Wanda Monroe did a great job of describing the Computerworld Honors program and ibiblio and Open Video in a UNC press release just out.
Author: Paul (Page 117 of 147)
A Winer and likely a diner as well. Dave Winer came up US 17 through far Eastern NC. His car wears the Cackalacky sticker I sent him a while back. His pictures, including one of the sticker, are here.
If the templates and other things are a little funky, fear not. I am working on that now. I’m already running the very very latest WordPress now — 1.5.1.3. But that changed the template set up. It should be easier to post comments now tho.
Update: Looks like everything moved over okay. The only thing lost so far is the style sheet switcher which was no loss really. It did take some cycles to pull that part out of the index.php tho. One obvious gain should be simpler commenting since I removed the authimage for now at least. This version of WordPress is supposed to be better with comment spam.
Sally, Tucker and I went out to the Fourth of July at the Eno early hoping to beat the heat. Most of the day was cooler, in the 80s, and a little overcast. None of the promised or threatened thunder storms scattered themselves our way luckily. Mostly we wandered round the booths. We did catch the last of the Malpass Family and all of the Polecat Creek session on the Meadow Stage. The Cats sing old school country — Carter Family, Louvin Brothers, etc and sound pretty good. It was getting hot by then.
We had a diverse lunch. Tucker eating a Polish sausage. Sally having fried veggies and dip. And I had Jamacian jerk chicken.
Representative David Price read the Declaration of Independence and the crowd responded with applause at appropriate phrases.
For an election year, the selection of local politicians on stage was sparse. Sally was the sole member of the Chapel Hill Town Council to appear. Everyone from Carrboro must have been celebrating there. Hillsborough was represented by Mike Gering who is I believe up for election this fall.
Earlier I wrote about how the NYTimes reported that the way you write or type wires your brain and changes the ways that you think as well as ho you express yourself. Now on the the main sources for the article has posted a comment here telling us that she and another source were badly misquoted.
Kate Gladstone [warning corny music on her site] writes:
The NEW YORK TIMES misquoted me (it also misquoted a colleague, in some even more serious ways). One needs to write 100 legible *letters* (not words!) per minute in order to keep up with the speed required in most everyday adult handwriting tasks.
Today’s NYTimes Business Section is full of stories, seemingly unrelated in some cases, about how the net is opening up new opportunities for involvement in news, entertainment and other areas of communication. Among the articles is the center cover about citizen journalism featuring the Greensboro News and Record (with great image of their front page), an article on podcasting (there have been several over the past few days), an article about legal movie downloads, an article on AOL and Live 8 and the remaking of AOL to be less of a gated community, an opinion piece that says that whatever the Supreme Court decided about file sharing it will not change behaviors — this is supported by quotes from Hilary Rosen, and that’s just what I remember just now.
The common link between the articles is not just the net, but the social use of the net and the demands placed on our commercial structures by the people using the net. Will they get on the cluetrain or has it already left their station?
BBC‘s Radio 3 is offering free downloads of the Beethoven Symphonies aired there. The trick is that you can only get them for a limited time — one week after the on-air broadcast. That means that I missed 1 – 5, but I did get 6 – 9. Hurry and get ’em!
John Reuning and TJ have been working hard at getting torrent.ibiblio.org set up. This is the central site for getting bittorrent downloads of material from ibiblio. What Osprey, the software that drives torrent.ibiblio.org, adds to BitTorrent is a perma-seed so that there is always a seeded torrent available of the listed material from our tracker and structured and managed metadata to allow you to understand what is in each torrent.
The site will allow ibiblio contributors to create, describe and manage their own torrents and will allow folks who want to get material from ibiblio an easy way to find the material and a reliable way to get a torrent going in case the material is suddenly highly in demand.
The goal is to make ibiblio torrents easy to install, easy to discover, reliable, authoratative and accountable — and of course legal.
Among the existing torrents are videos of talks given by Larry Lessig (1998), Eben Moglen (2001), Roblimo (aka Robin Miller), Cory Doctorow (2004), Doc Searls (2004), Dan Gillmor (2005) and others, DVD images of all of Project Gutenberg, Eclipse tools, rpath Linux, Fedora Linux,
BusinessWeek has discovered ibiblio alum Marisa Brickman and her great ability to be at cool places and amongst cool people. In this article dated July 11 (which shows that Marisa is alway a little ahead of us all), Jon Fine notices that Marisa has the ability to get rock stars to wear Levis and to drink bright orange liquids. Of course, that is only the beginning of Marisa’s abilities as those of us who have followed her Sup Magazine know.
Congratulations Marisa.
Brian Russell will be an official backstage blogger at the Philadelphia Live 8 show tomorrow! I hope he’s already on the road there since he has to be back to celebrate his engagement at a party on Sunday here in Chapel Hill.
Check out AudioActivism for his latest reports.
