Satellite Radio for your computer. Attaches to your computer via the USB. Access to all 100 channels. You can save song titles and artist names to an “alert” list and get a pop-up message when a favorite song or artist is playing on a different channel. Click and you’re there. XM says “it’s not Internet radio (since the signals are still delivered via satellite), so users will experience no buffering or stalls, no slow channel changes, and the program won’t affect the PC’s performance.” The product is scheduled to begin shipping May 2nd for $69.95. I’ve never been one to listen to the radio at work but this could change that. Tell me again why this will have no impact on “traditional” radio.
“Enlarged prostitute”
Those watching the closed captions on the 6:30 p.m. Tuesday feed of Peter Jennings’s “World News Tonight” were informed that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was “in the hospital for an enlarged prostitute.” Apparently the typist hit the wrong key, or keys. Greenspan was home recovering Wednesday from prostate surgery, said his wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. As for that “enlarged prostitute,” Mitchell told us: “He should be so lucky.” (Lloyd Grove – Washington Post) By way of Shop Talk.
BBC checks with Radio Iowa
One of the reporters that works for our network in Des Moines (Matt Kelley) was interviewed by the BBC today. A British man was arrested in Fort Madison (Iowa) after flying there from England to rendezvous with a 14-year-old Iowa girl. The two met on the Internet three months ago. The man tried to pay his hotel tab with a check from a bank in England… a dispute arose… the cops were called and he mentioned the name of the girl who was staying with him. The girl had been reported missing by her parents as a runaway the day before. The BBC called the Radio Iowa newsroom and asked Matt Kelley to fill them in on the story. The busted Brit, by the way, is a radio deejay who –if convicted– could get 12 years in prison. I’ll see if Matt recorded the interview from his end. Doubt it.
Dennis Miller on Congress and politics
“Congress is just a place where we send mediocre men to get Earl Scheibed into looking kind of, vaguely, consequential. And politics is just a bullshit world where “my esteemed colleague” means “this prick here.”
“Fat guys are the chirping canaries in the mineshaft of freedom.”
– From Dennis Miller’s sixth HBO special
King of Torts, Pattern Recognition, Altered Carbon
I would have sworn I mentioned these but can’t find any reference. John Grisham’s King of Torts was… predictable. And not very interesting. But I couldn’t put it down. Hmmm. I enjoyed William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition more than any of his recent books. And Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon was pretty damned good, despite similarity to early Gibson novels.
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
“In the 25th century, it’s difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is “digitized” and from which -unless the stack is hopelessly damaged- their consciousness can be downloaded (“resleeved”) with its memory intact, into a new body.”
— Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Blogging from Baghad?
I have no idea if this is the real deal. But if it is, well, it’s kind of amazing. Or maybe not. If it IS legit –and at least one person has done some research– it’s just such a good example of blogging.
“…half an hour ago the oil filled trenches were put on fire. First watching Al-jazeera they said that these were the places that got hit by bombs from an air raid a few miniutes earlier bit when I went up to the roof to take a look I saw that there were too many of them, we heard only three explosions. I took pictures of the nearest. My cousine came and told me he saw police cars standing by one and setting it on fire. Now you can see the columns of smoke all over the city.”
Assume for the sake of discussion this what it appears to be. No governments. No big news organizations. Just some guy in a city under attack, publishing his thoughts, feelings, whatever… to the entire world. The Internet has changed/is changing the world and blogging is an important part of that change.
Doc Searls, David Weinberger: Net fundamentals.
“When we look at utility poles, we see networks as wires. And we see those wires as parts of systems: The phone system, the electric power system, the cable TV system. When we listen to radio or watch TV, we’re told during every break that networks are sources of programming being beamed through the air or through cables. But the Internet is different. It isn’t wiring. It isn’t a system. And it isn’t a source of programming.”
1. The Internet isn’t complicated
2. The Internet isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet’s value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internets three virtues:
– a. No one owns it
– b. Everyone can use it
– c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already
Halley Suitt on writing and blogging
“And everything I ever learned about writing didn’t matter anymore. Everything I ever thought about writing went out the window as the breeze blew through my hair and the words poured out of me. I didn’t have to take writing seriously. I didn’t have to take words seriously. I didn’t have to sound like anyone else. I didn’t have to sound like The New Yorker — which weirdly, I sometimes sound like a little by NOT TRYING TO SOUND LIKE IT. So it showed me that I had a lot of hang-ups about writing and it showed me how to get over them fast. It showed me how to sound like myself. It gave me back my voice, which surprised people and surprised no one as much as it surprised me. Blogging was a place I could go and be me, completely, totally, unapologetically me. And if people didn’t like it, screw ’em. And I could write the hell out of the screen and if it blew up and disappeared, it didn’t matter anyway, because I could always come back and try something else again later. So despite all my inclinations towards bottles of ink and pads of paper, I started to blog and blog and blog and blog and there was no stopping me.”
Windows Media Encoder Series 9
Discovering the power of Windows Media Encoder Series 9. I’m really poor with math and have to believe I’ve made some kind of error but it appears that Media Encoder crunched a 780 meg avi file down to a 9 meg wmv file. And it still looks pretty good. I don’t see how that can be. Feeling my way along with new tools and you can check out a couple of early projects. The first is a 5 minute montage of pix from many moons ago. The second is a sixty second trailer for an 18 minute piece I did on The Derry Brownfield Show (did I post this already?).
Till now, I’ve really tried to make everything work for folks still on dial-ups but I think I gotta let that go. Life is just shitty at anything less than broadband. I know, I was there for many years. It just sucks and I’m sorry about it. So get cable if you can or DSL. If not, just check your email and forget the web. It really isn’t there for a dial-up.