Just like Carrboro to be in the lead; this time beating Spring by a few days.
The pickings are slim this time of year, remember it snowed here on Wednesday of this week. Lots of plant sets. Greenhouse tomattoes. Cut flowers are daffodils. Organic meats.
Month: March 2005 (Page 3 of 5)
Flying back from the Emerging Technologies Conference in San Diego took most all of today. The mystery of American Airlines trying unsuccessfully to sell boxed food continues. They offer it. $3 for a box that no one wants. People open their bags of sandwiches that they paid $6 for in the airport. We sit eating only slightly better food for which we paid twice as much.
No movies. No music anymore. Of course I was on two half flights. That is SAN to OHR then OHR to RDU. Similar flights except sub DFW for OHR on the way there.
All the flights were completely full BTW.
Chris DiBona, who is now OpenSource Project manager at Google, announced http://code.google.com. Note that Google is using SourceForge to host their open projects. Chris named SourceForge back in the day. We still run a SourceForge download mirror on ibiblio.org
Larry Lessig announced that his book, Code, will be available for update via wiki beginning today (hosted by JotSpot)
Odeo the podcasting company presented (but not live or even in Beta quite yet).
BBC’s Paula Le Dieu will be heading up the Creative Commons International efforts from London.
Jeff Bezos announced and demoed A9.com’s openSearch.
Yahoo Tech Labs announced the Tech Buzz Market Game.
O’Reilly announced their new Where Conference to take place June 29 – 30 in SFO. It will:
explore the emerging consumer and enterprise ecosystems around location-aware technologies–ecosystems that increasingly impact the way we work and play. Location-determining technologies like GPS, RFID, WLAN, cellular networks and networked sensors enable an ever-growing array of capabilities from local search, mapping, and business analytics to enterprise integration, commercial applications, and software infrastructure.
Bloglines/Ask Jeeves purchase explained. (in more details that the article that I linked to there).
Reminder that Jessamyn West will be here (here being Chapel Hill as here is actually San Diego for me at the moment) on Monday.
Full details here.
A great way to keep up with the conference here is the eTech Attention Stream which combines postings tagged as eTech or eTech2005 from Flickr, technorati, and del.icio.us.
Sally is stepping in for Eric Muller at his IsThatLegal.org blog and going to a conference on Southern (North) American History.
Jeff PomeRantz tells about the history of Dewey vs Library of Congress at Duke University. The Duke Librarian writing in 1937 thought that the Library of Congress classification system was a fab. Duke is still trying to get to LC even now.
More that I can tell here.
Neil Gershenfeld’s Bits and Atoms talk kicked off the day.
Found commerce.net folks, including Rohit Khare, who fondly remember Simon Spero’s time there. Had a great chat with Jimmy Wales of wikipedia and agreed that we need to get him to Chapel Hill soon. Remet Chris diBona who is now handling open source at Google. On other searching fronts, spend a good time talking with Ruben Ortega who is CTO of A9.com, amazon’s search venture. Over lunch Dick Hardt explained how SXIP does identity management (Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol).
Am to remember to tell Fred that I met Roger Dingledine of the Free Haven Project. And to tell Brian that I met Carl Coryell-Martin of Green Media Tool Shed.
Also had a discussion over breakfast about the long tail, media concentration, and innovation. Right now I’m thinking that the tall concentrated end of the curve is ruled by what Jane Jacobs calls the Guardian Culture while the now famous Long Tail is ruled by Jacobs’ Commercial Culture.
Robert Kaye not only has the best hair measured by percentage left on head, but he can make a distiller about of simple parts and then… at the Makers’ fair this evening.
Musicbrainz guy and best haircut at any conference title holder, Robert Kaye gives a heads up on what’s up today.
I wasn’t on the elevator when it stalled with Doc, Steve Gillmor and Justin on board. That was definitely an upside of the conference. Each of them had an amusing version of the maybe 15 minutes of terror.
I was there to see Jeff Bezos click on YES when his computer prompted him that “Software update available install now?” I was amongst the ones shouting NO! Jeff went on to announce A9’s open search.
I was there when the folks from Yahoo! and O’Reilly announced the release of the Tech Buzz Game “a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends.”
I was delighted by Danny Hillis’ (of Applied Minds and founder of Thinking Machines) robots, maps, and highly modified H2.
There is more to say about today, but I’m competely pooped and others have some good initial takes down here.
Former King of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk has a blog of mostly official papers that have been scanned. Interesting to see his underlinings and comments on things. Helpful if you can read French and/or Cambodian. He’s been at it for over a year and his web site has been a subject of internet curiosity for sometime.
John Edwards will be podcasting (thanks Brian). From http://johnedwards.com
STAY TUNED: John Edwards Podcasts Next Week!
Next week John Edwards will participate in an exciting new medium: podcasting. He will answer your questions and update you on his family and projects. Do you have a question for John Edwards? Click here.
What is podcasting? It starts with an MP3 file that will play on your computer or portable music player – but it acts like a subscription. This means you are alerted when a new podcast becomes available – and you are always kept up-to-date with the newest broadcast.
How do I get started? Download free software for your Mac or PC at iPodder.org. Then check back here at One America: next week we will provide a link to download John Edwards’ podcast!
There are quite a few folks blogging the sessions today so I’m going to give you (and me) the collective link fromWeblogs, Inc. and write about other things that go on later.
