Roger McGuinn writes to say that all of the over 100 songs in his Folk Den are now converted to mp3 format. When he started in November 1995, we had to use .wav and .ra. This really limited the places you could play the songs. But with mp3 you have a lot of flexibility.
Roger began putting up one folk song every month almost 10 years ago and hasn’t stopped yet. There are a lot of nice surprises along the way including a trio of Roger, Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry playing and singing “Sloop John B” November 2004, Frank Hamilton (once of the Weavers) singing with Roger on “Brazos River” January 1999, and a vintage tape of Roger (then Jim) at age 16 playing “John Henry” August 1998.
All the songs are under Creative Commons licenses.
Author: Paul (Page 132 of 147)
As I was walking down the street after having visited with my ole poet buddy, Ann Deagon, I passed the Number One Chapel Hill Downtown Eyesore. The Wicked Burrito was not a great place when it opened. The outside paint job was ugly, tacky and unappealing. But then the place was abandoned by the chain that owns it. It sat idle and fading and breaking with rusting iron rails for years.
The owners, Lone Star Steak House and Salon [STAR], refused to relet the building prefering to let it sit and decay.

Finally the Town took notice and various threats were made.
But today the owners took action. The building (a former gas station in better times) was surrounded by painters.
I struck up a conversation and learned that the poor painters had spent the morning matching the old tacky multi-color paint job. This afternoon they start stripping and painting. Soon instead of fading decaying tackiness, we will have bright and shiny tackiness.
I am trying to decide which is worse. I guess it won’t just be conjecture soon. I’ll be able to compare the two choices.
Who: Philip Meyer, UNC’s Knight Chair in Journalism
What: The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age
When: Friday, February 25 at 7 p.m.
Where: Market Street Books & Maps
704 Market Street
Southern Village
Chapel Hill
919/933-5111

What: Inside Darfur and the Humanitarian Information Centre
When: Tuesday March 1 at 4 pm
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Center, 3rd floor Carroll Hall, UNC
Who: UNC grad and ibiblio alum Mark McCarthy

Bob Moog invented modern electronic music with his synthesizers and his theremins. But in a bad business deal, he lost his name for a while. He has it back and he’s the subject of a new documentary. Sally Greene notices that Moog has kindred spirits, of all sorts, in his current hometown of Asheville NC. She also has the links to a Guardian interview and to the movie trailer.
Moog, as you will find, has a looser idea of what autonomic computing might mean.
Ted Vaden, the public editor (as opposed to the private editor?) for the News and Observer, writes of blogs and blogging today in an article called “Bloggers Challenge Traditional Media”.
His unified vision of what/who/where bloggers are is off. No, we are not all the same. Some are professional journalists, others are thoughtful, some are paid operatives, some are cranks, some don’t care about politics in the least, etc. Place me where you will.
Vaden does give props to OrangePolitics.org and ends his article by saying: “note to self: Start an N&O blog.”
In the meantime, UNC Journalism and Mass Communications alumni and Triangle Bloggers Conference organizer, Anton Zuiker, throws down the blogging challenge to his alma mater (where I am on faculty and was lucky to have had Anton in class). Part of Anton’s challenge is that no one should take on our Deanship unless they have “read this [this being a Peggy Noonan piece] and responded to it – on a blog!”
If you have missed blogging altogether and need to catch up, professional journalist Ed Cone has written an intro to blogging for the News and Record called “Beginner’s guide to the blogosphere”
I had an idea while reading Dave Winer’s 2001 notes about adding a payload to RSS. Podcasting came about because there needed to be a little more than a payload in RSS, but you had to have that first. Now you can hook the RSS payload into a number of enhanced aggregators like ipodderX and much is made seamless.
We saw that BitTorrent has some pretty big missing gaps and aimed to address several by creating Osprey to add permaseed and managable and searchable and distributable metadata to the BitTorrent bag of tricks.
