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October 29, 2003
Neologism of the day: Scientologeists
<hex> Oh, not the bloody Scientologiests again.
<hex> s/ies/is/
<dngnand> Scientologeists!
<dngnand> They rattle things around. Knock stuff off your mantle. They're a generally annoying sort.
<hex> Help! Subpoenas are materialising in my house!
<hex> I'm kept awake at night by voices cross-examining me!
<hex> "Ma'am, sounds like you have a case of Scientologeists."
<hex> You know, that could explain a lot.
Posted by Earle Martin at 10:17 PM |
October 28, 2003
Ol' Blue Eyes
Via #foaf I hear of Libby Miller's
experimental new RESTful RDF-aware IRC bot, the curiously-named
I'm amused to see this in the example usage:
<libby> .pathf libby miller, frank sinatra <whwhwhwhwh> Libby Miller to Frank Sinatra via Earle Martin, Dan Brickley, Dan Connolly, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy
No kidding. And who said there was no future for the Semantic Web?
Posted by Earle Martin at 9:16 PM |
October 26, 2003
Things I love about the Internet: streaming audio
Example: with the Net, you can listen to the NYPD's radio transmissions [RealPlayer format] and Russian pop music [MP3 stream] at the same
time.
The availability of streaming audio across the Net has impressed me, deeply. I've spent the last few years feeling very dispirited about the state of music in general. However, broadband and audio streams have lifted my spirits immeasurably. Now, there's no restriction on what I can listen to. The corporate-owned and -controlled radio stations and their meagre output pales into insignificance compared to the incredible choice of music I can find online at sites like Shoutcast. In the last few weeks, I've been able to listen to Japanese and Korean and Romanian and Brazilian and Armenian and Arabic and Hawaiian and Vietnamese pop in addition to the Russian stuff I mentioned; genres I would never normally encounter, like darkwave, roots, ragtime, gabber, "80s alternative college", soca.... All completely inaccessible from the standard radio spectrum. And that's before you include the police and fire and railroad scanners, ham radio feeds, talk stations, recorded live comedy broadcasts, stations that play only music from video games, radio dramas from 50 years ago....
In short, you can find every kind of music under the sun, entirely uninterrupted by the kind of crass, annoying advertisements that you have to suffer through on a "real" radio station. I've discovered a plethora bands whose music I want to buy, and never once felt the urge to smash the radio to make the idiot disk jockey SHUT THE HELL UP - because for the most part there are no disk jockeys. Most importantly, the independent nature of the stations means that they're not forced to play whatever their parent corporation - like Clear Channel - forces them to, and stuff it down your throat.
Choose what you want to listen to. Choose streaming audio.
Posted by Earle Martin at 9:03 PM |