the three prior posts

We signed up for Hosted Exchange from Live Office at the beginning of July. I guess there are just some things we don't understand about these mail-server things, because the three prior posts are all still showing in our DRAFTS folders back at our PCs. We had no idea they went out.

Confusion nothwithstanding, this is a great time to be alive, and we need to work out some of the inconsistencies. Will wonders never cease?

Why is this blogsite hanging? Did SiteMeter sell me out?

For the past few days, this blogsite has been hanging up everybody who comes here. It started the day we posted the foreign-language renditions of commentary on Ohio's HB 477.

Toodling around the internet, I've found similar problems occurring over the past year for others due to something called dg.specificclick.net, which they say was introduced by Sitemeter, which we used until yesterday. Here's the story and the supposed cure for the malady: http://michaelsync.net/2007/04/11/things-you-should-know-before-using-sitemeter

I could actually see the dg.specificclick.net come in and take over the page loading process, so I got rid of its cookies and Sitemeter as well. Everything worked for a while.

Now, it's all hanging up all over again. Well-wishers are emailing me to say that, having entered here, they've abandoned all hope and will follow my progress even more vicariously than before, from other perspectives, in other ways, safely.

If anybody has some suggestions, and can post a comment here, I'd appreciate help finding a work-around. If you can't post, the I am emailable at taferrisATgmail.com.

another Dennis hits the bright lights

One of our MeetTheBloggers Salon edition alumni, Dennis Althar, has sent us this press release. His new invention (they look like twin cobras!) got included in an artwork at The Whitney Museum. Our local talent goes to New York to get discovered. Does anybody else think this is ironic, or just plain wrong?

ALLTRONICS TECHNICAL SYSTEMS
CLEVELAND, OHIO
800.255.8766
http://www.atssounds.com/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 6, 2008
CONTACT: Dennis Althar
Cleveland
Audiophile Speaker System Selected for Whitney Biennial Show
Cleveland, Ohio

All-tronics Technical Systems announced that its Copernicus II speaker system has been selected for use in the prestigious Whitney Biennial Show in New York, March 6-23, 2008. The Whitney Biennial showcases 81 of the most innovative contemporary artists from around the world and is expecting 40,000 people to attend.

Noted visual and sonic artist Marina Rosenfeld has chosen the Copernicus II for use in her installation “Teenage Lotano,” a realization of noted Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s modernist masterpiece “Lotano” (1967). Ms. Rosenfeld’s performance uses a choir of 20 teenagers, thereby juxtaposing a high modern composition with a teen-vocal sound reminiscent of pop music. The individually recorded tracks are then melded into a sonic mix, sometimes with moments of choral harmony, then dissipating into abstract isolated sounds. Fragments appear with cello, percussion, bass and electronics.The challenge for Ms. Rosenfeld is in transferring the specific placement of sounds which she has created to an open performance space. The imaging, or source of each sound, is critical to her artistic vision of the piece. In previous settings, a series of headphones (binaural sound systems) were set up for use by the audience. In this so-called “perfect environment” the producer can control the elements of the recording, especially the imaging. But at the Whitney installation, a large, cavernous assembly room, with heavy wooden walls and floor will be used, and an open speaker system was required. Most high-quality audiophile speakers seek to “fill” the room, resulting in levels, balance, and sound placement entirely dependent on the room’s acoustics. The detailed elements and imaging of Marina Rosenfeld’s “Teenage Lotano” would be lost. Ms. Rosenfeld selected the Copernicus II speaker system because of its focused imaging and accurate reproduction of sound. The system employs a novel, 16-speaker array in each of two slim, curving towers, each paired with a powerful subwoofer, to focus the sound in a “sweet spot,” placing the listener in a three-dimensional sound stage, with absolute imaging, depth and presence. Utilizing precise time-alignment technology, the speakers allow the listener to visualize the vocalists and instrumentalists at their exact positioning on the stage. Vocal quality is perfectly reproduced, with the soloist seeming to come forward into the room. Sounds emanate, not from the speaker drivers in front of the listener, but from the musicians, wherever they are located on the stage. In “Teenage Lotano,” the listener is beckoned by lighting to approach that location in the room where they will experience Marina’s sonic creation. They will be able to pinpoint the various spots in the room from which the sounds seem to emanate. Standing anywhere else in the room, listeners can experience the unique mix of sounds which she has assembled, but in the “sweet spot’ the sonic experience is unique – and as intended and designed by the artist.

