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WordPress PlanetWhy I don’t pay for Cable TV
Every time I talk to my cable internet company they keep asking me about what I am doing about Cable TV. I have a 30Mbps download connection and 5Mbps upload connection, digital phone service, but no cable TV service. Why? Well, the way I figure it, with all that bandwidth, all that speed, and a wireless router that will send out 30Mbps to each device in my home, there is no reason to pay an additional fee to get TV. They can send the TV channels over the internet connection very easily. Sites like Amazon.com and Netflix do that and have been doing that for some time.
Now, there is another solution. I found a software package, that is described here, that will give you access to 3000 HD channels from the US and various other countries. It’s not all that magical or mysterious. Our internet speeds have been increasing all the time and with very little in the way of benefits for us. This is something that runs on your computer but you can easily hook up your computer, including your laptop to your TV and they are constantly offering new ways to stream content from your computer to your TV. In fact, I read about a service that allow you to stream wireless HD compressed and uncompressed, with support for 3D that will be coming in 2012.
Oh, did I mention that when you buy this software, you will be able to watch all these channels for free. So, get the software that will let you watch 3000 HD channels from around the world here.
>>To Order this Software, click on this link<<
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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Unbelievable Scene at #OccupyChapelHill
Ok, Chapel HIll is about the least dangerous, least violent place I’ve ever been. It is made up of families, children but mostly the University Students, Faculty and Staff. This is just an unbelievable scene to see police with assault rifles on Franklin Street!!!
One hears Chants of “Shame.” and “Takes a lotta guts to pull an assault rifle on a little girl. Who do they serve – Well’s Fargo. Who do they Protect – Well’s Fargo.”
Police The Army of the Rich!!!
Police The Army of the Rich!!!
Police The Army of the Rich!!!
“Shame!!! Shame!!!”
Image via Wikipedia
A group from the Anarachist Book Fair (not entirely affiliated with Occupy Chapel Hill) decided they would occupy a building on Franklin St. that has been vacant for at least a decade. This building, known as the “Chrysler Building”, is used by its renter as a tax write off and left abandoned.
I happened to be grabbing dinner when I saw cops block off the street. I knew they were probably raiding this site so I headed down to see what was going on. I only had a cell phone with me so that is all I was able to shoot with. The Police raided with assault rifles drawn (which was clearly overkill). I didn’t capture the initial breach, but that apparently came with officers in a white unmarked vehicle. I am not sure if I agree with this group of protester’s tactics in taking the building, but the response was too much. They held it since yesterday prior to the raid which came in the 5pm hour.Related articles
- On the Chapel Hill raid (occupyblogosphere.wordpress.com)
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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A Poem I dedicate to Bruce Martin Whealton Jr.
Demonostrating how special Bruce Martin Whealton is…
A thousand fair suitors all stab at your heart
Those poets of movement and jockeys of art
The high-volume vendors who hustle romance
Splashing their canvas with color and dance
The blasters of trumpets, gold banners unfurled
They offer lush gardens in glistening worlds
Yes, bearers of torches and carvers of stone
Who whisper their sonnets and surrender their thrones
And there in your doorway, no shadow is cast
No lingering voices, no ghosts from the past
Just a cluster of walls, and a window of pain
Collecting the heartache like droplets of rain
Still I stand before you, with palms to the sky
No gold in my pocket, no thorn in my side
And all I can offer, where words have no place
Is a body that trembles, and this love that awaits
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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very special
Bruce You are very special web designer and very kind, responsible,lovely full of the energy and different man who I have known.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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My Wiki Being Recognized as Semantic MediaWiki of the Month
This is quite an honor
There are many very talented web developers and web development teams that write applications that use these cutting edge technologies. I was working alone with a vision in mind and an idea. MediaWiki is the same software that runs Wikipedia.org the very popular online encyclopedia. However a wiki can be used for anything. Wiki comes from an Hawaiian word meaning quick. On Wikipedia one can edit almost any page (the exception being protected pages) without logging into the site. Or one can login and create or edit articles. Once you save your page it is immediately available on the internet. So, it is the quickest and easiest way to publish a web page or web content.
There are also some very simple formatting instructions or codes you can use to present your article or page. For example to make something a header you would surround it with one, two, three or four equal signs, like this ==My Level 2 Heading== where two == signs gives a level 2, one equal sign use a level one header and usually isn’t used because the title of the article on the page uses that level of heading, so it is reserved. There are many other editing markers that you can use and they are easy to find by doing a search for “edit mediawiki article” on a mediawiki wiki or on google or bing.
So, what is Semantic MediaWiki? I did say that my wiki was being recognized as the Semantic MediaWiki site of the month. This involves extensions to the software to allow a MediaWiki to become a Semantic Website or to enable many features of the Semantic Web. Some of these features may not seem all that useful if one doesn’t have any idea how this Semantic Data or information can be used on the Semantic Web, outside of what we are doing on our own website. The Semantic Web does create open-linked data/information that can be accessed, or queried across the world wide web. That is why they call it a global database.
