Mike O’Connor

This is the latest geek project -- reclaiming Robert's old PC and transmogrifying it into a personal video recorder (PVR for short) with a Hauppauge PVR 350 and SageTV software.

Sure, I could have gone out and bought a Tivo or ReplayTV for about the same (or maybe a little less) money. But I see several advantages to doing it myself;

Son Richard made me do it... He said I would chicken out, but I didn't... Watch this clip from Almanac (Minnesota public affairs show on the PBS network) and wait for the sight-gag at the end...

Here's Mikey on Almanac

Yes, Mike the Media Maggot rides again.

Ah. Every once in a while I come across a fantastic lecturer who illuminates a huge topic. Carl Sagan did that for me when i was at Cornell -- I used to play hooky from classes and go sit in on his Astronomy 101 lectures (as did several hundred other folks).

A less known example is Hubert Alyea who was a brilliant Princeton chemistry educator upon whom The Absent Minded Professor was modeled. He was a colleague of my Dad and I grew up listening to Professor Alyea's amazing chemistry lectures (from which the notion of Flubber emerged).

Professor Felton (also at Princeton) is in this league in this lecture "Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue". The stream's likely to be one of the best hours you can spend if you're interested in the digital media rights issue.

Here are a few topics;

- How Sandra Day O'Connor saved the fast forward button

- A great explanation of how to digitize media

- Technology convergence

- The most important concept in Computer Science

- The Celestial Jukebox and the Napster case

- The Remix culture – Negativeland, the Grey album, Woody Guthrie

- DVDJohn

- The Fritz (Hollings) Chip

And more. The whole stream is about an hour and a half, but I gave up at the Q&A session -- the questions were long and badly recorded so I got tired of waiting. Same goes for the introductions -- I skipped those as well. The lecture itself is an hour. Well worth every minute.

Here's a link to a 2mb MPG file that shows how to fold a t-shirt. It is about the neatest thing you will ever see.

Serves as a reminder that elegance can be found in many places. Would that all our efforts were this beautiful.

Here's a great site to go look for the latest and greatest thinking about radio networking. The link is to the page where the speaker's notes are posted.

A terrific resource for community-technology geeks, like me.

For you history buffs; Lorenzo Milam, Bill Thomas and I organized the first national community-radio-organizer gathering back in 1975. Held in Madison, WI, we called it NARC (national alternative radio convention). I, living in Madison, was responsible for the actual logistics of the conference and overlooked a few things. Like, places for people to stay... But it didn't matter because we all just sat around and talked to each other for 72 hours straight and then headed home.

This conference -- the 2004 National Summit for Community Wireless Networks looks to be the same kind of "ignition" event for the community wireless folks.

Check out the "sponsor" links if you're interested in finding out who the movers and shakers are around the country. Looks like a pretty energetic bunch. I hope they have as much fun, and get as much started, as we did way back in Madison.

Ok, I've been one of the ones who took a long time to "get" blogging, so I'm probably going to preach with the enthusiasm of the recently-converted. But it seems to me that there is a tasty middle ground between the monsto-blogs (for example the New York Times front page) and the pipsqueak-blogs (like this one) in which lots of interesting things could happen. One that comes to mind is switching the PR industry away from "pushing" out their stuff (with web pages, email or gawd-forbid fax) towards publishing RSS feeds so that journalists can "subscribe" to their press-release stream and gain all the productivity gains that would arise if reporters could "cover their beat" by watching RSS feeds rather than slogging through the daily deluge...

Nope, not a new idea by a long-shot -- Mark Jones has exactly the same idea in

this piece

that ran in

Infoworld

last November. But it's worth amplifying, and explains why I'm starting to "get" blogging as a useful gizmo for the mainstream business type person.

*My* revelation came while talking to the PR person at a large local outfit and asked him what his day was like. The story he told got me to thinking... He spends his day mostly rasslin' with the logistics of getting his stuff *out* rather than actually writing. He's held captive by Joe, The Webmaster From Hell to get the stuff out on their web site. He waits for the fax machine. He juggles a huge list of email addresses.

If our hero had an RSS-capable blog at his disposal, he could push his own content to the web page, and reporters who cover his beat (of which there are many, this is a pretty important outfit he works for) would be able to peruse his stuff the way we watch RSS feeds. You know, "boring" "I don't care" "yawn" "OH! Now *that's* interesting..."

I think both sides of the equation would be better off. The PR person would do more writing, the audience would do more reading and a lot of awful middle-stuff would be gone.

I also think there are a lot of projects out there for blog-builders who want to get paid for their efforts. Package this up as the answer to the PR-maven's problem and go to town.

m