Accept no substitutes

Category: General (Page 29 of 135)

I (heart) BarCampRDU, Weird Al, and Fiesta Grill

My weekend in three locations.

BarCampRDU (Flickr photos tagged barcamprdu and technorati posts tagged barcamprdu)

Weird Al at Carowinds exceeded expectations as they say in school surveys. His parody of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” as “Fat” done in a fat suit was one of the best of his many many costumed performances.

I cannot say enough good things about the food at the Fiesta Grill. If the Fiesta were closer than the taco trucks, I’d only eat Mexican at the Fiesta.

Security Theatre is it required?

NYTimes’ Brad Stone reflects on a talk by Mr. Security Bruce Schneier at the Black Hat Conference in “The Weird Pyschology of Security.”

Schneier’s talk is broader than Stone’s focus (see link to entire talk below) but Stone gets it right in this conclusion:

Mr. Schneier’s message: It’s foolish to ask us to be rational about risks. And sometimes “security theater” – like the stuff we see at the airport – can actually have a purpose when there’s a need to reassure people that they really are safe. But such displays can still be harmful when there are no solid security measures to back them up.

Read the entire talk at Schneier’s site.

Geocaching without GPS

Just posted to GeekDad at the Wired blogs.

Where’s Tucker?
–He’s out looking for a geocache.
We don’t have a GPS.
–He says he doesn’t need one. He has Google maps.

It’s not as hard as you might think go geocaching without any equipment other than an iPhone or even staring hard at a laptop before you go or, carbon watchers close your ears, print a map. In this case, we live within a quarter mile of the cache. But here’s what Tucker had done (and you can do too).

Geofinding
Go to geocaching.com
Enter your address in the "Search with Google Maps" box.
Hit enter and be amazed how many geocaches are nearby!
Get the coordinates and description of a nearby geocache.
Put the coordinates into Google Maps and switch to Satellite view.
Zoooooom waaaaay in.
Memorize or bookmark on the iPhone.
Wander around and let the clues lead you.

Once you find the geocache, fill out the finders log at the site and online.

Repeat at other geocaches.

Eight random facts meme

I’ve been tagged by someone who already knows all of my secrets and wants to know more. So’s I’m to reveal eight random facts about me and then tag 8 people who are asked to do the same. Here goes:

  1. My head was completely shaved until I was 13 year old. But I’m making up for that now.
  2. As far as eggplant goes, I’ve had my fill. I experienced complete Tantric overkill one summer in Turkey during which a different eggplant dish was served to me every day for two weeks. I now avoid eggplant dishes.
  3. I have never been in South America.
  4. Every morning I finish the NYTimes Crossword before going to work — except for Fridays.
  5. One of the poems I first published in News and Observer disappeared from their archives but no matter a copy ended up on a website in South Africa.
  6. I failed freshman English the first time through. Two misspelled words and you were out. I was always out. Thank gawd fore cumpoterz.
  7. For a year, I lived in an airy farm house that I heated with wood in the winter. That as a bad idea. But now that same place is the home to Mark Hewitt’s Pottery.
  8. I spent one Spring Break during college working for Manpower and bagging little pine seedlings for Arbor Day. The rest of the crew were alcoholic Viet Nam vets. I got the boss to buy us all rubber gloves on the second day. We all had cracked hands on the first day. As a reward I was allowed to seal the bags instead of sticking my hands in the water. And my friends the vets all offered to buy me drinks.

I tag Danica, Kevin, Bora, Cathy, Anton, Kelly Jo, Jeff, and Bascha.

The Context of “Keeping the Context”

The Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries are out and they contain the poster lead by Cal Lee from our “Keeping the Context: An Investigation in Preserving Collections of Digital Video” that was presented at the conference. The participants in the Video Archive project and the authors of the poster are Christopher A. Lee, Helen R. Tibbo, Dawne Howard, Yaxiao Song, Terrell Russell, and Paul Jones. As you can guess by the listing, I take pride in the good work done here even though my contribution on this particular part of the project was much less than the others.

