Verizon is expanding its FiOS fiber-optic TV/Internet/phone to 30 more towns in eastern Massachusetts, reports the Globe, as well as DSL in western Mass.
Expanding DSL for rural broadband … hey, that sounds like an interesting idea.

I figure anybody who reads this blog will know why Leap Day exists, but just in case here’s my explanation from today’s Telegraph, written for the very lay audience. The summary from the introduction: "Why does the leap year exist, anyway? Because the solar system isn’t organized very well."

Tuckerman’s Ravine, Feb. 24, 2008
Although the official National Weather Service site in Concord is flirting with a season record of snowfall, the Telegraph reports that Nashua is far from a record - but that if you combine rain, we’re in very-high territory for total precipitation, which raises concerns about a third flood-filled spring in a [...]

A class-action suit has been filed alleging that Comcast cheats customers by slowing peer-to-peer traffic. Like many national ISPs, Comcast says it sometimes has to cap traffic to keep bandwidth hogs from hurting us all.
UPDATE: The Globe’s Hiawatha Bray has a story today about increasing backlash against the company - including allegations that it [...]

Photo from wikipedia article about the prison
There’s really no geek angle here, but the story tickled my fancy: The Navy wants to lease out the dilapidated, century-old prison that hulks out over the river at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The mind boggles at the thought of a quarter-million square feet of fixer-upper! Lovely location, though.
[...]

ADDENDUM: The Telegraph has reposted video from last year’s competition in Manchester.

Forty-eight high school teams are descending on the Verizon Center in Manchester today, preparing for the regionals of the FIRST Robotics competition. This year’s contest involves racing around a track while manipulating a 40-inch-wide, hard-to-hold ball. There will be less bashing and more planning [...]

The U.S. House has passed an energy bill that extends the tax breaks, which are vital to keeping those lots-of-press-but-still-feeble industries growing. The Senate will be a tougher row to hoe, and Bush promises a veto partly because of new taxes on oil/gas firms.
The removal of similar tax breaks in the Reagan era [...]

If Rhode Island wants to be a tech hub, as the Globe says they do, they need a moniker - you know, "silicon this or that" But what the heck is the state known nationally for except corrupt local politicans?
There’s always the "smallest state" bit I suppose ("Silicon Shrimpville"?), as seen in this tidbit [...]

Dartmouth has received a grant to, among other things, "digitize 1,500 photographs from the Stefansson Collection, the bulk of which weretaken during Stefansson’s 1913-1918 Canadian Arctic Expedition" and put them online. It shows a polar society that is long gone due to economic reasons, and is now threatened by climate change.

The loss of water pressure that’s been there for 100 years might destabilize the riverback, so folks upriver of the Fort Halifax Dam in Maine - about an hour north of Portland - are being warned that their houses just might slide into the Sebasticook River.
Several small-ish dams have been removed from dams in [...]

Verizon and FairPoint still have to agree to the stipulations placed on the deal by the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission - the last of the three Northern New England state PUCs to approve it - but that seems likely.

So if you’ve got a verizon.net email address or verizon hosted Web page, get ready to [...]

I can’t say anything more without spoiling the joke in the Speed Bump cartoon from Sunday - but if you like math, you’ll like it.

Can you say "media paradigm shift"? Maybe not quite, but as the NY Times notes, "to scores of bloggers, it was a case of local boy makes good" when Joshua Micah Marshall’s one-man blog, TalkingPointsMemro.com , won the George Polk Award for legal reporting, for his coverage of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys general.

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/
This link is a collection of maps from all over the world, sometimes accurate, sometimes fantasy, sometimes wishful thinking. The latest is a map drawn by Thomas Jefferson showing his vision of the new lands to the West bounded by French Louisiana.
When I grew up in coastal Maine, maps, my stamp collection and shortwave radio [...]

http://tf.nist.gov/cesium/fountain.htm
This is a very nice - simple description of the cesium clocks built by the National Bureau of Standards. The latest is accurate to about 1 second in 60 million years.
Seems like that ought to be good enough.
Earle Rich
Mont Vernon NH & LaBelle FL