Accept no substitutes

Month: September 2005 (Page 1 of 3)

Facebook follow up

Heard in the hall. “This class is always boring. I’m glad I can work on my Facebook profile for an hour”
“Your profile is so awesome.”
“I need to catch up with Julie’s”

Heard at the Daily Grind. “Can’t talk now. Not sure about this weekend. Just check my Facebook. I’ll put it [presumably the weekend plans] there.”

The slides from Fred’s presentation are in PDF [correct link to the presentation] The slides from Fred’s presentation are in PDF and the talk will be podcast by Brian Russell at audioactivism.org on Monday.

UNC pwned by FaceBook

They know all about us — because we tell them.

the ibiblio blog has covered Fred Stutzman’s Facebook study about the self-reported political orientation of the UNC campus earlier on.

Fred will be talking about that and more tomorrow Friday September 30 at noon o’clock in 208 Manning Hall.

One new observation from Fred: 85% of incoming Freshmen had a facebook account on day one of class.

Hear it all tomorrow. Slides may be available online (when they are I’ll add a link here).

Free listening = CD sales and concert attendance – a personal story

The Old Ceremony
There is this guy Django Haskins who is a wonderful writer and performer. He lives somewhere here in town. I’m not managed to see his shows with International Orange or The Old Ceremony or solo. But I heard a cut or two by him on the local low power FM station WCOM.

Then I looked him up and found his website. His shows were listed and I tried to catch him between his trips to NYC, but I’m too pooped to pop and too old to stroll as the song once went. But I did download rough cuts of his music and became pretty attached to American Romeo, Ole, and Blood and Oil.

Today strolling by School Kids Records, I noticed that the window display was for the new Old Ceremony CD. I checked it out. On it were the songs I had liked as roughs. The CD was on consignment to the store so the chance that I might find it any where else were slim. [yes, you can buy it online at this link] Of course I bought it. I was delighted that the money would go to a local record store and to the band. It’s a professional product in every way and very very listenable.

Chapel Hill Pop Noir — so they say.

Boyle on WIPO and Webcasters

Jamie Boyle’s Financial Times article just appeared online last night and I posted an article about it on SlashDot. Just for fun, here’s what I submitted:

It’s always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to WIPO (who deserves the sticking) in his latest article, “More rights are wrong for webcasters”. Boyle lays it out so that “economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money” can get what’s wrong.
But is Yahoo! the webcasters’ enemy? as Boyle says.

And here’s what showed up on SlashDot:

“It’s always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to the World Intellectual Property Organization in his latest article, “More rights are wrong for webcasters”. Boyle lays it out so that “economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money” can get what’s wrong.”

Jimmy Wales – New Venue – Oct 5

ibiblio.org Speakers Series

Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When:3:30 Wednesday October 5

Where: 209 Manning Hall

What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.

More about Jimmy and Wikipedia

Sponsors: ibiblio.org
School of Information and Library Science
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Scholarly Communications Working Group

Poster in PDF form here (with new location)

See Jimbo on CSPAN’s Questions and Answers (September 25, 2005 and online archive)

“Books on Trial: Witch Hunt in the Heartland and a Nation’s Response”

At the 2006 Henderson lecture:

The lecture focuses on a 1940 raid of an Oklahoma City bookstore by police officers, who confiscated more than 7,000 books and arrested 16 people. Oklahoma officials then put the books on trial, and prosecuted and sentenced four of those arrested to ten years in prison and fines of $5,000.

The Wiegands will present the previously untold story of the trials, the public book burning and the appeals process that was ultimately used to reverse the decisions

.

Brown is the new Black

In case you haven’t noticed, some time this spring brown began replacing black in fashion. Not just brown by itself, but brown accompanied by or should I say complimented by Carolina Blue. Sally mentioned this to me in the spring. Then in June when we walked down Chicago’s Miracle Mile (the street that has been remade to look like the part of a mall that is made to look like a city street), all the store manikins were in the same rich brown and light blue. Matrons and hipplets, teens and office girls, everyone with new clothes was in brown and blue. Now on campus, it’s even more obvious. Folks who two years ago were in black t-shirts now have on brown. Sorority girls and even punkster guys are in the same colors. Even Perry Farrell (once Jane’s Addiction) was wearing the colors at his Lollapalooza show in New York.

post-Spooky

Birth before being ReBirth
Every show of ReBirth of a Nation is a new live mix. So Sally and I saw different shows when we each saw the show earlier. What I saw and danced to at the Creative Commons Birthday was different from the Spoleto show that Sally saw and the show that we saw together with Tucker last night at Memorial Hall was different yet.
People seemed amazed that Spooky does a new live mix at every show, but then as a DJ he’s used to changing his show each time and to trying to read the audience.
This clip was not what we saw exactly but it does give you a flavor of how Spooky remixes the Griffith film. More music, sheet music, photo show, and an essay by Spooky about Rebirth can be found here.
Roger Ebert, in the best less than book length take on Birth, notes that Griffith himself cut the movie in many different ways over time and that the fragility of the film often resulted in prints of different lengths being shown each night. Ebert tells us, at the end of his article, that Griffith “once edited a version of the film that cut out all of the Klan material, but that is not the answer.”

