Taken directly from the Facebook event:

On Monday, April 19, 2010 at 12:50 pm in the Turlington Plaza area, there will be a protest about parking at UF!

The University of Florida sells 2-3 times as many decals as they have parking spots! Students have to hunt and hope that they “get lucky” to find a parking spot on campus. If this is the case, where is all the money from decal sales going? It’s not going toward building more parking garages but rather towards renovating things such as the Reitz Union and paying out salaries because of their budget cuts!

UF gives a ridiculous amount of tickets for outrageous reasons and sometimes because they know students would rather pay the money than wait 3 + months on appealing the ticket. So, instead of 60 days to appeal a ticket, it was cut back to 30 days, and now 15 days. They are trying to cut back the time students get hoping they forget and owe money anyway!

We’re fighting the cost of decals, the amount of tickets given, where the money goes and more. We want UF to end the practice of issuing tickets as a business to raise money. The City of Gainesville, towing companies, and Parking Services must stop profiting off of poor students! Come and attend this protest. It will be sure to make the front page of The Alligator and possibly other papers.

There’s nothing worse than trying to find parking on campus at 3am and being stuck in your car for 30 minutes until someone decides to get a midnight snack at Steak and Shake. Realistically, I don’t expect much change to happen, but good luck to them.

For those of you that don’t know, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. In the words of the website, it is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. They basically film experts in various subjects speaking on interesting topics, ranging from the science of love to how mushrooms will save the world, and put the videos online for anyone to watch.

UF held its own TEDx conference at Pugh Hall with our brightest professors speaking on the impact of bugs in society, the future of space study, the evolution of the music industry, improving global infrastructure performance, the impact of dance in a global society, and the relationship between music and architecture. We recorded some of the talks from our DJ booth. Not all of them were that interesting from our vantage point, so we’ll only post up the two most entertaining. I’m sure the talks will be on UF’s website sometime in the near future if you’d like to see all of them in their entirety.

Here is Scott Wilson demonstrating what is sure to be the future of digital music:

You can also check out Dr. Barfield’s humorous lecture on bugs and society on our youtube page. It’s still uploading as I post this, so if you don’t see it, check back later.

This was definitely one of the most interesting gigs we’ve ever had. We also found it particularly interesting that everyone LOVED the funky house set we were playing, from professors to freshmen. We attempted to record the set, but accidentally used the wrong line-in settings, so it ended up not recording. However, you can still check out our previous mixes on our “Tunes and Mixes” page, and check out some of the jams we played below:

I kind of wish this event was promoted harder here in Gainesville. TED is one of the more groundbreaking educational platforms in the world, and every university in the United States should host its own TEDx conference. We’ll post an update when the official vids go online, but enjoy our little sneak previews for now.

What’s your favorite TED video?
Are electric trumpets the new keytar?
Do you wish there was a funky house music night somewhere downtown?