News and Ideas from the Bleeding Edge

The very first iPad, 2008

OK, OK, I didn’t invent the internet. But I sent an MP3 around the world way before you or Steve Jobs did. I told you it was hot, didn’t I? No way I was going to rest on my laurels, I kept after it.

Sometime early in 2008 researchers in our Carrboro kitchen created the first working iPad. You could, back then and probably still, get a printable version of the iPhone, ready to print on cardstock and fold into a iPhone-shaped model.  Combining parts from the model and a small notebook, we thought we had something potentially very useful. When used with any- and I mean any — writing device (100% compatibility!!) you could instantly be taking notes, sending messages, drawing pictures, writing songs, making tiny paper airplanes,  the possibilities are  endless.

So the iPad was born. I showed it to several witnesses and potential investors (loozers!!!!) who failed to jump in. Pictured at left is the (still) working prototype, a 64-page model, with fake iPhone cover. Didn’t come with a pen, that would cost you extra.

I coulda sold a million, damn. And if I hadn’t spilled something on the cover of this one I might be able to get a lot for it on eBay. Double damn.

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From the CBO via Krugman:

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What a fabulous day! September 25th was the annual Carrboro Music Festival, a great socialist arts event. Free music played for free, PERFECT weather.  Following is an excerpt that doesn’t do the band justice, they were so fine, NC Saxophone Ensemble - Check it:

NC Saxophone Orchestra by chris-frank

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You pay us to borrow money??? If a few million regular people could get this deal, it would help a lot, don’t you think?

Woah!!! A 5 year pays -.75%….and we’re selling them like hot cakes!

T-bills at negative percentage

Krugman’s blog

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Against all odds, efolkMusic.org wins one round in the endless battle to stay alive on the web, which means not pissing off Google.  For those of you who haven’t been following closely, our upstanding, never-spammy website found itself on Google’s bad side as “pharma hackers” found a way to game the super-secret algorithms and create a couple million links that combined the terms “efolkmusic” and various popular drugs.

Visitors to our site were aware of no problem, Bing and Yahoo searchers saw us fine, but we were pretty quickly blacklisted by Google. We had to hire a “security” company to clean up the mess; they did a half-assed job, we were ostensibly in the index, but you could google “efolkmusic.org” and we didn’t show. Arrgh!!!

Google give websites little recourse for remedy- there is no one you can call, no dialog you can have with an employee. The robo-messages say “don’t bother replying”, and send you to some so-called help pages or the forums. It’s hard to tell if there is any official presence in the forums, but the volunteers (if that’s what they are) are certainly part of the super-organism that is Google, and 24 forum-posts later we got help there from a “Robbo” dude (or robot???) — VOILA, we found two lines of bad code that the cleanup missed, squished them in a few aggressive keystrokes.

As of today, we are back to “normal”, go ahead, search “folk music mp3s”, any-old search engine will do. And PLEASE, consider making a donation of any amount, help us continue the good fight.

Because they could squish us at any moment- fear of fear, as Randy Newman says- isn’t that what terror is?

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