resistance to persistence

Who subscribes to TV Guide? This just became apparent to me. I’ve never understood the point of TV Guide. TV listings are in newspapers, free daily papers, online, everywhere. Why would you need to buy a TV Guide, let alone subscribe to it.

I’ve been listening to Adam Curry’s [about] audio show, Source Code. I get the show as MP3s through an RSS feed with enclosures. There’s not a lot of enclosure feeds available, but they’re rapidly increasing.

I’ve been following the enclosures work closely. Now you can subscribe to RSS feeds to get news updates, but instead of just getting text, there’s an attachment. With the right RSS Aggregator, you can have it download automatically the attachment and save it to your hard drive. It’s an obvious evolutionary step in RSS subscription. I’m surprised it’s taken this long to get going.

Adam’s doing a lot to push the technology forward. The Radio Userland aggregator was one of the first (if not the first) to support enclosures. There was an article a few months ago about having bittorrent feeds as RSS enclosures and then BitTorrent would automatically fire up and download the payload from the torrent file. This will be the eventual progression.

Right now, Adam’s focused on the iPod. He started off creating some Apple scripts which automatically copy the incoming enclosures into his iPod. It’s a great idea. Overnight, let the RSS aggregator download the mp3 files which then fire up the applescript to sync the mp3 files into his iPod for listening on morning commutes, etc. From talking about this, he had an informal challenge to others to do the same and improve on the idea. There’s lots of idea copying and improving going on, which should be happening. There’s now an official site, iPodder.org. It’s very rudimentary at this point and is Java based on Windows. Give it some RSS enclosure URLs and it downloads all the attachments. I don’t think it automatically adds them into iTunes yet. I have to manually add them, but that’s not so bad. I’ve listened to about a week’s worth of his shows so far. I don’t have an ipod yet, but I’m working on it.

I’m looking to find mp3 versions of the Howard Stern show. They took it off the air in Toronto and I can’t listen anymore. I can’t pickup the Buffalo station that broadcasts it and I know there’s someone creating Stern mp3s each day. Once I can get those on a daily basis for my listening laughter I’ll be set.

I think the next step in the progression will be a slight improvement on the current work. Instead of attaching the MP3 enclosures directly to the RSS feed, it would be more economically and bandwidth cheaper to attach a .torrent file to the MP3. This would drastically drop the load on the server and bandwidth charges. Curry states he’s got about 100 people downloading his feed, so right now I don’t think there’s enough critical mass to feed the show with torrents. Once he reaches a certain number of users, he could probably then switch over.

Which makes me think even further down the road. What happens if the broadcasting industry starts towards that kind of a model. There will have to be dedicated torrent seeders on all the time if you want to ensure 24-7 availability. If nobody is seeding, then nobody else can download. Perhaps this will be a future industry. Torrent seeding hosting facilities.This may be something for hosting companies to branch into in the future.

Click the image to start the process.

I’m amazed at the power of blogging and google. In April of 2004 I had a problem with Hibernate and after googling for an answer to the problem, I couldn’t find anything. A day later I posted my problem on my blog and within an hour, Matt Raible had seen my post appear on JavaBlogs and immediately gave me my answer. And it was a simple one…stupid oversite on my part. I updated the post with the solution and added the following to the update: “Hopefully google will index and it’ll be a reference in case others have the same problem.”

Every few days I get comments added to the original post on the No persister for error saying that many people have had the same problem and my blog and google have solved it for them. It’s a good feeling to give back since I’ve had to use Google so many times in the past. Thats why it’s also important once you do post somewhere about your problem to go back and list how you eventually solved it. You’re not the only one with that problem.

Read how to get a free iPod

This isn’t a scam…or a pyramid scheme…I’ve done a lot of reading on this.

Click here to get your own iPod and help me get mine: http://www.freeipods.com/default.aspx?referer=9226357

It’s actually free. Gratis company is paid to get people to sign up for services (AOL, Columbia House, etc). As an incentive to get people to sign up, they’re giving away an iPod if you sign up and get 5 friends to signup as well. And there’s lots of proof of cases where people have gotten their iPods…this isn’t a scam. Read the story at Wired.com

The important thing is to use a referral link so the person gets credit for signing people up. Click on my referral link to start the process and get us both started on the path to a free ipod.

Add your name to the comments list if you’re signing up.

Today was a lucky day. 2 “celebs” and I use the term lightly…they’re not quite at celebrity status. More like Canadian-well-knowns.

On the streetcar into work in the morning, Master T, former MuchMusic VJ was jogging along King St. I’d seen him around town a few times in the past.

When I went to grab some lunch today, Ian D’Sa from Billy Talent - the guitarist with the 4″ flattop hair was driving and stopped at a stopsign as I was crossing the street. Ian was actually in disguise…he had a hat on. I’m sure it takes at least 15 minutes to get the hair up and it’s probably not an everyday thing.

I added this category as a spot to log celebrity sightings. I end up seeing quite a few. Toronto is funny that way. It’s not LA, where you have to travel with bodyguards & wear disguises and people are always expecting to see celebrities. It’s the opposite…in Toronto, you don’t expect to see celebrities, except maybe during the Toronto International Film Festival (on now) where you see tons. And when you do see them, you think…”nah, that can’t be…this is Toronto.”

Friends are always amazed at how many celebs I see…I’ve got a thing for recognizing faces & names. And I’m always on the lookout. So I’m going to start listing sightings when I see them and I’ll even account for ones I’ve seen in the past when I remember them.

My goddamn rock solid ghetto shiznit name is Ass Machine Real.
What’s yours?
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A close friend of mine started a non-profit organization, GlobeAware, a couple years ago. What is GlobeAware, you ask? It’s a volunteering vacation. These short-term (1 to 2 weeks) adventures in service focus on cultural-awareness and sustainability, and are often compared to a “mini peace corps”. I think it’s a great idea and a great way to help others.

A new reality show is in the works, in partnership with GlobeAware, and are accepting applications. Apply to Voluntouring now…deadline is fast approaching. Download a pdf file with details.

Voluntouring is an inspirational television series that documents the challenges,
successes and failures of a small group of adventuresome volunteers, who will travel
to Cusco, Peru to donate their time and considerable energy to teach life skills
to and care for deaf orphans.

From howtofoldashirt.net, a visual guide on a quick & easy way to fold your shirts in 3 seconds. Where was this for all my laundry-doing life? Do you know how many seconds of my life I could have saved if I’d known about this earlier? I could have at least save 218 seconds by now. Those 218 seconds are lost, never to be found again.

download (right click|save as) the quicktime movie and watch it repeatedly on laundry days…it took me a couple tries before I got the hang of it.