Beautiful Photos from Cincinnati 1937-1941

nr068.jpg, originally uploaded by mgsmith.

Check out this amazing set of photos of Cincinnati, Ohio from 1937 through 1941 by Nelson Ronsheim.

Election 2008 Video Roundup

This year I've come across more video online than I remember seeing in years past for both candidates and issues in the upcoming election.

CET has a page set up with several videos: CET Election 2008. They have a District 2 Candidate Forum as well as special reports on Issues 5, 6, and 8 - Payday Lending, Casino, and Proportional Representation.

Waycross Community Media has a collection of government related videos, including forums on the County races, Issue 23 for Greenhills, Issue 40 in Springfield Township, candidate forums for the State Legislature, and a District 1 candidate forum.

Last, The Cincinnati Beacon has a video of some of the judicial candidates saying a few words.

Be an informed voter!

Free Wifi at PLCH

The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is now providing free wifi for use by the public. Right now, the Main branch downtown is covered and rollout to other branches will begin October 27th. This page will track the progress of the rollout.

The wifi is free to use. Patrons must provide an email address and agree to the library's standard Internet Use Policy. (The email address can be fake, the library doesn't actually email you.) The wifi connection does pass through the library's content filter and cannot be unfiltered. Patrons wishing to use unfiltered internet will need to make a reservation on one of the library's workstations.

As they are converted, library branches will no longer be Cincinnati Bell Wifi hotspots.

Books I'm Currently "Reading"

I've gotten into something of a reading spree lately. This due in part to a book club I recently founded with some friends. We all live in different cities, so we are running the whole thing online. We're using LiveJournal, since it seems to fit our needs better than anything else.



For the book club, we read When We Were Orphans last month and we're reading Falling Man this month. It's my turn to pick a book next month so I'm mentally working on a short list.

In parallel to the book club, and maybe in part because of it, I've picked up my reading of other books too. My "for fun" reading has two tracks: comics and eastern thought.


At the same time I got When We Were Orphans from the library, I also picked up Soon I Will Be Invincible. I am really liking this one. The chapters alternate between a super-hero and a super-villain's perspectives. The villain Doctor Impossible's chapters are hilarious. They're like the best parts of Venture Brothers. The thing about Soon I Will Be Invincible is that in a lot of ways it's just like a comic book story, but told in paragraphs rather than with images. The fact that literary themes are starting to show through in the novel, shouldn't be surprising because I think that comic books can be a literary medium as much as any other. I haven't finished reading this one yet, because I'm purposely reading it one chapter per night.


Last week I read Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. I noticed on the shelf at the library and picked it up because somewhere in my mind I had the impression that it was an important work in the genre. I read it fairly quickly, and it's good, but I wouldn't say great. I guess I'm not a long time comic book reader, so I didn't get all the cameos and such. The art is absolutely outstanding though.


Then two items came into the library that I had put holds on. Within a week of each other I picked up Watchmen and Apocalypse Suite, which is the first collected volume of Gerard Way's Umbrella Academy. I haven't started either one yet, but I'm really looking forward to them both.


The other track that I'm spending time on is eastern thought. I have been listening to and really enjoying a podcast of lectures by Alan Watts and so I was inspired to go through my bookshelf and see what I had on the topics he discusses. The podcast comes out once a week on Sundays and I listen to it before going to bed. On other nights of the week I read a few pages each out of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The Hagakure, and The Tao of Pooh. I like getting a little different perspective from each one each night.


I haven't had a pile of books this big on my night stand for a long time.

Software should not be able to break itself this badly.

I don't know how to feel about this. I'm simultaneously pissed off and embarrassed. I just got finished making a jackass out of myself thanks to some evil software.

Introduction

I am an IT professional. I figure out people's computer problems and fix them. I think I'm fairly good at it. A friend of a friend has a business and I sometimes come over to help them out with computer problems that they aren't able to figure out themselves. They can get a lot done on their own, but sometimes it's more efficient to just ask me to do something. They pay me to do this. Tonight they asked me to come over and figure out how to get rid of a virus on their computer and install Norton Internet Security. Sounds easy.

