Josh Shear

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

40 Below Civic Engagement Task Force Brings Fourth Involvement Fair Downtown
Event to bring together non-profit organizations and volunteers across Central New York

Syracuse, NY — The 40 Below Civic Engagement Task Force is pleased to announce the fourth Central New York Involvement Fair, Thursday, May 27 from 4 until 7:30 p.m. at SUNY Oswego Metro Center, 2 Clinton Square, Syracuse. The fair will be followed by a networking event hosted by Syracuse First at Al's Wine & Whiskey, 321 S. Clinton St., Syracuse..

The Involvement Fair is a place for local volunteers to find non-profits to become involved with. Picture a job fair, but instead of company recruiters sitting behind tables collecting resumes from nervous students, the tables are staffed by passionate non-profit volunteers or employees, and the people walking around are local residents looking to engage in their communities.

The first three involvement fairs, held at Drivers Village, Le Moyne College and Pensabene's, have been hugely successful for area agencies and organizations, and bringing the event downtown will only mean easier access for more area residents.

There is a nominal table charge for non-profits (RSVP required), and the event is free to attend for anyone looking for volunteer opportunities (no RSVP needed).

The networking event at Al's, hosted by local non-profit organization Syracuse First, will feature food and drink specials for Involvement Fair vendors and attendees with name badges. The event is free to attend.

Local media outlets, non-profit organizations and anyone wishing to attend are invited to contact Civic Engagement Task Force co-chairs Kelly Bayne and Josh Shear at the information below. The task force website is 40bcetf.org.

Kelly Bayne: baynek@gmail.com
Josh Shear: joshuanshear@gmail.com

Chris Brogan's video comes along at the right time for me and for some people around me.

Take-aways: People only know what you've done. You know, more or less what you're capable of, and beyond that, you might even surprise yourself while in the process of showing others what you can do.

OK, so everybody and her second cousin's oldest daughter has already written about the new Google. But I'm a fan of this new design, at least as far as the logo and SERPs go.

Admit it, you didn't even realize it was a new logo. But it's a bit bigger, and they got rid of the drop shadow. It really pops off the page.

And then there are the SERPs (that's Search Engine Results Pages if you're new here).

All that stuff on the left? A lot of people in the search industry say it looks really cluttered. But we (those of us in search) already knew that stuff was buried up at the top and bottom in various menus. Most people didn't. Now it's obvious that it's there to everyone.

So yeah, I'm diggin' the new look. Now if only they could make Wave or Buzz useful. At this point, I'd settle for one of them.

I got this press release regarding the 2010 Shaun Luu Horror Fest, which will raise money for Golisano Children's Hospital and the Westcott Community Center. Last year, the festival kicked off a successful $10,000 campaign to raise money for a nursing station at Golisano Children's Hospital. Hopefully you'll be able to get out and support the event!

***

The 2010 Shaun Luu Horror Fest will take place Friday, June 11^th to  Sunday, June 13^th, with all raised funds to benefit the Westcott Community Center and Upstate Medical University and Golisano Children's Hospital.

The 2009 Shaun Luu Horror Fest completed a pledge of $10,000 to Upstate Golisano Children's Hosptial in memory of Shaun Luu.  Shaun died in 2005 at 23 after a long battle with brain cancer.   The horror movie/ music festival raised $5,840, which included a $1,775 contribution from the Palace Theatre, a host of the film festival.  The latter gift represents a portion of the proceeds from the theatre's monthly "Brew & View" 35mm themed film series.

This year’s events kick off at 6:30 pm on June 11^th with a six-band bill at the Westcott Community Center, followed by horror films at The Palace Theatre from 12 pm, Saturday, June 12^th until 5 am Sunday, June 13th.  The horror fest wraps up with an all-day music fest at Monirae’s starting at 12 pm, followed by an afterparty hosted by the Half Penny Pub in Armory Square at 12 am, June 14^th.

The following is a detailed schedule of events:

DAY 1

Friday June 11th @ Westcott Community Center - benefit for Community Center
6pm doors open/ all ages/ $7
6:30pm - music

LIKE WOLVES http://www.myspace.com/likewolves666
MANDATE OF HEAVEN
END OF THE YEAR http://www.myspace.com/endofayear
MISTLETOE http://www.myspace.com/mistletoe315
TIGER FLOWERS http://www.myspace.com/tigerflowersnyc
COWARDS http://www.myspace.com/wearecowards

Westcott Community Center
826 Euclid Avenue
Syracuse - (315) 478-8634

DAY 2 -
THE 2010 SHAUN LUU HORROR FEST:

SATURDAY JUNE 12th
@ The Palace Theatre
2384 James St. Syracuse, NY

All movies on original 35mm film!
All ages matinee, Noon-3:30pm, $8.00
INDIANA JONES AND TEMPLE OF DOOM
THE GATE

Adults 16+, 4:30pm, $20.00
DEATH RACE 2000 (Corman version)
HENRY PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER
STREET TRASH (Q & A and FIRST ever Live Commentary over 35mm print with Writer Roy Frumkes)
TORTURE DUNGEON (1970 Andy Milligan film)
EVIL DEAD (Official GRINDHOUSE TOUR DATE)
WEIRD SCIENCE
HALLOWEEN 3 SEASON OF THE WITCH
ALIENS DEADLY SPAWN

Planning to come to all 10 movies? Get in for just $20!

