Accept no substitutes

Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 15 of 38)

Fredmania – Facebook and Fred on Carolina Week

I just got back from a great talk by Koleman Strumpf at Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He’s added movie trading to his file-sharing study so I got to hear a lot of new news. Basically, trading movies is now worse economically than trading music (at the current quality levels at least).
But when I got back, Fred and a guy from Carolina Week had taken over my office. Except for my shabby mess, it looked like a TV studio. Fred’ll be on later in the week talking about FaceBook and social networking.

2 Mini Schnauzers need a good home

UPDATE: These dogs found a great home last night (01/25/06). They no longer need to be adopted.

A collegue writes seeking a home for older mini-schnauzers. Her note below:

One of our emeritus faculty members entered assisted living on December 19th. As part of her agreement to go, my mother and I said we would take her two little schnauzers, Strudel and Hugo. They are cute and starting to grow on us but mother, who is 83, and I already have two very large standard poodles. No matter what we try the four dogs do not seem to like each other. Well, that’s putting it very gently. It is just too much for us to keep all the dogs apart and I need to find Strudel and Hugo a new home or homes. We tried this for a month put sadly have failed.

I am in desperate need to find a foster home. I say foster because the original owner will pay for all food, health care, and all other expenses related to the dogs for as long as they live. They have had good health care and all their shots, etc. Strudel will be 12 in May and Hugo will be 11. While they could live another five years, being little dogs, it is unlikely if I have to take them to Schnauzer rescue that anyone will really want them. It is so sad to be old and unwanted.

These two can go together or separately to a home where there are no other dogs (well, Hugo could go anywhere, I think, but Strudel needs to be alone or with Hugo) and someone can love them in their elderly years. I am afraid they are not feeling very loved in the house with the monster poodles. They are house trained, do not chew furniture or the like, come when called, and enjoy patting and cuddling – especially Strudel! I dearly wish I could keep them. I feel terrible, but we just don’t seem to be making this work. If anyone is out there who would like a little companion who is just looking for love and affection this is your cost-free chance.

Contact Helen Tibbo at tibbo AT ils.unc.edu or leave a comment here.

Looking at people looking a photos of people looking at Art

Rosenthal: Big Man and Child
John Rosenthal has a great eye, a steady hand, a wonderful sense of composition and a tendency to reveal humor in a very smart way. Today was the opening of John’s show at Tyndall Galleries. Most of the images were taken in galleries and to good effect like the one above of a child looking at Ron Mueck’s Untitled (Big Man) sculpture in the Hirshhorn Gallery.
There was a very good turn out of writers, photographers and artists as well as lookers.
Next Sunday, John will be giving a gallery talk from 2 – 3 there.

Death to my espresso machine?

Have I been dealing death to my espresso machine by bad grinding? I love my Solis Crema 70 which has been doing a fine job for the past 5 or so years, but a while bad I noticed the flow was slow. I cleaned the machine. That improved things, but occassionally it still slowed. I ground more and more using my Krup blade grinder and that caused things to be worse instead of better. Next the Krup started gasping (not related to the Solis I think). The fine powered coffee had sifted into the power switch. I shook that loose a few times and it kept acting like it would work just a little more.
Today I decided to replace the Krup. There was a nice selection at Southern Season that included a new Krup model. I got a new Krup. When I opened the instructions, I learned that blade grinders are deemed not acceptable for pump espresso machines. Fine for drips and plungers, but no no espresso. Why? The fine powder clogs the wonderful crema pin point holes. Damn, that’s it I thought.
I went back and looked at burr grinders. They are much more expensive and giant. I’m not opening my own cafe with my lovely little two shots at a time Solis. I don’t need a 14 inch high, giant binned, industrial grinder — do I? I’m looking at alternatives now. Solis has a Maestro Plus that looks tempting but a bit steep. What’s a cheapskate coffee snob to do?

UPDATE: I went ahead and picked up a Bodum Antigua (as Badi suggested) tonight. My first cup of espresso out of the Solis Crema is the best I’ve had from that machine. Putting in store-ground espresso was good but this is better.

