Rob W of Podcast 411 features Senator and Vice Presidental candidate Johnn Edwards on his most recent show. Senator Edwards talks about his own podcasts done at his home with his family and post them on his website, One America Committee dot Org.
Note: Rob and Senator Edwards are speaking via Skype (voice over IP).
Rob also gives mention to the podcastercon.org being planned here with Brian Russell in the lead of the planning. (Check it out).
Author: Paul (Page 124 of 147)
Andie Miller writes from South Africa to tell us about American Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry site.
The site is meant to be fodder for newspapers seeking free content and to thus get poetry out into the hands of more folks — more folks who read newspapers.
Locally, the News and Observer has been doing a good and fairly regular job — they sometimes print prose — in their Sunday Journal section, were my own poems have appeared over the past couple of years. I appreciate the readers and the publication and especially the copyediting there by Marcy Rice.
Miles at tinyapps.org has found and put together a few sources for the missing ABC News story on ranting laptop theft victim and Berkeley prof Jasper Rine. Miles also notices that the original video has been edited at Berkeley to remove Rine’s rant — so much of archives as history. But luckily there are copies around the Net [torrent of QT format] in case you are wondering what we’ve been talking about.
Page 1 on the story in Google cache. Thanks to Miles.
Page 2 of the story in Google cache. Thanks to Miles and Julian Robichaux.
Earlier stories here about Rine and the laptop theft and here about the vanishing story on ABC News.
Alert commenter, Julian Robichaux also points us to Jasper Rine’s teaching statement in which he tells us all “Facts just aren’t that important.” To be fair to Rine, he’s getting our attention in order to make a point. That is teaching the emerging discoveries in biology that the process of discovery and research is more important to learn than a series of facts of the moment.
CalStuff blogger, Allen Lew let’s us know that the Berkeley student blog is on the case as well with pointers to articles on Rine and laptop there.
To our knowledge, the laptop remains unfound.
What a delight to hear very local radio, Carrboro’s low power community radio WCOM, broadcasting live from a very local event and sounding very good and professional enough to enjoy. We’ve been listening to music live from the Shakori Hills Festival and it’s clear and well mixed. A great milestone for our local community radio which just came on the air this fall.
Not long after the story broke on the net of the angry rant by stolen laptop victim Jasper Rine, a story pointing out the very obvious problems with the claims made by Rine appeared on the ABC News site. The story by Hari Sreenivasan did a great and lively job of describing why Rine’s claims were wrong while sympathizing with him over the theft a bit.
Not long after I linked to it, the story vanished. Luckily I grabbed at least one good paragraph for my post. As it turns out no one else grabbed any of the story that I nor others can find.
Miles at tinyapps.org managed to get a screen shot of Google News to prove the story existed once.
Now not only is the ABC News story gone, but the site that broke the story originally seems to have vanished as well (at least for me for Miles of tinyapps).
Here’s the challenge: Can you find the story anywhere? In a cache? Other places on the Net?
John Reuning asks: Is James Boyle really John de Lancie aka Q of Star Trek?

You be the judge.
In an ongoing in North Carolina invasion of Britain, Phil Meyer appears in today’s Economist (just as Jamie Boyle is in the Financial Times). Phil is quoted, his book cited and props given.
Recent visitor, Dan Gillmor also gets star treatment in the same article, “The Future of Journalism: Yesterday’s Papers,” which asks or rathers tells us what Rupert Murdock told US editors last week, the business of news is changing drastically.
Also mentioned blogs, podcasting, wikis — the usual technological suspects.
Neighbor and dapper chappeau sporting Duke prof, Jamie Boyle, has a great brief piece in the Financial Times today. “Deconstructing stupidity” lays it all out on the major themes of Intellectual Property which Boyle considers as dumb as the flat-earth theory. Boyle puts the subtle point on topics quickly and practically.
A friend who blogs anonymously handed me a stickie note tag from a pad she hides in her desk. I guess blogging is completely mainstream when the word is on stickie note tags in the remainer bin at the Dollar Tree along with last year’s Pokemon figures.
All the ibiblio office is abuzz over the video performance of Berkeley Professor Jasper Rine as he visits a class in which the pharmacological effects of coffee and of viagra are explained to put fear in the heart of the person who stole his (Rine’s) laptop during the another class. Boingboing has good coverage and links to many versions of the tape. And there is even a cartoon version. ABC News’ Hari Sreenivasan discloses the most unbelievable part of Rine’s over the top tirade:
At the beginning of the monologue, Rine outlines how he reinstalled the laptop’s version of Windows on a second machine and how folks at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters responded within 15 minutes to the anomaly. (The idea that Microsoft would respond in 15 minutes to anything ought have been the first indication that there were some liberties with the truth.)
It turns out that it’s not such a good year for laptops with sensitive information at Berkeley.
And it’s not such a good year in Hampshire, England where one of the many laptops missing from the Ministry of Defense was found still full of data.
NC Poet Laureate Kay Byer releases a poem each day by a different NC poet on the NC Arts Council Website. Quite a variety there. Like Kay, I love the lines in Margaret (aka Peggy) Rabb’s “Dogwood Alarm.”
Just got word that I won the UNC Faculty Election as the Professional Schools’ Representative to the Adminstrative Board of the Library. The Library in question being the UNC-Chapel Hill Academic Libraries.
This puts me on two library boards at once. The Chapel Hill Public Library Board of Trustees and the Administrative Board for UNC.
Send your local library issues this way. (And thanks if you voted for me).