"I have found working with All-tronics' Copernicus II speakers to be an extraordinary experience,” the artist noted. “The tremendous focus of the speakers allows the listener to encounter sound in a truly sculptural fashion, and is the reason I selected these speakers to present my vocal and electronic composition in the Whitney Biennial 2008 exhibition. I don't know of another system that is as realistic, elegant looking and sonically refined as these speakers. A truly wondrous sound system!"

The Copernicus II speaker system is designed and manufactured by All-tronics Technical Systems, located in the historic Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. The All-tronics staff and advisory panel have extensive experience in audio speaker development and sound reproduction; as well as knowledge and expertise in medical sonography, where time alignment is critical to accurate sound generation. “Techniques developed for Doppler phase array technology,” general manager Dennis Althar noted, “have, for the first time been applied to the field of music reproduction.” It is the precise placement and timing of the speaker output which produces such accurate imaging for the listener.

Additional information on the Copernicus II speaker system may be found at http://www.atssounds.com/

-30-

video reprise of the debate night MTB command and control center

The Franchise Video Blog » Cleveland Democratic Presidential Debate LiveBlogging Video -- I am the balding/bald one to the left of Joel's new Flip Video Ultra camera which, according to the December issue of LAPTOP Magazine is the Editor's Choice and offers near-seamless integration with YouTube. I think Gloria needs to get one of these--the higher-end version can store up to 1 hour of content.

Joel Libava's constantly thinking about new angles, and I'm glad we have the opportunity to be working with him on these pioneering community-dialogue efforts. And now, I know what a Flip Vid is and does, and everybody ought to run out and get one.

e24 Transcription | Web 2.0 Transcription Service

e24 Transcription Web 2.0 Transcription Service -- Somehow, when they offer to transcribe our podcasts with the advertisement "All transcriptions are down by Human and not by machines," my enthusiasm wanes.

LAUNCH PARTY tonight at the IdeaCenter, from Mike DeAloia

Good-Day My Friends:

I just wanted to send a reminder for you to get ready for the Best Damn Tech Show Period (“BDTSP”) Launch Party sponsored by our good friends at ASM International. The show will take place on June 28th @ IdeaCenter (1375 Euclid Avenue) – Fourth Floor. Get to see the new ASM Design Studio and the expansion of the IdeaCenter. You will also be able to sign up as an exhibitor or general attendee for the BDTSP. The Launch Party is FREE! Let’s get a good crowd at the event.

Also, take the time to enjoy the Flavor Oasis featuring Woo City Ice Cream brought to you by Flourish – a Cleveland, OH-based design and ad agency. This is a BDTSP exclusive! I have seen the Flavor Oasis and it is awesome. Kudos to Flourish!

Send the gospel far and wide – we want great attendance for the launch party and a lot of excitement for the upcoming BDTSP.

What: The Best Damn Tech Show Period – Launch Party Sponsored by ASM International
Where: IdeaCenter (1375 Euclid Ave.) – Fourth Floor
When: June 28th – 6pm to 9pm
Why: To launch the Best Damn Tech Show Period and to show the cool ASM Design Studio (and get some Woo City Ice Cream as brought to you by Flourish)

To RSVP please email mary.adams-morrow@asminternational.org. I look forward to seeing you there!