Off to breakfast and today’s first session.
Settled into hotel. IM from Doc, who is to be my roommate, saying that he’s up in LA at a Starbucks and will be late. To me it’s late already since I’m on East Coast time.
The conference hotel is a little walk away. There I check in and get swag. Tutorials have already been doing on. I miss the folks giving them but run into Dan Gillmor and his friend both taking advantage of wireless. Then in to Sara Winge who is just settling into email herself. Justin Watt comes by looking for dinner eaters. Since I didn’t pay $3 for salami on the plane and since Justin and pal are good dinner partners, we take off to Star of India restaraunt, where I have passable pineapple mango curry chicken, veggie samosa and pakora.
I miss the l0ft party because it’s past midnight EST.
Tomorrow will be a full confernce day. I wish my battery was a bit newer and laster longer.
It had to be a joke! I get on the plane and after the too salty to even think about eating pretzels are handed out (remember that dehydration is the most common problem in air travel) and then the diuretic drinks dispensed, there is an announcement. Something about a new service from American Air Lines. We can now buy a box meal! For $3, you get the stuff that you didn’t want to eat when it was free. Salami. Dried fruit bits. Oreos. $3. Let me say it again $3!
A quick reminder before I hop on the plane. Jessamyn West will be speaking here in Chapel Hill on Monday March 21.
I will be at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this week and hopefully blogging from there.
One of my guilty pleasures is reading the “Modern Love” feature in the New York Times Sunday Style section. The pleasure shouldn’t be that guilty; they have very good writers writing very good and interesting takes on varieties of love in the modern age (or at least the contemporary age). Over and over I see articles by writers that I know are good but I am surprised to see in the Times and more surprised to see in the Style section.
Take today’s for instance. Novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz writes of the surprise of watching her husband at age 53 decided to take up rock guitar, to join up with an financial manager, a Renaissance poetry professor and a lawyer to form a band called Rackett, and to end up with a song co-written by Warren Zevon and produced by Bruce Springstein. The unsurprising part is that her husband is the immensely literarily gifted poet Paul Muldoon. The surprising part is that her husband is the rather wrinkled and distracted 50ish Irish intellectual Paul Muldoon. Hanff Korelitz does a wonderful and loving and modern take on mid-life crisis and the odd success of Muldoon’s passion and her sharing of that passion.
Small personal note: I was a reader/reviewer for some of Paul Muldoon’s earlier works when they were being published by Wake Forest University Press and the wonderful Dillon Johnston (who looks much more like an older rock star than Muldoon). I particularly remember the joy of reading his complex Quoof in manuscript. I still believe that Quoof is the most significant book in the Muldoon canon.
South African friend, Andie Miller reminds us that exiled Nigerian poet/novelist, Chris Abani will be here in NC.
At last report, Abani is scheduled to be speaking in Raleigh at NCSU’s Human Rights Week on Monday March 28 6:30 in Williams Hall.
NCSU’s site says:
First imprisoned by the Nigerian regime at the age of eighteen when his debut novel was labeled a threat to national security, Chris Abani continued, after his release, to challenge injustice as part of a guerrilla theater group that performed plays in front of government buildings. His activism led to more arrests, and, eventually, a death sentence. Released, he chose exile, settling first in the United Kingdom, and then in California, where he currently teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Chris Abani’s experiences inform and shape his beautiful, evocative and award-winning writing, including the poetry collections Kalakuta Republic, Dog Woman, and Daphne’s Lot, novels GraceLand (shortlisted in the Best Book Category (Africa Region) for The Commonwealth Writer’s Prize) and Master’s of the Board, and his plays. Mr. Abani’s novel, GraceLand, was recognized nationally by being selected for the ‘Today†show ‘Today Book Club’. Graceland tells the story of a teenage Elvis impersonator trying to get out of the ghettos of Nigeria.
In his presentations Mr. Abani opens minds and widens horizons, showing how art can serve a just cause. Come hear from someone who has challenged tyranny with nothing more than his pen, as he fuses the worlds of politics and art while discussing human rights and democracy. A reception with Mr. Abani will follow the presentation.
Sponsored in part by the Caldwell Fellows Programs, the University Honors Program, the University Honors Village, and the University Scholars Program.
Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, was on The Connection yesterday talking about his movie/show/music remix of the DW Griffith movie “Birth of a Nation.” Spooky aka Paul’s version is called “Rebirth of a Nation.”
I caught a very early version of the show at the first Creative Commons Launch party/gettogether in SFO a while back. Sally and her mother saw Spooky put it on down at Spoleto in Charleston, SC last spring.
Spooky uses video software to highlight the different aspects of the film, the racism, the stereotypes, the false heroism, etc while making a pretty damn good party mix.
On the Connection, he talked a lot about remix culture, remaking, and about reserving some rights. As usual, Miller is articulate and fun the listen to and not bad to dance to either.
Aardman Animation‘s best characters, Wallace and Gromit, have a feature film, “The Curse of the Wererabbit,” coming out in October 2005. A preview (in Quicktime) is up on the Apple site now.
Barbara Solow has a good write up on Mark McCarthy and his work with the Humanitarian Information Centre in Sudan and Darfur this week in the Independent in their Front Porch Section or here down under “Information is power.”
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