Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

Its public radio pledge time in Cincinnati and I'm a bit confused on how to proceed this year. Between terrestrial radio and the Internet, I have a huge selection of stations and shows that I could support. To start off, this metro area has two stations that carry NPR news and shows, WVXU and WNKU. Generally I listen to WVXU during drive times since it has the clearer, stronger signal but WNKU does carry Fresh Air during evening drive time which is a nice change of pace.

But with that said, I am more likely to listen to national public radio shows or shows that are produced out of the major cities. For example, my most favorite listen of the week is On the Media which is produced out of New York. On a drive to the airport real early on a Saturday morning, I discovered that WVXU actually carries this show. However, I'm never up at that hour so its because of the show's podcast that allows me to listen to the show. This is also true of the NPR Sunday Puzzle, the Diane Rehm Show, NPR Sports and Brian Unger's Satire Report. Like On the Media, all of these are carried on my local stations but at times when I would never be listening due to my love of sleep and gainful employment. So in this case, a local donation would in theory would contribute some money to those shows.

But what do I do about all the other shows that I like that aren't carried locally. One of the beautiful things about podcasts and the Internet is that I am not limited to my local geographical areas. Its not surprising that WNYC in New York City and KCRW in Santa Monica, CA have wonderful programming. In particular, WNYC has The Brian Lehrer Show and The Leonard Lopate Show. The former is more news/politcs based and the later is more focused on culture. Out west, KCRW has The Business and Left, Right and Center. The Business covers the business that LA is best known for: Show Business and LR&C is by far the best weekly 30 minutes on politics.

This doesn't even cover shows that aren't in the mainstream like the excellent The Sound of Young America or podcasts that are providing a useful public service like Life of a Law Student. After all, the Internet and podcasts greatly expands the possible number voices I can hear so I should broaden what I could get my public radio dollar.

Lastly, I'm not even considering some of the other shows that I listen to that of a commercial or promotional nature like Slate's podcasts,
Diggnation, Tiki Bar TV, Ask a Ninja and The Onion Radio News. While these places don't necessary have a way to donate money, they do offer up things like t-shirts for purchase.

As you can see I have loads of choices (some better than others) but no clear direction on what I should do. It would be pretty pointless to take my desired donation and divide it up between all the shows because what are they going to do with two or three dollars. Does anyone have any grand suggestions?

Just finally caught the first two episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Damn what an enjoyable two hours. Sorkin really knows how to write smart, dense, non-patronizing dialog. Its like the magic from those first few seasons of The West Wing has returned.

Just got the message: Error in NetWkstaGetInfo (2138) when remote desktoping into a VMWare Guest image of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. It turns out this error occurs if the Workstation Service is not running which it wasn't for some unknown reason.

I discovered this morning that my ReplayTV unit hasn't been able to connect to download its channel guide information for the past few days. This is when I discovered that my usual trick of pressing 2-4-3 Zones to bring up the Diagnostics Menu to force a connection wasn't allowing my Replay to connect. It just kept on saying that my device wouldn't connect. After much troubleshooting and net searching, I came this post on howto change your modem settings for the ReplayTV device. This let me choose a lower baud rate and the connection went right thru. This makes me a very happy person.

Also, as an aside, I discovered that the key combination 4-1-1 Zones brings up the version dialog for the ReplayTV. This told me I was running version 3.02 of the firmware which was compiles in Feb. of 2002. I just had a conversation this week with a friend where we discussed how often I was getting software updates for the device. Apparently not very often. :-) However, thru some more searching, version 3.02 appears to be the latest version for my model of ReplayTV.

One of the joys of living in the city is that you can meet all sorts of interesting people that happen to live near each other. Doublely good if you actually get along with these people. Stir in some alcohol and you have yourself the makings of a House Crawl. This incarnation of the house crawl featured 5 houses with 5 signature drinks. Here are the libations:

1. The Caesar - For those who don't know, this is a Bloody Mary made with Clamato instead of Tomato Juice. It is said to be national cocktail of our neighbor to the north, Canada.


2. Our 2nd house featured a very strong rum and fruit punch, that we instantly dubbed Sucka' Punch


3. Next on the list was The American Pie which was very good (and I had far too much of)


4. Next, a classic, the Martini.


5. Lastly, the drink with the best name ever, Pink Panty Pull Down.
   

As you can imagine, a good time was had by all. To prove it, just look at the more photos.

(Also, I am just guessing at the recipes that each of the house bar masters and mistresses used. If someone wants to send me a corrected link for their drink, I'll be happy to update this).

Jeremy Zawodny's post on the nofollow tag made me stop and consider that I have nofollow enabled. While I don't have lots of comments on this blog, I am diminishing the contributions of others by having that enabled. So since I have upgrade my spam defenses on this blog site, I feel more comfortable about disabling this feature. For Movable Type 3.x uses, this is just a matter of going to your plugin page and disabling the Nofollow plugin.

I spotted these flowers outside the P&G Gardents in downtown Cincinnati. They were quite lovely and the camera phone picture came out nicely I think.

I can't believe that there is a product titled Free Range Chicken Poop Lip Junk let alone people willing to buy it. Notice the product is labeled with "Contains No Poop!". Glad they clarified that for me.

Its completely useless, but neat nonetheless: ASCII Maps, a complete rendering of Google Maps into ASCII Graphics.

(via Ned Batchelder)

This one had me wondering. With the picture of the turkey, this could mean Department of Natural Resources. However just as I was taking this picture the owner walked up and told us that it stood for Do Not Resuscitate Me. As an aside, this guy seemed pretty preturbed with me taking a picture of his license plate.

