Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 123 of 147)

WOW, got laid 3 times this week

A lot of people with intriguing names have been writing to tell me about the number of times that they’ve gotten lucky. Spamassassin is learning about them tho. Soon they will be off with the various spellings of Rollex where I will never see them.
If you feel the need to tell me about your luck, send that story via paper mail to:

NC Attorney General’s Office
9001 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, NC 27699-9001

Be sure to include a return address and a day time phone number.

Someone is listening – parts 1 and 2

Sally Greene notices that the News and Observer now runs not only a few blogs, but an NC Blogwatch. She discovered this heretofore well kept secret by mining her refer logs. Turns out that the NandO blogmasters aren’t using Trackback to the posts that they feature. They do have a Trackback for their own post and I’m using it here to Trackback to one of the articles there that links to an article here.

Meanwhile WXDU is being stalked or policed depending on your viewpoint by “an unidentified, middle-aged man.” How you can tell age and gender from email has yet to be explained. The Chronicle reports that the emailer has been reporting on what words and expressions are used on air by WXDU DJs and is also including images grabbed from the WXDU webcam in his emails to Duke administrators.

According to the e-mail sent to the WXDU list warning DJs about the situation, President Richard Brodhead, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta and Executive Vice President Tallman Trask have received the man’s e-mails. Moneta said he is involved in conversations about the situation with people who have expressed concerns but declined to comment further. Several WXDU DJs also declined to comment about the situation.

An Effin’ chillin’ effect?

Tiger, Tyger, TigerCats, Lulus and Red Hats

Hamilton TigerCats
Most Slashdotters miss the humour (note Canadian spelling) of Bob Young’s offer to give Apple a free license for the use of the term “Tiger.” Bob owns Canadian Football’s Hamilton TigerCats who have been the Tigers continually since 1869.
TigerDirect is suing Apple claiming that Apple’s use of Tiger infringes on TD’s trademark specifically by knocking TD down the results pages when one searched Google for the word “Tiger.”
Bob Young, Red Hat Linux founder and current Lulu CEO, says:

This lawsuit is a load of codswallop. Nobody and no company should have the exclusive use of the word ‘tiger.’
136 years ago we were called The Tigers. If anyone owns the exclusive rights to the word “tiger” with that much history and tradition, it’s gotta be us.

In a recent check (2 seconds ago), the first result for a Google search for “Tiger” was dedicated to the 5 subspecies of Tigers and the second was TigerDirect.

Anyone who can use the word “codswollop” in a complete sentence is someone I admire.

Win a McGuinn 7 string

HD-7 Roger McGuinn Martin Head
As the stripper said, “Two G strings are better than one.” Guitarist Roger McGuinn believed her and designed a Seven String Guitar with two G’s. One is tuned an octave higher than the other so’s you get the jingle jangle 12 string sound whilst being able to do blues bends, slides and single string runs. The guitar has just been released by Martin as the “HD-7 Roger McGuinn Dreadnought Signature Edition.”

Camilla McGuinn writes to make sure we know that we could win one! Acoustic Guitar magazine and Martin Guitars are running a giveaway contest. You only need to register to get a chance of winning. Acoustic Guitar would love it if you also subscribed, but that’s not required.

Note: ibiblio has been host to Roger McGuinn’s Folkden for most of the decade of its existence. This month’s song is “So Early in the Spring.”

O’Reilly digitalmedia has a nice interview with Roger about the 7 string and more in an article by Randy Alberts from March of this year.

Did that happen in the Spirit World?

A while back I was standing geekily against the wall at a writers’ party listening. Two writers were talking. There was an intense discussion about the fate of a character who had had some fantastic experiences that made the Spiderman biography seem uncontrived. Then one asked the other, the other being mystery writer Michael Malone, “but did that happen in the Spirit World?”
Yes, these were/are writers of soap operas. And yes part of what they were discussing took place in the Spirit World. A place about which I am woefully uninformed.
Michael Malone has a rich Spirit World life as well as lives in other Worlds. One of his soap opera characters, Marcie Walsh of “One Life to Live,” has written a murder mystery (with Malone) called “The Killing Club.”
First, “One Life to Live” isn’t exactly true as the New York Times Magazine explains, “she had picked up a rare disease after being thrown into a Dumpster (long story) and given it to her boyfriend, who died.” But then we learn about “her new boyfriend (who is actually her old boyfriend’s soul in a different man — long story).”
No matter, her book has become a plot device as well as a product and I hope a book worthy of joining Michael Malone‘s other wonderful and fun work on my shelf.
Today’s NY Times Magazine, quoted in part above, has a good article on the artifice behind the creation of the book/event/plot device.
Bonus connection: Michael Malone’s home is on property ajoining Saint Matthews Church in Hillsborough.

Organs, Carrboro Day, Bebe Music

Spring is in the air and with it music.

First off, the 1883 Hook and Hastings pipe organ at our church, Saint Matthews in Hillsborough, is back fully restored. There was a great long feature in today’s Chapel Hill News, but they don’t include pictures in their online version. The Church will hold a special service/dedication/concert on Thursday May 5 at 7 to welcome the organ back.

Second, Tucker and I went up to Southern Village to see/hear the 6th Annual Baby Home Benefit Festival. The music was fine but our favorite part of the festival, which raises funds for the Kamensk Uralski Baby Home in Russia, was the wandering magic of Josh Lozoff.

