I figured a few hours worth of fine tuning on the site, and it would be ready to go, full time, and that I wouldn’t need to touch it again.  Right.

The story will continue in “Rewriting the Co-op.”

Today, things have changed.

For today, friends, I’ve downloaded Hulu Desktop.

I’ve got to say, the app itself is exactly what I was waiting for – gorgeous, gives me access to all the same content as the site.  I’ve still got ads to deal with, but I get the content free, which is an acceptable trade-off to paying for the content on iTunes.  And the actual app itself is far more beautiful, and usable from a remote, than the Hulu site itself.

Now, I’ve still got that same DSL connection that I had when I wrote the original post.  I’d really love to see the Hulu app be able to pre-cache the episode – especially if I “subscribe.”  Get the first 5 minutes of each episode so that I can watch anything I’ve subscribed to, and watch it immediately.  If my DSL connection becomes a problem for the Hulu Desktop app, I’ll scrap it.

“What can Hulu do about my internet connection,” you ask?  Well, here’s the situation: I also have a Blu-ray player with Netflix Instant Streaming built in.  Although I do get the lower end of the quality compression spectrum, I still get served.  It works well, the quality is good enough (read: not annoying, but not cinema, either), and I can count the times the picture has stuttered or rebuffered on one hand since January.  This problem has been solved, so hopefully Hulu solves it too.

And yes, I’d love it, AT&T, if you would upgrade your local switchboxes so I can get faster DSL.  That would be great.  We’d be best friends forever.  Ahem.

So thumbs up Hulu Desktop App, thumbs down AT&T until you upgrade your POTS network, and outlook unclear on the viability of Hulu watching in my home.

Rock & Roll, everybody!

• GMail
• Flickr
• YouTube

If you’ve ever broken the TOS on any of these sites, you are now a criminal under the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act according to precedent set by this ruling (Groklaw).

And what is this ruling you ask? Why, it’s the ruling agains Lori Drew, the woman who cyberbullied 13-year-old Megan Meier on MySpace.

Did Lori Drew do something awful? Yes. Is she a bad person? Sure looks like it. But this law was never intended to be enforced in this way. Surely Terms of Service and End User License Agreement’s cannot be enforced by the Government – they are Civil Suit fodder only, right? Well, not anymore.

Now {Internet Company}’s lawyers can write laws. The Federal Government is responsible for enforcing them. This is not good, friends. Not good at all.

As you may have guess by no Five and Change on Wednesday, I’m taking a Thanksgiving break. Just wanted to say thanks to all four of you that read regularly.

I am thankful for my family and friends, and I hope you have all had as nice a Thanksgiving as I have.

Peace and Prosperity –

PD

I also absolutely know that many people aren’t that lucky. I frequently talk to people who a) don’t like their job, b) don’t like their home, or c) don’t like either. I know I have felt that way from time as well; we all work a shit job once in a while; we all let the house get a little too dirty; we all let our relationships suffer occasionally.

But there’s something we’re all born with that all too frequently gets ignored. It’s called instinct. Doesn’t that sound animalistic?

Instinct, in animals, is the thing that says “loud noise = run away,” or the thing that says “brightly colored frog = poison.” Instinct keeps animals alive. That doesn’t mean, however, that simply because we can use words like “loud” or “frog” that that instinct is now dormant in us, that we have to ‘reason’ our way through every problem. Because we reason, however, instinct gets washed in with the noise of our lives.

So what is instinct for us bipeds, then? Is it a feeling in the gut? Is it some ball of stress I’ve buried and tamed? No. Instinct does not cause stress, it causes action.

What will causes stress about instinct is when you ignore, or outright flout it. Now you’ve got to deal with the fact that some part of you thinks you made the wrong decision. Whether that instinct is right or wrong won’t matter – what matters is that it feels right, and what you did feels wrong.

Instinct comes from the reasoning you’ve learned as a child. What you like. What you don’t like. Your morals. Your parentage. Your religion. What you did and learned in school. These things have combined into the amalgam that is you. Instinct is pre-reasoning from being a child, watching your parents, and seeing how life unfolds when you make the right decisions, versus when you make the wrong ones.

I find that my instinct often fights with my desire for gratification. I can waste an afternoon playing video games, while my instinct sits and asks why I’m not at the Secretary of State getting my license plate tabs renewed. Procrastination is the opposite of instinct; while procrastination has me sit on my butt, instinct tells me what I should be doing next.

So trust it and do it. (Note that sometimes this means saying NO to the new thing. Instinct will tell you when you’re overloaded.) Instinct and gratification are not opposing forces always; eventually you’ll have done all that you can do “productively,” and your instinct will say, “Take a break,” or “Play Mariokart,” or “** your wife.” This is when gratification is truly gratifying – you’ve beaten down all the dinging bells, the project managers, and the nags, and you’ve gotten control of it all. What’s more: you’ve now given yourself the ability to be yourself. Rock and roll.

Now I’m sure that no Slashdot reader will intentionally watch any “sport” that has judges determine the winner, but their wives/girlfriends might seize control of the remote because they want to know who is the best at that ribbon-twirling thing.

