The first meeting of the soon-to-be Coalition for Progressive Media has taken place and the dream of a Democracy Nowified Buffalo begins to coalesce. The meeting basically discussed the various ways that can be utilized to bring Democracy Now here. The first step was discussing the possible locations of the show. Because the airwaves have been overwhelmed by the corporate media it is a bit more complicated than simply setting up the garage. The overwhelming opinion seemed to be that we need to get this show heard by as many as possible, and talk centered around which station could provide us with that. Now the problem, of course, is monetary. Democracy Now is actually the cheap part-they give away the first year, and thereafter base the price on a sliding scale between $1,000-$5,000 (to reference this, News Hour w/Jim Lehrer is in the 6-digit range). But, the air time is sold at differeing rates per station, which, for a daily hour-long program, ranges from a couple to twenty-couple thousands of dollars.
From here the discussion led to the inevitable, fund-raising. This money can be generated from ads on the program, but will primarily come from donations. To this effect, Amy Goodman will be appearing at a fundraiser in early December. Our efforts are now focused on advertising this event and the principle behind it and securing enough support to actually make Democracy Now happen ASAP.
We will hopefully have the flyers ready around the beginning of next week. If anyone has anything to offer or to suggest, please email elmwood, paul, emily, or terry. The program needs to be here. It is just the first small step in taking back the public airwaves, but it has the possibilty of opening so many eyes/ears that otherwise may never have the opportunity. Let's do it!

I experienced a tragic racist situation at Wilson Farms today. Below is my letter to Wilson Farms recounting the situation. You can respond in the forum on our site, as well as, send your thoughts to them - here is the contact information.

Phone : 1-800-522-2522

Web Form:

Snail Mail: Wilson Farms
6363 Main Street
Williamsville, NY 14221

To Who It May Concern,
Today, I went to Wilson Farms on Elmwood Ave at Auburn to buy a gallon of water as I have almost everyday for about 2 years. I wish I never left the house. Outside the store was a black homeless guy. He apparently was told by the Wilson Farms Manager Ken Kensek (or something close to that) that he could not wait outside because he was "bad for business." Then the manager dragged him inside by the shoulder in a very, I'm gonna lynch you kind of way, and said he was going to have him arrested for trespassing. Although, I feel this is kind of harsh, that is not even the situation that really offended me as a customer.

At that point, the black homeless man pleaded with Wilson Farm's Ken Kensek? not to be arrested for trespassing outside and then Ken told him, "here's the situation . . if I ever see you again I AM GOING TO CRACK YOUR HEAD OPEN WITH A BASEBALL BAT." Then the black man said, "ok, ok, just don't call the police." Followed by the manager saying,

" DO YOU THINK I'M KIDDING, I'M GOING TO BREAK YOUR SKULL."

I find this to be disgusting and totally unprofessional.

I was shopping at the moment and ran out to tell my friend who was out of earshot. I came back a couple minutes later, not sure what to do.

I decided to return what I bought in protest of the unfair racist treatment and corporal threats against this man. Ken was not immediately visable to I returned the products to the cashier and loudly stated why.

The people behind me also left their goods. I am going to start an all out boycott until there is some sort of formal repercussion for Ken. Lastly, I would like to point out that I am the webmaster of the new a community forum that is just starting this week in order to report on neighborhood news in the Elmwood Strip Community of Buffalo, NY. I expect a formal report as to what repercussions Ken suffered for his unprofessional and downright illegal behavior in your store.

Sincerely,
Paul Visco

The journals are free as always but now we are thinking of offering webspace for our elmwoodstrip.com users own homepages. If you re interested in this service please contact me

This week I am releasing the long awaited Elmwood strip 1.2. I has many new features, most of which you can already check out. First of all you can now add links and images to your journal entires via HTML tags. You can also change you banner, even to an animated swf one. You can change you background color, and not just when you first create the blog but over and over as your heart desires. even better is that you are not limited to the color choices I selected. you can add you own hex value colors oif you would like.

