Jason Griffey

Evidently, there is a new underground sport brewing in the cities around the world….Le Parkour. Started by a guy named David Belle…more or less, it looks like the art of being as close to Spiderman as possible. There’s an official website, which has a video page. I recommend checking out the USA Parkour video for an example of the sorts of things that they do. Imagine….rock climbing, combined with martial arts, with a side of urban exploration. Very odd, but completely cool to watch. Ignore the French rap music in the background.

200 million dollars. I’ll say that again…slowly: Two hundred million dollars.

That’s how much NPR was given today by Joan Kroc, of the McDonald’s fortune. Everyone who loves NPR, go out today and buy a Big Mac in celebration.

…so I suppose it had to end sometime. I thought that MAYBE the curse of terrible comic movies had been lifted, but possibly not. The Punisher, a longtime fan favorite, appears to have been….how to say this politely….completely fucked up.

One: the movie is set in Florida. The Punisher (Frank Castle) is wearing a trenchcoat. In Florida. In the comic, he’s in New York. New. York. Trenchcoats = ok in NY. Not so ok in freaking Florida.

Two: why do we need Travolta as a bad guy? I mean…really. Let’s use Travolta where we need him…as the uber-cool dancing badass. Not as the king of some crime syndicate.

Three: one of the bad guys, seen briefly in the trailer, is none other than “Big Sexy” Kevin Nash, a professional wrestler best known for his participation in the classic wrestling group the New World Order (NWO). He’s the very large blonde guy throwing the Punisher around.

At least we have Spiderman 2 still in the works to look forward to. Sam Raimi isn’t likely to screw things up, at least.

Ok….I'm just gonna give up on Radio. WordPress is more better.

Reset your links: http://www.ibiblio.org/griffey/wp/

If I ever figure out how to forward, I'll set it up. Ibib is being a bit weird about it.

….something that we have not done here in the UNC blog space is to mob blog something (not mob as in mobile, but mob as in group). Is there any event upcoming that would benefit from the publicity (however minimal) of being mob blogged? Everyone shows up, with laptop, and blogs during the event to describe/discuss it….my first thought was the Latin American Film Festival, in some way…a talk, maybe even a FILM (that might be odd). But I’m up for suggestions….

I think I have mentioned this, but I don’t believe that I have fully discussed my adoration for this little application. How do i love thee, iTunes? Let me count the ways…

1. I love you for your Smart Playlists. iTunes allows you to use, basically, boolean logic when designing playlists for your music. Want all the songs in your collection with the words “rock” and “child” in them, but don’t want anything by Guns ‘n Roses? Smart playlist, to the rescue!

2. I love you for your “Top 25 Most Played” playlist. iTunes automagically keeps track of the songs you play the most, and arranges them in a playlist for you. So, at your disposal, you can immediately have those songs you just KEEP PLAYING. Conversly, you can tell it to only play songs you’ve NEVER played before. So good, soooooo gooooooooood…..

3. Most of all…I love you for your “shared music” capability. You can choose to share the music you have, and anyone on the same network can stream it from your machine…and of course, you can stream from theirs. Right now, I’m on the library’s network, and iTunes sees 5 other users, any of which I can stream music from. So useful…I can listen to a TON of music that I otherwise wouldn’t have access to, and sample bands that I would like to hear.

All this, and not even any mention of the iTunes Music Store, the only way to legal puchase music that isn’t completely moronic and full of DRM goodness (yes, I know that the files you get with iTunes have DRM attached…but you can immediately burn to CD, and poooof! No more DRM). All I can say is, after trying iTunes, Napster 2.0 can suck it.

The end result is that I want both and iPod and a 12 inch Powerbook. Neither of which I can actually get, but the longing is there. I’ll go out on a limb and say that thanks to iTunes the iPod will be the most popular christmas techie gift this year, hands down. Apple is gonna sell a ton of them.

Hmmm…problems with the forwarding. Since Ibib is virutally hosting my domain (www.jasongriffey.net) the forwarding is a little odd. I'll put in a word with ibib help to see what's going on and how to handle this, but in the meantime….those of you linking to this, please update your links to: http://www.ibiblio.org/griffey/wp as that is the blog I'll be updating most frequently.

Hopefully, I can figure the forwarding thing out, or maybe just set up a subdomain or something (like blog.jasongriffey.net or something).

Highlights from Halloween 2003, Chapel Hill, Franklin Street

Most popular costume: Spongebob Squarepants
Sluttiest costume: a group of girls, dressed as Fire Fighters, with signs that said “Hoses Needed”
Best Costume: Roy, complete with blood and a stuffed white tiger clawing at his throat

See the pics of the insanity!

Check this out! OCLC opening some of its records to Google!

OCLC has announced to its library members that it will begin testing the opening of WorldCat records to Google access. The project will extract a 2 million record subset from the more than 53 million records in the WorldCat database. The subset will target the most popular and widely available books by only selecting records with a minimum of 100 libraries holding each item. Searches on Google will retrieve the records and link through OCLC to library holdings. The move expands the scope of the Open WorldCat yearlong pilot project to make library resources available from non-library Web sites and will “test the effectiveness of Web search engines in guiding users to library-owned materials.”

Why haven’t I heard about this yet? Libraries should be shouting this from the rooftops.