Regards,

Michael C. DeAloia
"Tech Czar"
Senior Executive for Technology Development
City of Cleveland

216.857.2628 (M)
216.664.3644 (O)

we'd hate to see Google go the way of DR DOS, and OS/2

Microsoft Will Alter Vista Operating System - New York Times -- Finally, somebody has Microsoft's number. Bill Gates may be one of the best game players of all time, but sometimes he gets carried away and a bit ruthless--he has a sort of oriental approach to "all's fair" or winning at any cost. He probably took Sun Tzu's Art of War to heart, back in the day of The Masters of the Universe.

WASHINGTON, June 19 — Microsoft has agreed to make changes to its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint by Google that a feature of Vista is anticompetitive, lawyers involved in the case said on Tuesday.

The settlement, reached in recent days by state prosecutors, the Justice Department
and Microsoft, averted the prospect of litigation over a complaint by Google that Vista had been designed to frustrate computer users who want to use software other than Microsoft’s to search through files on their hard drives.

Google had made its complaint confidentially as part of the consent decree proceedings set up to monitor Microsoft for any anticompetitive conduct after it settled a landmark antitrust lawsuit five years ago that had been brought by the states and the Clinton administration.

Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership does wi-fi

Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership now offers free wi-fi downtown for up to 2 hours daily. The annual rates at $120 for unlimited access aren't bad if you live or work there, either. How soon will we have similar service in Cleveland+? Why don't we have it now?

Verizon patent litigation extorts Vonage for 5.5% royalty

Vonage Wins Permanent Stay in Verizon Patent Litigation --Bruce Perrens, whom we met recently in an MTB session, gave us the catchphrase, "If you can't innovate, litigate," and that's what Verizon's been doing with Vonage lately. Today, Vonage obtained a permanent stay, so it can go about it's business almost as usual, with the modification of paying a 5.5% royalty to Verizon and posting a $66 million bond. This is similar to the AT&T situation with the Ohio SB117, where an uncompetitive and hidebound older company tries to gain market share of a market in which they aren't in the least competitive, using their pawns in the state legislature to extort the companies that created the market. There's honest and forthright competition, and then there's the cheater's game played by AT&T, which might be rephrased as, "If you can't innovate, legislate," especially if you have cooperative "operatives" like Bob Spada and Lance Mason. Am I being too harsh, too unfair?

Bill Callahan's been giving this SB177 thorough and balanced coverage for the past month, and I guess Matt Zone testified today down in Columbus.

Cingular/AT&T Wireless and Sprint/Nextel are blocking FreeConferenceCall numbers

FreeConferenceCall Blog Site > Home ( DNN 4.3.6 ): Here's a revolting development of phone carriers throwing their weight around. We have used FreeConferenceCall for about two years now, and their services have multiplied exponentially in that time. This seems to be a case of the vestiges of the Second Wave trying to hold their ground and maintain their entrenched interests as the Third Wave proceeds to engulf them. Don't miss the video here that will make everything more understandable. In a defensive move, FreeConference call has started an email campaign and a blog:

Last week, some of our Cingular and Sprint customers began calling into customer service with issues surrounding their connections to our service. After speaking with Cingular’s customer service group, our customers were given numerous, and unfounded, reasons for the call blockage. Reasons cited included fraud, international forwarding, fee disputes and, to our astonishment, that we were blocking our own FreeConferenceCall numbers. We cannot corroborate or justify any of these reasons. FreeConferenceCall would never knowingly impede our customers from using our services. For now, we can tell you that a Cingular spokesperson has gone on record and stated that their terms of service gives them the right to block any number they wish and also said that AT&T’s wireless service is "between one person and another person, not between one person and many." Cingular and Sprint have chosen to block service to our shared customers regardless of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules and regulations. Neither carrier has ever directly complained, filed suit or even contacted FreeConferenceCall. The upshot is that carriers are basically telling you that a cell phone is not intended for use on conference calls of any type. As a total commitment to our customers, we have quickly ramped up to help them deal with this issue. If you are experiencing connectivity problems, please call us directly at 877-482-5838. We promise to give you unparalleled technical support and will treat every customer with immediate, personalized attention...
...Thanks to the grassroots efforts of our customers, partners and the blogosphere, the current phone blocking situation has quickly become a turbo-charged topic rife with controversy. On one hand, we have the telecom giants – in fairness to these companies, they have laid the infrastructure and given us the 5 9’s of phone reliability that we continue to leverage. On the other hand, you have those companies that disrupt and drive change in an antiquated industry that is 100 years old and in dire need of a face lift. However, it appears that larger forces are at work than simply a debate between two sides of the telecom fence. We are facing issues that will likely define how we handle our business, our customers and our communications in the future...

