24/7 DIY Media Conference @ The Internet.

I also saw this on Boing Boing.  A DIY Video Conference put on by USC:

24/7: A DIY Video Summit will bring together the many communities that have evolved around do-it-yourself (DIY) video:
artists, audiences, technology providers, academics, policy makers and industry executives. The aim is to discover common ground, and to chart the path to a future in which grassroots and mainstream, amateur and professional, artist and audience can all benefit as the medium continues to evolve.

It looks like they will be streaming some of Friday’s academic content on the web.

Link to conference website.
Link to live video stream of panel discussions.
Link to info about forums, IRC channels, and other ways of communicating amongs conference participants

Your Campaign Here

Keep Out All That I Fear Yard Sign

One of the yard sign designs that Chiara and I submitted for the Your Campaign Here project, titled Keep Out All That I Fear was selected for production and distribution.

Link

Update: The IDS did a very, very short story on the Your Campaign Here project and Chiara was interviewed:

The first winning sign was a collaboration of two artists, Chiara Galimberti and Geoffrey Hing. Galimberti, an Italian native, said since she is not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to vote, the contest was a chance for her to participate in the campaign.

“Just seeing all the debate, I thought it was a strong avenue for politics without being a part of it,” Galimberti said. “I’m an outsider, but I still have strong political ideas.”

Link to IDS article.Update: I saw this minimalist campaign sign on Boing Boing:

Link to Boing Boing post about the sign.

webserver_auth module for Drupal 5

I’ve been playing around with Drupal for work and wanted to use mod_auth_kerb to authenticate Drupal users. The Webserver Auth module seemed helpful, but only worked in Drupal 4. I got the module working with Drupal 5.5 running on Apache 2.2.3 using mod_auth_kerb 5.1.

Link to my patch to make webserver_auth-4.7.x-1.x-dev work with Drupal 5.x
Link to documentation  on updating  Drupal 4.7 modules to Drupal 5.

CRITICAL ISSUES LECTURE SERIES presents Rashad Shabazz, Berkeley University “Carceral Geographies and Black Masculinity: The Prisonization of Black Living Space” @ Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, Bridgewaters Lounge (IU Campus). 4p.

CRITICAL ISSUES LECTURE SERIES presents Rashad Shabazz, Berkeley University “Carceral Geographies and Black Masculinity: The Prisonization of Black Living Space”
Time and Location: 4 p.m.
Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, Bridgewaters Lounge
Sponsors: African American and African Diaspora Studies

Published
Categorized as Lets Go

IU Black History Month Events.

From the BHM website:

On behalf of the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs and the IU Bloomington Black History Month Committee, we are inviting you to join us celebrating Black History Month. The Black History Month website will navigate you through the activities that the Indiana University and Bloomington Communities will feature during the month of February.

The 2008 Black History Month theme is “Building Our Community: Celebrating Our Past; Securing Our Future.” During Black History Month, the campus and the community will come together to celebrate the invaluable contributions that African Americans have made to our community and to our larger society. As we strive to build a better and more equitable community for all of our citizens, our celebration will include programs and activities which, while taking a look at our past, will offer a vision for the future.

The variety of programs planned for Black History Month include our keynote lecture by Terrance Roberts, a member of the Little Rock Nine; Film Director Raquel Cepeda and the Blood Diamonds Documentary; Step Afrikah! Step Show Performance; and the African American Dance Company and its 11th Annual Dance Showcase. Our hope is that you will regularly refer to the calendar of Black History Month programs and activities on this website and join us in our month long celebration. A full schedule of events and contact information are available on our calendar link.

Sincerely,

David F. Hummons,
Chair, IU Bloomington Black History Month Committee

See http://www.indiana.edu/~bhm/events.html for event listing and details.

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Categorized as Lets Go

push: Psychogeography


I heard an interview with the author on Living on Earth on NPR and it sounded interesting, and linking reading the Power of Maps and other things I’ve been thinking about when traveling.

From the interview:

GELLERMAN: It’s interesting on airplanes now, on the backs of the seat in front of you, you can see, you know, a map and you see yourself traveling virtually over this place. But, for all intents and purposes, you’re just in this hermetically sealed airplane.

SELF: Yes, and I think it’s a virtuality. I mean, everything about modern flight, which I’ve expatiated on elsewhere in that book, is in fact designed to make the experience boring and dull, it’s designed to virtualize it within a corporate environment. You know, there’s no reason why they couldn’t put much bigger windows in planes. There’s no reason why the stewards and stewardesses shouldn’t wear, you know Ride of the Valkyrie helmets and the captain shouldn’t shout over the P.A., ‘wheee!’ as you take off. You know, they don’t want you to be excited. They don’t want you to know where you are. And in a sense, nobody really wants to know where you are or wants you to know where you are. You know, people who travel for business especially, may go to many different cities in a year, and apart from a tiny little grid of streets around their hotel, they’ll have no real sense of orientation.

GELLERMAN: This line jumped at me, actually. I was surprised to read it. You write that ‘the place chooses you. It’s not so much that you choose a place.’

