Accept no substitutes

Month: September 2008

Cone and Jones in G’Boro Oct 15

Who: Ed Cone and Paul Jones
Where: Greensboro Public Library, Nussbaum Room at Central Library, 219 North Church Street, Greensboro, NC
When: 6:30 pm Wednesday October 15

Please help fill these seats!


Greensboro Public Library
is hosting a panel discussion with new media maven Ed Cone and digital archiving guru Paul Jones.

Meet two of North Carolina’s own Internet experts for the price of one, and amazingly, the price is free!

If you are interested in topics like collaborative media, new journalism, digital preservation and open source, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to hear these e-founding fathers.

“We are pleased to host this conversation with these leaders. How information is shared and preserved is relevant to the function and future of the public library,” states library director Sandy Neerman. “The timing is right to focus our attention on this while we grow to serve the next generation of library users.”

This event will take place on Wednesday, October 15, in the Nussbaum Room at Central Library, 219 North Church Street. Doors will open at 6:30 pm. Light refreshments will be served.

Top 5 reasons to attend:
• Warm up for the 3rd annual ConvergeSouth Conference, another fantastic and free event taking place October 16-17 in Greensboro.
• Enjoy free refreshments provided by our sponsoring organizations, Friends of the Greensboro Public Library and Tek Systems.
• Gather at the same time and place as the Greensboro Bloggers and Web Designers Meet Up. (These monthly meet ups are an opportunity to learn and share the latest trends in web presentation and communications. Come see what you’ve been missing!)
• Submit your burning questions for our speakers through their respective blogs. Let them know you are coming and what you want them to talk about. Ed Cone / Paul Jones (right here below)
• Celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the opening of Central Library on Church Street. If you’ve never been, it’s about time!

Who is Ed Cone? Ed Cone is employed as a senior writer at Ziff Davis Enterprise and writes an opinion column for the Greensboro News & Record. He has worked as a contributing editor at Wired, a staff writer at Forbes, and as a freelancer for a wide variety of magazines and papers.

Who is Paul Jones? Paul Jones is the Director of ibiblio.org, “The Public’s Library ,” a large contributor-run digital library (ibiblio.org also includes the Site Formerly Known as MetaLab and SunSITE). Besides speaking at conferences world-wide, Paul teaches on the faculties of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill.

More information? Contact
Jennifer Worrells
Greensboro Public Library
219 N. Church Street
Greensboro, NC 27402-3178
Phone: 336-373-4157
Email: jennifer.worrellsATgreensboro-nc.gov

Have ye an IT business idea? Carolina Launch Pad can get ye off th’ ground.

Have ye an IT business idea? Carolina Launch Pad can get ye off th’ ground.

New pre-incubator program now takin’ applications at www.carolinalaunchpad.org What be it? th’ new pre-commercial business accelerator, Carolina Launch Pad–or Launch Pad fer short–be aimed at aspirin’ IT entrepreneurs who be part ‘o th’ UNC community and who have not yet developed their business ideas into funded start-ups. th’ program be a partnership between th’ Renaissance Computin’ Institute (RENCI), th’ UNC Chapel Hill Office ‘o machines Development (OTD) and UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business sword fightin’ academy.

Launch Pad aims to set the sails with up to five entrepreneurs each year beginnin’ in November. them chosen to participate in th’ program gunna be housed in professional office space at RENCI headquarters in th’ Europa Center office buildin’, 100 Europa Drive, Chapel Hill, whar they gunna have th’ chance to interact with RENCI’s seven seas-tavern machines experts, learn ’bout its machines resources and attend lectures and other events. In addition, professionals with OTD, th’ business sword fightin’ academy and from th’ Triangle IT community gunna coach and mentor th’ entrepreneurs.

Who be Eligible?

Carolina faculty, crew and students who want to turn their technological inventions and ideas into viable businesses. We be aimin’ at business ideas in th’ pre-fundin’ stage, not new businesses already sellin’ or providin’ services

What does Launch Pad offer?

Each Launch Pad participant gunna receive a small office equipped with a desk, laptop abacus, and long distance parrots and storage space. th’ common set the sails area gunna offer a printer and fax machine and a conference table. Parkin’ fer a limited number ‘o team members gunna be available at no charge. Launch Pad participants gunna have access to a RENCI sea server to host a basic tavern durin’ their one-year stay. Access to RENCI’s technological resources, such as high performance computers, th’ Innovations Lab and th’ Visualization Lab, gunna be considered on a case-by-case basis.

How do I apply?

Complete th’ Carolina Launch Pad ship form at www.carolinalaunchpad.org by SeptembARrrrr 30. A limited number ‘o applicants gunna be selected to interview with th’ Selection Advisory Committee in early October. th’ project admission date be November 1.

fer more information, spy with ye eye th’ Carolina Launch Pad tavern at www.carolinalaunchpad.org

Palin Purloined emails revealed – They belong to the people and the state

A lot of people are excited about the screen grabs of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email pages. How they were gotten is less important than what they indicate; Sarah Palin and her staff, like many of us, comingle personal and business email. The difference is that for most of us our business isn’t government business and the use of a Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail account isn’t partially aimed at avoiding the sunshine that state business requires. Palin’s does that in several cases.

