Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 114 of 147)

Powers of Seven chapbook?

I’ve six poems written and four of those published for the series I’ve been working on based on the number seven. Since each of the six corresponds in some ways, often obliquely, with each of the seven days in Genesis’ first creation story, I could take the seventh day off for rest.
Here’s how it looks so far:

ibiblio-mania various

Besides the SlashDot article posted below, ibiblio has received some other very good and varied attention in the past few hours.

ibiblio’s Osprey on SlashDot

John Reuning had an article on Osprey accepted and posted last night on SlashDot

The comments were various and many. Here’s the article and the links:

BitTorrent for Content Providers
Posted by
timothy on Wednesday August 10, @06:50PM

from the but-it’s-per-se-bad-don’t-you-realize dept.
snuvlorgin writes ibiblio.org has entered the fray, launching an enhanced BitTorrent site.
Among the torrent offerings (all legal) are Linux kernels, distros, Project Gutenberg texts, and the ibiblio Speaker Series, which includes videos of talks by Larry Lessig, Robin Miller, and Dan Gillmor. ibiblio developed and open sourced the Osprey and Permaseed software to make BitTorrent seeding reliable, persistent, and suitable for large-scale content providers. Yes, you can find these torrents later.”

Power of the Peep and Dr Fun

Dr Fun creator Dave Farley writes to say that he’ll be interviewed for a documentary on the Eastertime favorite Peeps called “The Power of the Peep.” Dr Fun has had a load of fun with peeps over the years.

Dave was also interviewed about webcomics by Le Figaro (in French of course).

A few links to some Dr Fun peep featuring cartoons below.
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200004/df20000424.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200104/df20010410.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200104/df20010411.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200104/df20010412.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200203/df20020325.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200203/df20020326.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200203/df20020327.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200203/df20020328.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200203/df20020329.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df20030414.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df20030415.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df20030416.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df20030417.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df20030418.jpg

Rain and Netscape IPO

August in Chapel Hill is usually dry. I recall several summers in the past decades when we were under water restrictions. Today we are simply under water. When I walked in this morning, water wasn’t rushing out of the grates; it was shooting up out of the grates! I had on a poncho and was carrying an umbrella but from the knees down I was soaked. Megan reports that Franklin Street was/is flooded down toward Panzanella (and the Wicked Burrito).

This week is the 10th anniversary of the Netscape IPO. Some people are claiming that should be the anniversary of the Internet or the Web, but of course things were longer in the making than that. Kevin Kelly has a good essay in Wired this month on the subject with an amusing projection into the next decade.

Kerouac Scroll to Roll into Town

The original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road will be exhibited at the UNC-Chapel Hill Wilson Library from September 29-December 17 this fall. The opening reception will be free to the public on September 29, from 5-7 p.m. at the Saltarelli Exhibit Room, third floor of the Wilson Library. The NC Writers’ Network is a cosponsor of this significant event

Marching Penguins

No not the Linuxbierwanderung, but the movie about Emperor Penguins, the March of the Penguins. I wondered if people were serious about how good and how moving this Antarctic documentary had been for them when they saw it. Now that I’ve seen it myself, I too am impressed. The story of the penguins yearly life cycle is dramatic and amazing on its own, but thinking (when not totally absorbed by the movie’s story and beautiful photography) about how the movie was made in such adverse conditions raised my level of amazement even higher.

Orange County Elections Resourses

Ruby Sinreich and the folks at Orange Politics has created not only the best discussion forum about local politics at the main OP.org site, but also other very useful resources on their special elections page. Besides the candidate lists (with links to websites/blogs), there is information about filings and about registering to vote.

My favorite is Corey Reece’s Dynamic Election Map of Orange County, North Cackalacky made using the Google Maps API which pinpoints the registered residencies of all of the candidates. Corey has added RSS-fed recent articles from each candidate’s site (that make use of RSS).

Tax Free Weekend

For some things, there is no tax for this weekend. Mostly back to school supplies, clothes and the like, but also for computers. The lines at the Apple store were very very long — except for the line for those who qualified for educational discounts. Woo woo ! That is us! We picked up additional savings on an iBook for Tucker and got a free (after rebate) iPod Mini as well as $100 rebate on an HP Scanner/Copier/Printer. We had to pay tax on the iPod and the Printer, but over all we saw some very good savings.
Later Tucker got new shoes.
We have shopped and we are done shopping!

“MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream

Marco Williams (who also made “Two Towns of Jasper”) was in Durham for a showing of his “MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream” at the Center for Documentary Studies last night. Tucker and I went over to see him.
The MLK Blvd story is a familiar one to us as Sally had worked hard on the renaming one of Chapel Hill’s main roads to MLK Blvd. As Yogi would say, it was deja vu all over again as we watched the drama of road renaming play out in Eugene Oregon. The same arguments, the same substitutions offered, the same talk about process. Only Council person Bettman in Eugene stepped up and was strong enough to read King’s words on the subject to her fellows on Council as they claimed that the cost of stationary was too great to allow for renaming or claimed that they had a more “creative and unique idea” like naming the library or a park.
The vote in Eugene was 6 against the naming and 2 for.
Marco visited MLK Blvds, Sts, Rds, and more around the country to see what was happening there. Great visits with interesting people including one dirt road that ends at a trailer house where a delightful and cranky admirer of MLK lives.
Back in Eugene, Marco visits the various business people who talk about the hardship of change in carefully coded language.
One more direct merchant, Ed of Ed’s Warehouse, says he will shutdown his appliance business if the road in front is renamed. During part of the discussion, Ed tells Marco that Marco is “thinking like a black person.” Ahem. . Camera pans to Marco. Marco has long long dreadlocks and is, well, a black person. Camera pans to Marco. Ed tries to say well I want you to see it my way, but he can’t quite express himself clearly on that.
After a period of aggitation and of editorial writing, the Council decided to revisit the renaming vote. This time the vote was 5 – 3 for the renaming.
Many other stories in this 54 minute film that was made for limitied cable release on the NYTimes/Discovery channel.

[links etc later]

Running 200 miles in 4 days!

Scott Adams ran and Les Chaffin biked 50 miles a day for 4 days on the Blue Ridge Parkway from Milepost 0 to Milepost 200! The pictures are in (you are chastised for not running IE before you see the pics tho).

Scott and Les weren’t just running/biking for the challenge, but doing it to honor the memory of Jay Clark who recently passed away in May. You too can help celebrate the challenge and honor the Memory of Jay Clark:

Donate to American Cancer Society Or
Donate to National Hospice and Palliative Care Organizations
If donating by check please make checks payable to “American Cancer Society or National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization”
Label them for “In Memory of Jay Clark”
Mail them to Scott Adams / 29 North Circle Drive / Chapel Hill, NC 27516

UNC = Rock School

Rolling Stone Magazine (not to be confused with the band which will be playing at Duke soon or the various blues songs or Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone) has released their list of Schools That Rock. Chapel Hill/Raleigh/Durham are listed as Number 2 just behind Seattle.

WXYC is the only radio station mentioned in the Radio Section. Duke’s free iPods (with Duke tuition ;->) start off the article. Cat’s Cradle and School-Kids get special mentions. Nothing in Raleigh or at NCSU gets any ink at all.

Someone should tell the folks at Rolling Stone that town and metro areas are not schools; the article and list are more about places that have music and have schools — not so much about the schools themselves.

Podcasting and iTunes delight

We tuned up Roger McGuinn’s Folk Den and registered the podcast with iTunes lately. We’d been podcasting it for a while, but the iTunes subscription service makes it really easy to get new audio into your player — if that player is iTunes.
I have the about 100 songs from the Folk Den in my player when I saw a new song just show up! This is exactly what is supposed to happen, but it was still amazing. Roger had just added the song to the Folk Den about 5 minutes or so earlier. Without any effort other than subscribing to our RSS feed, I had the song there and ready to play and/or transfer to my iPod.

We have some work to do on the metadata, but we’ll be working on that and on a WordPress version of the Folk Den next.

Other podcasts I enjoy are Harry Shearer’s Le Show from KCRW (also easy to subcribe to on iTunes) and Brian Russell’s AudioActivism.org.

Bonus: Catch up with Roger and Camilla at Roger’s blog.

Jones-mania in USA Today

Watch for it on the stands tomorrow! Or on the net now! In an article titled “RSS feeds college students’ diet for research” I give what appears to be a complex, yet concise explanation of RSS:

It’s like a subscription or clipping service,” says Paul Jones, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of ibiblio.org, an online public library of Web information (www.ibiblio.org). “You can drag any Web site you want to watch, from BBC to personal blogs, and it will let you know if you have new stuff.

Mark and Rathi McCarthy in Sudan

Mark and Rathi are in Sudan working for the UN’s Humanitarian Information Centre and for the UN Food Aid respectively. Mark is an ibiblio alum who was here on leave briefly this spring to talk about his work in Darfur. Mark’s mom writes (in a comment on this blog) to let us know that despite the riots in Khartoum, Mark and Rathi are okay. But that Rathi and other UN folks are in their compound in Khartoum and Mark is out of town in Darfur.

Hope to hear more later and hope that it will be good news.

Shuttle liftoff – select the cameras

ibiblio alum Jim Ray may be over in the penumbra of the dark side but he is making the best of it. Check out the slick multimedia package that Jim worked on for MSNBC on the Discovery shuttle launch. You can select which 3 camera angles you’d like to use to view the shuttle launch at once from a set of up to 11 available cameras and that’s just the beginning. As you replay the launch, you can move between cameras. Take a look. This is a wonderful piece of work.

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