Apple iSight camera for video conferencing with my business partner in London. Although since his camera is sitting here in a box, I guess it is ok to turn my onto the Bay, which is a bit stormy this morning. Those are whitecaps you see, if you look hard enough. Oh, we also had an unknown Navy Patrol Boat off in the Bay this morning. Too hazy to make out the class or name. Mystery boat.]]>
Gulf War website or below….]]>
PenguinRadio device are again focusing on a small unit with wi-fi capabilities and not much more. Too many “”media centers”” are being introduced in the $300 range that are comparable, but not quite what I wanted to do. Now I’m thinking that to truly revolutionize radio, we have to have the smallest device possible with 802.11 capabilities. Something that fits the form factor of a clock radio or something that size. Unfortunately we can’t do that with a new influx of capital, and we won’t get new money until we sort out the old paperwork that is piled all over my office. More stuff to do when I get back from London.]]>
College Football Radio on the Internet. The radio is a bit more soothing than the TV sometimes. Do you know why the New York Times editorial page sucks? Because none of the writers on that page are college football fans. I mean, even they supported Williams or Amherst, they’d be more in touch with America then the lot they currently have writing. Just a random thought….]]>
PenguinRadio is that radio stations on the Internet have multiple streams of audio. Some are in Windows and some are in Real and some in Mp3. Some are high bandwidth, some are low. Getting them to all appear under one radio station listing was actually kind of difficult, but I think I’ve finally figured it out. Now I have a new problem–how to make a listing for an event covered by multiple stations? Some soccer games in Latin America for example are covered by five stations. I had to create a whole other variable (Network ID) that groups together similar programming across different stations (and so on across their different feeds). I have no idea what I’m going to do when a station plays multiple events, such as cricket and soccer. I guess I’ll deal with that next.]]>
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PenguinRadio this week, but little of these changes are visible to the naked eye. One that is now resides on my homepage, a “”last played”” feature that shows the last five stations played in our database. Our database has dropped from 6,000 streams to 2600. Talk about the chilling effect of the copyright law and the RIAA. In addition, foreign broadcasts now make up a greater percentage of our stations, leading me to wonder about the “”trade advantage”” of doing a station overseas. If the PenguinRadio ever comes into being, the differences between borders for radio listening will disappear. There may actually develop some sort of trade imbalance due to the RIAA/Copyright licensing issue in the USA and the lack of those laws overseas. I envision a time when Congress is up in arms as radio listeners start to desert the US and turn to foreign broadcasts. As one who has listened to thousands of hours of overseas radio, I can tell you that in many cases, there isn’t much of a difference between US and other stations all playing the same top 40 drivel. I still have to work out one more major change to PenguinRadio–having a database that allows multiple fields for a single column. i.e. column: What did you eat today? answer: chicken, or tuna and chips, or spam eggs bacon and spam. How to make one column accept multiple numbers of items…. I think I know…]]>