“First comes love, then comes marriage“, then comes what in that Web 2.0 carriage?
Two of our strongest local blogging activists, Ruby and Brian are tying the knot today (forever memorable because it’s also my wifes b’day).
Congratulations and fondest good luck on what promises to be a sweltering July 22nd.
Saturday, July 22nd’s RDU Barcamp should be a yearly highpoint for the Triangle tech community.
A “who’s who” of producers and consumers on ‘net-related tech will gather (@ 8 am as ibiblio’s Paul Jones notes) to thrash through some of today’s trendier tech topics.
As local social justice activist (and newly minted groom) BrianR, over at Yesh.com, observes, UNC’s Fred Stutzman has gone above and beyond planning what promises to be an incredible tech unconference
Fred Stutzman has a written a wonderful post called Advice for Planning a Bar Camp. It contains a lot of excellent info about how to plan an unconference. In this case doing it BarCamp style. The RDU BarCamp is this Saturday July 22. (Congratulations Fred for pulling this off. I’m sure the event will be a huge success!)
and documented how to put together such a beast.
Excellent way to wag the long tail Fred!
Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett died July 7th (as announced today). Syd’s influence on Brit rock was comparable to the Beach Boys’ Wilson’s (whose Pet Sounds often appears neck-n-neck with “Madcap Laughs” in lists of influential albums) on the US scene.
My copy of “Madcap” is sorted into a special sub-section of my album collection along with other unusual standouts of the 60’s/70’s Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Gong,Henry Cow, et. al.
I’ll be off-line for awhile.
By the time I return Chapel Hill will probably have a new town manager, I will have been appointed to zero or more additional advisory boards and Chapel Hillian’s – especially those on the wrong-side of the digital-divide – hopefully, will have a new muni-networking task force to take that bull by the horns.
Council is ready to take a break and so am I.
Local IndyWeek reporter Fiona Morgan covers the story of a “copyright comic” in the tech-oriented magazine Wired.
Fair-use is an important tool for online activisim, as is copyright. Many online authors, for instance, use a Creative Commons content license to ensure widest dissemination of their message.
To make the issue a bit more digestable, three law professors (two from Duke) created the comic book: Bound by Law.
Practicing what they preach, the comic book is freely available under a Creative Commons license.
Fiona routinely covers tech-related issues for the IndyWeek, for example, this week’s important coverage of NC ‘net neutrality and media consolidation.
Just as consumers are becoming aware of things like net neutrality and media consolidation, Congress and the North Carolina legislature are acting like nobody’s paying any attention.
…on June 13, the Finance Committee of the N.C. House passed the Video Service Competition Act without amending any of the no-brainer changes suggested by public interest groups that would have made it a little less of a travesty. A state version of the Internet TV provisions currently winding through U.S. Congress, this bill would abolish the current rules governing cable television service. Telephone companies such as Verizon and BellSouth have been pushing hard for this bill, because it would allow them to expand from broadband Internet to video service without having to negotiate with local governments. The bill will soon go to the full House for a vote; the Senate version, having passed one committee, makes one more committee stop before going to the floor.
Thanks go to ibiblio’s Paul Jones for the story tip.
I asked the Council to look into LFG two years ago and then made it part of my environmental proposals for the 2005 Council campaign. Recently, UNC has suggested using the old 35 acre Horace Williams landfill site to produce clean energy for Carolina North.
Now, from the June 17th Chapel Hill News, comes this Letter to the Editor outlining successful uses for LFG.
Landfill gas projects (LFG) have been around since the late 1970s creating cheap renewable energy to citizens. When landfills decompose they create a gas called methane, which is 23 times more effective at trapping atmospheric heat then carbon dioxide. This gas can remain in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, increasing the speed of global climate change.
LFG projects capture 60 percent to 90 percent of methane released from landfills and help to improve the air quality of the surrounding communities as well as creating more jobs for the community. Each LFG project is equivalent to removing the emission from 14 million cars and will decrease the use of oil by 150 million barrels, which is a nice thing to hear since we have depleting natural resources.
Cost savings have helped companies such as General Motors save more than $5 million per year from their five LFG projects and SC Johnson in Racine, Wis., is saving $1 million per year. Of the 140 projects taking place in the United States, more than 700 landfills can cost-effectively install LFG projects.
Why don’t we do our part in helping the environment and increasing the change in our pocket? More information: 888-782-7937 or www.ncgreenpower.com. — Ronna Fischer, Chapel Hill
Thanks Ronna for pressing forward on local LFG.
Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future.
– Orwell, author 1984
Those who control our modern means of communication are free to manipulate the past, recast the present and shape the future. Powerful, greedy, immoral – the masters of our converging media/medium empires already trample heavily upon the newly emerging Town Commons.
Unfortunately, with today’s House vote destroying Internet neutrality, a vote generally along party lines, the monopolists now have untrammeled freedom to despoil the Commons.
What is Internet neutrality?
Council member Sally Greene is passionately pursuing a ten year plan to end local homelessness. Her participation, along with other valiant volunteers, gives me hope that the goal is achievable.
Tonight, she reports on the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness’ efforts.
Of note, they’ve agreed to “emphasize the chronically homeless in our planning (but not at the expense of current efforts to help all the homeless).”
As documented by Sally, folks chronically homeless account for the lionshare of service consumption. Dealing compassionately with this key segment of the homeless population not only honors our better angels but makes excellent fiscal sense – strained resources can be freed up to address the larger population.