In my wiki sites, which are about genealogy, I used some extensions that allow forms to be created for entering information into the website. Behind the scenes and hidden from the user is the code that gives meaning to this data or information that you enter into the form, meaning that can be used by machines or software. So, on a genealogy website, when you enter information about a person, you would want to list, spouse, father, mother, children, ancestors, and etc. Think of these as properties. You might want to ask who was John Smith’s wife back in 1850? If someone entered that information into the form, the software would have that encoded so that later this question can be asked.
The sites I produced are here: “Whealton Family Genealogy”: http://whealton.info/w/ and “My Family Lineage”: http://my-family-lineage.com/w/
Continuing, a Semantic web application allows questions to be asked later that were not originally considered when the application was created. This is very new. It also allows for a standard way of defining terms, or meaning in different knowledge areas, or areas of discussion. For example, I you were talking about who you know and what you do on the internet you would use the FOAF vocabulary – Friend of a Friend. Of course, these vocabularies must be defined somewhere. FOAF is defined or specified here. In the context of Genealogy, two other important vocabularies can be used, “BIO: A vocabulary for biographical information” which is defined here and “RELATIONSHIP: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people” which is defined here.
My two wikis use forms so that when you enter the name of a spouse, or father, or mother, the values are matched up with these vocabularies. This is an important way to define terms in a way that can be “understood” by computers. Software or computers can use this information contained in the vocabularies to understand, as it were, how terms relate to each other. Previously, computers had no idea what these terms meant or how they relate to other terms. Even when you were asking Google natural language type questions and it seemed that Google understood, it was only using pattern matching and the fact that two or more words appeared on the page together.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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Introduction to the Semantic Web Part 3: FOAF – Friend of a Friend
This video describes how to use the FOAF Semantic Web vocabulary and what a Semantic Web Vocabulary is. This is a continuation of other Semantic Web videos that I’ve shared as tutorial or how-to videos. More videos about the semantic web are available here:
http://futurewavedesigns.com/drupal7/training-videos-semantic-web
Visit this link to get your free profile published and linked with others:
http://futurewavedesigns.com/drupal7/get-free-profile-and-grow-your-network
FOAF – Friend of a Friend
FOAF is a Semantic Web Vocabulary used to describe people, their activities and their relationships to one another. It is becoming very popular for people who discover that others are doing this, to setup and publish on the web, their own FOAF profile. This vocabulary has served as the base from which other vocabularies have been extended. These other vocabularies will extend some of the terms used here as sub-Classes or sub-properties. I’ll explain that with examples, very soon.
So what is a vocabulary in this context?
For the Semantic Web, We deal with controlled vocabularies, which define terms and how they relate to each other. We have a hierarchy of Classes which each have properties. This is where you get the triples which relate the classes to the values of these properties. As an example:
A Person "has name" "Bruce Whealton"
This is a triple. Person is a class (I’ll demonostrate how to correctly write that with FOAF in a moment) and "has name" is the predicate with "Bruce Whealton" being the value. This would give this image if we were to present it as a graph: 
We use a vocabulary to describe concepts that relate to a specific domain, or an area of knowledge… or simply to a set of concepts. Different fields and professions have vocabularies, such as the medical profession, or the legal profession, or online chat communities. We have terms that have relationships to one another. Through these relationships we find meaning. This is how we find meaning on the semantic web, through controlled vocabularies; And this is how we form Semantic Web databases, aka "triple stores," because the data or information is stored in the form of triples.
FOAF concepts are prefixed with the letters foaf. Some examples are foaf:Person, which describes a person in the real world. foaf:name is a property of foaf:Person. Thus we get the triple foaf:Person foaf:name "Bruce Whealton"
which is a triple. It represents knowledge or information. It is an assertion that is stated explicitly. That will contrast with inferred knowledge which computers can discover or be programmed to display using "reasoners." Much more can be represented with this vocabulary, FOAF. The full specification of FOAF is here. Much more can be represented with this vocabulary. We can represent our business or place of employment, where we went to school, our online chat ids, where we have accounts online, such as with facebook.com or linkedin.com, our websites and weblogs and more. One of the most important things we want to represent, is who we know.
foaf:knows
Using this property, we crawlers can discover foaf profiles by crawling from one profile to the next. Each profile will have links to the people that one knows, alone with links to web pages that describe those people, if possible, we link to the file containing the foaf profile of the person we know. Web crawlers, particularly, Semantic Web Crawlers, follow those links… You build your network through links within your foaf profile and the links to you in other profiles. Your foaf profile is stored in a file, typically, in RDF format, which was described earlier in my posts here, i.e. foaf.rdf
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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Defining a Website in Dreamweaver
This video deals with defining a website in Dreamweaver. When defining websites, as opposed to creating a document in a wordprocessor, you deal with multiple files that come together to define what you see on the web page. These files include the html (officially it’s been popular to use a varient of HTML known as XHTML 1.1 – extensible HTML), images, style sheets (CSS – Cascading Style Sheets) that define the look and feel of the site, javascript for interacting with the user and for browser based effects. In addition, many websites have code that runs on the server.
