Accept no substitutes

Category: Amusements (Page 20 of 31)

Things that are amusing

Tax Free Weekend

For some things, there is no tax for this weekend. Mostly back to school supplies, clothes and the like, but also for computers. The lines at the Apple store were very very long — except for the line for those who qualified for educational discounts. Woo woo ! That is us! We picked up additional savings on an iBook for Tucker and got a free (after rebate) iPod Mini as well as $100 rebate on an HP Scanner/Copier/Printer. We had to pay tax on the iPod and the Printer, but over all we saw some very good savings.
Later Tucker got new shoes.
We have shopped and we are done shopping!

“MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream

Marco Williams (who also made “Two Towns of Jasper”) was in Durham for a showing of his “MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream” at the Center for Documentary Studies last night. Tucker and I went over to see him.
The MLK Blvd story is a familiar one to us as Sally had worked hard on the renaming one of Chapel Hill’s main roads to MLK Blvd. As Yogi would say, it was deja vu all over again as we watched the drama of road renaming play out in Eugene Oregon. The same arguments, the same substitutions offered, the same talk about process. Only Council person Bettman in Eugene stepped up and was strong enough to read King’s words on the subject to her fellows on Council as they claimed that the cost of stationary was too great to allow for renaming or claimed that they had a more “creative and unique idea” like naming the library or a park.
The vote in Eugene was 6 against the naming and 2 for.
Marco visited MLK Blvds, Sts, Rds, and more around the country to see what was happening there. Great visits with interesting people including one dirt road that ends at a trailer house where a delightful and cranky admirer of MLK lives.
Back in Eugene, Marco visits the various business people who talk about the hardship of change in carefully coded language.
One more direct merchant, Ed of Ed’s Warehouse, says he will shutdown his appliance business if the road in front is renamed. During part of the discussion, Ed tells Marco that Marco is “thinking like a black person.” Ahem. . Camera pans to Marco. Marco has long long dreadlocks and is, well, a black person. Camera pans to Marco. Ed tries to say well I want you to see it my way, but he can’t quite express himself clearly on that.
After a period of aggitation and of editorial writing, the Council decided to revisit the renaming vote. This time the vote was 5 – 3 for the renaming.
Many other stories in this 54 minute film that was made for limitied cable release on the NYTimes/Discovery channel.

[links etc later]

UNC = Rock School

Rolling Stone Magazine (not to be confused with the band which will be playing at Duke soon or the various blues songs or Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone) has released their list of Schools That Rock. Chapel Hill/Raleigh/Durham are listed as Number 2 just behind Seattle.

WXYC is the only radio station mentioned in the Radio Section. Duke’s free iPods (with Duke tuition ;->) start off the article. Cat’s Cradle and School-Kids get special mentions. Nothing in Raleigh or at NCSU gets any ink at all.

Someone should tell the folks at Rolling Stone that town and metro areas are not schools; the article and list are more about places that have music and have schools — not so much about the schools themselves.

Podcasting and iTunes delight

We tuned up Roger McGuinn’s Folk Den and registered the podcast with iTunes lately. We’d been podcasting it for a while, but the iTunes subscription service makes it really easy to get new audio into your player — if that player is iTunes.
I have the about 100 songs from the Folk Den in my player when I saw a new song just show up! This is exactly what is supposed to happen, but it was still amazing. Roger had just added the song to the Folk Den about 5 minutes or so earlier. Without any effort other than subscribing to our RSS feed, I had the song there and ready to play and/or transfer to my iPod.

We have some work to do on the metadata, but we’ll be working on that and on a WordPress version of the Folk Den next.

Other podcasts I enjoy are Harry Shearer’s Le Show from KCRW (also easy to subcribe to on iTunes) and Brian Russell’s AudioActivism.org.

Bonus: Catch up with Roger and Camilla at Roger’s blog.