everything that rises must converge

InformationWeek Weblog: Travel Tools That Let You Leave The Laptop Behind -- Mary Flannery O'Connor gave us the phrase "everything that rises must converge" years ago, and today we see it in action. Here's a great article about crossovers and synergies. Especially slick is the click-through to GrandCentral and the fact that the New York TIMES is now following InformationWeek leads, and with as little as a 6-week lag. The GrandCentral blog talks about today's "David Pogue impact", as well.

I just signed up for the GrandCentral beta, which gives no-charge full-featured access to the entire service. Moreover, after the beta period ends, GrandCentral promises some level of on-going free access. Check it out. It can give added levels of functionality--recording, screening, archiving, messaging, another email--even to those who have only one line.

REALNEO moving forward

Welcome to the real neo organization! REALNEO for all--Norm was off the air for a few days recently, and now we know the reason why. He and Jeff are transitioning the site to the next level. Have a look. Join up. I've always thought this Drupal site is so beautiful, and the registration requirement, although irksome to me, is well worth the effort.

"Increasingly, if you're not LinkedIn, you're left out." --Business 2.0

I got this off the bottom of an email somebody sent to me. I thought it was an interesting marketing ploy from an interesting phenomenon.

note the 300-mile radius, and then the 600

Knoxville - Oak Ridge Innovation Valley - East Tennessee Economic Development Agency--This regional promotion piece comes from an ad in the sidebar of Small Times, which I discovered because of Chris Varley's comment today on an Ohio ranking, and how Beautiful Ohio is being supplanted by Innovative Ohio. Note what the folks around Knoxville are thinking. We do some business down there, and we enjoy working with them a lot; they're upbeat and going places; they're very proud of their area. Maybe it's time to start building some bridges. Virtually. Actually. Physically, even though you can't fly there direct from CAK, yet.

Callahan's pizza run brings a community together: there's a meeting here tonight

Callahan’s Cleveland Diary » Blog Archive » Robbed at gunpoint--Heads up. There's a meeting around these parts tonight. Let our councilman [can you believe the size of the City Hall fonts? Where's the Tech Tsar?] tell you about it [emphasis mine]--

FYI – there will be a Crime & Safety meeting this Thursday, Jan. 25th at 7:00 pm at the Archwood UCC, which will be utilized to hopefully squelch rumors on the street relative to the murder on Riverside. These other crime trends will also be discussed. In addition, with assistance from the local development corp., the 2nd District Police and Huntington Bank, we’re holding a Brooklyn Centre Merchant’s meeting next Monday morning at 7:30 am at the Brooklyn Centnre Huntington Branch for area businesses to discuss crime trends in the commercial district (a few recent break-ins), as well as what more can be done to have businesses better coordinate safety strategies.

On the bright side, we saw Bill at the MTB session with Jim Rokakis last night, and he reports that the hoodied perps DID NOT take his pizza that fateful night.

I was trying to look at the positives of all this early this morning as I took out the rubbish and shoveled the drive and the walk, and the only thing that occurred to me was to be thankful that my mittens had a trigger finger.

I'm sure we'll come up with more and more positives at the meeting tonight.