The Work

The first problem was that they had some unknown amount of malware on their computer, including at least one trojan and/or something claiming to be a trojan that was in fact something else. Anyway, they could have gotten this taken care of themselves if they would have been able to get Norton Internet Security to install, but it was quitting at the end of the installation with an uninformative error saying it failed to install. So that's what I came to fix. I figured out eventually that it wasn't installing properly because there were parts of a previous version of NIS still installed and NIS doesn't like that. I should mention that this is such a well known problem, that Norton actually has a tool you can download specifically designed to completely uninstall NIS from your PC before starting a new install. So that's what I did, I used this tool to uninstall, then I went ahead with the new install and it worked fine. Everything is groovy, I am good at my job. Sweet.

The Fuck Up

After NIS gets up and running ( after a modest number of reboots, etc. ) everything seems to be working fine. I run a scan on the PC to start looking for viruses, etc, and it runs as one would expect. I notice that the LiveUpdate service is running in the background, which means that NIS is getting new virus definitions and patches and such, so I decide to 'pause' the PC scan until this is finished. After hitting pause, NIS informs me that 2 problems were found and fixed and that it would require a reboot to finish the fix. I click 'restart'. When Windows comes back up, it is a joke of an operating system. For starters, it takes 2 to 3 times as long for Windows to start and when it finally comes up, I realize that a lot of things are missing. There is no Start Menu or Task Bar. Most of the programs do not run. This is surreal. I start hunting around and trying different things including rebooting more times and I eventually determine that no essential system services are running. Further investigation shows that svchost.exe is missing. Services refuse to start. WTF? My theory is that NIS somehow quarantined or mangled svchost.exe to the point where Windows didn't know where to find it. And once that was accomplished there was no getting it back. It was now impossible to get NIS or anything else useful to run. I could get explorer.exe windows and other admin stuff like the Control Panel and msconfig and all that stuff, but there was no way I could find to get those services to come back up. When I clicked 'start' to start the service I'd get a 'file cannot be found' error message. Anyway, I banged my head for an hour, including biting my nails while they looked for their Windows installation disc, which of course had gone missing.

Lack of Conclusion

Essentially I got to the point where I couldn't get any further without somehow repairing the operating system and with the Windows installation CD gone, I was stuck. I was 100% positive that the user's important files were still all present and intact. I could browse the file system freely, but there was no way to use the files since apps wouldn't run and there was no way to transfer them somewhere else since there was no network access and I didn't have my external hard-drive enclosure. Not that backing up the files would have done any good, since I couldn't actually re-install the OS anyways. It was getting late so I just admitted that I was stuck and apologized and left. They said they'd just take it into Microcenter in the morning. Needless to say, I didn't accept any money from them for ruining their computer and thereby their ability to work, pay bills, etc.

What Now?

I just don't know what I'm supposed to feel about this. I mean on the one hand I feel heavy, heavy shame. I messed the PC and it just happens to be vital to their business. Before I got there, they had viruses, yes, but they could also use the PC normally - you know Internet, QuickBooks. After I left the PC was essentially useless. It would boot up into a joke of an operating system and taunt them with their precious files, but not let them actually do anything.

On the other hand, I feel really mad. I mean, I didn't really do anything that even had a whiff of a chance that something this catastrophic could happen. I was practically standing up and brushing my hands together in triumph before I rebooted the computer that last time. How can it be that software can fuck itself up so badly without even a hint that this was about to happen. I don't feel like I did anything wrong or could have foreseen this. And I see myself as a pretty savvy IT person. I've tangled with and mastered Norton products before. I feel like it's the software's fault, but at the same time I feel like I have to take the blame and I'm really losing face here. That is outrageous, honestly.

Silverglades is Amazing!

Silverglades on 8th is my new favorite place downtown. They are one of the best places to eat lunch, but what really makes them #1 for me is the fact that they're open "late". By late I mean they are open until 7:00pm Monday-Friday, which is actually surprisingly rare. This is especially handy for me since I work until 6:00pm.

Their food is absolutely top notch. It's all Boar's Head meats and cheeses, some really outstanding sandwiches, paninis, and wraps, and some of the best "deli selections" you can find downtown like pasta salads, casseroles and such. Also, soups, several types of salads, yogurt, a nice selection of snacks, and smoothies. Everything seems to have been selected or prepared with quality in mind. Honestly.

Also, you can get milk, butter, and eggs there. Oh, and beer. They have a good beer selection which includes Great Lakes and my favorite beer: Christian Moerlein OTR. I challenge anyone to find another place in the CBD where you can get all that after 6:00pm.

The fact that all this is in one place and it's open late enough for me to get things on my way home from work boggles my mind and I love them for it. If you've never been, definitely pay them a visit. It's located on the first floor of the Power Building at the corner of 8th and Sycamore.