For this reason, it is important to define a site with a particular structure.
For a portfolio of our work visit: http://futurewavedesigns.com/drupal7/porfolio-projects
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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A Protective Instinct–I always wanted to be protected
In my previous post, On Becoming a Liberal, I wrote about the idea of a “bleeding heart liberal.” I ended by saying that I am and was motivated by a passionate desire t protect and to be protected. I can remember this desire developing in childhood. I was very shy throughout child-hood, and into early adulthood. I was very small always and as a younger child, that really brought out that sense of vulnerability and fear of being hurt. It wasn’t just that, though… There were numerous areas of my life where I felt the desire to be protected. My maternal grandparents were very protective and strangely enough, I often found myself embarrassed by that. Not always, though, did I feel embarrassed. Sometimes having them speak up for me was such a wonderful feeling. It made me feel loved and valuable, worthy of protection.
As time went on, over the years, I became increasingly sensitive to the needs of others and their vulnerability to harm, or other forms of vulnerability. Especially, later in life, when I wasn’t the one who was vulnerable any longer, I acted at times, as I would want someone to act on my behalf, or as I would have wanted someone to act if they thought I was being hurt. The idea of one person intimidating another person was not something I could stand or accept. I had to act. I would start confronting a parent for striking, or spanking, their much more vulnerable child. It was what I truly desired that someone would have done for me. Isn’t that how we are supposed to act? Do onto others as you’d have them do onto you. And the corollary to that for me was do for others what you would have wanted someone to do for me, if I was in that situation.
The desire for power was never something I had ever wanted. I never felt the desire to have power over another person (other than in a very rare instance where a person means to harm me, which can be avoided by avoiding bad parts of town late at night).
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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Becoming what they call a Liberal
I remember the epiphany that hit me as an undergrad student at Georgia Institute of Technology, during my early years. I started out that year and previously, as a conservative, having voted for Reagan and identifying myself as a Republican. Indeed, Engineers ( I was majoring in Electrical Engineering) are somewhat conservative in general. Yet, it was a self-proclaimed “bleeding heart” liberal that helped me to define and discover who I really was, who I really am, what I believe, and what kind of values and morals I have.
It just hit me, that the best way of describing myself was as a “bleeding heart” liberal. What really resonated within me, to the core of my being, and what I realized was “right” in my world view, was just that, a great sense of compassion, my heart going out to the vulnerable… a profound desire to care for, protect, and defend others that were vulnerable or those who were hurting or in need. It seemed like the most profound truth to me. I am well aware of the arguments against liberalism, or a politics or governance, or set of laws, described by these terms “liberal,” or “left,” or even more derogatory terms like “leftist” and it’s use to connect people with evil forms of communism. However, these arguments against liberalism, just never seemed logical or right to me. The assumptions made or the conclusions drawn by the right, or the conservative approach, just did not ring true with me as being right, or just or even logical in terms of the arguments made.
However, the “bleeding heart” part of me, came from a deeply ingrained and passionate desire to protect or see that people are protected. I’ll continue with this in the next post.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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A Progressive/Liberal version of the Tea Party
I find in interesting this idea of emulating the Tea Party. Yes, indeed, progressives do have passionate ideas about what we think is right. We care about changing things and creating a better country. We have our own ideas about what is morally and ethically right. We can certainly get behind certain ideas about the way things ought to be. Call it morals or ethical beliefs, these things inspire us with a passion to improve our nation. Sometimes it is quite perplexing to me that there are such radical differences among Americans about these things.
We have so many things in common and yet we are so very divided often about what is right and the way things ought to be. It would be wrong for anyone to think that people like myself do not feel just as passionate about the things that we value… It would be wrong for persons like myself not to speak our conscience.
We cannot help but seek what we know is right. An observer might say that both opposing ideas cannot be right. However, I do not inform my beliefs based only on my passions… on feelings. I find reasonable, logical support for all my beliefs and feel with certainty that my beliefs accurately represent what is right.
For these reasons, I don’t think that I want to emulate the “Tea Party” per se. I don’t view them as being led by the brightest, most rational or sane group of folks. Would our “tea party” also be rascist? I’m not saying this in any way to reflect on the person who is being seen at the center of this movement – Van Jones. I have to say I could relate to some things I heard from him… like why do people who claim to be patriots have such problems with our government of the people, for the people and by the people and with American values – the values that shaped how our nation was formed.
I just think any good movement in America should be careful about who and what they emulate. We should avoid what is bad about the Tea Party and focus on rationality, reason, logic, and intelligence in addition to our passions and values.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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