Then we sped over to Carrboro Day which is held appropriately on May First. The whole town was celebrating with music, kids activities, etc. And the new Low-Powered FM station WCOM was broadcasting the music stage live. WCOM is getting really good at this and is the only station in the area directly covering live music events. I popped in the WCOM studio which are right on Main Street looking over to the grounds of Weaver Street Market inspired by Melva’s playing the Django Reinhardt influenced sounds of John Jorgenson. Once there I ran into not only Melva, but Chris Frank (eFolkMusic, Red Clay Ramblers, wears a Fez and plays a Tuba), Solomon Gibson III and Jane the engineer. In the background, the live feed from the Carrboro Day stage was on so we and all the listeners could hear the playing of Too Much Fun, Berkeley Grimball‘s band. It was definitely a Carrboro Day — I even missed the Sunday Jazz on Weaver Street lawn (altho Sally and Tucker were there for that).

Cole Fest: 26 years of Deaning Journalism

Richard Cole is stepping down after 26 years of being the Dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina.
Last night, Sally and I went over to celebrate his time, his kindness, his optimism, his innovativeness and his leadership with about 300 of his closest friends. Richard has had some influence on the life of anyone who has said the word “journalism” in North Carolina and beyond so to narrow down the list to only 300 is saying something.
It would take a long long page to list all of Dean Cole’s accomplishments, but the University Gazette takes a pretty good stab at it.
There is no dispute that Dean Cole knows his journalism and he certainly knows his barbecue — he accepts only pulled pork from Bullock’s of Durham. (I prefer Keith Allen’s of Allen and Son, but don’t tell Richard).

Carrboro Poetry Fest: May 21 and 22

Last year’s Carrboro Poetry Festival was a real blast. Paris of the Piedmont Poet Laureate Patrick Herron lined up 40 very very different poets for two days of readings. He’s doing it again May 21 and 22 in Carrboro’s Century Center. I’m making a return appearance with a few new and different poems.

The low down:

Friends of Huffington

Nassib Nassar sends this links to a parody piece from the Guardian teasing us about Arianna Huffington’s upcoming Huffington Post project (which begins May 9). The advance press says that the project will be a group blog by 300 celebrity bloggers [are there 300 celebrities that want to blog?] including:

Warren Beatty, Jon Corzine, Walter Cronkite, Larry David, Nora Ephron, James Fallows, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Hart, Vernon Jordan, Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Arthur Schlesinger, and Mort Zuckerman.

This list from Editor and Publisher article.

Andy Ihnatko’s 24 Hour Audio Book

MacExpert Andy Ihnatko sends a link for downloading the audiobook that he created according to the rules for 24 Hour Comics Day. “Jeeves and the Object Class” is slightly less than 1 hour and 30 minute story conceived, written, and performed in bad British accent by Andy in just over 24 hours. The noise in the background is P. G. Wodehouse spinning in his grave. That said the story is pretty good and has as a major character a librarian from North Carolina. Not like too many that I immediately recognize, but very believable — except for the accent.

First He Invented Easter Eggs then…

Warren Robinett invented Easter Eggs hidden in computer games when he hid a famous first one in his Atari Adventure. He writes now to tell us about his publication of some of the results of his nanotechnology research, “Defect-tolerant interconnect to nanoelectronic circuits: internally redundant demultiplexers based on error-correcting codes.”

Got that?

If not, Warren explains a bit:

If the abstract doesn’t quite make sense to you, some context is that a “crossbar” is a very small circuit structure we can fabricate where one set of parallel wires crosses another set of parallel wires. A bit can be stored at each junction, so that the crossbar can act as an extremely high-density memory. Our group at HP has made wires as narrow as 6 atoms wide (2 nanometers wide). A problem we have with stuff this small is that there are sure to be defects in what we fabricate, and the paper is about a defect-tolerance technique — a way to make the crossbars such that they will work in spite of having a lot of defects present. The “demultiplexer” the paper talks about is a kind of digital circuit needed to select individual bits in the memory being accessed.

CopyNight, Copyright Day

Today is World Intellectual Property Day. And tonight is CopyNight. The first is a promotion of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which says that the objectives of the day are:

WIPO has tailored its 2005 World Intellectual Property Day message and publicity material towards young people. The over-arching objectives are:

  • To encourage young people to recognize their own ability to create;
  • To increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps to foster creativity and innovation;
  • To raise awareness of the importance in daily life of patents, copyright, trademarks and designs

.

On the other hand,

CopyNight is a monthly social gathering of people interested in restoring balance in copyright law. We meet over drinks once a month in many cities to discuss new developments and build social ties between artists, engineers, filmmakers, academics, lawyers, and many others.

And there is a CopyNight in Raleigh which is sponsored by old friend and theremin player, Steve Burnett, but somehow I’m just finding out about it.

Beyond Heroism!

21st Century Achievement Awards image
We are now beyond Heroism and beyond Laureate-ism here at sunsite/metalab/ibiblio. I just received a note from the Computerworld folks that we are Finalists in the Education and Academia Category (only 5 finalists in each category) for the Computerworld 21st Century Achievement Awards.
We’ll be at the June Awards Ceremony in Washington at the National Building Museum Building on June 6th.
I think I’m to wear a tuxedo again. Maybe I should buy one. And possibly I get to wear our medal again too! Just glad to represent all the folks who have worked on sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and all our contributors.

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