What is Proportional Representation?

I was going to write a post up on this topic, but our Hamilton County Commissioner David Pepper beat me to it on his blog: What is Proportional Representation?

Library Digitization Project video on CETconnect

There is a nice video on CETconnect about the library's Virtual Library project.

Red Bull Soapbox Race

10042008612.jpg, originally uploaded by Pez King.

Just got back from the Red Bull Soapbox Race, which is still going on. Mt. Adams is packed. I've never seen this many people up here in the streets. I imagine the partying will continue into tonight. Good times...

Yak Shaving

Ok, so back in June I had an idea for a fun web app. I realized that there were lots of articles in Wikipedia tagged as "needing a photo". Also, I realized that there were lots of articles in Wikipedia tagged with geo-tags (example). It seemed like a straightforward and useful thing to mash these two lists together and find out things that are near a particular location that need photos taken of them. That might make a fun way to spend a weekend, or find interesting things when vacationing. Oh, and it would be neat to slap some Fire Eagle on there since it's Teh Hotness.

So, I decided to try and put something together.

The first step is figuring out a programmatic way of getting these two lists of articles, so that we can compare them. This is our first step down the rabbit hole.

Geonames

There isn't a direct way to query Wikipedia for articles near a geographical location, but luckily there is a service called Geonames that allows to do exactly this. They let us form a url like this:

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipedia?lat=39.10982894895&lng=-84.48848724365&radius=15

that returns articles near a certain latitude and longitude within the given radius. Nice.

Few problems though:

1) There is more than one way to geo-tag a Wikipedia article and geonames only recognizes one of these kinds of tags. No worries, though, right? We can just go in and convert the ones with the bum tags over to the nice kind of tags. Editing Wikipedia for fun and profit! Sure, you could do that, except...

2) Geonames only crawls Wikipedia every so often and stores the geodata in it's own database. So, you're not querying the live Wikipedia. You're just getting whatever geonames has and that could be months old. Also, there's no predictable schedule for how often geonames will re-crawl Wikipedia.

But it does have pretty many articles, so we'll live with it for now.

Wikipedia articles needing photos

Now, we need to get a list of articles that need photos to compare with our list of articles that are near us. Again we discover the unfortunate trend of there being more than one way to do things in Wikipedia.

For starters, there are two major ways to mark that an article needs a photo.

A) Use the 'reqphoto' tag. Using this tag by itself marks the articles as needing a photo. Adding the 'in=' parameter, specifies that the thing is 'in' a particular location. And here's where it gets crazy: You can put multiple locations with 'in=somewhere', 'in2=anotherplace', 'in3=athirdpace' and so on. For each place that the article is 'in', Wikipedia automatically adds it to a category called "Articles needing photos in place". This can become messy.

B) The other way to mark an article as needing a photo is to use a WikiProject tag from a WikiProject that is based on a place and set the 'needs-photo' tag to 'yes'. For instance the WikiProject Cincinnati tag. This will add the article to a category called "Cincinnati articles needing photos". Some of these will be articles related to Cincinnati, like a person or a company, but not really located in one specific place. There are WikiProjects for many major cities and states, but not all and some don't use this feature.

Some articles use the reqphoto tag and others use the WikiProject tag. Some use both.

One problem with the reqphoto tag using the 'in' parameter is that there are no good guidelines as to what types of values 'in' should be. Many articles have 'in=Ohio'. Some just have 'in=Cincinnati'. Some have 'in=Cincinnati, Ohio'. Better yet, some have 'in=Cincinnati, Ohio, in2=Ohio'. In other states people have organized all reqphoto tags by county. So they'd have 'in=Cook County, Illinois'. I haven't been able to find a consensus on what is the best way to use this tag. Sometimes it is used for things that move, like people. Sometimes it is used for things that cross borders, like roads or mountains.

What that means is if you are in Cincinnati, and you want to check to see what articles need photos, there are potentially 5 categories where the article might appear:

Cincinnati articles needing photographs
Wikipedia requested photographs in Cincinnati
Wikipedia requested photographs in Cincinnati, Ohio
Wikipedia requested photographs in Hamilton County, Ohio
Wikipedia requested photographs in Ohio

And that's not to mention things that got categorized into other municipalities, like say Norwood or Springdale. Those won't appear in any of the above lists. Also there are the articles that have a reqphoto tag but no 'in' parameter at all.

