It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

Last weekend, I mentioned the press conference to announce the Grant for Technology Opportunities selections for this year. The press conference happened this afternoon, and will be replayed this week on cable channel 6. Here is the statement I gave at the press conference:

Over seven years ago, local leaders had a vision to use technology in novel ways to help people and to strengthen our community. That vision led to the Grant for Technology Opportunities program, or GTOPs.

GTOPs was created in 2001. It was designed by the predecessor of the Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission. The Commission wanted to support digital technology projects that could benefit our community. GTOPs is funded by the city, and is administered through the city's office of Telecommunications and Regulatory Affairs, or TARA.

The goals of GTOPs are to:

On Monday, I'll be participating in a press conference where the City of Austin will be announcing the 2008 selections for the Grant for Technology Opportunities program.

Here is the press release:

Austin City Council Member Brewster McCracken and members of the Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission will present the 2008 Grant for Technology Opportunities Program Awards at an announcement ceremony on Monday, April 21, at Austin City Hall, 301 W. Second St.

Ten winning projects will receive GTOPs funding for connecting citizens with information technology, computers and the Internet.

"GTOPs enables local organizations to leverage technology in novel ways," said Commission Chair Chip Rosenthal. "Its achievements are remarkable, and a tribute to the innovation and community spirit of Austin."

Posted in

• Austin
• Tech Policy

Earlier this year I wrote about the transition to digital television.

This weekend, the Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission is co-sponsoring an educational event to let people know about DTV and how it affects them.

The Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission and the City of Austin’s Office of Telecommunications and Regulatory Affairs will present a free community forum on "The Transition to Digital Television" from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, March 30, 2008, at the Conley-Guerrero Senior Activity Center, 808 Nile St.

Members of the community forum are invited to learn more about the digital TV (DTV) transition, and who will be affected by this technological advancement. This transition affects viewers with televisions that operate with roof-top antennas or "rabbit ears."

The full details are here: City to host forum on transition to digital television

I have amarok configured to submit tracks played to last.fm. If you go there you can see what I've recently listened to.

I get frequent errors in the amarok status bar such as

Failed to submit 'Mining for Gold' and 8 other tracks

and

Failed to submit several tracks to last.fm

I Googled the messages and found many reports of the problem, such as this thread. Most people pointed their fingers at a server problem. I was skeptical.

When, however, I tried to log into last.fm through the web interface and saw it intermittently fail, that confirmed for me that the flakiness lives in last.fm servers.

I saw this thread that suggested resetting the password--even to the same password--cleared the problem. I tried that and it worked. Before, I had dozens of songs pending to be posted. After, they all went through.

Here's hoping that last.fm eventually fixes their infrastructure problems.

A note, primarily to my readers (both of them) who follow this blog by RSS.

I've added a bunch of social network badges to the sidebar of my site. If you know me, feel free to friend me or stalk me or whatever it is you kids do these days.

I was using the Amarok "Album Cover Manager" tool to fill in the missing cover artwork in my music collection.

It has a "Fetch Missing Covers" button, which goes to Amazon and retrieves the artwork it needs. The lookup often makes mistakes, particularly because I tagged artists in a discouraged "Lastname, Firstname" form. Still, it's easier to fetch them all, then go back and manually fixup the ones it got wrong.

I ran it over several hundred albums. It made a lot of mistakes, but none quite so hilarious as the one to the right. The album cover you see is what it selected for London Calling by The Clash.

My media center PC is an ASUS bookshelf computer running Ubuntu Linux and KDE desktop. I use it primarily for music, running the Amarok music player.

Our house is pretty small and open. I can see the entire living room from my desk. I often play music on the media system while I'm working. The annoying bit is that I have to get up from my desk and walk over to the living room anytime I want to fiddle the controls.

I wish I had a good way to control the music from my desk. I've been puzzling over this for a whilte. I've tried various ways to control Amarok remotely and none were satisfactory. Then it dawned on me that I was missing the obvious: I didn't want to control just the media player but the whole desktop. I can do that using something like Virtual Network Computing (VNC).

I had the most phenomenal breakfast this morning. It occurred to me afterwards that it was completely made of foods from local Austin sellers.

First, there was the migas quiche by The Soup Peddler. I've had a few things from them, and everything has been extremely flavorful and delicious. Past favorites include chicken corn chowder and chicken pot pie. I'll add the migas quiche to the list. The crust was very tasty and flaky, a little worse for the microwave reheating but still quite good. The filling was light and tasty, and not the "you've got 20 eggs in your mouth" feel I've had with some other quiches.

The quiche was topped with mild salsa from Hill Country Homestyle Canning. I was already a fan of their pickles. Their plain dill pickles are a favorite. The salsa is remarkably fresh and tasty.

Just got home from Bar Camp Austin III. I had a phenomenally good time.

You usually hear at gatherings like this that the interesting stuff happens in the hallways, and the sessions just fill the time between. Well, not here. The sessions were excellent. I didn't have to suffer a single product demo. Every session was well facilitated, the participants engaged, and nobody boorishly hogged the discussion.

One of my favorite sessions was titled something "Weblog Vanity Sites and Thought Leaders". No, I don't know what that means either. The organizer never showed up. So a bunch of us just talked about blogging, circling the topic back to how to make a difference (and be noticed) with our blogging. The group conclusion seemed to be that being "A List" (or noticed by the "A List") is becoming less important to getting ideas recognized. What's most important is becoming a respected authority in a niche area--which may involve an offline presence in addition to your blogging.

Congratulations to whurley and all the organizers on a job well done.

Thanks to GSD&M for hosting the event. One of the things that made the day so great was the large number (five) of session rooms, and plenty of room to mill about between.

This has been my weekend of community media.

Saturday, I attended the Texas Community Media Summit. There were several highlights of the event for me. For instance, it was nice to see Debbie Austin from The Texas Observer give a shout-out to Austin Bloggers, a site I manage.

I also enjoyed finally meeting U.T. R.T.F. Professor Laura Stein who seems to have a good earthy handle on community media issues. She lead a session on media convergence. It got me thinking about funding for projects such as open source tools. One effect of Texas SB 5 is that many cities will find their PEG (access television) budgets cash rich for capital equipment, but starved for operating funds. Maybe some of those funds can be used for servers and other infrastructure for community media projects.

I had a blast chatting with public policy superstar Charles Benton. He got me thinking about the impacts the digital television transition will have on community media, and what opportunities there may be.

Then, on Sunday, I went to see the new Michel Gondry movie Be Kind Rewind.

"Wait! Wait!" you say. "What's that got to do with community media?"

I don't want to give too much away, but if you've seen the trailer you already know it's about a couple of guys who end up creating their own movies. What I enjoyed was seeing how the process of creating their own media ultimately affects their neighborhood and the people around them.

The movie was sweet and had a lot of heart. I enjoyed it a lot.

The embedded video is Michel Gondry's own sweded version of the movie trailer. (I'll also recommend the sweded trailer by these guys, with its inspired Big Lebowski bit.)