I’ve had absolutely no problems with my 2001 PT since the sensors were replaced. No more stalling and great performance. The end of this past week, I gave it the acid test: 5 hours on the Interstate from here to DC. It worked great. I of course was a little excited as I pulled off the highway to refuel in rural Virginia. I did have my AAA card out and the number on my autodial hot list. But I didn’t need it. Finally. Woo Woo!
Author: Paul (Page 68 of 147)
This morning, we (the Knowledge Trust) voted to join the Open Document Format Alliance. Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF Alliance was there to answer any questions and Pat Schroeder, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers was there to ask questions but to finally agree on the resolution which I had moved.
The Alliance began with 36 members in March of this year and now has over 320 members worldwide.
Fred announces the UNC Social Software Symposium on his blog:
It is my pleasure to informally announce the Social Software Symposium, to be held at UNC-Chapel Hill on December 8-9, 2006. The event will be a two day exploration of two burgeoning areas of social software: folksonomy and social networking websites. Drs. David Weinberger (Cluetrain, Small Pieces Loosely Joined), Nicole Ellison (MSU) and Cliff Lampe (MSU) will be featured attendees.
Cristin Paul, Program Coordinator for the Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) program at Duke University, write with this alert:
What: ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Fred Stutzman
When: October 17, 2006, 12:00-1:15 PM
Where: John Hope Franklin Center 240, 2204 Erwin Road, Duke University, Derm, NC
Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, will be speaking about his work on ClaimID.com, a project that allows individuals to control their online information. Fred’s research interests include social software and networks, identity production in digital worlds and cultural effects of social computing.
The goal of the biweekly TechTuesdays lunch forum is to create a shared dialogue around innovative uses of technology that spans Duke’s faculty, graduate student, and IT development communities. In doing so, TechTuesdays seeks to fuel increased collaboration and integration among Duke’s technology developers by allowing members to pool resources and expertise. Each TechTuesday session features a 30-40 minute project presentation followed by an open discussion. Lunch is provided at each meeting. Parking vouchers are provided for the Medical Center parking decks
The folks at Berry College have really loaded up the wiki with questions for me to answer! Doing a talk with this kind of conversation beforehand will be really helpful in keeping me from being a expert dropped in from a plane. They are challenging me in a very good way. I’m going to have to work hard to organize the talk and to add some wisdom if I can muster any ;->
The theme is “Expression, Repression & Association: What happens when intellectual property laws, social networks and privacy collide” and the wiki/open conversation with the folks there is definitely leading to some good and open expression. I already feel an association with them (in a First Amendment sense?). What about repression though? That’s in their questions (see the wiki).

Here in DC and wearing my tux for the Louis Round Wilson Knowledge Trust Awards ceremony over in the Willard Hotel.
Winners were/are:
- * The Knowledge Trust Education Award – UCLA University Librarian Gary Strong
- * The Knowledge Trust Exploration Award – William Blake Archive founder Dr. Joe Viscomi
- * The Knowledge Trust Innovation Award – ibiblio.org director – Paul Jones
- * The Knowledge Trust Next Generation Leadership Award – Kidz Online founder Wes Cruver
- * The Knowledge Trust Wilson Prize for Lifetime Achievement – National Library of Medicine head Donald Lindberg
Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive was cited in absentia for his important work. He’ll get his award in the Spring at the Knowledge Trust’s next meeting. He’s in Sweden at the moment.
More write-up and pictures here.
EdCone.com did a quick Q&A with Garry Trudeau about his new milblog, The Sandbox, which was announced recently in Doonesbury.
There are already some powerful postings on Sandbox by servicemen and women — and comments.
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New twisted spires as you enter DC turn out not to be the tennacles of invading space plants afterall, but instead the Capitol’s newest memorial.
Spent the afternoon on a nice fall drive through Virginia ending at the Hotel Washington in DC. I’m here for the Louis Round Wilson Knowledge Trust Meetings and Awards — tomorrow and Friday. I have my tux ready for tomorrow night. More new on that afters.
I love the new NextBus, predictor of next buses on each route in Chapel Hill. Now if only a bus came close enough to our neighborhood for me to ride it.
You can check on a particular stop and even set alerts (login required for this last). There is an ADA compliant version of the site that should work on even simple wireless devices.
The News and Observer is reporting that dancing and hooping will be back at our favorite Third Place, Weaver Street Market at Carr Mill in Carrboro. There is a policy now that has a long list of restrictions including:
“2. Solicitation and distribution of literature or handbills is prohibited except as specifically authorized as part of a Weaver Street Market event.*
*WSM will sponsor a monthly event for non-profit-making organizations with values consistent with its mission to have tables and make their literature available according to guidelines set forth for this purpose.”
[I am trying to imagine handbill day at the Weave now.]
“3. Loitering is prohibited.” [staying a bit too long is part of what a third place is about, isn’t it?]
“5. Unauthorized performances and unauthorized large or publicly advertised gatherings are prohibited. “Performance” means any activity intending to attract or having the effect of attracting a crowd of spectators, or that’s volume disturbs others. Performances need to have the advance written permission of Carr Mill Mall.”
