Mike Posner is a Detroit-native, but his academic career at Duke had to be put on hold recently because his music career began to explode. His CD “30 Minutes to Takeoff” sits at #8 on the Billboard 200 chart, led by the single “Cooler Than Me”. Posner is a guest on tonight’s “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”, airing at 12:30am on NBC. (Will Ferrell is the primary guest, but his Raleigh ties are for another post).

If case you are stuck in a doctor’s reception area or old-folks home, be sure to check out the August 2010 issue of Guideposts magazine. The feature this month CSI: Miami star and Raleigh native Emily Procter. There is a nice article titled “What Inspires Me”. Disappointingly it is not about Emily’s lifelong crush on the boy two-doors-down. Instead it is about her friendship with a wheelchair-riding homeless man named Jim. Emily has done a superb job of keeping her feet on the ground in a city and industry full of insanity. People like Jim are the ones who have reminded her about what really matters.

WRAL announced today the release of a Yahoo! TV Widget. The small data application allows viewers to follow a WRAL data stream while watching a Yahoo! TV Widget-capable TV. The widget can be added by selecting it from the Widget Gallery.

Yahoo! Widget Demo

Just a reminder that when you turn on the TV tonight you’ll find TWC’s new channel lineup all rolled out. Complete information is here. Don’t worry about your scheduled recordings. Their schedules still should be intact.

Wednesday’s episode of The View is scheduled to have Clay Aiken as a guest. The show airs on ABC at 11:00am.

The previously mentioned Time Warner Cable channel realignment is coming to the Raleigh area on June 8. From that point on all channels above 100 will be reassigned to numbers based on the following categories:

• 100s – Local Programming – all OTA channels
• Lower 200s – Kids & Family
• Upper 200s – Learning & Discovery, Faith & Inspiration
• Lower 300s – Entertainment
• Upper 300s – Home & Leisure, Shopping
• Lower 400s – News & Info
• Upper 400s – Music (not Music Choice)
• 500s – Sports
• 600s – Movies
• 700s – Premium Movies, PPV
• 800s – International
• 900s – Music Choice
• 1000s – HD version of the exact same channel with 3-digits

This will be a breeze once you learn a few key channels: CBS, FOX, NBC, and ABC are on 105, 150, 117, and 111. Their HD channels are 1000 higher on 1105, 1150, 1117, and 1111. ESPN is on 500, then ESPN2, ESPNU. Fox Sports Carolinas is on 508. HGTV and Food Network are on 350 and 351, respectively. Palladia is 1453. Yep! That pretty much does it

WRAL has just released version 2.0 of their free substitute browser on the iPhone. The new version allows readers to forward stories to Facebook, Twitter, email, and SMS. It also features a tiny current weather in the upper right, so there is no need for one on the lower menu bar any more. The update also allows one to skip to the next story while viewing an individual article.

A long-awaited feature is the ability to lock/unlock rotation. It is hidden in More | Settings. I’m not sure if this is new in 2.0, per se. While it is nice to have the ability to change rotation, it still is not what I suggested. I’d like to see WRAL’s app behave like Safari where it rotates for three orientations, but does not the phone’s top side is down. Safari’s configuration is the best when lying in best, to be honest.

Finally a word of warning; this app is very crashy (even more than normal iPhone apps!). The majority of the time that I skip to the next story the app crashes. Several times it crashed when jumping in and out of news sections. Unless you are incredibly excited about the sharing features, I’d wait until 2.1.

Last week your favorite site broke the story to Raleigh about Time Warner Cable remapping all of its digital channels in Charlotte. Now Time Warner has posted that these changes will be coming to the Triangle area in June. The rollout dates are as such:

• 4/20: Lumberton
• 6/2: Fayetteville, Dunn, Fort Bragg, Wilson, Southern Pines
• 6/8: Raleigh, Cary, Wake Forest, Youngsville, Garner, East Wake Co., Farmville, Selma, Goldsboro, Seymour Johnson.
• 6/16: Durham, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Henderson, Bunn.

The exciting improvements will remap all SD channels over 100 into categorized groups, and puts HD versions of those channels at a position 1000 channels higher. Finally, the 1- and 2-digit channels you currently know and love will not change (but will be removed in not so many years). TWC has not released specific channel lineups, so we don’t know yet whether or not Time Warner Raleigh will allocate cable networks to the exact same channel numbers as they will in Charlotte.

Time Warner’s gaffe last week (where they accidentally mis-assigned a Playboy ad-roll) made the Jimmy Fallon’s monologue on Friday night. Nice!