Shuttle liftoff – select the cameras

ibiblio alum Jim Ray may be over in the penumbra of the dark side but he is making the best of it. Check out the slick multimedia package that Jim worked on for MSNBC on the Discovery shuttle launch. You can select which 3 camera angles you’d like to use to view the shuttle launch at once from a set of up to 11 available cameras and that’s just the beginning. As you replay the launch, you can move between cameras. Take a look. This is a wonderful piece of work.

Father-son flicks on a rainy day

Without entirely realizing the theme or the local connections, Tucker and I watched two great father-son movies with Chapel Hill connections on this rainy Sunday.

Danny Wallace‘s Big Fish as interpreted by Tim Burton is dazzling and funny. The father here is a teller of tales which are nearly true and to everyone but his son better than the truth. they are mythic and aspire to more than the father has actually achieved which drives his son now a reporter in france up the wall. the son tries to get at the truth — the wrong truth it turns out — until the last moments of his father’s life when he must create the final mythic tale for his father. then the funeral comes and we see that there are pieces of fact among the stories. just pieces but enough to give the myths meanings and to make them more than just fantasy.

October Sky, an anagram as it turns out for Rocket Boys the title of the memoir by Homer Hickham, has an appearance by Chapel Hill’s Mark J. Miller as the alcoholic stepfather of one of the boys. The tension in the story of Hickham and his friends is between Hickham’s father who is secure only in his work in the coal mines and is threatened by his son’s going interest and success in rocketry. The father has his reasons: people are dying in the mines, the local mine isn’t producing up to the expected levels, the United Mine Workers are calling for a strike, there are layoffs called for, and the town, a company owned town, might close down with the mine. Still the son must follow his dream of creating rockets with his friends and of reaching beyond the small coaltown to some other larger world — to be as it were a big fish.

kegbot kegerator and Tar Heel of the Week

Technology to the rescue! Teen age drinking is a problem in Chapel Hill and elsewhere. Anti-drinking crusader Dale Pratt-Wilson is on the case and is featured as Tar Heel of the Week in the News and Observer (note: I was TotW back nearly 10 years ago. My being there had nothing to do with drinking.). Pratt-Wilson was a strong proponent of keg registration laws which if put in place would create stronger controls on kegs than on firearms. DPW makes sense on at least one point since more teens die in drinking related accidents than from gun shots. But as opponents point out, teens are not buying or drinking most of the beer. Immediate civil liberty questions come to mind. There was even a move to put RFIDs on kegs.

Leave it to the folks at Make Magazine. These technologists have gone several steps better with the kegbot kegerator. The Kegbot keeps up with all kinds of information including temperature, amount of beer remaining, etc but more importantly Kegbot keeps up with who is drinking how much using an iButton key. It can cut off heavy drinkers. And it does create an amusing way of measuring beer usage.

How We Rank

Installed the Fire Fox version of the Google Tool Bar and am checking out the features. One amusement is the PageRank meter. Not to be confused with the Google PigeonRank meter.

Google 10
New York Times 10
Duke University Home Page 9
whitehouse.gov 9
slashdot.org 9
ibiblio.org 8
UNC Home Page 8
newsobserver.com 7
EdCone.com 7
School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC 7
The Real Paul Jones 6
GreeneSpace 6
Orange Politics 6
Independent Weekly 6
NC State Home Page 6
Audio Activism .org 5
WCHL 5
WCOM 4
News and Observer Blogs 3
School of Information and Library Science at UNC 0
News and Record 0

The Increasing Uniqueness of Paul

Paul is 128 for 2004. The Social Security Adminstration’s list of the most popular baby names for 2004 has been released at their amusing website of first names. Paul came in at 128th most popular. A search across the history of Paul for the past 55 years shows that Paul was way up at 18 in 1950. The name hovered in the top 20 for 18 years hitting 15th at the most popular year (1958) before entering a steady decline which continues to this day.

The most popular for 2004? Jacob and Emily. In North Carolina, Emma and William are more popular than the top national choices.

Check out your own name.

Hot Jazz Mall?