Now that we know that Palin transacted the business of the state of Alaska in this manner, those emails belong to the people of the state and should be available via FOIA or by subpoena. Further it would be illegal for Palin or anyone else to destroy those emails (those that transact state business).

What anonymous has done is to reveal what she has, possibly illegally, hidden.

Now that the purloined emails are known to exist, let the press, the people and the courts do their work.

Update: Palin ordered to preserve emails on private accounts if they regard state business. October 13.

Carolina Conversation Tomorrow – with Me

Pleases drop by tomorrow and visit with me in Second Life as we kick off a series of casual conversations in Second Life.

The site is right, but the avatar is not me

The site is right, but the avatar is not me

Carolina Conversations is a series of live interviews with members of the UNC-Chapel Hill community conducted in the virtual world, Second Life. Our guests will discuss their work and interests and will also respond to questions from the Second Life audience attending in-world.

Next Carolina Conversation: Paul Jones

Live at 10:30 a.m. EDT, on Wednesday, September 17, 2008

SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/UNC%20CH%20II/222/28/40

Larry selected and produced this video from the Second Life Carolina Conversation (above)

Little Brother and Hackerteen

Cory Doctorow‘s young adult book, Little Brother, just got a great review in the New York Times. It’s a favorite here too. I bought a copy and offered it to my son, but he had already downloaded a copy and read it on his computer. That should tell you something; that and to know that Orwell is one of his favorite authors so many of Cory’s allusions weren’t lost on him.

A Wordle of Little Brother:

We also recently read the first HackerTeen comic from Brazil via O’Reilly. It’s an odd but oddly satisfying work — hacker teen in manga style drawn and written by Brazilians for an International teen audience marketed in the USA. It comes with a hacktivist website which is multilingual but mostly in Portuguese.

Castanets in my Cruiser

A couple of weeks ago, the add oil light went on in my fabled 01 PT Cruiser. It had been happy until then and was due an oil change in the next week — already scheduled. Nonetheless, I added 2 quarts of oil just to be safe as oil is cheap and engines aren’t.

My next trip out the engine sounded loud as if there was a flamingo dancer under the hood. The castinetts got louder as the car accelerated and went away at idle. Other then the sound the car performed normally. Normal RPMs at shifts, normal power, no oil light flash etc.

When I took the car in, I ask the dealer mechanics to check out the sound. Other than that the car was only due for a new air filter and oil and lube. The report came back that the car was fine tho slightly low on oil. Under pressure, no leaks were reported.

But as I drove off the castanets continued, but I imagined not so loud as before.

The car continued to perform about the same for about 10 days.

Last night I took about a 40 minute drive to a friend’s place and the sound seemed much much less. The car performed fine.

But this morning, I turned the key and the Check Engine light went on and stayed lit. I ran the diagnostics that display in the odometer and got the following “no” “faults” then the gauge run through and then 05-00. I can’t find this code anywhere. Shouldn’t it begin with a P and if there were truly “no faults” shouldn’t the sequence end with “done” instead of a number?

More after I call in tomorrow.

That’s Progress! Camilla and Roger leave the grid

From the Roger McGuinn Roadie blog:

Hurricane Fay began creeping northward from Naples, FL on August 18. The very day we had scheduled to initiate on our new PV solar panels to power most of our house’s electrical needs with the sun’s energy. The rain began … it didn’t stop for five long days, but the panels worked! Even on rainy cloudy days, our system charged the storage batteries. Our two refrigerators were never in the slightest jeopardy of losing power. Almost everything in the house is now solar powered.

On August 30th, we conducted another experiment with the system. We totally disconnected our house from Progress Energy “grid.” The air conditioners, the clothes dryer and the electric range and oven ceased working. We’d planned to see if a portable air conditioner could keep us comfortable throughout the night but guess what … it rained all day. Hurricane Gustave’s outer bands showered our house. I did manage to wash four loads of laundry on solar power and hung the clothes up to dry on racks, but we didn’t want to take the chance of testing the portable air conditioner. The lights, fans and computers worked all evening. When the sun rose the next day, the batteries totally recharged. A new day dawned and a fresh source of power was available. It was so exciting!

Read more and more stories here.

Chapel Hill’s smart bands

They seem like innocent rockers, but many of Chapel Hill’s bands have their egghead side. Last night as Django Haskins was fronting The Old Ceremony shouting out his introduction to “Bao Qian” aka “I’m Sorry” in Chinese. I remembered that Violet Vector and The Lovely Lovelies sing a bit in Latin, “Serva ad Manum” and about archeology “Double Axe.” This is a town that has been home to bands with names like “Light in August.” We’re not talking Clash dropping in just a little Spanish in to “Should I Stay or Should I go,” but something else again.

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