This is a tree that fell just down the street from our house.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Tree Down in the Neighborhood
Leave a reply
Category Archives: Uncategorized
links for 2009-09-28
-
This is probably a good gift idea for my oldest son who's a pen afficianado. Pens that write anywhere, anyhow (upside down even) and are easily stowable.
-
Creative idea to communicate a position on climate change: "To bring more attention to the climate change in the arctic regions and the melting ice, the German World Wide Fund for Nature placed 1,000 ice sculptures in the shape of sitting humans on the steps of the German capital at noon."
-
"The Chapel Hill campus was hit with a 17 percent increase in financial aid applications this year, resulting in a 23 percent jump in the number of students who qualified for aid. By comparison, UNC saw an 8 percent increase in aid applications in the fall of 2008 and a 2 percent increase in those who qualify. The university provided $225 million in scholarships and student aid during the 2007-08 school year, the most recent year for which totals were immediately available.
'We've never seen this kind of increase,” said Shirley Ort, UNC’s associate provost and director of the Office for Scholarships and Student Aid. “In my lifetime, I've not seen this kind of economy either.'"
-
This story about the House's proposed overhaul of the student financial aid system interests me for two reasons: first, I have kids just a couple of years away from going to college and second, because one of my summer internships in college (back in the 80s) was with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. I seem to remember that the student loan biz had issues back then too.
links for 2009-09-25
-
"There’s still no substitute for the real thing but unless you have a full collection or a penchant for flea markets, at least you can flip through virtual editions of every Life magazine between 1936 and 1972—courtesy of an expanded partnership between Time Inc. and Google"
-
Rex Hammock has a fascinating post about something I'll call an "insta-magazine" that was published in Australia: "So, to recap: The dust storm occurred on Wednesday. Photographers — professional and amateur — headed out into the storm and, with no organizing or pre-event planning, captured “a day in the life of a dust storm.” As people with digital tools in their hands are wont to do, photographers and observers began to upload what they were seeing and experiencing and capturing to the web. With the speed and finesse of someone who has an up-close-and-personal understanding of the “community” aspects of photo sharing (trust me on that one) and who helped to innovate much of the processes of web-based “social-media” collaborative magazine publishing, Derek put together a magazine — and has given us just one more glimpse into the potential of the magazine format."
-
I like the idea that the folks at Clinton Global Initiative came up with as an alternative for conference bag swag.
links for 2009-09-24
-
"I believe that there are many problems in companies that look a lot like the problem Netflix faced — such as insurance underwriting, oil exploration, or evaluating an employee's probable success. As long as the problem has lots of structured data and clear outcome variables (and the company can successfully design a way to keep customer and proprietary data safe) it makes sense to design a competition that uses the market in ideas. Then you just have to decide how much it is worth to you to have a 10% advantage over the competition on a key issue."
Butt Duster
Another text from the oldest in reply to my text that was a reply to his first text about Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly being at West Forsyth today. I told him I thought Reilly was there to tape the “Homecoming” show for ESPN:
“yeah they came to school, and mr. riley told a story about a “butt duster” who saw all the models of sports illustrated swim suit edition naked. and the principles were so mad that he said it”
Anyone want to fill me in on what a “butt duster” is?
Also, I obviously need to explain the difference between “principles” and “principals” to my son.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Rubbing Elbows
Just received the following text from my oldest son who’s a junior at West Forsyth: “i met rick riley today”.
Apparently ESPN is in town to tape one of their “Homecoming” shows for Chris Paul who’s a West Forsyth alum. His family still resides in Lewisville.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Morning Fog Over 421
The morning commute on 9/24/2009
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
links for 2009-09-23
-
FireDogLake has the story (h/t to Ed Cone for the link): "In a stunning moment during the Senate Finance Committee markup Sen. Tom Carper defended a secret deal that the White House, Baucus, and PhRMA had reached. The White House has long denied the deal. Carper publicly acknowledges that part of the deal was that PhRMA would run millions of dollars worth of campaign ads in support of health care reform.
According to Carper the “golden rule” in Congress is that secret back room deals in exchange for advertising buys must be honored."
-
From the press release: "Jason Dolph, Manager of the Chartwell Auctions Charlotte office, stated, "This may be a once in a lifetime opportunity to acquire quality cash flowing commercial real estate in the Greensboro and Charlotte markets at substantially discounted prices." Dolph adds, "Many commercial real estate investors are not finding the bargains they anticipated from bank foreclosures. This auction on October 28th in Greensboro, NC offers an array of office, warehouse, flex, and multi-family real estate with a genuine opportunity to purchase at your own price."
The auction will be held on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 1:00 P.M. at the Clarion Hotel Greensboro Airport, 415 Swing Rd., Greensboro, NC 27409. For a free color brochure on the October 28, 2009 Real Estate Auction with terms of sale for all properties you can call Jason Dolph with Chartwell Auctions at 704-831-8983."
-
Interesting idea from Squidoo: "Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. (Here are some examples). More are on the way. We'll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page (and we'll happily add one for you if you like). Each page collects tweets, blog posts, news stories, images, videos and comments about a brand. All of these feeds are algorithmic… the good and the bad show up, all collated and easy to find.
Of course, these comments and conversations are already going on, all over the web. What we've done is bring them together in one place. And then we've made it easy for the brand to chime in.
If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once you take the page over, the left hand column belongs to you."
-
"Single-family home sales in the Triad were down 17.2 percent in August.
Data from the N.C. Association of Realtors shows that in August, the Triad had 1,034 sales of new and existing homes, compared to 1,249 in August 2008. It was also a 3.7 percent decline from July, when there were 1,074 sales."
-
"The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.
In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops."
links for 2009-09-22
-
Fred Wilson writes about new urban architects: "And one of the crowd favorites at TC50 this past week was a company called CitySourced, which built "a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution". This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in my "public channel" post earlier this year.
These and many others are our new urban architects. I am not suggesting that the traditional roles of urban planning and architecture aren't still important to our cities. They are and will continue to be."
-
The FCC's new push to enforce net neutrality is being fought by Republicans. Ironically they are arguing that regulating ISPs will harm competition, but anyone with more than a monkey brain knows the opposite is true. You know it's backwards when Ensign and Brownback are pushing it.
Quote from Ensign: "In this struggling economy, any industry that is able to thrive should be allowed to do so without meddlesome government interference that could stifle innovation," Ensign said in a statement. "We must avoid burdensome government regulations that micromanage private businesses or that limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want. The Internet has flourished in large part because of a lack of government interference; I see no need to change that now." Reminder to Ensign: The internet exists because of the government and flourishes despite the monopolistic tendencies of the telecomm companies.
-
Lex says: "My guess? No way the table gets run — the banksters take too much care of one another for that — but right now Lewis is probably commenting over cocktails about the view from under the bus."
-
This is way cool: "We are a group of MIT students seeking to share the artistic aspects of science with others. On Sept. 2, 2009, we launched a digital camera into near-space to take photographs of the earth from high up above. (see “Flight”)
Several groups have accomplished similar feats (see “Other Launches”), but as far we know, we are the first group ever to:
(1) Complete such a launch on a budget of $150 total. All of our supplies (including camera, GPS tracking, weather balloon, and helium) were purchased for less than a grand total of $150."
-
The HS football coach who won the state championship without punting or kicking. I always wondered why more coaches didn't try the no-punting thing (never thought about the kicking), especially high school coaches with relatively weak punting that doesn't do much to change field position. I also love stuff that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but is actually backed by some good data/logic.
Sharing
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Befuddled 