BBC Radio gives podcasting a try.

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“BBC Radio has for the last month been making some of its radio shows available for MP3 download. Is this news? Well yes, previously they’ve always streamed their content, so you had to be by your computer to receive it. With downloads you’ve been able to take it with you.” [via Scripting.com]

Our networks should be exploring podcasting but when I talk to people about it they think I’m nuts. The fact that BBC Radio is jumping in (and NPR and a shit-load of other pretty reputable broadcasters) is completely lost on them.

What did you do today? Nothing.

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Just stumbled across this wonderful comic strip. I don’t know what percentage of American’s wind up in nursing homes but we all fear it. At least I do. Even the best nursing home is not a good place. Or so I concluded after my experience with my father (shudder). And by the time “they” have to put you in the home, you’re too far gone to blow your brains out or over-dose.

My standing joke has been: “Just make sure they have broadband.”

Numb3rs.

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I’m a big fan of the movies of Ridley and Tony Scott, so I don’t know how I missed the fact they are brothers. The two are collaborating on TV series (that premiers on CBS in January) called Numb3rs:

“Rob Morrow stars as an FBI agent who recruits his mathematical genius brother to help the Bureau solve a wide range of challenging crimes in Los Angeles. Inspired by actual events, the series will depict how the confluence of police work and mathematics provide unexpected revelations and answers to the most perplexing criminal questions.”

I’d be much more hopeful about the series if it were going to be on HBO but I’ll be watching.

Photo journal.

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Some friends of ours are making a quick holiday trip to see family in Florida and will be travelling at the peak. It gave me a wonderful idea. Take a photo every hour, on the hour, for the duration of the trip. Start with a shot of the alarm clock on day-one. Then, at the top of each hour, look around and take one picture. Nothing posed. Just shoot the first thing that catches your eye. And then go one with your holiday. If you’re awake 15 hours each day, for a fast 3-day trip… you have 45 images without having to think much about what you’re doing. If anybody tries this, let me know how it works. And I’d love to see the photos. If you don’t have a Fotki account, here’s a good reason to set one up.

Play-by-play on line two

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Rick Bozich — a sports columnist for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky– isn’t sure he needs radio anymore:

“I followed the final 15 minutes of the Louisville-Florida basketball game while I was in Freedom Hall on Saturday. The game, remember, was played in Gainesville. I was courtside for Kentucky’s annual Basketball 101 lecture against Indiana. I did not have a radio. I did have my cell phone. I connected to the Internet. Clicked to an ESPN site. Another click, and play-by-play from Gainesville flashed on my screen. Stats. Time. The works. Actually, that’s not true  no greasy bacon ads. So tell me again, for precisely what do I depend on WHAS radio?

From my perspective, the most interesting part of this story is that the cheif operating officer of our company brought it in to me. He gets it and that’s very important. One more thing… Radio is not going away. I don’t want it to go away. But broadcasters must find a way to embrace new technologies instead of trying to lobby them out of existance or deny that existance.

Who needs broadcast television?

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From adrants: “Who needs broadcast television, when podcasting will literally allow for the creation of personalized media channels? In the future, the device referred to as a TV will carry your own personalized podcast that you create and modify to your heart’s content. Looks like growing old might not be so bad.”

To die for

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“Three decades after the U.S. defeat in what Vietnamese call the American War, and just three years since the two nations signed a bilateral trade agreement, U.S.-branded hotels such as Sheraton have opened. U.S.-based tour operators are venturing in. And today, a United Airlines jet touches down in Ho Chi Minh City (still called Saigon by many), marking the first commercial American air link to Vietnam since the war.” — USA TODAY

I think I read some where that the US now does $5 Billion in trade with Vietnam. Flash back to the bloodiest days of “the American War,” and imagine you’re a U.S. soldier being ordered to risk your life to save the South Vietnamese from a life under Communism (I think that’s why we were there). If you could have looked into the future and seen that we would one day be trading partners with Communist Vietnam, would you still have been willing to lay down your life because politicians back in Washington decided it was vital to U.S. foreign policy?

So now our young men and women (and Iraqi men, women and children) are dying for a different foreign policy (I think it’s the War On Terror). Just for fun, let’s pretend it’s 2035 and the U.S. has just signed a new trade agreement with Osama bin Laden. Seems ridiculous. Obscene. But no more impossible than the USA TODAY story above would have seemed in 1970.

Should a young man or woman be asked to lay down their life fighting an enemy that will one day be a trading partner? If we use WWII as an example, I guess the answer is “yes.” We were on the right side in that war and we do lots of business with Germany and Japan (and Italy).

But, somehow, that just doesn’t feel right to me. If I’m going to risk my life to kill the other guys, I don’t want to kiss and make up down the road. Never. Ever. That’s why I would have made a poor soldiar and an even worse Secretary of State.