This is a tentative. Films may run ahead or behind schedule. Use this as a general guide.

NOON - 2pm : INDIANA JONES TEMPLE OF DOOM
2:00-3:30pm : THE GATE
3:30pm - 4:15pm : DINNER BREAK
4:30 - 7:30pm : DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)/ HENRY PORTRAIT OF SERIAL KILLER (1986)
7:30pm - 7:45pm : Break
7:45pm - 10:00pm : STREET TRASH/ TORTURE DUNGEON (1970)
10:00pm - 10:15pm : Break
10:15 - ? : EVIL DEAD, WEIRD SCIENCE, HALLOWEEN 3, DEADLY SPAWN

DAY THREE
Sunday June 13th - 100% benefit towards Golisano Childrens Hospital and Upstate Medical Center
@ MONIRAE'S
688 County Route 10
Pennellville, NY 13132-3314
(315) 668-1248

( 16 BANDS ONLY $10)
Doors open at noon/ all ages w/ re-entry
first band 12:30pm. Show goes down at 11:30pm
Band line up from headliner to opener

ANOTHER BREATH http://www.myspace.com/anotherbreath
GHOSTxSHIP http://www.myspace.com/ghostxship315
THIS IS HELL http://www.myspace.com/thisishell
ARCHITECT http://www.myspace.com/architectkills
RINGWORM http://www.myspace.com/ringworm13
FREYA http://www.myspace.com/freya
THE LAST SEASON http://www.myspace.com/thelastseason
WALK THE LINE http://www.myspace.com/walktheline315
IRON RAIN http://www.myspace.com/ironrainchicago
ROSETTA http://www.myspace.com/rosetta
EAST OF THE WALL http://www.myspace.com/eastofthewall
FOUND DEAD HANGING http://www.myspace.com/founddeadhangingBTG
PUBLIC ASSISTANCE http://www.mediafire.com/?iwneiyon4kz
EBONY SORROW http://www.myspace.com/ebonysorrow
LUCERTOLA http://www.myspace.com/lucertoladoom

STRONG WILLED http://www.myspace.com/strongwilledxxx

POST SHOW AT HALF PENNY PUB SUNDAY NIGHT
Sunday Night MIDNIGHT- 2am Post Party @ The Half Penny Pub - 21 and over FREE SHOW )
ADELPHIA http://www.myspace.com/musicbyadelphia
Mayflower http://www.myspace.com/mayflower
Night Owls

The Half Penny Pub
321 West Fayette Street
Syracuse, NY 13202-1201
(315) 478-3091

I wrote the other day about QR codes, primarily because I'm starting to use them. But in general, bar codes and bar code scanning have me a little too giddy for my own good.

Mostly what happened is one day at work, someone said, "Hey, I heard you can read this thing on a cell phone," and pointed to a QR code. So I went to the Android App Market and downloaded a few bar code applications, finally settling on Barcode Scanner by ZXing. It read the QR code fine.

But then I brought it home (always a smart thing to do with your cell phone), and flipped over the Scrabble Dictionary that was sitting on the coffee table. Yeah, it scanned that fine, too – and then linked me to a Google Shopping results page that offered me various locations and various prices for the book.

I then scanned the bar code on a box of staples from Target and while it read the code, it couldn't find a shopping result. So I searched the Web, and got a bunch of sites in Chinese, which probably made sense, since they were made in China.

Then for kicks, I hopped over to Target.com and discovered you can only get them in stores, so everything made sense.

Anyway, there are a bunch of bar code standards, including a unique one for the Post Office. With smart phones taking over the mobile phone market, I'm really curious to see where this goes.

I got a press release in from Crazy Diamond at Assault City Roller Derby.

***

Assault City Roller Derby is excited to announce its first home bout of 2010 at the Greater Baldwinsville Ice Arena in Baldwinsville, NY on Saturday, May 15th. Assault City will take on Roc City Roller Derby of Rochester in a rematch of last year’s home opener. Doors open at 6 PM and the bout starts at 7 PM. There will be refreshments, halftime entertainment and loads of excitement.