So far so good. Now if the payload for an RSS subscription were to be the the B/T Download link, we’d have a nice B/T software release service (to think of one use). John says that we already “plan to generate several rss feeds in osprey,
the first batch of which will correspond to the 3 blocks on
http://torrent.ibiblio.org.”
Hmmmm.
I may or may not have the flu. I have had my flu shot which made me feel like I was protected. Like Fred, I felt a little sore in the joints and tired yesterday. No fever. No gastro that I can tell. No coughing. So maybe no flu.
Gonna up my vitamin C with some clementines shortly.
Mark McCarthy writes that he’ll be in town mid-day Monday February 28 through the evening of Tuesday March 1 on leave from the UN group in Darfur. This means he will not be here during my class time, but we’ll be working on setting up a time when he can give a talk and share his experiences and insight on running an IT operation in the midst of a serious humanitarian crisis.
Watch this space for details of his upcoming visit/talk.
He writes:
I can discuss my role as the Data Coordinator in the Humanitarian Information Center (HIC) for Darfur. We are part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Our role is to fill the information gaps that are present at the early stages of a humanitarian crisis.
I am the number 2 in the office. My manager deals with all the politics, planning, and headaches that I am glad to avoid. I have a team of 3 internationals and 3 national staff. In Darfur, the most immediate need was mapping. We needed to help the humanitarian actors get to the areas of need. They needed to know where the internally displaced persons (IDPs) were and how to reach them. Then we focused on mapping the needs in different regions and who was working to cover those needs.
The stage of the emergency we are at now has us beginning to take a hard look at information gathering and sharing amongst the agencies. Our mapping is pretty complete and we are shifting as appropriate.
Life is not fair — and it wouldn’t take much to make it fairer. Dave Winer invents the code and the idea of adding a payload to RSS. (in 2001)He and Adam Curry shake down the details and promote the idea as podcasting. Today, it’s a front page story on the NYTimes (Saturday below the fold, but who wouldn’t be delighted with that). And the story only mentions Dave and Adam once in two www pages.
Since August, when Adam Curry, a former MTV video jockey, and David Winer, an early Web log writer, developed the podcasting technology, 3,075 podcasts have sprung up around the world, according to a Web site, Ipodder.org, that offers downloads of podcasting software.
The story is about odd content and about “control” neither Adam nor Dave get a quote. The story may want to be an everyman can do radio, but it’s more of the these silly people who can’t work from a script or edit want to do radio about God and cooking. The Times knows podcasting is important, but they give it the pajama treatment (I am writing this in my pajamas).
I had no idea who was singing this catchy song, “American Romeo,” on WCOM tonight as I was driving home. I missed whatever the DJ said except that they were from here in Chapel Hill. Luckily Google came through for me and I discovered Django Haskins and The Old Ceremony. Pop Noir indeed. Good music even on their rough cuts.
This is one reason we need community radio. This guy is good and he’s been playing around town and I’d never heard of him — of course I’m too old and tired to be a scenester.
Dale Dougherty‘s Make just arrived in the mail. It was a big hit at dinner with my 12 year old son and his 13 year old friend. It’s a good thing that I got the intro to the book/magazine out at FOO Camp because I’ve not had a chance to keep it in my hands for very long before it’s been taken from me.
Went to a great talk over in Computer Science (Thanks Diane Pozefsky for inviting us) by Kathryn Britton (IBM) and Wayne Clarke (Cisco) on autonomic computing. Autonomic computing is like the autonomic nervous system. That is it is a system that operates without thinking like say your circulatory system, digestive system, etc. Autonomic computing is the evolving effort to achieve the right balance between what a person does and what technology does. IBM has a very good descriptive site dedicated to explaining autonomic computing. As well as a place to download and try out some free software for autonomic computing. The Alphaworks site also has some good introductions to autonomic computing including the very useful ABCs of Autonomic Computing by Lori Small.