The lesser

(that means jump ahead for the sexism bit)

There’s two things in there that could be construed as insulting; the first I’ll tackle would be the ”sport” air-quote. I fully believe that there is sufficient technical ability required in gymnastics to consider it a sport. These people do train their asses off.

However, it is a judged sport, which does set it slightly apart from an officiated sport. An officiated sport generally has objective rules, which a third party observer can categorically qualify. Ball goes in hoop: 2 points. A judged sport relies on having a very significant amount of knowledge in a panel of people, who then score the performance. Usually, a judged sport agrees on some universally decided perfect technique, and then judges based on the comparative performance.

I do admit that I find myself less interested in judged sports in general. If I watch one of these Dance shows, for example, I am often befuddled by the judges’ comments – a spectacular performance to them is simply mediocre to me, but something I really like, they will stomp on. Why? Because I don’t perceive the same things they do. They clearly agree, at least to some extent, what the ‘perfect mambo’ looks like. I wouldn’t know a mambo from a tango. One of those has roses.

Even sports like MMA (that’s Mixed Marshal Arts) I find lacking. Not because of a lack of action – there’s plenty of it. There’s also lots of action in gymnastics and figure skating, though. It’s because unless there’s an objective Knock Out, the match is judged. I have a bit easier time telling who’s winning as opposed to dance, because usually one guy is pinned. But that’s usually when I flip channels. Sorry, but two dudes wrestling on a mat is not sport to me.

So what is “sport” then? That seems to be subjective itself. However, implying that something’s not a sport, when there are people devoting their lives to what they clearly believe is a sport, does ring of bigot to me. But hey, I’ve said some insensitive stuff myself. Probably on this very blog.

And the greater

The more obvious slur is that about women and their obsession with ribbon-twirling things. I’ll defend this only in saying this: he said it on fucking slashdot. For every joke that even mildly insinuates something remotely negative about women, there’s at least three “but hey, none of us have girlfriends now, do we.” There’s so much self-denigration, regarding gender and overall manliness, that most jests on Slashdot that come off as “macho” in any sense are satirical.

Presuming from here that the crack was satirical, it would certainly be non-obvious. Only knowing the audience and the context of Slashdot in general can you extrapolate that particular nature from that comment. Anywhere else, and it would most definitely be blatant sexism.

With that said, it is very likely generally true that if somebody is changing the channel to gymnastics in the house, and the candidates for doing so are one male and one female, it’s probably the female. I know I can’t get past “So You Think You Can Dance” without my wife saying something. Is it a generalization: yes. Is it mandatory that “Women like watching gymnastics” is an insult? Absolutely not. Just like “Men like watching football” isn’t an insult either. We all know that it’s not universally true, only generally true from one’s perspective. I can accept that.

Here’s the rub, though: a misstep in phrasing can make a generalization sound like an insult.

Though it’s unlikely that a Slashdotter would watch a subjectively judged sport, it’s possible that their partner may be interested in the judging process of gymnastic competition. This article will give you some knowledge in that regard.

There! Now it’s totally bland, and completely not worth the time to read or comment on. You’re welcome, taco.

Not sure if this is really a productivity thing, but I’m definitely getting used to my gmail labels, and my jott.com. Invoicing still isn’t something I look forward to, but at least the resistance level is now so low, that when I’m doing it I feel like the check is actually around the corner. Instead of struggling to get myself to sit down and get it done.

I now take to my gmail to manage, well, my life, essentially. I didn’t realize I was even doing that before, but since I’ve added the pseudo-organizational labels, I have found my searching and combing through past mail far easier. Especially my now-key “ToBill” label, which gets me billing on the 1st & 15th of each month.

I think the real key to productivity isn’t labels or todo lists – those are only tools, and they won’t work for everybody. The key is to think about yourself, and how you can trick yourself into accidentally doing more work at the right time. For me, if I’m actually reading my mail, it helps a lot to throw it into a few bins for later. I used to only do that if I found myself searching for the same email over and over. Now I capture it there and then, and I have it immediately that next time. And I was already living in GMail, so the labels were a tool that I could add without adding much complexity.

Productivity means different things to different people. My mom, as an example, is a person who can (and with regularity, will) do the next steps on 100 things in a day, but if a real project-sized monster doesn’t get done, she will never feel like she did something. So the key, for her, is to open the time to tackle the next steps on one project – nix the multitasking. Then she can do those 100 steps, and finish something. Same output, but to her, it will feel like more. It’s not necessary for her to finish something every day, but strategic completion planning is very important.

I get that same feeling from putting the invoices in the mail. Something is done now, so I can go back to my programming and blogging for a while. Feels good.

The thing that frustrates me is that after over 100 years of having this theory, we’re no closer to reconciling it with our faith. I personally believe that it’s very easy to believe in both Evolution and the Bible, and here’s the hint: most of the details in both are wrong, especially when interpreted by the layperson.

