I understand how it happened. I opened my mouth about RSS on a listserv and voila, found myself invited to speak at the

The meeting is called: Semantic Conflict, Mapping, and Enablement: Making Commitments Together. One offering reads:
Netcentric Semantic Linking: An Approach for Enterprise Semantic Interoperability(Paper).
Let's raise our glasses and toast ontological coherence!

What am I doing here?


My brain is hemorraging!

I've trained some non-techies to use RSS/blogs, but these folks were refugees from "A Beautiful Mind". Bearded and sandaled PhDs who thrive on topics arcane and intellectual.
My bread is buttered with a more rudimentary spread.

Early on in my preparation I decided not to try to hang with the intelligentsia, but to throw them a curve, a bit of humor midst an otherwise cheerless ensemble. I declared the podium an "acronym free zone" and rolled through the blogosphere with admitted aplomb. Here's a sample:

His Empire has been misunderstood.
Viewed as monolithic, inaccessible.
A public relations nightmare

In an effort to show everyone his softer, human side the icon of EVIL removed his mask.

nsf ontology taxonomy darth rss blog blogosphere weblog

Click the Zap button on the right to hear what I'm talking about! If UB40 floats your boat you would have loved these guys from Birmingham. I saw the English Beat a million years ago in Jersey at a mammoth club called Emerald City. I couldn't stop dancing. This was my first experience with the joyful noise of ska.

The multi-racial band carved a distinct sound through the use of alternating lead vocals by guitarist Dave Wakeling and punk-toaster/rapper Ranking Roger, supported by a tight band consisting of Andy Cox (guitar), Dave Steel (bass), and Everett Moreton (drums). The addition of 50-year-old saxophonist Saxa, who originally played with Prince Buster and Desmond Dekker, gave the band credibility and fleshed out its sound.
Four albums and a never-ending tour from Hell later, the Beat imploded and mutated into platinum pop as the "Fine Young Cannibals" and "General Public".

The boys from Birmingham

from "Stand Down Margaret" - a tribute to the hawkish Prime Minister:
i said i see no joy
i see only sorry
i see no chance of your bright new tomorrow

so stand down Margaret
stand down please
stand down Margaret

Learn more about ska's Jamaican roots here.

music ska englishbeat dancehall reggae

Curiosity in the recent deployment of technorati tags led me to look for a way to join the party. George Hotelling wrote a sweetly simple perl plugin for Movable Type that turns keywords into technorati tags.
Installation was a snap, but getting technorati to recognize the tags took a bit of tweeking via a support team (Kevin Marks) that rivals any corporate help line I've ever used.
Bottom line:
Make sure the call to create the tags is in the MTBody statement of your Atom feed for technorati and your Main Index template for public web viewing. I place my tags at the tail end of my skimmer's wake.

Insufferable frustration brought me to the web site of Jay Allen, curator of a most excellent MT-Blacklist perl plugin that helps to eliminate comment spam.
I had just finished deleting, one at a time, a hundred or so comment and ping spams for "texas hold'em" when I decided there must be a better way.
Installation of his award winning plugin was a snap. Just be sure you download the right release for the version of MT your running (I didn't).
Instead of using the ineffective IP banning technique MT provides, this module creates a blacklist of line items and a one step comment spam deletion across your blog.
I'll let you know how it works.
Stay Tuned

Ok, It's been two days since I "plugged-in" the blacklist stopper. I got a dozen trackback spam, found the plugin link at the bottom of the trackback page in MT, de-spammed the entire site and added the spamtext to the ban list with one click --- AWESOME!
jg

MT movabletype commentspam spam technorati tags folksonomy

Malo was mortified. He had spent too much time and hard earned cash on culinary school to be shunted from one half-assed operation to another. His first gig in Baltimore was an organic restaurant that was as flightless as its namesake. "Puffins" had a staff of stoners and work-release cons could never keep it in the air and the restaurant tumbled to the ground in a heap of tofu and "...seared ahi tuna ($17) consisted of two beautifully charred filets sitting atop a peppery Southwestern risotto studded with asparagus, red pepper, chives, pimiento, and green onion..."

Quick stints in a Holiday Inn, an up-scale deli, a doughnut shop with aspirations of grandeur, and an Alaskan cruise ship called Amistad left Malo bone weary and racked as a riblet.
Burned out, he took a job pushing security systems in Baltimore City. A growth industry if ever there was one.
Two years in, and desperate to get back to his true calling, Malo answered an ad for a sous chef at a Johns Hopkins University eatery. The CAFÉ AZAFRÁN had a menu to die for (e.g.):
"...a Mediterranean wrap of hummus, baby spinach, artichoke hearts, Kalamata olives, goat cheese on a pesto tortilla".

Finally a gig with legs.
I asked where it was. He said he wasn't real sure, only that it had a huge telescope in the lobby.
"You don't mean you're cookin' at the Space Telescope Science Institute, do you?"
"Yeah, I think that's it, why?", he asked.
"Nothin', really... that's way cool, I'm excited for you, man."

As I hung up I had a vision of the congressionally orphaned Hubble Space Telescope tumbling into the sea, dragging with it a nouveau cuisine eatery and my friend, Malo.
Shhhhh... don't say a word. Remember what the Ramones said, "Ignorance is bliss, just look at you."

chef hubble comedy

Click "ZAP" on the radio blog to get the aural flavor of this one:

The batucada is like a sonic war with rules. The deep, unflinching beats of the surdos are attacked from all sides by the Caixas (snare), cuica, agogo, tamborins, and reco-reco. The rhythms swarm over the bandas, take control of their garishly costumed or barely clad bodies and push them in swirls of color and controlled chaos down the passarela. The pre-Lenten parade at Rio´s Sambodrome is the Superbowl of Samba. Only fourteen of the one hundred neighborhood escolas make the cut to the "big show". Each group builds a half-dozen elaborate floats and stitch costumes for thousands of performers. From the humblest of beginnings in the barrios, this festival has gone world class and over the top. How has it managed to grow to these proportions and yet stay guileless? Is it the indefatigable effort of these folks of modest means? Can many hands make light work of such a grandiose effort?

Well, yes and no... as the following excerpt from Gambling Magazine illustrates.

"The jogo do bicho or animal lottery is an underground industry with a reputation for reliability and an estimated 80,000 employees in Rio alone. It has typically Brazilian dimensions, generating an estimated 10 million bets a day nationwide. Lately, though, the game has run into bad luck that accentuates its dark side..."

"The illicit lottery's big-time gambling bosses, the old-school gangsters known as bicheiros, have been prosecuted or slain or have succumbed to old age. Investigators have linked them to drug trafficking, gunrunning and institutionalized bribery..."

"The bosses of the animal game are still admired community leaders because of their longtime role as patrons of Rio's samba schools, the training ground for performers of Carnaval. The creation of an official Samba Schools League to organize Carnaval in the mid-1980s distanced the jogo do bicho from the yearly extravaganza, according to league officials. But samba schools are still linked to gambling bosses. Luiz Pacheco Drumond, the president of the Samba Schools League, is considered a top boss. He was convicted of gambling-related crimes last year..."

I like glitter and body paint as much as the next guy, but the real carnival in Rio began and continues in the backstreets.
Just watch out for the pick-pockets.

rio carnival samba lottery

In fond remembrance Do not dispair

Hold fast to his vision

We can save the world

With Love

Protect the innocent

nourish the downtrodden

share what you can

The Bob Marley Foundation

bobmarley marley reggae