We say:

In the Preserving Video Objects and Context (VidArch) project, we are developing a preservation framework for digital video context. Access systems for text collections often rely on surrogates, such as indices, catalogs, and abstracts. In addition to facilitating discovery and retrieval, surrogates provide valuable contextual information. In archival description, attention to context is expressed through finding aids, which include not only inventories of the contents of collections, but also background information about actors and activities that generated the materials, and the ways they were organized by their original creators or recipients. Recent research has produced and investigated an analogous set of surrogates for digital video collections. These include textual descriptions, title, captions, and annotations, but they also include surrogates that are still or moving images: video segments, keyframes, slide shows, and fast forwards.

VidArch is focused on two collections within the Open Video repository: videos that NASA produces to advance learning and appreciation for science; and videos of presentations to annual ACM conferences. The two collections reflect several forms of documentation that may be valuable to preserve in order to convey context: text-based surrogates, image-based surrogates, links to related videos, use history data, and supporting documents (e.g. lesson plans). We have generated finding aids to the two collections in order to reflect contextual information that is not readily available within Open Video. The poster below presents aspects of an evolving framework for digital video context and illustrates points of potential contextual information creation/capture within the lifecycle of the NASA videos.


JCDL Context Poster

World’s Best Espresso Machine gives free books

Espresso Book Machine

The first Espresso Book Machine™ (“the EBM”) was installed and demonstrated today at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL). The patented automatic book making machine will revolutionize publishing by printing and delivering physical books within minutes. The EBM is a product of On Demand Books, LLC (“ODB”), the company founded by legendary publishing executive Jason Epstein and business partner Dane Neller, who joined SIBL’s Kristin McDonough for a private event there to speak about the EBM’s potential impact on the future of reading and publishing.

The Espresso Book Machine will be available to the public at SIBL through August, and will operate Monday- Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library is located at 188 Madison Avenue (at 34th Street).

Library users will have the opportunity to print free copies of such public domain classics as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens and “Songs of Innocence” by William Blake, as well as appropriately themed in-copyright titles as Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and Jason Epstein’s own “Book Business.” The public domain titles were provided by the Open Content Alliance (“OCA”), a non-profit organization with a database of over 200,000 titles. The OCA and ODB are working closely to offer this digital content free of charge to libraries across the country. Both organizations have received partial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

[more here]

Note: The UNC–Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science and ibiblio are members of the Open Content Alliance.

A library bigger than any building

Open Library (we’re involved with this at ibiblio somewhat), Project Gutenberg (we host that at ibiblio), and Archive.org (Head Brewster Kahle is a visiting scholar at SILS, was our commencement speaker a bit back, and is an old friend of ibiblio from way back) are the meat of this BBC story and they are somewhat at odds with the British Library. Long good quotes from Aaron Swartz

“A library bigger than any building”

An ambitious project to create an online catalogue of every book in every language ever published is under way. Public goodwill is not in doubt, but some libraries remain to be convinced.

[more here]

TriLUG presents Joey on Linux Video

The first TriLUG monthly Chapel Hill meeting will take place at 18:00 until 20:00 on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 in room 208 at Manning Hall on UNC Campus. The talk is on Linux video editing, given by Joey Carr.

The talk will introduce the capabilities of several of the most basic tools in linux video production (kino/dvgrab, cinelerra, ffmpeg, and mencoder). Other tools and multimedia-focused linux distributions will be discussed. A basic production workflow will be demonstrated for video capture via IEEE 1394 (i.e. Firewire), and editing in Kino. Finally, options for DVD authoring will be covered in brief.

Joey previously worked as a Java developer and later as a business analyst for a medical informatics application service provider. He recently returned to UNC to study film and video production in the department of Communication Studies. He is currently working for iBiblio on their video speaker series and other projects.

Upcoming: BarCampRDU, Revolution OS Showing

This Saturday August 4 is BarCampRDU at Red Hat World Headquarters. Sign up on the wiki if you plan to be there. And don’t miss Friday night’s pre-Camp party at Tyler’s in Durham.

