Accept no substitutes

Month: March 2008 (Page 1 of 2)

Others on MTS08

I’m still having family fun and worshiping at the church of BBall — Davidson trailing Kansas by only 2 at the half. In the meantime, here are some links:

Remember that our schedule was pretty packed.


Luis Villa who is in Law School at Columbia having been at Gnome before that blogs (and tweets) as tieguy

Adam Keys lets his inner MSFT fanboy loose as he explains why Scott Guthrie and the new ASP.NET MVC framework are important as The Real Adam (he has the Real meme but hasn’t he seen Rails and other framworks?). To be fair to Adam, he is mostly fan of only one of the two MSFTs.

Robert Cadena blogging as machine501 did a great job of blogging whilst the rest of us were snarking on the backchannel, but feels the need to show his OSS cred despite the great posts.

David Peterson who XMLs many places has some quick notes here.

A few of us remembered to tell hashtags.org to index our tweets ( I can’t believe what a good job I did of tagging *before* I remembered to register — ugh).
.

Not to worry tweet-fans, Twemes did a wonderful job of catching *all* the tweets tagged as #mts08 including all of mine.

Obligatory Flickr pics of geeks at a conference are here.

Technorati did a good job of catching most of us who used the “mts08” tag.


Slashdot has an article on the state of the MSFT brand
— not related to the Microsoft Technology Summit exactly, but interesting nonetheless.

UPDATE: Startup Weekend Andrew Hyde was no Dr Jeckle when he BarCamped the event (after I was out at the airport)

Don’t pitch me, bro!

Thursday night at the Microsoft Technology Summit 08, I ended up telling the very smart and personable Sam Ramji that MTS09 should be less Mix and more Bar.

Many of the presentations — that’s one problem there, but more soon — began, “how many of you were at the Mix conference?” Always the answer was “Err none of us that’s why we were invited here.” Mix if I have this right is a MSFT fanboy conference. MTS is for “folks who might not be so familiar with MSFT’s efforts in Open Source etc.” Overlap here is approximately zero.

The lesser of the presenters then gave us the Mix presentation. The smarter ones decided to abbreviate their presentations and to start an interaction with the attendees. The attendees are not softies nor Softies. Most were from OSS and user groups. Tara Hunt, Chris Messina and Andrew Hyde — even me — are veteran unconference organizers. OSS, StartUp Weekend, BarCamps etc have a less deferring atmosphere than, well, the presenters used to. But then conversations aren’t about how well you or Marketing prepared your slides — some were very pretty — but about a willingness to be open and to lightly manage the conversation.

I understand the MSFT pain here. Our first blogger conference, podcast conference, science bloggers conferences all wrestled with how to navigate between presentation (people need some basis for conversation) and conversation (some management is needed to keep things as a conversation and not chaos). It’s not easy. Any teacher knows that preparing a lecture is easy compared to leading a successful seminar. But all evidence is that learning is stronger in the seminar –even for the teacher herself. Sure enough that’s how our unconferences or almost unconferences turned out.

Further back, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann’s debate on the role of the news (in the form of newspapers and journals in their case) as recounted in the New Yorker by Eric Alterman covered the same territory. Dewey calling for informed citizens engaged in debate and in conversation — one great Dewey quote “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.” Lippman was more a fan of the elite presenting to the masses. We see this come at us again and again from the Cluetrain and Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation.

The good news is that at the closing of the Microsoft Technology Summit, Sam asked the attendees, who weren’t at the airport watching the de-icing of planes as I was, “If we do this event next year as a BarCamp, who would come?” Near-unanimous hands go up. Sweet. #mts08 (from Chris Messina’s tweet).

Man for the Job

“Committee hears of millions of e-mails trashed” in News and Observer.

Final paragraph

A public hearing on the issue of e-mail retention was scheduled for April 3 at 9:30 a.m. in the Administration Building on Jones Street in Raleigh. Franklin Freeman, Easley’s senior assistant for government affairs and hand-picked chairman of the committee, said that people who want to speak at the public hearing should not try to send him e-mail.

“I don’t even know how to cut a computer on,” Freeman said. “I do not communicate by e-mail. I’m still one of the old-fashioned folks who communicate by telephone or face to face.”

Misc on Sunday

Louis St Lewis looks elegant here but his opposite is even more so.

Larry Lessig is up for fixing Congress starting now.

F-Secure shows how China is using not only propaganda but malware and spyware against Tibet.

Boise State is the latest to convert their campus to GMail and Google Docs.

Appscout claims that Facebook is passing MySpace and further predicts the death of MySpace.

I will not mention Twitter’s ColorWars.

Updating some of the ibiblio activites since September on the wiki. Please help out if you can.

Jones on Borders on the Block

Janet Babin of Marketplace called this morning to get me to talk for her piece “Borders may be on its final chapter.” I talked. She chose this:

Janet Babin: Borders blames the economic downturn for its challenges. But the company has struggled to define itself — it’s not a deep discounter, and it’s not a well-known hangout scene either.

Paul Jones runs the internet archive Ibiblio.org at the University of North Carolina. He says Borders is also losing out to online competitors like Amazon. They can offer you any book you’re looking for.

Jones says there’s only two ways for brick and mortar stores to compete with that kind of inventory:

Paul Jones: One is to create an incredible atmosphere in which people want to be there, and the other is to have the deepest, deepest possible discounts. And I don’t think Borders took on either one.