Talking with Tron Guy

Way back in the day, we hosted some projects being developed by Jay Maynard. Then all hell broke loose. Jay became Tron Guy and a net icon of sorts. Jay still keeps a Public Domain IBM Mainframe software collection on ibiblio, but Tron Guy has taken on a life of his own (appropriately at tronguy.net).
I included Tron Guy as an enrichment link for INLS092 today. A few hours after I added the link to the class blog, I got a note from Jay who is monitoring RSS links to his site. You can’t fool Tron Guy.
After a little conversation, Jay sent me a copy of a top secret Tron Guy video done with the folks down at DAVE in Orlando.
I can’t release the video (Jay says hold on), but I did screen it and I can say that Cindy Morgan is just as lovely as ever and that Tron Guy does a better job than the original Tron actor. In the meantime, Jay aka Tron Guy has some very funny videos on his site.

Goldberg, Wells, Bush and a biorecorder

In class today, we’ll be talking about “As We May Think,” Vanevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. I’ve also assigned H. G. Wells’ earlier (1937) “World Brain” and Michael Buckland’s article on the near forgotten inventor of a pre-Memex Memex, Emanuel Goldberg, who had most all of what Bush dreamed of already working in the 1920s.
To my mind, Wells better grasped the potential social use of shared knowledge than Bush, while Goldberg operationalized the Memex concepts so much earlier (and I would say from most of my background readings better) than Bush.

My journalism collegue Val Lauder sends a story about a too observant feathered biorecorder that somehow seems to relate.

Turning tables on Journalists

My collegue Chris Roush on his Talking Biz News Blog takes the story of a BusinessWeek reporter who has his email interview questions posted by the interviewee.
I disagree with Chris and point to Dan Gillmor’s book in the comments. Dan touches on the story on his own blog for the Center for Citizen Media.
Also in the comments on Chris’ blog, thesanitycheck.com folks post a comment and a traceback to the interviewee’s reply.
Then Chris publishes this update: BusinessWeek reporter calls and is mad; Overstock head responds on Internet again. The reporter hasn’t caught on yet.
Of course I posted a comment to Dan’s blog telling him and his readers about Chris’s posts.
Got all that?
Hang on there’s more. Chris just posted, when I wasn’t looking, another bit from SanityCheck. This time, we learn that CNBC’s marker guru, Jim Cramer is threatening Sanity Check’s webmaster in More from The Sanity Check: Jim Cramer is mad now.

Shield law for bloggers — or for any Journalist for that matter

Dan Gillmor writes from the American Bar Association’s Communications Law conference where a mock Senate hearing about the so-called “Free Flow of Information Act” was underway.
As I comment on Dan’s blog (can’t see how to do a trackback there):

Jeffery Tobin in the current (Jan 16, 06) New Yorker has a lot to say about the background to this discussion in his article NAME THAT SOURCE Why are the courts leaning on journalists?. Worth a read.

Dykki Preppie?

Our urban Dykki gone preppie for 2006? That’s what the picture shows in this week’s Independent. Unfortunately the pic of Dyk isn’t online, but his resolution is

“I am turning over a new leaf this year and will be wearing polos and khakis, cardigan sweaters and sweatshirts tied around my neck. This resolution will fall somewhere between sobriety and monogamy.”
–Dykki, The King of Downtown Durham

Quickly pick up a copy of the January 11 – 17 issue and turn to page 27. Is there irony at play here?

Fredmania – Facebook and Fred on Future Tense

You can’t hear Future Tense on local NPR stations, but you can hear Fred’s interview on the Future Tense website — they even podcast if you’d like to get FT regularly. Here’s what the FT site has to say (but listen too):

Researcher studies Facebook use by college freshmen at UNC

Facebook is an online social networking directory that has become the rage on college campuses since it debuted in 2004. College students have created around six million accounts. Students make personal profiles pages, which typically contain photos. They can exchange messages, and join groups of friends. Profiles often contain a lot of personal information, such as relationship status and sexual preference.

Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, has just completed a study of Facebook use by freshman from the class of 2009.

Henry Greenside on Einstein and Gravity

The Friends of the Chapel Hill Public Library have been sponsoring a series of talks on Einstein. Tucker and I were at the first three, but he had a conflict today and I was there alone. Alone with a completely packed room! Dr. Henry Greenside does a fantastic job of making Einsteinian concepts approachable and understandable to the layman and his listeners obviously appreciate his work.

Greenside a nice set of notes and links to the talks and further readings on his Duke website.

Einstein’s most spectacular achievement as a scientist was his 1915 general theory of relativity, which explained gravity as a geometric bending of spacetime by matter.