There are many ways to plow through all this and I tried to plot them all out here:



It's a mess. But it's a mess I understand at this point. Getting a complete answer is not a simple as finding two lists and getting the intersection. The real problem is with that area labeled "http request x N".

See, I could get all the nearby articles, and then check each one of them individually for the reqphoto tag. But that would require making N additional http requests, where N is the number of nearby articles.

Or, I could check all the reqphoto categories using city, county, and state info taken from Fire Eagle (that'd be a fixed number of http requests) and then for each article needing a photo, see if it has a geo-tag (which is a lot of additional http requests). Also, this method leaves out an article that has been geo-tagged and has the reqphoto tag, but no 'in' parameter.

There's no way to make a small, fixed number of requests and have all the information to make this app really useful. That is sucky.

It turns out Fire Eagle is actually the easiest part. The only problem is that it gives you city names like "Cincinnati, OH" which then have to be converted to either "Cincinnati" or "Cincinnati, Ohio" to match up to names of categories in Wikipedia.

If you've got Fire Eagle powers, then you can try this version. If not, try this one or this one. That's about as far as I've gotten.

The last bit, which I leave up to the user to figure out, is obviously: uploading the photo and adding it to Wikipedia. I believe I could eventually set up a bot to take photo submissions and add them to the articles on behalf of the user, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

See also: yak shaving

Fireworks @ Great American Ballpark

07032008472.jpg, originally uploaded by Pez King.

Reds win and nice fireworks show! :)

RiverSpan Sculpture Exhibition This Weekend

06172008416.jpg, originally uploaded by Pez King.

The RiverSpan Sculpture Exhibition and Sale is an annual event celebrating the creative genius of a wide range of fine art sculptors. From pedestal size to monumental, the RiverSpan experience will satisfy the appetites of the casually interested to the fervent collector.

RiverSpan is not another arts & crafts event, but a calculated attempt to bring the work of fine art sculptors into public view. RiverSpan is produced in association with the CincinnatiUSA Regional Chamber, and together we are working to make your visit to the region an enriching experience.

Whether you come to browse or to purchase, our aim is to make the time you spend worthy of your effort. Sculptors are juried into the event from across all state and international borders, working in all range of style and media.

Friday, June 20th – Sunday, June 22nd, 2008.

Library Book Sale: June 2-6

Today is the first day of the Annual Library Used Book Sale at the Main Library Downtown. You can find really great stuff including CDs, DVDs, as well as art and of course books.



Don't forget Friday is bag day - buy a bag and fill it up with anything for $10.

Le's Cafe (the cafe inside the library) will be grilling out on the Walnut Street plaza all week, too.

All proceeds help support the library, so stop by!

Avril-Bleh Grocery Update

I've taken a few photos of the new Avril-Bleh Grocery that was supposed to open this week. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting really close. Between Wednesday and today it's been painted and most of the fixtures seem to be in place. I even saw a rack holding bags of chips in there this afternoon.





My biggest hope is that they'll slightly later hours than Ciancolo's on Main, since I usually get off work about an hour after they close.

Startup Weekend Cincinnati

Apparently there has been a little more drama in the world of Startup Weekend recently. This time related to Cincinnati.

You may remember the story hitting Cinplify and a few local blogs in March.

I thought it sounded like a pretty neat idea and I voted on the startupweekend.com/cityvote page.

A few weeks after voting I received an email from Ray Angel of StartupWeekend.com claiming that preparations were beginning for an even in Cincinnati:

I've begun planning for the Columbus weekend and we hope to be announcing it on the Startup Weekend website soon.

I'd like to be able to announce the Cincy Startup Weekend around the same time if at all possible and I need to narrow down the weekend that works best for the majority of people.

A visit to the site showed that a Columbus event had been announced, but as far as I could tell, there wasn't any announcement about Cincinnati.

Anyway, I didn't think much about it.

As usual, once a I'm exposed to a meme like this, I start noticing it where I might not have earlier. It didn't take long before I was actively digging around for information about this whole operation.

The group has been mentioned a few times on TechCrunch.com, fairly amicably, but the real juice is on uk.techcrunch.com where they did a longish post about the history of Startup Weekend so far and the apparently dramatic Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend's founder. From that article we learn that a few cities have had uneasy relationships with Hyde and to varying degrees have divorced their "startup weekends" from his company. Some have complained about his style of management and professionalism.