[Does this mean Weiner Dog Meet Up will be called a performance?]
The Valley Wag, besides watching the GoogTube purchase, gives sound inventment advice for both angels and VCs: Look to the tightest and more reliable social network out there — the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.
Disclosure: I am a member of long-standing and of long hair in the LFHCfS.
Fred writes that he’ll be moderating a panel of Social Networking Systems enterpreneurs at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley tomorrow night. He has tickets so if you’re in the area, drop him a note soon.
* Fred Stutzman, Ph.D. student, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, author of Unit Structures, co-founder of ClaimID.
Panelists:
* Steve Loughlin, Affinity Circles, Inc., President and Chief Executive Officer
* Keith Rabois, LinkedIn, Inc., Vice President, Business Development
* Jeff Roberto, Friendster, Inc., Sr. PR/Marketing Manager
* Jim Scheinman, Bebo, Inc., Vice President, Business Development and Sales
October 19th, I’ll be at Berry College in Rome, Georgia as part of the “Expression and Repression” series. I will try not to be repressed. The wiki they set up has me talking about (so far):
- What is Net neutrality and why should we care about it?
- How has copyright law in the United States been subverted by commercial interests, and what should we (as a society, as a people) do about it?
- What do you feel is the future of online file sharing, i.e music,videos and books, and its role in our society?
On October 26th, Googlist Craig Silverstein will be speaking to a growing crowd (almost 400 tickets delivered so far) on:
- Making more information searchable, with a focus on google book search and google scholar
- Making information more useful, with a focus on ‘expert ranking’ schemes such as google co-op/google health.
- Making information more accessible, with a focus on mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, etc.
All of them together in one brief video from Amanda Congdon at her AmandaAcrossAmerica site. You won’t be shocked that Ed is hyping next weekend’s ConvergeSouth conference whilst Amanda hypes the as yet unreleased “Dreaming in Code.” If you know Ed, you will be surprised that he is sooo stiff on video–even as a joke he must have had to work hard to be that unnatural. Ed is a very fluid guy.
The Sunlight Foundation‘s Family Business Project asked citizen journalists to find out how many members of the House of Representatives have their spouses on the payroll.
In less than 2 days, “Citizen Muckrakers have investigated 437 members of Congress, and tentatively found 19 spouses who were paid by a member’s campaign committee-totaling some $641,200 since January 1, 2005.”
The organizers at Sunlight can hardly believe it themselves — and they promised to start the verification process on Monday.
Sunlight Labs offers a number of cool tools for watching Congress and they promise more.
If you have skills, they are looking for an intern.
PBS will begin show a two part series on the live of Giacomo Casanova. The first part played by Doctor Who #10 David Tennant and his later librarian incarnation by Peter O’Toole. Website is revved up and ready for the sexy older librarian.
Ed Cone reports that Matthew Gross has joined the John Edwards One America Committee as an advisor for online communications. We had a good dinner discussion with the Edwards, Ed, Matthew, danah boyd, Fred Stutzman and about a dozen other bloggers a couple of weeks back. Elizabeth Edwards is particularly aware of internet communications on a very personal level as she describes in her new book.
Jonathan Dube at CyberJournalist is blogging the Online News Association conference, “An American Forum: The Future of News is Here, Now What?”
Technorati shows the trends of blogging about Apex, NC’s toxic fire and lists the blogs of citizens (and of newspapers).
ConvergeSouth in Greensboro is next weekend. It really looks great, but I’ll be just back from DC (see next para).
I’m off to DC at the end of next week for the Louis Round Wilson Knowledge Trust meeting. The last one in Granada was quite a good event. Less site-seeing for me this time because of time constraints, but if there is one thing I should do in DC say late Thursday evening or Friday afternoon lemme know.
One side amusement, I picked up a nice tuxedo that fits great and looks pretty good at a giant formalwear outlet — called the Formalwear Outlet— just outside of Hillsborough for a very very good price. They have lots.
Last night there was a fire in Apex, NC. That would have been innocent enough, but the fire was at a hazardous waste storage facility in downtown Apex. The inaptly name EQ North Carolina, where the EQ stands for Environmental Quality, fire released a large and lingering cloud of chlorine gas leading to the evacuation of 16,000 people.
Kirk Ross at Exile on Jones Street notes that the Town of Apex has a webcam right near the site and that WRAL has aerial photos and more. I note that both the News and Observer package and WRAL use internet mapping services — Yahoo! at N and O, Google at WRAL.
Kirk also lists the violations for which EQ NC was cited in March of this year and for which they were fined $32,000.00.
EQ NC failed to (partial list follows):
- Maintain and operate the facility to minimize the possibility of a sudden or non-sudden release of hazardous waste constituents to air, soil or surface water which could threaten human health or the environment;
- Immediately carry out the provisions of the contingency plan whenever there is a release of hazardous waste or constituents which threatens or could threaten human health or the environment;
- Not store a container of hazardous waste that is incompatible with any waste or material stored;

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