IBM full Lotus position

IBM Lotus Takes Social Networking to New Heights--I've been a LOTUS fan for years, from 1-2-3 to Magellan to Agenda to Notes, even through the transitional years of LetOnlyTheUsersSuffer when support was in short supply. Now, here's a new iteration we're going to have to watch closely. For me, reading the whole article, it sounds like it might help my workload and overall organization. Here's the lead-in:

With collaboration as its legacy, IBM's Lotus division went back to its roots and announced its plans to deliver social software for businesses.

IBM's announcements at the company's Lotusphere 2007 show here represent the "most dramatic expansion of collaborative technology ever," according to Michael Rhodin, general manager of IBM Lotus, particularly as opposed to competitive alternatives "that tell you what you have to buy."

Foremost among the new technologies IBM announced on Jan. 22 is Lotus Connections, which enables users to gather and share information through social networks and provides dashboard views of projects, people and connections in various communities.

The Lotus Connections software borrows from IBM's deep research pockets and features five Web 2.0 technologies: Activities, Communities, Dogear, Profiles and Blogs. Activities is a Lotus technology that shares and organizes e-mail, instant messages, documents and other items related to a particular activity or project into one logical unit. Dogear is social bookmarking software that enables users to bookmark pages within their intranet. Both technologies came out
of IBM Research.

Rhodin called Lotus Connections "the industry's first ready-for-business social software platform to connect us to you, and you to us, and you to each other and to others beyond this room."

no geeks need apply

The Turntables That Transform Vinyl - New York Times--Here are two turntables for rescuing vintage vinyl from the '60s and '70s, and you don't have to be terribly technically attuned to begin the process. I wonder if my old classmate Bernie Naworski out at Play It Again, Sam is going to be stocking these. Give him a call, before you go far afield to pick one of these up. Remember: Local production for local consumption.

where's Miss Jane?

New Scanners for Tracking City Workers - New York Times--If we had invested as New York is investing in managing it's human resources, we could have answered the question quite easily during the last administration. Using technology to monitor Cleveland city workers might be a better investment than using cameras at intersections to feed off citizens just passing through. Let's crank up another deep and meaningful Red Room Dialogue, and while we're scrapping the red-light district entrapment cameras, the omnipresent reminder of the sad, sad legacy of the Campbell administration, let's look into managing our human resources better at the city level. I think it's quite possible to do way better with way less, or way fewer, but we'll never know until we try. Let's start with monitoring the burgeoning employment pools at the Water Department and then at Muni Light. Let's also consider doing away with the protectionism of the civil-service system. We can't afford the overhead of public-employee refuge centers any more.

And since we're on the topic, where's Frank? Any sightings? Does his really low profile somehow give new meaning to the terms "invisible hand" or "transparent leadership"?

Sunday: catching up on LinkedIn

LinkedIn: Tim Ferris--Today was the sort of day to catch up on software and databases. I installed speech recognition software in XP and amused myself as it failed to understand me--just like adding another member of the family.

I also surveyed my realm after over three years of collecting names, beginning with a re-focus on community-based data in July of 2003. My LinkedIn connections are now approaching 400--my public profile's at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/30a/559. I used to think that people with that many connections were promiscuous networkers or insincere accumulators or just plain old obsessive-compulsive, but after a while of hanging out, you just happen to accumulate a good load of links. I still happen to think LinkedIn will have some usefulness down the road, but I've backed off Ryze, and I'm scared to death of MySpace. Other computer social or business networking attempts have come up short or even been darned annoying, and I can't even remember what most of them were right now, except for Konnects, the truly annoying one.

time to get that huge monitor

Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC - New York Times --Once again, Netflix is out ahead of the pack, and we all stand to benefit.

“We’ve gotten used to it,” Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, said of the doomsday predictions. But Mr. Hastings also said he understood why questions about his business kept coming up. “Because DVD is not a hundred-year format, people wonder what will Netflix’s second act be.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Hastings will begin to answer that question. Netflix is introducing a service to deliver movies and television shows directly to users’ PCs, not as downloads but as streaming video, which is not retained in computer memory. The service, which is free to Netflix subscribers, is meant to give the company a toehold in the embryonic world of Internet movie distribution.