More recently, a spat has occurred between Hyde and an Andrew Paradies. Paradies, is a co-founder of another web-startup based out of Cincinnati called photrade.com. Hyde accused Paradies of creating an inferior clone of Startup Weekend and also dissed him for using a Creative Commons licensed photo improperly on the new company's site InOneWeekend.org.

I turns out that Paradies is involved with InOneWeekend.org, but isn't really a founder per se, and based on the back and forth it appears he and Hyde have made up. Still I don't think Startup Weekend and In One Weekend have much love for each other at this point.

Anyway, now it appears InOneWeekend.org is planning ( obviously ) an event in Cincinnati in July as their first weekend. However, they have no details on the site other than the dates.

One wonders if Hyde's SW is still going to come to town, or if they decided to skip us and let IOW take the reins. It's not clear to me whether they've made up their minds about coming since there hasn't been a post on the actual site yet. Columbus and Cincinnati both still appear on the voting page. The decision making process is not very transparent.

I guess my initial interest, if not enthusiasm, for the idea has been somewhat dampened.

I'll still try to attend one or both of the events if they actually occur, but now it'll be more out of morbid curiosity than an entrepreneurial attitude. I know the videos I've seen so far make it look like a pretty unique experience.


Boulder Startup Weekend 2 - Day 2 from Danny Holland on Vimeo.

This Saturday, May 3rd is Free Comic Book Day. As the name implies, Free Comic Book Day is a single day when participating comic book specialty shops across North America and around the world give away comic books absolutely free to anyone who comes into their stores.

It is a great way to get into comics if you're not already a big comic book reader, and it's a good way to see some stuff you wouldn't ordinarily pick up if you are already a comic book fan.

Here is the awesome list of books that you will be able to get for absolutely free.

And here is the list of participating stores in the Cincinnati area:

CLIFTON COMICS & GAMES LTD
3234 JEFFERSON AVE
CINCINNATI, OH (map)
(513) 861-5071

ROCKIN' ROOSTER COMICS & COLLECTIBLES
3805 NORTH BEND ROAD
CINCINNATI, OH (map)
(513) 661-ROCK

UP UP & AWAY!
4016 HARRISON AVE
CINCINNATI, OH (map)
(513) 661-6300

CAPTAIN COMIC
2105 BEACHMONT
CINCINNATI, OH (map)
(513) 231-0484

QUEEN CITY COMIC & CARD CO.
6101 MONTGOMERY RD.
CINCINNATI, OH (map)
(513) 351-5674

MAVERICK'S S/C & COMICS
8522 WINTON ROAD
CINCINNATI, OH (map)
(513) 521-4900

I've been to 5 of these 6 stores and believe me when I say they are very friendly places. You will usually find that the owner of a comic book store is the staff of that store and they tend to be passionate about not just comic books, but also helping people find what they are interested in. Whether you are looking for something specific and obscure or if you don't really know what you want, comic book store owners usually bend over backward to help you out. They are really great local businesses to support.

For more information, visit www.freecomicbookday.com.

Great discussion of surveillance on Visualingual

You may have already read this post about the Walking Tour of Surveillance in Downtown Cincinnati from this morning on Visualingual, but if you read it in the AM you may want to check back. An excellent discussion of the role of surveillance in cities has been going on in the comments, including a few comments by Bill Brown the leader of the tour.

Be sure to check out Bill's freshly updated map of cameras downtown, too!

The Banks Blog

Brianne and Suzanne from Live Green Cincinnati have started up a new blog to track action on the construction of The Banks.

Ground has officially been "broken" but they are keeping track of real construction-like activities, and it appears things really are happening down there. They have a link to a live webcam of the site and as I type this, there is actually a machine moving earth. Progress!

Stay tuned to www.thebanksblog.com to stay up to date on how things are going on what most people agree is the most important project underway in the city right now.

CiN Stage lineup for Taste of Cincinnati announced

The rest of the entertainment hasn't been announced on the Taste of Cincinnati site yet, but CiN Weekly released the details for the CiN stage:

May 24
6 to 7 p.m. - The Lions Rampant
7 to 8 p.m. - DJ set by Mista Rare Groove
8 to 9 p.m. - Bad Veins
9 to 10 p.m. - Mista Rare Groove
10 to 11 p.m. - Turnbull ACs

May 25
6 to 7 p.m. - The Seedy Seeds
7 to 8 p.m. - DJ set by Evan Scott Sharfe
8 to 9 p.m. - The Chocolate Horse
9 to 10 p.m. - Evan Scott Sharfe
10 to 11 p.m. - Alone at 3am
(Cincypunk pick!)
May 26
5 to 6 p.m. - Ian Ross Organ Trio
7 to 8 p.m. - Pete Dressman and the Soul Unified Nation

It looks like a great lineup to me.

