I wrote up a bit about my trip to India and (mostly) about my visit to McLeod Ganj, home of the Dalai Lama for Red Hat Magazine. Bascha made my pictures look much much nicer too.
Month: November 2006 (Page 1 of 4)
Joey has created a nice little “Search only-ibiblio” plugin for the FireFox search box. You can get it here. Easy to install. Just go to the URL using FireFox. Click. Install. Use now! Works great!
The semester is winding down, but the speaking and speakers keep coming on. Next week, we have these events to look forward to:

Thursday December 7 at 2 pm
I get to welcome Dr. Weinberger to SILS and to UNC before his Henderson Lecture here on Thursday December 7 at 2 pm. Fred will to the introduction. I’m standing in for our Dean who has a conflict.
The best part is that I get to invite everyone to a reception at the end of the talk. Be there to hear that.

The Christian Science Monitor article on identity, “Do you need a Web publicist?” which opens with cute quotes from JJB and gets into Fred’s original idea for ClaimID, was just picked up and run in USA Today.
I exercised a bit of that wonderful privilege last night at Computer Science 380 talking about copyright. They taped and have it online.
Event: Wizard People, Dear Reader
“It’s a Free Culture study break!”
What: Listening Party with Video
Host: Free Culture
When: Tuesday, December 5 at 6:00pm
Where: Murphey 104, UNC-CH
[Disclosure : I am faculty advisor to Free Culture – UNC]
Breaking News
Updated 10:07 a.m.
The Daily Tar Heel was the victim of a widespread larceny early this morning when at least 10,000 of its papers were picked up in mass right after they were delivered to their destinations. Unknown persons lifted the papers, of which each person is allotted one copy, from almost all of the newspaper’s campus bins and several in town. University police are investigating the incident. The DTH also is reprinting 3,000 copies of today’s issue set to be available around the Pit in the early afternoon. We apologize for any inconvenience. You can read all of today’s stories as well as view a full PDF of the issue [at the paper’s website]
Most popular articles of the day online:
- Sigma Chi guilty on hazing charges
- Buckeyes roll into town for a showdown
- Neither system all that fair anyway
- 7,000 of us want your seat
- Congress covers tickets, safety
UPDATE: Sigma Chi, already suspended til 2009 for hazing violations, fesses up to newspaper theft.
All too human, Google Answers has now expired. The Answering service, which approximated a paid reference librarian service, never answered the question “Why should I get my answers here and pay when I can ask Yahoo! Answers for free?”
JJB is revealed for his hidden cuteness factor, Fred explains the origins of ClaimID (and tells his own well-kept secret in the process). Read it all at the CSM.
I’m guest speaking at Jean Walsh’s and Diane Pozefsky’s combined CS 380 class this evening at 5 in 111 Carroll. I’ve put a few links etc on my wiki, we’ll be talking about innovation and intellectual property. They will have read, I hope, Chapters 1 and 8 of Eric von Hippel‘s Democratizing Innovation. I think I need to do a little intro to the four areas of intellectual property in the US – copyright and patent (in the Constitution), trade secret and trademark (in the Code) then move on to how policy can encourage or deter democratization of innovation.
I asked the class to post questions etc in the comments here.
The Manolo will diss me for sure. But the prices were right and the styles were err okay and the timing was perfect.
First Tucker and I went to get him some new shoes. I needed some new penny loafers too. I was ready to push the button at the Bass Store when we found a nice pair exactly my size at 1/3 the price right there in U Mall. The downside was they weren’t Bass. They were/are Hush Puppies! Yikes Hush Puppies. The squarest of the square. As in the Jimmy Buffett song “I’ve got my hush-puppies on, / I guess I never was meant for / glitter rock and roll.” But having small feet comes in handy, I can get kids shoes in the right style at a very right price.
Great feeling shoes with no breakin time required. Next comes the cane then the walker…
But from the Manolo angle, things got worse when on Ocracoke.