Evolution as a process and as a theory is still not greatly understood. We don’t really know how or why DNA mutates, or how genes split and become 2 genes in the following generation. We’ve got experiments that show that these things happen, but aside from random chance, we haven’t discovered all the mechanisms that make Evolution actually work. All we know for sure is that natural selection happens, and it operates to create enhancements in species over time relative to environment.

The Bible is far from well-understood. It’s been well-studied (much like Evolution), but there seems to be little consensus on what the damn thing actually says. Ask ten different pastors from ten different denominations what the most important verse of the Bible is, and you’ll get ten different answers. If not twenty. But ask them what Jesus stood for, and you’ll get the same things: forgiveness, compassion, understanding, and sacrifice.

The Devil is in the details. Literally, folks. As Christians, we can easily get caught up in who begot whom, and exactly how much pork we can eat and on which days during Lent. We almost always seem to forget the important stuff like love and grace. We argue about the details so much, that when some “jerk like Darwin” comes along and says something that’s “so obviously not in the Bible,” we all gang up like Greek City-States against the Persians.

Believe me, the important parts of the Bible are not the details. They are the truths. If you read a verse, and you can’t say, “this is self-evident, and thus Godly,” then it’s probably editorial written by some guy who’s been dead between 6,000 and 2,000 years who had an axe to grind, and should be taken in that context.

To bring this rather lengthy response back around, Evolution has absolutely zero conflict with the Bible. The only argument that can be made is the Literal Genesis argument, that presumes that God is some cheap magician that pulled Light, Land, Sea, Time, Life, and Humanity, out of a hat, one (1) day (not exceeding 24 hours) each, starting at 9 AM, October 17, 4004 BCE. (I have yet to see an “on this date: Oct 17, 4004 BCE: World created. Rejoice.” on the last page of “Popular Science.”)

I’m not saying God couldn’t do it, but why would he? Doesn’t it make more sense, if you’re going to make faith something of any real import, to create a world where the existence of God could be shadowed by the natural and logical? Wouldn’t God create a system where his very presence was either completely apparent or completely unnecessary depending solely on faith?

I can believe in Evolution, and I can believe in God. I can believe these things because while I believe in truth that is scientifically tested like natural selection, I also believe in truth that is spiritually tested, like the teachings of Christ. These things shall not be foreign to me simply because they hadn’t been discovered when the Bible was written.

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is tiered service based not on the money you pay your ISP, but based on the money a service provider (like Google, Yahoo, Blogger) pays that ISP. Usually, as an ISP, you would do this if you had a competing service. For example, Comcast might want to put a speed limit on Skype, because Comcast has their own digital voice service. AT&T would do the same, in favor of selling you a phone.

The Internet was never designed that way. It was designed to be egalitarian. Bits are bits, and the Internet sends every bit just as fast as it can, regardless of protocol, port number, or packet size.

I want my bits to be equal. The ISP’s argue that these services are ‘Piggy-backed’ on “their” internet access. In reality, each of the aforementioned services pays a rather large fee to have their connection – they pay their ISP just like you do, and I guarantee they pay a heck of a lot more.

Clearly, nobody saw the Internet coming. We’re seeing disruption in all kinds of industries, especially information industries. Video, music, communications, they will all have to adapt to a world where units of information is bought at a flat fee.

Channel Neutrality

So here’s where I transition to the new topic: Channel Neutrality. Many people know that I used to work at a public access TV station. Cable companies are required by law to provide community access, if one exists in your community, on every plan – even basic cable.

Here’s where it gets interesting: AT&T “Advanced TV.” AT&T argues that it is not a “cable company” – they aren’t stringing coaxial cable into your house, just good old-fashioned copper wire. So, since they aren’t a cable company, they don’t have to provide PEG (Public Access, Education, and Government) access channels. So very likely, you simply won’t get them. (Take that, First Amendment!)

But it gets better! If your local PEG Channel decides that they want to pay AT&T to be sent to your TV, (which costs them well over $5,000, and likely upwards of $10,000, according to my old boss) they get siphoned into a separate “PEG Channel Area.” They’re no longer “Channel 25.” They’re “PEG Channel 2″ in the “Channel 99 PEG Area.” It’s hard to describe this correctly, so here’s a video of what PEG access looks like on AT&T U-Verse:

There is one advantage of this setup that AT&T is quick to point out: you can see PEG channels not just from your community, but from your neighboring communities as well. This was always a problem when I worked at BCTV, because one of the school districts we covered was not in our viewership – they were in WKTV’s.

Still, the decision to “block off” PEG into it’s own section is a curious one. The video makes no mention of if it’s possible to DVR record the PEG either.

It gets better yet! Because AT&T has been so successful not carrying PEG, the cable companies are now getting into the act!

Huh?

I’m not going to say this has anything to do with our politicians, except that it is just plain ignorance. Most people care less about their public access than they do about Google loading fast. But to me, this is a clear erosion of our freedom of speech.

So write letters. I think Americans need a new Freedom of Information Act, one that ensures that content produced by the people, for the people, gets to the people.