Accept no substitutes

Day: August 7, 2006

Required Poems (for 3rd and 4th grade)

I have in my hand a book. Unable to type with it in my hand, I set it down. It is called “Required Poems” subtitle “For Reading and Memorizing” “Third and Fourth Grades.” It runs about 200 pages and the more recent poems are copyright in the late 1890s. The book itself shows no print date nor copyright. Among the poems are works by RL Stevenson, Kipling, Riley, Longfellow, Whittier and de la Mare. Along with such giants as Bliss Carman, Phoebe Cary, Lucy Larcom and Oliver Herford.

Just a quick quiz, who remembers the poem “I Remember, I Remember”? Who wrote it? (No fair Googling quite yet).

Seasonal poems, poems with birds in them and heavily cadenced poems like sections of Hiawatha are often “Required.”

A personal note: My grandmother, bless her soul, often terrorized me by reciting with great drama Riley’s Little Orphant Annie. Each time she came to the nearly stuttered halting stanza ending lines:
Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

She would make a ghastly face and reach for me. My not yet luxuriant not yet flowing hair would stand on in. That is one poem lodged in my memory, tied to my deepest self by the barbed wires of fear.

Secret Diary of Steve Jobs Vanishes

After a very funny and very snarky run up to the Mac World Wide Developers Conference today, the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs vanished from the face of the web or at least from blogspot. In place of the various images of Steve and those annoying him particularly those last few hecking him about options are the words “In Memoriam,” one post titled “RIP” and the phrase “It’s gone…”
A couple of stray and mournful comments are rustling in the wind.

ibiblio to MCNC and NCREN

We’re moving ibiblio physically and networkedly to MCNC and NCREN. In theory, folks that go to ibiblio for software, radio, legal music, archives of history and technology resources (to name a few categories) will only see better performance and better response. We’ll see opportunities for stronger research relationships, more innovative networking solutions and experiments (we already do IPv6 streaming with those groups), more economic hosting, better opportunities for expansion as needed, and access to better bandwidth availability and pricing.

First to be moved will be the radio streams. They should change tonight if all goes as planned.

I just did an brief interview with the MCNC PR folks. I said something like:

We are delighted to be working with an innovative and creative and affordable group like MCNC and with Joel Dunn and Mark Johnson in particular. MCNC really stepped up with some imaginative solutions to our bandwidth situation and added extremely reliable hosting (far above industry standards) while allowing us to keep our involvements in Internet2 and National Lambda Rail (among others). Thanks to their good work, ibiblio will be cutting its operating expenses by 2/3s while increasing bandwidth, increasing research involvment, getting room for expansion and will be located in an extremely well-planned and well-provisioned computerroom at the nexis of the RTP commercial and educational network crossroads of our region.

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