The weather was great for walking on the beach, but Tucker and I had left our flops at home. I didn’t want to be in the sand in my hiking shoes. Then in the Variety Store, we came up on a barrell of Crocs Knockoffs. A virtual gator farm of black plastic shoes for only $5 a pair. Cheaper than the flops. Who could avoid them at that price? I could wear them twice and toss them if necessary. But the shoes are so damn comfortable that I wore them the whole long weekend. And kept them.
Even out on Ocracoke you can’t get away from IP talk. One morning at the Ocracoke Coffee Company I struck up a conversation with a pleasant guy who was in the process of moving down to the island. Turns out that he’s Peter Vankevich of the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office. We had a great talk as two IP/Copyright geeks.
Peter told me to be sure to take a look at the announcement from LC about DCMA exemptions. I was finally getting around to that (having been mostly net-free on Ocracoke) when I found the EFF’s analysis of the exemptions (here).
Peter had convinced me that he was really a nature photographer specializing in birds. He was being far too modest. He’s a very very serious birder and photographer. Now I know how he could pick out a myrtle warbler so quickly and easily.
Old bud Andy Ihnatko completely disses the Zune in a Chicago Sun-Times article that begins “Avoid the Looney Zune” and ends “Microsoft gets music player all wrong.”
Yikes, Mr. Gates all this and Vista too?
Not that there aren’t non-iPod players that Andy thinks are competitive and fun to use. He likes several non-Apple products:
“The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba’s Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune’s limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.”
“Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, ‘What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?'”
Andy’s bottom line: “Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.”
Just learned that my journalism colleague Bob Stevenson died on this Saturday afternoon. Bob was a remarkable fellow who claimed that “My life is unremarkable.” That was about the only thing that Bob got wrong.
A brief and simple note about the OcraFolk Festival Fundraiser on Friday night. One great surprise was seeing Jef the Mime for the first time in years. There were a number of new surprises at the show — Rob Temple has become quite the versifier of local tales both humorous and scary. Ocracoke is growing some very good young musicians too.
Up in the predawn so as to get to Swan Quarter for the 9:30 am ferry, the first to get to Ocracoke in a couple of days. Since the Nor’easter blew in and blew the ferries into port and blew the ocean over the highway.
Ferry reading: John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity. Could be simply called “Simplicity’s Laws” (Thanks to Steve Kulp for the book suggestion). Took less than the 2 1/2 hour trip to read. Tucker got half way through it after I finished reading. But I’m still thinking about the ideas there. Not the shallow business book that I feared, but a smart book on design and usability.
Bruce the Road Worrier Siceloff is unhappy with NCDOT’s 511 service and their website. Me too. Here’s my tale:
My goal to get to Ocracoke if possible.The NC Ferry website had said that the ferries weren’t running. Then that they were but not which ones or when they would start. More importantly could I even get to the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry by car as it turns out.
starting at 11 am
511 – no ferries are running
website- some ferries but not which ones
phone call to ferry station on Hatteras:
me: is highway 12 open down Hatteras?
ferry: the dare county sheriff has that information
me: is the ferry running?
ferry: not much reason to run with highway 12 closed
me: closed on ocracoke or hatteras?
ferry: yes, there’s an ocean overwash. would you like the sheriff’s number?
phone call to ferry station at Swan Quarter:
me: is the ferry running?
ferry: we expect it to run at 4 pm
me: can i get there from here?
ferry: now you can. the road was flooded but it’s fine now.
me: think it’ll still be good in the morning?
ferry: sure
hours later (4 pm):
web site: no update as to status of individual ferries. New line in alert “Ferry service to Ocracoke will resume once flooding subsides at Hatteras and Ocracoke.”
511: updated but not specific. notes exceptions in ferries but is vague on which ones will run when. confusing information about Highway 12 based on counties through which it runs. voice mail system aborts. “we seem to be having technical problems. please call back.”
Note: The 4 pm ferry from Swan Quarter did not run on Wednesday afterall. When we got down on Thursday morning there were several unhappy carloads of people who had spent the night as close as they could get to the ferry after having been stranded there the night before.
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