Note: ibiblio is involved in information sharing with IBM at the theoritical level for autonomic computing when we are working with Rick Harper and Dave Bradley.
Abstract for the talk:
Self-Managing Systems: A Necessity for Future IT Infrastructures, the Autonomic Computing Vision
Computing technology has progressed rapidly over the last several decades with implementations and applications that were unthinkable a decade ago now commonplace. The rate of progress, however, has brought its own cost. As large IT infrastructures grow more complex the cost of managing these systems has increased rapidly. As a result a greater percentage of the IT budget is going toward maintenance of the infrastructure rather than improving its benefit to the business.
We will discuss how self-managing systems will not only help solve today’s problem of increasing complexity but, will, in fact, finally allow IT infrastructures to directly serve the corporation’s business needs rather than being a static and poorly implemented attempt to automate yesterday’s business processes. We will delineate the opportunities for, and challenges of, standardization of self-managing technologies. We will describe IBM’s vision for autonomic computing, with particular focus on problem determination, configuration, and optimization. We will conclude with some of the research areas in which further exploration is needed.
So, I have to describe ibiblio.org’s past 12 years and its future communicating clearly what the project is designed to do and how it changes and improves people’s lives while “situating the benefit within a specific business or institutional context” in less than 50 words!
Suggestions are welcome.
My first cut is:
ibiblio.org, which began its life as sunsite.unc.edu in 1992, is a contributor-run digital library and archive serving the world. ibiblio began as a way to share and support all kinds of free software, we now host over 1500 non-software related information sharing projects on almost every conceivable subject.
That’s 48 words.
Just got email from Jan Hensley who is doing a photo display of writers from North Carolina saying that he, his camera and my old buddy poet Ann Deagon would be coming here next week so’s he can add my photo to his show. He’ll be putting together a show of photos and first books for the North Carolina Writers Conference in July. My only book, What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common, has some age on it, but it’s also been sold out since it was published in 1990. You can read it online where it’s been since 1992.
Some more recent poems are “Unapproachable Edens,” “Birds and Fishes,” and “Dividing Waters (1954)”.
One of the amusements of being on the staff/board of the Linux Documentation Project is that we get documents that proport to be of interest to Linux folks that are actually odd looks-into the undeveloped minds of the authors. Often I cannot tell irony from confusion, humor from confession, insight from misstep.
One such document arrived today from (confused, confessing, or comprehensive) Canadian author, Dustin Harriman.
This 25-page HOWTO is called:
“Female Protocol HOWTO: A Geek’s Guide to Understanding Women”
Download the OpenOffice Document here
…or, alternatively there is an online HTML version here
This somehow syncs with the “meet-up” and “life on Mars” articles today.
Fred alerts us to a Space.com exclusive, “NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars .”
The article begins:
A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.
The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.
What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.
Anton has the Chapel Hill Blogger Meet-up going. It began last night during the Virginia game. I needed to spend family time with my 12 year old cheering UNC and booing (mostly) UVa and hoping for a Bojangles deal, so I couldn’t go.
The attendance looks promising, but I’m wondering if the active bloggers are somewhat divided politically. Will right meet left here?
Here’s a toast to Anton and here’s hoping to be at future meet-ups.
Looking for other impressions as well.
Will UNC have another 100 point night against Virginia? Bojangles better be prepping their sausage biscuits!
UPDATE: Although the Heels romped over Virginia, they were held to a mere 85 points (UVa managed to score 61). No Bojangles for us.
I am being programmed to desire all things relating to The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) as panicy race to the April 29 release of the movie approaches.
Today, the (err a) trailer was released on the front page of Amazon.com! The movie blog procedes apace.
Unfortunately it will not be as corny as the BBC TV version or the wonderful radio show. I maybe an old codger, but there was something about sitting in the dark imaging the characters as Douglas Adams described them that no special effects can replace.
I do love the BBC sponsored website designed like the legendary Guide that preceded wikipedia by several years and is almost as amusing.

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