RevolutionOS poster

Carolina Open Source Initiative will be hosting FREE PIZZA and the movie RevolutionOS on Monday August 6th at 6:30pm in
the Carolina Union Room 3206B. [PDF poster for the event here]

UPDATE:
New location for RevolutionOS — Manning Hall 208

Perez’s Carrboro (and Hungarian) Connection

Today’s NYTimes gives a buncha ink/electrons to celebrity gossip Perez Hilton. He is to people as shoeblog.com’s the Manolo is to footwear. No question. But there is more to this story than gay Cuban guy goes to LA and spreads the dirt. Perez is raking in the dough thanks to great ad sales and very very good rates through Henry Copeland‘s Carrboro-based BlogAds.com.

Of the business side, Henry dishes on the rates:

Mr. Lavandeira’s blog [PerezHilton.com] commands as much as $9,000 a week for a single advertisement and $45,000 for the most expensive ad package, according to Henry Copeland of Blogads.com, the ad sales representative for Perezhilton.com. His demographics — a largely female readership, with an average age of 26 — lure ads from fashion brands, spirits companies and, of course, Hollywood.

And Hungry? BlogAds is a multi (at least dual) national corporation with staff in NC and HU.

How I Gained and Lost My Fangs

They came from Serbia. That gave me an edge. Danica bit me first. That was hours before anyone else in my network was aware of the Vampire Facebook application. Without SuperWall, a lure at which I refused to even nibble, I only got 10 bites per day. So inspecting my FriendWheel application. I looked for friends who for the most part were unconnected. My hunch was that Marc Granovetter was right on Facebook as he had been on so many social networks. If he was right, the loose ties in my network would lead to more entrepreneurial Vampires, those more likely to bite folks that I would be unlikely to reach otherwise. Then, I figured, in this clearly pyramidal schemed application, I would quickly advance in the Vampire hierarchy.

What’s more it worked and worked well. Soon I advanced to Vampire Bride to Vampire Mistress and then to the barely clad and overly muscled Vampire Ninja or was that Jedi? I was too busy staring at the picture to read the words. At that point, I’d need to double my over 1200 points to get to the next level whatever that might be.

But today, I became tired of Vampiring. I imagine that a successful Amway Diamond might feel the same way, but I would hope with a bit more guilt over those more recently bitten.

I had seen my Vampire Army grow and seen my other Vampire friends advance (not yet to Ninja I might add with no small touch of pride). So far so good. Then I dropped by 30 points. My fellow Army members were wising up.

I too chunked the Vampire app. It was fun. Slightly obnoxious (sorry to have added to your burdens Jason Calacanis ;->). And sated some small competitive desires that were keeping me from Buddha-hood.

See you later Vampires. Still there on Facebook tho.

HP7 and the Simpsons Movie

There must be some relation between them, but I’m not sure what yet. Caught the Simpsons Movie last night and was rolling on the sticky floor of the stadium seated theatre which is a trick in itself. Then the credits: How many voices can some of these folks do! Harry Shearer is a master.

Halfway into HP7 having started mid-afternoon. No! I will not talk about it til I’m done.

That’s me: Defending Bill Shatner

Has Been cover

Dave Menconi can’t get behind celebrity vanity recordings. He forgets that Bill Shatner is a true artist whose self-awareness sets him far ahead of the pack specifically in his 2004 Ben Folds produced project “Has Been.”

I say in the thread to Dave and a Nimoy-defender:

In his dreams, Nimoy is half as self-aware as Shatner.

“Has Been” made it to number 22!

“Transformed Man” well good for a yuck, but also as a template for what could be and was transformed by Folds into something unique and wonderful — “Has Been” The great Joe Jackson piano on “Common People” is worth the time to download (err buy). The guitar (Adrian Belew) on “I can’t get behind that” is as good as the Rollins-Shatner interaction. Then there is “That’s me” Lyrics by Nick Hornby.

Further evidence that Shatner is the greatest: “Common People” with Folds, Jackson and others on Conan O’Brien.

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