I mentioned awhile back about my public radio donation dilemma. I suppose I should tell everyone what I decided on so as to encourage others. I decided to donate to WVXU here in Cincinnati. I decided to give a bit more to New York since I listen to them more and I am costing them more money since I listen to their shows exclusively via podcast so I hit them with a nice chunk of bandwidth costs. Also, to be honest, the WNYC Mug looks a lot better looking than the ugly Prarie Home Companion mug that WVXU was offering.

Lastly, you can't help but listen to a personal appeal from a public radio host on your own blug. So, I decided to throw him a few bucks by picking up a Sound of Young America T-Shirt.

Someone really like sports radio.

Up until now, i've missed out on one of Cincinnati's better fall events, The Reggage Run. I've been here for 8 years and this is my first time running in this 5K event. Its not so much an event but more of ordeal. The course is extremely hilly with two massive hills. The last 3/4 to 1/2 mile is entirely uphill. I did the race in 29:30 which isn't great considering my goals for next year's marathon. Whatever your time, you can enjoy the large party that they throw with lots of free food and drinks and the money all goes to a really worthy cause.

More photos can be found in the gallery.

Milieu - the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops

This American Life is finally offering a free podcast. Its available here. The trick is that they are only going to have one show available each week, so be sure to fire up your aggregator every week.

(via TSOYA)

I was flipping the TV while tonight and came across one of those ubiquitous clips shows that you see on cable that purport to count down the top 25 of actors, surfers, child stars, and so on. This particular incarnation was about models. I caught the segment on Brooke Burke. They gave a long list of her modeling credits and then said the following, "But Brooke isn't a bimbo, next in her career she showed that she had brains by staring in E!'s Wild On". For anyone who has actually seen that show knows this is very faint praise.

Just got finished listening to the panel discussion What Teens Want and was shocked by one of the kids on the panel. He revealed that he had a $50-$60 a month ringtone and downloadable game habit. That's insane. Espacially considering that this same demographic thinks its ridiculous to spend money on music but are willing to spend a huge amount of money on snippets of songs.

The other really telling thing was that moderator was trying probe the kid's decision making process for purchasing goods in context of the online world. He did this by asking them how they would go about buying a new CD player. The kid hit it out the park by basically saying, "Why would ever want a CD player." Shows you how times change.

Force Majeure - an event or effect that cannot be reasonably anticipated or controlled i.e. An Act of God.

I was inspired by this AskMefi post on massage, espacially the part about massage schools being cheaper, to see if Cincinnati offered something. I am pleased to say that in Blue Ash there is a place called the School of Medical Massage, Cincinnati Campus. The hours aren't great but the price at $33/hour are wonderful. Espacially when you compare this against a place like Mitchell's Day Spa. At half the price, this might be something I treat myself to more often.

If you've ever seen the average looking guy at the bar who seems to be able to talk to any woman he wants and more importantly the woman want to talk to him, then you might have seen a pickup artist. Granted this person may have this gift implictly but it is also just as likely that he has honed his craft. Not surprisingly, the Internet provides a way for these guys to collaborate and build up a body of shared knowledge. If you want to learn more about this fascinating intersection of sociology, libido and self worth all collide in the second half of this episode of The Sound of Young America. It features Neil Strauss who wrote a book called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

Mammon - a personification of riches as an evil spirit or deity.

A reader reported that my Amazon Cincinnati Public Library Greasemonkey script was no longer working. I've noticed this before but hadn't gotten around to looking into the problem. Well, a reader complaint is all it took for me to look into the problem. It turned out to be a pretty easy fix. Here is the fixed script:

cincinnatilibrarylookup.user.js version 0.2

Enjoy!

Copious - large in quantity or number; abundant; plentiful

As a big fan of the Wikipedia and ocassional contributor, I like to do my part to keep the site up to date and free of mistakes and vandalism. While I certainly fix errors as I come across them, a different type of stewardship is needed if the site is to survive. This is where an individual keeps track of changes and double checks them that take place to a small subset of the site's entries. Presumably these are entries that the watcher has some expertise or feels compelled to take care of them. I'd like to do that on a few areas that I know about (e.g. my high school Wheeling Central). The traditional way to do this is to watch a special page of changes that the Wikipedia provides that shows recent changes to your "Watchlist". While this works, it's hard to remember to check it because frankly the pages I care about don't change very often. This is why when I found this article that explains Wikipedia's per entry edits RSS feeds I was very happy. Adding these feeds to your aggregator is truely the best way you can steward pages in the Wikipedia world.

While for the most part, I like iTunes, I am disappointed by a few things relating to how the product handles Podcasts. For one, I'd like to be able to get the URL of where a podcast track can be downloaded from. This would make it so much easier to share good episodes with friends. Secondly, I'd like to get an export of my subscribed podcast feeds in some reasonable format (e.g. OPML...not that OPML is completely reasonable, but that is another post). Getting an extract of your feeds is currently impossible in Windows iTunes (I hear this is possible to achieve on a Mac with AppleScript but I am Mac-less so I can't verify this).

Its with this frame of mind that I came upon the iTunes Windows SDK. I thought to myself, "Cool, I can code around this lack of features". Sadly, I was mistaken. This SDK does work and Apple should get praise for making something that was documented and relatively easy to use. However, the SDK is 2 years old and has no Podcast specific behaviors or insight. Interestingly enough, thru the API, the "Podcast" folder that you see in the UI is considered a playlist equal to the playlists that you can create. This means that you can get access to the individual episodes of your Podcasts but there isn't any information about the Podcast feeds themselves and no additional Podcast information like the original URL of the track. Oh well, perhaps they will release an update at some point.

I just discovered that dropping a whole Reese's Peanut Butter Cup into a steaming mug of hot chocolate is crazy delicious.