Robert Kaye, who has the most creative hair styles known, writes to announce the MetaBrainz Foundation, which is designed to run the evolving MusicBrainz project.
MusicBrainz is a user maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the name of an artist, the name of an album and list of tracks that appear on an album. MusicBrainz collects this information about music and makes it available to the public.
With the creation of the MetaBrainz Foundation, the MusicBrainz project enters its second phase of life. In the first incarnation, the project was privately maintained and focused primarily on basic music metadata described above. Today the MusicBrainz project has the legal backing and infrastructure of the MetaBrainz Foundation, which will allow it to embark on a mission to expand its scope.
MusicBrainz recently released the Advanced Relationships feature which allows volunteers to enter vastly more information about music than previously possible. This new feature allows MusicBrainz to capture essential music information as well as obscure facts about music and the musicians who created it. With these new features, MusicBrainz takes the first step towards creating a user contributed music encyclopedia.
MetaBrainz has a killer Board, including Larry Lessig, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow and Dan Brickley and is officially tax-exempt and is ready to receive your donations and your help.
From Dan Gillmor come these stories of bloggers promoting literary fiction from the Village Voice and the LA Times.
from the LA Times article:
Calling themselves the Litblog Co-Op, the effort includes the sites the Elegant Variation, Moorishgirl, Rake’s Progress and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, all of which will continue to operate separately, the bloggers say.
Key to the effort is the Read This! campaign they’ve created, in which five of the bloggers will each nominate a title he or she thinks deserves readers’ attention, then the co-op will vote for one to promote jointly. The first title (four will be selected each year) will be announced May 15 on the group’s Web site, www.lbc.typepad.com.
Blogger Mark Sarvas, who drew the project together, described the effort as less an award program than a conversation starter.
Are we ready for poetry reviews and/or contributions to the News and Observer forums?
This just in from the North Carolina Library Association:
Senate Bill 971 – North Carolina Libraries Special Plate – The bill authorizes the Division of Motor Vehicles to issue a North Carolina Libraries special registration plate. The additional fees for the special plate will go to the North Carolina Library Association, Inc. for the Association’s public programs.
Notes: The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Finance. Each year several bills are introduced to add special plates for the benefit of various groups. This type of bill is generally held until late in the legislative session for consideration. If the bill passes, plates will not be issued until there are at least 300 requests and there is no estimate given on the amount of income the plates could generate.
Ross A. Holt
Head of Reference
Randolph County Public Library
Note: the primary sponsor is our State Senator, Eleanor Kinnaird.

So it’s a beautiful day and we’re working outside at the Grind. John R suddenly starts laughing outloud. Why? He was amused by this image from the Red Hat Magazine site.
I was amused because I read “Tryest” without the “E” It’s that kind of day. So beautiful that the smallest things bring joy and diversion. The only part that dampens things down is that I’m working while I’m out here.
No, not that poetry is written by or even for depressives, but that the News and Observer’s noble attempt at making poetry writing inclusive and fun was immediately hijacked by trolls.
For poetry month, that is April the month in which we are mid-way through, the News and Observer published a very broad sampler of poetry, 5 or 6 by different authors, in a beautiful layout in their Sunday Journal section. The online version has an even nicer color photo illustrated slide show.
Now the participation kicks in.
The News and Observer has some barely moderated forums populated by trolls who represent the darkest portion of the ids of some spiritually impoverished part of Raleigh. But never mind that. Poetry can bring light — perhaps.
Or perhaps not. The public, which must go through several hoops to join the forum, is encouraged to take a line for NC Poet Laureate Kay Byer’s poem and to create a new poem of their own.
I like the idea — part of it — The participation and the remaking and the building on in a personal and unique way off of the Byer poem.
The problem is the N and O forum. A glance at the postings immediately put you off. The first posters don’t follow that stated rules at all. What one has to go through to register for the privilege of posting with the trolls is just not worth it.
The poetry project is held hostage by a bad interface, an unpoliced community, and unfilled expectations.
In some ways, I’m happy to have this as an example for my virtual communites class upcoming in the fall. But frankly I would rather have seen it work out as designed.
Can this project be saved or salvaged?

Recent Comments