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Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 29 of 38)

MLK Blvd Dedication

Sally’s hard work on the renaming of Airport Road came to a successful climax on this beautiful Sunday in the Dedication Ceremony, March and Party. Edith Wiggins and Sally were the two Council members on the committees for the renaming and the celebration. It was a long process, but a fruitful one.
Today on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s visit to Chapel Hill, there was a ceremony at Town Hall (live blogged by WillR on OrangePolitics), a sign unveiling (photographed by Ruby), a march to the Hargroves Center (where King spoke in 1960 the night before he spoke at the University), and a great party with music and BBQ. Several hundred folks took part in each of the activities on a beautiful clear Spring day.

Extreme Web Makeover for Chapel Hill

When a house or car is so far gone and so pathetic that it seems unsalvagable, the Extreme Makeover Team shows up and saves the day. The Town of Chapel Hill website, which may be been fine back in the day if that day was pre-1995, just “won” an extreme web Makeover. The extreme team from Civic Plus of Kansas selected the Town site over more than 130 other municipal government entries, according to the Civic Plus website.

As a part of the remake, Civic Plus will also host the Town’s website, provide training, and more.

“We are thrilled to receive this opportunity to better serve our citizens. The new web site will have a lot of features to help users find information quickly and offer more ways to interact with local government.”

Bob Avery
IT Director
Town of Chapel Hill, NC

Note: The Chapel Hill Public Library has already done its own extreme makeover on its own inititiative. There is more to be done to integrate the catalog systems, but it looks great! (I’m on the Library Board of Trustees, but the Library took the lead and managed all the work on the site. We, Trustees, encouraged and suggested only.)

There are questions here though. The award for the Town looks like a two year lock-in to a proprietary technology set hosted in Kansas which could result in a difficult migration to any other system later. Hosting public information off-site and out of state means giving up ownership of the Town’s information and although there is CMS style control, ultimately the Town loses control of their own information flow and presentation.

But potentially the worst part of the deal is that the Town will now be two years away from getting to a more integrated information technology infrastructure with parts of their information in Kansas and parts in various departments. The workflow needed to make the town work well will be difficult to manage and to migrate.

Tell me where I’m wrong or what I’ve left out.

MLK Blvd Dedication – Sunday

Airport Road, which is not to be confused with Airport Drive and which does not take you anywhere near the Raleigh-Durham Airport, will officially become Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard on Sunday May 8 which is also the 45th anniversary of MLK, Jr’s visit to Chapel Hill
.
There’s a big ceremony planned with music, speakers, poetry and politicians.

WHEN: Sunday, May 8, 2005 2:30 – 4 pm

WHERE: OUTSIDE CHAPEL HILL TOWN HALL
at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Stephens Street

MUSICAL PERFORMANCES
J.R. Manley Essence of God Youth Choir
The St. Joseph Male Chorus

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS
Mayor Kevin C. Foy, Town of Chapel Hill

INVOCATION
Reverend Jill Edens, United Church of Chapel Hill

THE OCCASION
Bill Thorpe, Former Chapel Hill Town Council Member

SPECIAL PRESENTATION
Elizabeth Aklilu

HISTORICAL REMINISCENCE
Fred Battle, President, Chapel Hill Carrboro NAACP

CLOSING
Remarks, Street Sign Unveiling, and Call to March
Mayor Foy

PEOPLE’S PROCESSION to Hargraves Center

WHEN: 4 – 6 pm

HARGRAVES CENTER,
216 N. Roberson St.

MUSICAL PERFORMANCES
United Voices of Praise
Liquid Pleasure

Tor: The Onion Routers for anonymous communications

How TOR works
Native Chapel Hillian and Free Haven maven Richard Dingledine writes to get the energy up for a big throwdown in SFO where he will tell his “Stories From the Trenches
About the Creation of Tor, an Anonymous Internet Communication System.”

Explore the World of Anonymous Communication Online

Join EFF at 111 Minna Gallery to Hear Stories From the Trenches
About the Creation of Tor, an Anonymous Internet Communication System

WHEN: Tuesday, May 10th, 2005, 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

WHAT: Tor: A Brief History of the Most Important Privacy Software Since PGP
Tor is a free/open source software project to create an anonymous
communication system on the Internet. Tor runs on all major platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/UNIX).

WHO:
Roger Dingledine – Tor Project – tor.eff.org
Roger Dingledine is the chief researcher and developer of Tor and has worked on anonymity and security software at MIT, Reputation Technologies, and his own Freehaven Project. Roger will share his personal experiences about the creation of Tor.

Chris Palmer – Electronic Frontier Foundation – www.eff.org
Chris Palmer is EFF’s Technology Manager. He will discuss EFF’s goals and reasons for supporting the Tor Project.

WHERE: 111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: (415) 974-1719

This event is free and open to the general public. You must be 21+.
Refreshments will be served. Free t-shirts for people currently running Tor nodes. (Bring your IP address.) To learn how to set up a Tor node, see http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc.html#server

Please RSVP to (415) 436-9333 x129 or bayff-rsvp@eff.org

111 Minna Gallery is accessible via BART. Get off at the Montgomery station and exit at 2nd and Market. Walk south on 2nd Street for a block and a half, and take a right down the Minna Street Alley. 111 Minna Street is located between Mission and Howard.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world: http://www.eff.org/

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:

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.

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