General admission tickets are available at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/109079 for $10 each. A limited number of front line tickets are $20 each and reduced-price children’s tickets are also available. $1 from each ticket sold will benefit Shriners’ International, who provide programs for children with orthopedic conditions, burns, spinal cord injuries and other conditions.

ACRD is an all-women’s flat track roller derby league consisting of working mothers, professionals, wives, and students, ranging in age from 21 to 45. Their goal is to help local communities and promote women’s empowerment. Since its inception in late 2007, Assault City has competed on the road in Vermont, New Jersey, and Ohio as well as throughout Upstate New York. ACRD is recruiting skaters and referees. Skaters must be 21 years old; no skating experience is required. Refs can be male or female. For additional information, please visit www.AssaultCityRollerDerby.com.

I know I'm in deep at work. We took a trip to Home Depot for a doorknob, some fertilizer, some charcoal and a few other household goods, and I couldn't quit looking at the shelving.

Essentially, the material handling industry is about moving stuff and storing stuff. And the Home Depots and Lowes and BJ's of the world basically take pallet loads of stuff from trucks or trains or boats and move them to warehouses where they sit on racks.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you knew this, you likely just never thought through the process. There's actual thought that goes into those shelving units, and I'm not talking about from a marketing and store layout perspective. What goes on the shelves is important to consider, and so is how it gets there.

I've never noticed grooved tracks on the floor, so they're not using something like an automated guided forklift. They're likely, instead, either using some sort of narrow aisle truck, or possibly a small counterbalanced forklift, since when it comes down to it, those aisles aren't all that wide.

From a technical standpoint, the shelving is only the metal grating on which you actually put the stuff. The unit on which you lay shelving is called racking. Racks have certain standard widths because pallets – the wood or plastic things that a giant bundle of paper towels, for instance, comes stacked on – have standard widths.

(Aside: There's a lobbying fight in Congress right now. Some plastic pallet manufacturers want stricter fire code measures for wood pallets, which would essentially make wood pallets much more expensive both to manufacture and to use. I hate when competition gets worked out through legislation. If you have the better product, people will use it.)

Racking is set up in various ways depending on how you load it. If you go to buy bulk nails or screws or whatever, the shelves are just set up to hold bins, and someone puts those on by hand. The boxes of 50 granola bars you get from BJs were once on some sort of pallet and were probably wheeled out of the warehouse on a dolly to be unwrapped and manually placed on lower shelves. But if you look up, you'll oftentimes see bulk items still wrapped in giant loads. Sometimes they're even still on pallets.

Then there's those long pieces of wood or piping you can get – the kind that doesn't fit on normal racks because the support beams would get in the way. So they're on what's called cantilevered shelving. Essentially, it's a beam supported from only one side. People have these things in their homes, too – you might screw or nail a piece of prettily designed metal into your wall and place a piece of painted wood on top for a nice shelf. Those pieces of metal are cantilevered; they're supported from the back by the wall, but they're on their own for the rest of it.

There's a whole process to choosing whether you're going to just slide the pallets in and use the pallets themselves as the shelving, or whether you're going to place the load, with or without the pallet, on a bunch of rollers to do the sliding for you, or something else.

There's also the whole thought of how you're going to unload. Most stores use a last in, first out method, just like if you were loading your car with groceries – since the first thing you put in the trunk is against the back wall, you grab the last thing you put in first. Since warehouse stores tend to put their racks up against the wall, or back-to-back with another rack that has different items on it, this system works best.

Some warehouses, though, use a first in, first out system, where you load something from one side, and unload it from the other. If you're loading and unloading something like this with a forklift, you use a drive-through rack, which a truck can enter from either side (or drive all the way through if there's not a stack of something in the way). Those store racks would be drive-in racks, which a truck can enter, but then has to back out because there's support beam or something in the way.

You may have noticed the funny not-exactly-bar-codes looking things I dropped on the Contact page. That's called a Quick Response bar code, or simply a QR code.

I've been learning about them and their various applications for a little while now. Seems they've been in use in Japan for quite a while, and now they're making their way to the U.S.

You can do quite a bit with these things: Simply drop a URL or a text message, for instance, or embed a bunch of contact information. Or an ad, or a coupon, or information about a painting at a gallery.

And the fun part is any smart phone with an auto-focus camera can read them. BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 and newer even comes with one built-in, if you're only including your BBIM or a URL. There are other apps out there that will read more complex messages.

I've been using Barcode Scanner by ZXing for my Android phone; it's free and handles a lot of 1-dimensional (standard product) bar codes as well. I've also been recommended QuickMark for the iPhone and iPad (99 cents).

I wouldn't know what to get for the BlackBerry or Palm, but I know there are apps out there. Stick a link in comments if you're using a good one.

There are plenty of free QR code generators on the Web, as well; I've been using the one from ZXing for contact info and the one from Kaywa for URLs.