There’s more work for the OCPEH but this difficult decision has significantly advanced their cause.
Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy wrote a nice piece for the IndyWeek on friend and local civil rights activist Robert Brown.
I’m not sure whether Robert Brown was a hedgehog or a fox, but I know that he thought about it. He probably had an opinion, although I never asked him which he thought he was. Robert was a thinker, an informed thinker who read widely, and would off-handedly refer to something like Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog & The Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History…
Thanks Kevin for reminding me of Berlin’s essay and Brown’s works. Continue reading Hedgehog & Fox: Mayor Foy Honors Robert Brown
When: 6:06PM, 06/06/06.
Where: Mid-town Chapel Hill.
What: Horizontal sheets of blueberry-size hail.
A rapid moving storm front dumped up to an inch of pea to blueberry size hail in our yard.
Not wanting to bike MLK in a tonight’s downpour, I called my wife for a ride home. While on the phone with her, all hell broke loose. All I could hear over the phone was a general din as she and my son ran through the house closing windows – yelling to each other about buckets of rain, pounding hail and tornadic winds.
Acknowledging the futility of broadly (and blandly) reporting stock and bond closing prices, today the N&O announced:
The good news? They plan to deepen and expand both local coverage and general analysis.
I’ve been wondering how long the local print media would continue with stale stock reports. Real time quotes, company profiles, timely news updates, Edgar on-line and scam-ridden forums are only a click away at places like Yahoo Finance.
I hope the town follows the N&O’s lead and honors its commitment (soon) to publish the Council’s flash reports in real time on the town’s website.
Waiting to publish stale news electronically using an image PDF of a paper newsletter layout is so last decade…
I proposed a downtown parking task force both as a citizen and a candidate for Council. Working, shopping and living (near) downtown for many years, I have seen the parking dynamic shift as development, transit and demographic trends progressed.
Currently, I believe the key parking problem is not supply but allocation of existing resources.
I have some ideas on how we can craft a partnership between town, university and private interests so that we can improve the “downtown experience” without having to pave over more of our vanishing natural downtown areas.
Here’s my request to Council asking to join with other stakeholders in working towards a more sustainable, healthier and friendlier Chapel Hill downtown.
Mayor and Town Council,
During the 2005 election, I proposed forming a downtown parking task force to pull together both public and private stakeholders to solve some of our parking allocation problems.
It was great to see Council Member Cam Hill’s call on April 10th for just such a new task force to review public parking downtown.
I want to join this new Downtown Parking Citizens Committee to help create a sustainable solution to our downtown parking issues.
May 8th, Council formed the Downtown Parking Citizens Committee charged with analyzing existing parking conditions; reviewing conditions in light of the goals of the Comprehensive Plan, Downtown Small Area Plan and the Downtown Development Initiative; proposing plans to mitigate existing parking problems and developing strategies to implement the proposed plans.
Staff also recommended that the committee “consider appointing citizens who work, shop and visit downtown…”
I’ve seen the downtown parking dynamic change over 27 years. I’ve regularly shopped, visited and PARKED downtown for two decades. I’ve worked downtown for over 5 years (and, luckily, have a reserved spot). Day in and day out, school in and out, morning, noon or night, East to West End, I’m quite familiar with the vagaries of finding parking downtown.
Besides the hands-on experience, I’m conversant with the various plans – Comprehensive, Downtown Small Area, Downtown Development – studies (like the LSA [parking(PDF)] [mobility(PDF)] and prior citizen group efforts), ordinances and LUMO restrictions that influence the existing parking dynamic. Further, I’ve read and reviewed a number of key transit and transportation studies and proposals – from town, from NC-DOT, from the University – that should inform any proposed solutions.
Finally, I believe I have some new ideas on how to form a collaborative proposal that brings Town, University and private business efforts into alignment to not only help solve some of the more intransigent of parking issues but to also to add flexibility into our overall parking/transit approaches.
Thank you for your consideration,
Will Raymond
If you’re interested in improving the “Downtown experience” and want to participate on a task force with a constrained and strategic mission, fill out an application and email it to the town’s Town Clerk. Additional Town Clerk contact information.
11PM local news:
NBC17 also deserves kudos for being the only station to mention the extremely long odds, 1 in 146 million, of winning the ‘ball.
WTVD was a bit breathless in their coverage – the news guy excitedly telling us “we’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s drawing”.
WRAL played up the “inconvenience” people had waiting to squander their bucks.
I’m going to give WRAL a small break because they did a nice piece on the expected correlation between counties with high unemployment and high ticket sales.
Wilson County has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the state and often ranks No. 1 in ticket sales per capita. Nine other North Carolina counties selling the most tickets per adult have unemployment rates above the state’s average.
“It is not unexpected,” said state Sen. Janet Cowell. “I think that is what other states that have lotteries have seen.” Cowell explained that is part of why she opposed the lottery all along.”It really is a regressive tax, essentially, that really impacts lower income communities, not higher income communities,” she said.
“I don’t think that has any conflict with us,” said Wilson County’s Employment Security Commission manager, Terri Williams. “We’re here to help them find work and to help them with unemployment until they can find work.”Williams believes continued fallout from several plant layoffs and seasonal tobacco cuts are more to blame, but admits, “Of course, we hate to see the poor spending money on lottery tickets.”
Yep, so today’s computer snafu isn’t the only glitch we’ve seen in the system.