Mark Bradford at the Cincinnati Art Museum

This exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum looks awesome:



Who knew the CAM had it's own YouTube channel?

Thanks to the always top-notch Cincinnati Revisited for the heads up.

Two reasons to go to Arnold's Thursday, March 20th

I don't know if this was done on purpose or not, but this month's Green Drinks Cincy coincides with the Inaugural Tapping of Christian Moerlein's new Barbarossa Double Dark Lager.



The tapping will be of a new year-round beer, "a Munich style beer with a lower alcohol content than the company's recent seasonal beers. The name is a tribute to the first beer marketed by the German immigrant founder of the original Christian Moerlein Brewing Co. in the 1850s." I hope to get a signed copy of the poster to go with my signed copy of the Emancipator poster.

Green Drinks Cincy speaker this month is Heather Mayfield from the ORSANCO Education Foundation.

• The tapping on zipscene.com, on upcoming.org.


• Green Drinks Cincy - March on upcoming.org

Cincinnati metro bus route to get free Wi-Fi

Via MuniWireless:

The Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority will launch a three-month pilot program providing free Wi-Fi service to commuters aboard the Kings Island Express, one of the busiest suburban bus routes from Cincinnati’s northernmost suburbs to the city’s downtown. According to a news release issued today, neither taxpayer funds nor bus fares are being used to finance the program. Details will be released at a media event planned for Wednesday. Expect this program to be funded, at least in part, by advertisers and commercial sponsors, the finance mechanism that the city’s Project Lilypad has used to initiate free hot spot service in commercial areas around the city. --direct link to Business Courier article

It says this is a three-month pilot project, but it doesn't say whether that means they would roll it out to other routes if successful.

Route 71X schedule and map, other routes

If I were designing the network, I'd examine the possibility of using a mesh-network like the one Robin Chase talks about in this video from TED.

Mt. Adams

03082008197.jpg, originally uploaded by Pez King.

Now in Beta Testing: www.cincinnatiparking.info

Last Spring I had an idea to make a website for finding a monthly parking garage downtown. I started working on it last Spring, but then kinda slacked off for a while.

Recently I've been going back in and tweaking some of the things and trying to get it ready to "show off".

The URL is http://www.cincinnatiparking.info/



Pretty much all the ideas I originally had are there. Now, I'm just trying to figure out how to make it better.

#1 - The data is published as a PDF by DCI and so I basically have to manually update the garages. And it only comes out quarterly. I'm trying to think of a way to make this more efficient and more accurate. Ideas here would range from getting the data in a better format directly from DCI or embedding my map directly into their site (by selling it to them), to getting "users" to somehow submit up-to-date data whether "users" means garage owners or parkers or volunteers.

#2 - It is not pretty. I have been learning the ins and outs of CSS and have got it into a basically usable style, but it could be better. Also, I have not tested it on a huge range of browsers and screen resolutions.

#3 - The main feature is the map. The other feature is the "Search" table. Maybe it would be nice to build other ways of querying the database, like search by distance or price range, etc.

Check it out and tell me what you think. I am open to any suggestions and I need new ideas to work on.

Thanks.

IKEA Opening March 12

I started reading this OHIKEA! blog within the past week or so. Today IKEA announced they're opening the Cincinnati/West Chester store on Wednesday, March 12th (map). I have already started figuring out what I want to buy. :) One of the first things I happened across randomly was this product called "DAVE":




Actually, I could probably really use one of those!

Hi-Tek Contest on Jamglue

I meant to mention this earlier but it fell through the cracks over the holidays. Jamglue is holding a guest verse contest with the new single from Cincinnati's own DJ Hi-Tek. The song is called "My Piano" and features Ghostface, Raekwon, and Dion.

This is the snippet to add your rhymes over:
My Piano - Contest Backing Track uploaded by Hi_Tek

The beat is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license which means it can be shared and re-used for non-commerical uses. Jamglue is a remix community that built CC licenses into its structure. The site has actually lets you build songs online right in your browser as if you were using a simplified version of ProTools. They also have a large collection of user contributed beats, samples, and remixes.



It's cool to see Hi-Tek supporting an exciting community like this.