Managing the Digital University Desktop

At the Managing the Digital University Desktop: Understanding and Empowering the Individual; Preserving the Public Record and Institutional History symposium.

“Managing the Digital Desktop” is a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) grant funded project to study computer file management practices in academic units and administrative offices here at UNC-CH, across the 16-campus UNC System, and at Duke University.

The project is further described here.

Episcopal podcast from Grace Cathedral

Grace Cathedral

Four feeds from San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral:

  1. Subscribe to the Choral Eucharist Sermon feed
    Copy and paste link into iTunes or other Podcast manager:
    http://www.gracecathedral.org/mp3/sermon/sermon.xml
  2. Subscribe to the Sunday at Six Sermon feed
    Copy and paste link into iTunes or other Podcast manager:
    http://www.gracecathedral.org/mp3/sermon6/sermon6.xml
  3. Subscribe to The Forum feed
    Copy and paste link into iTunes or other Podcast manager:
    http://www.gracecathedral.org/mp3/forum/forum.xml
  4. Subscribe to the Daily Meditation feed
    Copy and paste link into iTunes or other Podcast manager:
    http://www.gracecathedral.org/mp3/dm/dm.xml

Jimmy Wales – Oct 5 -ibiblio speaker series

ibiblio.org Speakers Series

Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When: 3:30 Wednesday October 5
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Room
305 Carroll Hall UNC-CH
209 Manning Hall
What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.

More about Jimmy and Wikipedia

Sponsors: ibiblio.org
School of Information and Library Science
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Scholarly Communications Working Group

Poster in PDF form here

Spoooooky

being very Spooky
This Friday, DJ Spooky will bring his Rebirth of a Nation show to Chapel Hill. This remix of NC native DW Griffith’s “technically groundbreaking, but explicitly racist 1915 film.” Spooky (aka Paul Miller) says “I hope to create a counternarrative, one where the story implodes on itself, one where new stories arise out fo the ashes of that explosion.”
I saw a very early cut of this project at a Creative Commons Birthday and Sally saw an early complete performance at Spoleto in Spring 2004. This Friday we get to see it together at the newly refurbished and remodeled Memorial Hall.

True and Candid Compositions (1795 – 1868)

What were they thinking? Those crazy college students who came to Chapel Hill at its founding and up til the Civil War. They were thinking about drinking and pranks for starters. But there is more.

The Documenting the American South Project, which has been hosted at ibiblio since its beginning, announced the release of their “True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina.”

[The project] presents 121 edited documents written primarily by students attending the University of North Carolina between 1795, the year in which the institution opened its doors, and 1868, when the devastation of the Civil War closed them again. The documents provide important first-person accounts of how antebellum University of North Carolina students lived and worked and are drawn from three special collections of the University Library: the Southern Historical Collection, the University Archives, and the North Carolina Collection. Each document is accompanied by a digitized image of the original source. The manuscript materials have been transcribed, edited, and annotated by Professor Erika Lindemann, who also has written several essays that provide editorial, historical, and contextual information for understanding the documents. Among the topics treated in these essays are the establishment of the University, student discipline and faculty authority, the purposes of a university education in the antebellum period, the daily lives of students, the role of slaves and servants, the students’ academic writing, their work in the debating societies, and their responses to the Civil War.

The project also got a wonderful writeup in today’s News and Observer by Jane Stancill.

AV Geek: Country Code Please

My run in with DRM killing a legal use yesterday nearly killed a presentation. The distributor of Occupation: Dreamland asked me to set up to show part of the movie from a DVD he had burned. We were in a state of the art classroom with a great new DVD player, computer hookups and several projectors. I can do this.

Simple to place the DVD in the DVD player and hit play. Or it should be. But that happened was that the DVD was never initialized in the player. Out of desperation, I pulled out my PowerBook and stuck the DVD in there. Apple gave me a nice message telling me that a “Country Code” or “Zone” I forget which was needed. They suggested using 1. I did.

Everything then worked fine after that — except that the lights and screens and curtains didn’t like me changing devices so much. They went through several amusing gyrations as I tried testing between the DVD player and laptop.

The aggravating thing here is that we had a wonderful legal DVD copy with a wonderful legal and approved use, but the code (as Lessig warns us) nearly locked us out.

The battle over zoning DVDs was mostly fought five years ago. Here we were with a completely allowed use and we were stymied — almost but not defeated thanks to Apple.

But this is an incomplete thanks, as Cory explained in January, you only get so many region changes before Apple permanently fixes the Zone so that it will never change again. They are not required by law to do this (according to Cory).

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