Our friend Sylvia Garrard is not only a painter but also a singer. She just made a demo CD of four jazz pieces with pianist Chris Reynolds. In honor of that, we met at the Southpoint mall restaurant where Chris was scheduled to play with a guitarist as a duo. Things were a little confused. Our friend Jane couldn’t make it at the last minute. Chris has split with the guitarist and so had also split the dates. This week turned out to be the guitarist’s week at Maggiano’s. We listened a while then walked out and heard some funky jazz down the street. Playing in the 100 degree heat were the Usual Suspects, a local to Durham band that featured the wonderful Beverly Botsford on percussion. The jazz was hot and so was the air and anything that had been in the sun even a few minutes. We ducked in for a bite and caught the closing numbers after sunsite when the temperature had dropped to only 93 degrees! Good funky jazz and the band was paying some serious dues.

Massive Webcast? Why bother?

Just got a call from WCHL (1360 AM) asking me about a supposedly unique webcast scheduled to come from the University of Pittsburgh in September. The pitch here is that the producers of the event say that the webcast lecture will be have the largest audience of any academic lecture in history. Sounds like high-hopes promotion and wishful thinking. The talk is the Cutler lecture on public health for 2005, “The Public Health Consequences of Disasters: Challenges for Public Health Action” by Eric Noji.

I’m dropping my Gameboy and tuning right in!

Seriously, why is this news? We’ve been doing webcasts for years and years. SunSITE did a live webcast of Bill Clinton’s visit to Chapel Hill for the 200th anniversary of the founding of UNC back in October 1993. Live webcasts without interaction are most interesting if they are of a historic event like today’s space shuttle launch or the Victoria’s Secret annual show. Just check out Technorati for recent listings of webcasts, not to mention Google; there are no shortage of webcasts of every variety.

Stored webcast that can be played at leisure (via timeshifting) make more sense when you don’t want or need to provide real-time interactivity. We do that with the ibiblio speakers series for talks by Larry Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Dan Gillmor and even the Triangle Bloggers Conference. Heck, we even make the talks available through BitTorrent using Osprey.

If the talk were to allow some kind of intense and interesting and innovative interactivity, then we’d have a story. “We’ll have a million people listening to an academic talk on bioterrorism” is an amusing claim. A stunt really. And without added value to the lecture or its contents.

BTW Pittsburgh says “This year we plan to offer a live webcast of the John C. Cutler memorial lecture. The lecture will also be made available on the Pitt Media Site archive after the event.”

Potter conjectures

Having finished Harry Potter number 6, I’m ready to make some guesses as to what will happen in the next book. Not exactly what, but at least two questions that must be answered.
1) Who is RAB? I agree with wikipedia posters that RAB must be Regulus Black. I had guessed that when I decided to check wikipedia — and damn if there wasn’t a well argued conjecture there that agreed.
2) Where is the final horcrux of The Dark Lord? In Harry Potter of course. Harry and Voldemort cannot kill each other — and they have tried. Not sure how it got there but I suspect via RAB in some way. Also what does this have to do with all this “power of love” talk by Dumbledore?
3) Speaking of Dumbledore, is he really dead? Possibly not since the organization is called “The Order of the Phoenix” afterall.

Marchionini-isms

Poet of a sort or at least a creator of bon motes. My collegue Gary Marchionini has a gift or a curse for creating oddly specific words for the field of Information and Library Science. He has not been as widely recognized for this gift/curse as he deserves. In order to rectify that, I present this short list.

Google Moon joins Google Earth

Today in celebration of the 36 anniversary of the first moonlanding, Google not only spiffed up the logo on their search page, but they released a Google Maps version for the moon. Landing sites and more are noted. Now if they will only add bike paths and public transportation mapping too. (yes on the moon and on the earth too).
They do keep the Google off-earth site meme going.
Hint: zoom in to on the Google Moon Map for a cute surprise.

Not moon-related, but Google Maps related: The folks at housingmaps.com have taken the Google Maps API and added the Craig’s List housing datastream and ended up with a great service if you are looking to buy/rent/lease a place to live (Triangle included as Raleigh).

Also [spoiler here], today’s New York Times Crossword theme is the first moon landing. And yes I finished it over coffee!

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