Brian is one of 50 bloggers world-wide to get such a pass (thanks to Dave Sifry of Technorati for setting this program up).
Atlantic-striding James Boyle opines in the current Financial Times about European software patents. As usual, Boyle is clear and concise on complex issues wittily cutting to the chase and in some cases cutting close to the bone.
European geekdom is in a frenzy. The cause? A key vote on a proposed Software Patent Directive is due to be held in the European Parliament on July 6th.
Except, depending on whom you listen to, the directive is not really about software patents at all. Some argue that as its official name indicates, it is only about “computer implemented inventions.†They claim it will only cover systems that use software to control something in the external world, traffic lights say, but not software that just runs to be.. well.. software, such as an internet browser or a spread sheet program.
Opponents strongly disagree. They claim the directive not only allows expansive “pure†software patents, it also might allow for the toxic US innovation of “business method patents.†If a normal patent covers a new design for a corkscrew or a way of cooking burgers, a business method patent covers the idea of opening a bottle of wine, or of selling fast food.
[…]
Reasons to fear food are presented in Weight Watchers Recipe cards from 1974 as discovered and annotated by Wendy McClure (author of “I am not the New Me” and blogger at Poundy )
I am at the unfortunate age at which this is a part of my history I can still remember. Hopefully I will grow out of that. Molded food haunts my dreams. That is food that has been pressed into molds, but food that is covered with mold comes in occassionally as well. I have spent most of my life as a thin person.
Michael Taeckens of Algonquin Books wants me to point out that Wendy will be reading from and signing her book in Durham at The Regulator on Friday, july 8th, at 7:00pm.
Two items that are somehow related.
Apple follows up their podcast-enabling iTunes update with a nice writeup on how to use GarageBand to create podcasts. Especially helpful are the various GarageBand independent hints and suggestions on how to compose a good show.
Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams delivered a speech, published in the Guardian, subtitled by the paper “Humanity, imagination and a real sense of community are what is needed to rescue journalism from its parallel universe”
The Philip K Dick Android had a few things to say when Sally and I spoke with him last week at NextFest.
First, Dick uses some deep structure parsing to get the sense of what he is being asked (thanks Noam Chomsky for inventing this).
From that, Dick can choose from some canned answers. Sample: What is your favorite color? PKDA: Green.
Or he can, drawing on the old ELIZA software, enter into a Rogerian interview. Example: What do you think about the President? PKDA: Which President do you have in mind?
But third, Dick can draw on a large database constructed from the entire corpus of his work. Using latent syntactic analysis, PKDA can create entirely new and unique phrases and answers that sound very very Philip K Dick.
Example: Phil, Where are we now? PKDA: [looking around the room] We appear to be my living room. [pause] It could be a simulacrum though. [pause] But why would the authorities bother?
Now that is the real Dick!
The NC Arts Council and the NC Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer feature a Poet of the Week on the Arts Council website each week. You see a little intro to the poem, some poems, a poet portrait and a poet bio.
The week of July 11th, I will be that poet.
- iTunes now supports podcasts and looks to be doing a great job so far. So nice to get Le Show and to see how iTunes handles multiple enclosures, like the many songs on the Roger McGuinn Folk Den Project.
- It’s finally rainy and cool. Best appreciated if you, like me, were in Chicago during the heatwave last week.
- Google Earth is for Windows only.
- Grokster ruling could mean DRM is always required (and more). Interpretations and readings below:
- WordPress is odd about embedded lists for some reason today
What do Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Rice Burroughs have in common?
They all lived in Oak Park, Il in the early 1900s. Burroughs from 1914 – 1919. Wright from 1889 – 1909. And Hemmingway from his birth (1899) – 1919.
I was trying to imagine the kind of place that could hold these three men at three very different times in their lives almost contemporaniously. What would the child, Ernie, think of his odd neighbor up the street, Mr Wright. Did he read the stories that Mr Burroughs was beginning to publish as his Trazan series?
I was trying to think of all that as we moved around the small town on yesterday in one of the hotter heatwaves to hit Illinois in a while. We visited the Wright house and studio and saw a number of his houses. We even took in the Gay Pride Day service at the Unity Temple (designed by Wright and considered one of his great works). The original prayer for the day which called us to be thankful for the warming days of summer was wisely dropped and another prayer about inclusiveness was added.
Later that night we had drinks back in Chicago in the John Hancock Building’s Signature Lounge (96th floor) with Adam Galinsky, the son of our neighbors.
Next we were up at 4 am (CDT) to go catch our flight back to the much cooler North Carolina.

AP and Jeff Pomerantz report that the drapes have been removed from the Justice Department statues by order of new Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The manly bare-chested Majesty of Law and the single breast baring Spirit of Justice were covered during the tenure of John Ashcroft by $8000 worth of drapery.
The Associated Press photographers report that they were not allowed to take pictures of the newly revealed statues though (in the Chicago Sun Times).

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