Dr. Henry Greenside, Professor of Physics at Duke University, will present a non-technical overview of Einstein’s theory and then explain some of its amazing implications, including the bending of light by gravity, how strong gravitational fields cause time to slow down, the properties of black holes that form when massive stars die, and how space itself can expand and contract. Dr. Greenside will desribe how general relativity is being used by scientists to understand many mysterious astronomical observations — monstrous black holes at the center of each galaxy, an ever-expanding universe, and the mysterious “dark matter” of which the universe consists.

Finally, Dr. Greenside will describe the major crisis with which physics is currently faced: our two greatest physical theories — general relativity and quantum mechanics — conflict with one another. The resolution of this crisis is likely to lead to spectacular and unprecedented insights.

Fred’s Facebook Final Report

Okay, it’s not a final report, but it’s an end of Fall semester analysis. Fred has been reviewing the Facebook usage at UNC in aggregate (not in detail) for the past semester and he has some very interesting findings. Check them all out at his blog. Much insight into UNC students’ political self-identity, ideas and practices of privacy, taste in music, books and film.

At Sam’s Funeral

Sam Garrard was an amazing man. I never knew him even though I had met him a few times and knew his family pretty well. Sam had Parkinson’s in the very late stages when I met him. It was at the Celebration of His Life, his funeral, that I got a glimpse of Sam, a look at how he helped create and sustain his family with their love of nature, of arts, of the outdoors and of ideas.
Sam’s very musical family celebrated his wide interest in music. Sam had started his adult life as a violinist and a music educator. He was someone who would play Bach’s Concerto in D Minor as well as bluegrass and traditional fiddle music.
Later thanks to the draft he became a pilot.
He kept a journal, a moving book from the excerpts, about his life as an Eastern Airlines pilot, about the sky from the cockpit, about the rare priviledge of being able to fly. He wrote movingly about music and how it communicated, how it lifted.
Sam’s service bulletin began with a Rilke poem that ends “am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?” and ended with a lecture quote from Wilber Wright “If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and wath birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount the machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”
The service was lovingly arranged and deeply thoughtout and sincerely touching. Afterwards I felt that I had begun to know the Sam Garrard that Parkinson’s has taken away.

After the service which was out in the county near the Eno River at Pleasant Green Methodist where many members of Sam’s family are buried, Jane and I saw vultures soaring. They are lovely at a distance. But we began to see them landing in a dead tree. By the time we got close to the tree, there were at least twenty of the raw red heads settled in for the night there.

Podcastercon – aftermath

Podcastercon was a big success! We had about 300 people here and a good many of them over 1/3 from out of state; Brian was right when he wrote that Podcastercon was national (and he was writing early on in the planning).
The conference was indeed self-organizing which meant that I mostly dealt with securing buildings, getting tables and trashcans, talking to caterers and the like while the sessions were well run by the attendees and Brian could keep us all on track.
During the first sessions, I managed to visit both the Podcasting 411 session and the Advanced Podcasting session as well as having some chat time in the halls with folks that I don’t get to see enough, like Ed Cone, and folks I was just getting to know as the day progressed.
For lunch we experienced the Med Deli version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Brian’s order of good Lebanese finger food from domates to tzatziki to humas to salad and chicken skewers fed us all well.
In the afternoon, I got to parts of the Podcasting as a Teaching and Learning Strategy session lead by the talented teacher Dave Warlick and to Mur Lafferty‘s Women in Podcasting session. Mur had lost her voice which is a terrible thing for a podcaster to lose. I didn’t get into the Copyright Law and Podcasting session lead by Derrick Oien formerly of MP3.com. That room was way to full for me to slip in and hear what was up. But I heard great reports. Derrick certainly knows the consequences of running afoul of copyright laws.
The open sessions were a bit scattered in location and I was running one so they’re harder to mention (or to link to).
Overall, we had a great time. A very attendee directed conference in content and in tone — relaxed, welcoming, open to a variety of ideas and of people with no one feeling like she or he had to be a superstar. I think we stayed true to Brian’s ideals throughout and the result was a great feeling of comradery and shared success.
Dinner afters for some of us — many from out of state — was at the new Bon’s Home Cookin’ where we experienced such Southern food specialties as fried green tomatos, okra (fried or stewed with tomatos), pulled pork, fried chicken, field peas and corn and some very sweet desserts.

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