The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

South Bend, IN holds the national position of fourth in quality of library services and with good reason. When one walks into any satellite library branch in South Bend, IN, what they see, besides a clean well lit place to read, are multitudes of computers for public use. These computers are state of the art, fast as thought, and have all of the updated software that one might need if that person does not have a computer of his or her own. In fact, the system is so effective that many view owning a computer cost prohibitive in lieu of the quality of South Bend's system. The main branch has more computers on the first floor than the entire main branches of both Oakland and Berkeley combined. Add that to the fact that usage is scheduled at two (2) hours instead of one and it kind of gives one pause. The Bay Area is supposed to be one of the most progressive places in the nation yet computer access is more like subjection to bear skins and stone knives. Even peripheral systems for community computer access leave much to be desired. Case in point, OCCUR operates a community computing facilitity at Eastmont Mall in East Oakland. I remember about 10 years ago when it was first christened. When one goes there now they see a sad sight of discombobulate malfunction. The place is filled with loud mouthed teens who play video fight games all day, the server doesn't work 90% of the time, and the staff is unresponsive. A few weeks ago I saw David Glover and asked him about things and he promised that things were going to get better. He claimed that OCCUR (and probably th Oakland Public Library System as well) was being extorted by ATT and we would just have to grin and bera things until the system was swithced over to Comcast (which is the server, incidentely, for South Bend's system). That was three weeks ago. I went there the beginning of this week and it seemed to be even worse. With all the so-called progressive thought here in the Bay Area it's a damn shame that when it comes to such an important tool as community access to computing, what we seem to have here is like the hanging gardens of Babylon. If you are not wealthy enough to have a computer then you're shit out of luck. The fruits are just out of reach for the average person.