I noted this low on the media radar sometime around Thanksgiving but hadn’t gotten around to blogging it yet: Dial-a-Human!
i vid
Yesterday I gave my parents a real-time video tour of the house and grounds via the magic of ‘high-speed’ internet and wifi. I must be a seriously negative creep because instead of marveling that we could do such a thing, I most have thunk on how aggravating and infuriating it is to deal with thousand-dollar technology that works as well as the two-dollar technology of 1968, at least as I recall it. Except the whole realtime video thing. And the two-dollar thing.
This of course fills me with well-warranted self-loathing, especially when I reflect on the fact that the easiest thing to cobble up on moving in to the new place was a Silvertone Victrola cabinet containing one (1) five-year-old iBook with an Airport card and one (1) set of high-quality powered spruce-cone computer speakers. I have been using this nightmare hybrid to stream in roughly equal proportion music from my 20-odd gb stash, near-real-time radio from local NPR gabfest KUOW, the same from old-home-place dusty classics champeen WFIU, and assorted other public radio streams including local cooler-than-thou woo-woo yipniks KEXP and also-old-home-place and shaggy enough to get me to relax faves WFHB.
Still, it’s the classical radio in front of the fire to which I’ve turned the most. Technology sucks.
Sweat
Manuel calls our attention to the phenomenon of penguin sweaters, happily including pictures.
Blog chatter
Viv and I are breakfasting at the W this morning, and the chatter at the next table appears to be about some sort of blogging start up.
I’d take a picture, but I won’t.
DVD 2 iPod
HOWTO Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software.
QUERY: do I have to help?
Last year
This thread is where I spent last Christmas, in a room with Viv, my parents, and Spencer. Can’t help thinking about it again today.
Hark
Off in the Christmas Cosmos. [via MeFi]
Fuel
Success!
more Xmas audio
[via Boing Boing] 10 + 100 Creative Commons Christmas Songs. I’ll be paying specific attention to A Medieval Christmas. Greg and I actually worked up a set book of obscure Christmas-related folksongs a few years ago but never really nailed the set. Looking at some really old European source material would be a great place to continue the project. i suppose looking at popular sheet music favorites of the 1840s to 1860s would be another good place to dig.
Who
A better browser-based whois. I found this after noting that my commandline version of whois no longer gives me dummy prompts to specify which whois server I’m querying. Ridiculous.