SELF: I’m not sure whether I mean that literally. But what I think I do mean is that – again, we live in a culture where place is sold to you. We’re kind of accessorized by place. People say ‘oh, I went to x,’ or ‘I went to y,’ or ‘the beaches are fabulous at z,’ or ‘they’ve got fantastic ethnic jewelry in p,’ and ‘why don’t you go to m?’ You know, they’re products. Places are products and travel magazines and travel journalism is by and large a catalog of these products that’s sold to us. And people acquire place as they might acquire any other object in that way, you know, their memory, their digital cameras, you know, they’re loaded up with these vignettes of place just as any collector might show you their Sevre pottery or their beer labels or whatever it is they collect. And I think that, you know, in order to have a profound relationship with place, again coming back to this idea of kind of knowing where you are, you have to look for those places that choose you in that way and say, ‘you know, you’re not going to be here for a day or so or a couple of days, you’re going to have an evolving, perhaps a lifetime relationship with me. I’m a place that you want to know about.’ And I think, you know, for all of us who, who think about, about the world, and who think about our place in it, that that’s true. That has a resonance. And when I look back over my own life, I mean – you know, a couple of the places that I’ve come to think of as kind of ‘my places’ over the years, I didn’t even like them when I went there. It wasn’t about liking. It wasn’t necessarily about having a good time. There was something more profound going on there.

Link to LOE interview.

Good Luck, The Hot New Mexicans, The Bradleys @ WIUX Stationhouse. 8p. free.

Good Luck is from Bloomington, a fairly new band whose members all come from a variety of other musical projects.  They play nice, melodic power-pop that reminds me a little of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.  The Hot New Mexicans are from Athens, GA and play punk music, but some songs are more down-tempo, nostalgic, and boozy.

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Categorized as Lets Go

Boxcar Books 6-Year Anniversary Dessert Party and Open House

Boxcar Books 6-Year Anniversary Dessert Party and Open House
Saturday, February 2nd 2008
7pm
at 310A S. Washington St.

Boxcar Books is turning 6 years old on February 2nd, and we’re
throwing an open-house and dessert party! For six years, Boxcar has
been proud to be one of many centers of community, culture, and
activism in Bloomington, and we owe our success to our you. Our loyal
customers, our supportive Bloomington and IU community, and our
volunteers.

To thank all of these valuable individuals and in lieu of our typical
annual benefit dinner, we?re opening up our doors for an evening of
delicious desserts, door prizes, an art show provided by the Deep
Roots Animal Sanctuary, a sale of 20% off everything, DJ?s and other
surprises. Please come on by for drinks and desserts in a casual
format and celebrate with us the continued success of Bloomington?s
only non-profit, all volunteer run bookstore and community center.

Check out images from our beginning:
http://www.boxcarbooks.org/index.php?set_albumName=The-Shop&name=gallery&include=view_album.php

Healthy Indiana Plan

Currently, I don’t have any health insurance. I think this is true for most of my peers, and for many low-income people, whether they’re low-income because of lifestyle and career choices, like me, or because they lack the economic mobility to obtain incomes that would allow for jobs that get a whole life policy with dividends and health coverage. None of them have incomes that would allow the purchase of individual insurance.

Currently, I have access to some medical care through the Monroe County Volunteers in Medicine clinic, which offers free medical and dental care, similar to what you would receive from an Atlanta orthodontist  or a family doctor or dentist to residents of Monroe County who are below 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL). This is certainly a good resource, but I’m not sure how far the care extends for advanced procedures, or in the event of some kind of emergency or catastrophic illness or injury.

Indiana recently introduced the Healthy Indiana Plan which is state-subsidized health insurance for low-income Indiana residents. Again, to qualify for this, one must be a legal Indiana resident, between 19 and 64, and make less than 200% of the FPLwhich amounts to:

Family Size Maximum Annual Income* Approximate Maximum Monthly Income
1 $20,400 $1,700
2 $27,360 $2,280
3 $34,320 $2,860
4 $41,280 $3,440
5 $48,240 $4,020

The cost of this insurance will be between 2 and 5% of the gross family income for qualifying people, and according to the HIP website, the coverage includes:

physician services, prescriptions, diagnostic exams, home health services, outpatient hospital, inpatient hospital, hospice, preventive services, family planning, and case and disease management.Mental health coverage is also included and is similar to coverage for physical health, and includes substance abuse treatment, inpatient, outpatient, and prescription drugs.

The HIP coverage is 3-tiered and structured like this:

  • A POWER Account valued at $1,100 per adult to pay for medical costs. Contributions to the account are made by the State and each participant (based on ability to pay). No participant will pay more than 5% of his/her gross family income on the plan.
  • A basic commercial benefits package once annual medical costs exceed $1,100.
  • Coverage for preventive services up to $500 a year at no cost to participants.

This seems very Republican (relative to some of the rhethoric I’ve heard in the news about different suggestions for health coverage policies) in it’s design because of the inclusion of the POWER Account (which I assume is what I’ve heard called a medical savings account) and because the plan seems to be administered by two private carriers: Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield and MDWise with AmeriChoice.

I believe that coverage will be limited to around 30,000 people (due to limitations on funding) and the plan will be funded by an increased tax on cigarette sales, but haven’t confirmed this in the actual release of the plan.

Of personal interest to me is the fact that it seems that much of the plan information is accessed and administered via the Internet. All plan participants must have an e-mail account (or will be given one if they do not) and both carriers list “Community Resource Centers” with internet access as part of their “Enhanced Services”. I think that more and more social services are using Internet technologies because they allow for cost savings. However, I fear that the costs of home Internet access (particularly for people with bad/no credit), unfamiliarity or discomfort with using Internet services, and the restrictions on access to public Internet resources like libraries or community resource centers (hours that the facilities are open may not match work schedules, no childcare options) may make the navigation of social services more alienating for their users.

In any case, I’m going to apply for the HIP and blog about my experiences.

Link to HIP home page
Link to summary of HIP