The rest of the weeknend I will be producing new graphics.

I spent a lot of time working on the code this weekend. There are lots more features. You can now upload images to our server. The page then gives you the address of the image and the code you would need to display an image in your journal entry. It also gives you a thumbnail and a way to delete the images stored in your directory.

Now you can also stay logged in thanks to cookies when you are updating your journal and you switch to view your journal. There will be many more features in the next month. Hope you enjoy.

I am trying to add more feature requests as they come in. One problem I am having is that as soon as many people sign up we are going to need some sort of way to categorize them in order to have them easily searchable. I am thinking of dividing it into zip code clans. That seems liek the easiest way. Do you guys have a better idea. If so please post your idea in the forum.

Let it long live in peices sold on ebay. The powerbook met a 40oz bottle of beer in an unfortunate accident and is no longer with us. This is the powerbook that was used to create this page. I am taking this as a message from "god" to give up on crapple computers. So I am on a little break while I wait for my new portable intel-powered openGL workstation. Fuck Apple anyways. I hate them and their lame ass hardware. If it wasn't for OS X I would have dropped them a long time ago. If you don't believ they suck, get this when my powerbook was in repair for defective parts last month they returned it to me without the battery and then tried to blame it on me asking me if I was sure it had a bettery in it when I sent it. I am moving onto Linux which is by the way the operating system this sit eis running on.

Most of you are probably aware of the events surrounding last month's cirtical mass ride. In short, the ride was stopped by police officers and the end result was unnecessary use of violence by police against a completely unviolent group of bikeriders leading to the arrest of nine (some with felony charges). This month's ride set out with everyone aware of the possible consequences and therefore stronger and ready to have that much more fun.
We started from Niagara square through downtown and into the East side. We rode in a line that must have stretched at least a half mile. Counters along the way put the number between 180-200 total bicyclists! It was great fun with catcalls, songs, and rampant good-natured chatter throughout the procession. The people we passed looked curiously and often inquired what was up, someone would respond and give their own interpretation of what it was we were doing. It was great because everyone's explanation was different, some yelled back, "fun!," others talked about bikers' rights, that's the beauty of it, this event is open to everyone's views and mindsets. Another great aspect that I noticed was that as we traversed streets that would normally be tagged as "bad neighborhoods" (ie.: the fruit belt and later the west side on Grant St.) the people generally responded even warmer than in the so-called good neighborhoods. We even grew in number as many of the residents of these communities, already on their bikes, joined in the procession and swelled our numbers.
The entire ride was without any police interference (though there was one instance where a camera was setup and recorded us as we passed), clearly in response to the harsh backlash in the communities from last week's activities. Critical Mass is still going strong and I encourage anyone with a bike to come on out and have one hell of a good time.

Well I have suffered some major setbacks. First off the trackpad died on the powerbook which had to be sent back in to get fixed. While it was in for repair, the memory chip died. Then when I finally got a new chip, the hard drive died. So you think, why not use the iBook. Well lets just say it went swimming an dthe motherboard got fried like chicken.

So basically, I am now typing this on a firewire drive that I have booting into the powerbook until the new replacement drive comes. I lost a lot of code too. So the new color picker is on hold. However, I have deiced to go ahead with adding little windows to each journal entry.

This will all happend probably some time this week. Right now I am having a funeral for the iBook. On a good note I sold the ti4600 finally and I got a good 186.00 for it which is pretty good.

Last of all I have to go work on thew syllabus for my summer class. I am going to be teaching 3D online cartooing at Canisius College starting June 23rd. I guess I am going to have to make some sort of php cartoon frame uploader script. I only have 6 students so I am kind of excited about the whole thing.

I worked a lot more to make the whole site have a common look. Although, I am not incredibly happy with the image it is set up to be easily configerable when I have a little more creative inspiration. For now my brain is zapped from too many SQL querries. I am going to go chill with my tortoise now. It feels really neglected and is tryiing to eat everything in order to get my attention.