Janet Babin: Borders says its largest shareholder, a hedge fund, will loan it money to keep it in business — and may end up buying part of the company.

Should IMs be public records?

Jimbo found out the hard way what happens when private IMs go public. In a few minutes, I’ll be down at UNC General Administration talking about IM and law. I made this table of IM and IM-like services with the help of my Tweet-buddies.

I donno how much of this will be public, but I’m interested in what you think. Should IM conversations amongst state employees be subject to public records law? Should we be required to archive them? Should they be subject to discovery?

MSFT Chip Implantment – Next week

Next week, I’ll be in Redmond, WA for the Microsoft Technology Summit 08 conference. It’s a “non-NDA” conference (notice the double negative) so I and others will likely be blogging until our chips kick in and make us only say good stuff about say Silverlight.

In the spirit of non-NDA, I’ve posted what MSFT calls “The External Agenda” on Google Docs – the Internal and Hidden Agendas haven’t been revealed yet.

Various entrys by myself and others will be tagged “MTS08”.

If you see a topic that I should pay particular attention to or a person that I should be sure to say hello to etc, let me know.

Wednesday: David Rumsey presents the OCLC/Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture

Rumsey on Maps
David Rumsey presents the OCLC/Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture
Turning Private Collections into Public Resources Using Digital Technologies and the Internet

When: Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Time: 2:00pm – 4:00pm
Where: Frank Porter Graham Student Union

David Rumsey, an historical map scholar and collector, will share how he turned his private map collection, one of the largest in the U.S., into a public resource at the second annual OCLC/Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture in Information and Library Science on Wednesday, March 19, 2008.

Rumsey, president of Cartography Associates and Chairman of Luna Imaging, Inc., will present, “Turning Private Collections into Public Resources Using Digital Technologies and the Internet” in the Auditorium of the Frank Porter Graham Student Union on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus at 2 p.m. A reception will follow.

Full info including parking and directions here.

Facebook event here.

Poet Jonathan Williams dead at 79

Jonathan Williams. Photo by Roger Manly
Jonathan Williams, the grand monster of Nawth Cackalacky verse, died yesterday. This news comes from Jeffery Beam who writes:

Jonathan Williams died yesterday evening (Sunday) around 9:30 PM.

I wanted to send this to as many people as I could : Feel free to share with others.

I am attaching a copy of the obituary I wrote for the NY Times and other media. Feel free to share it too. It doesn’t list the cause of death since I haven’t heard, as of yet, the official cause. [not online- pj]

You might also wish to read this posting about Jonathan’s work today on poet Ron Silliman’s blog

For those who can – you may also wish to visit Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina before June 7 to view an exhibition of Jonathan’s personal art collection at the Turchin Gallery. It’s a stunning show.

Condolences may be sent to poet Thomas Meyer, Jonathan’s partner and collaborator for forty years:

Thomas Meyer
The Jargon Society
P O Drawer 10
Highlands, NC 28741

Please join me in remembering an extraordinary individual who gave so much, oftentimes being ignored more than he should have been. A true “complete man of letters” as Silliman describes him.

From Jeffery’s obit draft:

Williams’ over one hundred works, published by many of the most important small presses in this country and Britain, exemplified his playful blend of polish and earthiness, and revealed his massive and impressive circle of friends. Williams seems to have known practically everyone of consequence in early and mid-twentieth century American alternative arts. An Ear In Bartram’s Tree (1969, University of North Carolina) and Blues & Roots/Rue & Bluets (1971, Grossman; 1985, Duke University) demonstrate his sensitivity to the nuances of language and the simple charms of Appalachian and White Trash culture. Quote, Unquote (1989, Ten Speed Press) was one of many editions of Williams’ astonishing accumulations of revelatory quotations discovered in his wide reading. A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (2002, David Godine) offers a select view of Williams’ photographs of unique people and places accompanied by pithy, revealing mini-essays. The Magpie’s Bagpipe (1982, North Point) and Blackbird Dust (2000, Turtle Point) collect spicy essays on artists and culture. Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems (2005, Copper Canyon) contains a selection of over 1000 of Williams’ poems.
Williams and his partner of forty years, Poet Thomas Meyer, lived since the early 1970s in a seventeenth century shepherd’s cottage in the English Cumbrian hills in the summer and at the Scaly Mountain home near Highlands in the winter. For the past decade they have resided mostly at Skywinding Farm, in Scaly. Williams is survived by Meyer, their beloved ginger-cat H-B, and numerous devoted friends and supporters. In the Appalachian poem “Epitaphs for Two Neighbors in Macon County No Poet Could Forget” Williams captures Uncle Iv Owens. It seems a fitting epitaph, too, for this remarkable man of American letters, Jonathan Williams:

he done
what he could
when he got round
to it

Esquire: Allen and Son has the best BBQ

That should be the Best BBQ anywhere there Esquire, but for now this is a nice report:

Allen & Son barbecue restaurant in Chapel Hill has been cited by Esquire magazine in its March 2008 issue as offering the best chopped-pork sandwich in the United States. The restaurant, which has been open since 1970, was cited in a 14-page special feature of the magazine entitled “Encyclopedia of Sandwiches: The Best Sandwiches in America” (page 146). Allen & Son is located on NC Highway 86, about a mile north of Interstate 40, at Millhouse Road just below the railroad track. It’s open Tuesday and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

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