BeigeJournal

Now that I’m a Formula 1 racing fan, I’ve been buying F1 Racing magazine. The June issue wasn’t in the bookstores yet on Sunday, but I did find a copy on Tuesday, two days after the rather bizarre United State Grand Prix. It takes a long time to get a magazine together, print it, and get it to the stores, so the big topic of the latest issue is the San Marino race at Imola, which took place on April 24, two months ago. They were able to get a few pages about the Spanish Grand Prix of May 8 in at the back, and then at the very back two pages each for track maps and historical results for the Monaco, European, Canadian, and US Grands Prix, all of which have been run by now. It’s got to be really difficult to write for a sports magazine knowing that by the time anyone other than your editor reads what you’ve written, five more events will have been run and readers will be straining their memories to recall the events you are writing about.

The weirdest part, really, is reading speculation about the future when there is a five-race delay between writing and reading, and all the speculation is semi-distant past by the time anyone reads it. I’m not at all sure how I’d want to write under such circumstances, but the policy of F1 Racing seems to be to write as though readers would be able to read it shortly after it’s written, giving the same effect for the people who read it as soon as possible as those who stumble upon a pile of old back issues on a shelf somewhere get. I’m not sure I like it that way.

There is plenty of content that does age well, such as driver interviews. Those of us used to this new-fangled Internet thingie might be inclined to wonder if it would make more sense to just fill the printed pages with the things that age well and put the current events and speculation about the future on the web site, where the future will still be future when people read it.

(Leave comments at the Livejournal post about this.)

Something I’ve been thinking about with all the podcasting excitement, and portable MP3 players in general, is how amazingly crappy the broadcast radio experience is, even on just a technical level. There are all sorts of programming issues, the bad shows, the advertising, the endless promos for upcoming shows—someday, we’re going to hear promos for upcoming promos—but the actual technology doesn’t work well.

Vast swaths of spectrum are reserved for broadcasting, the broadcasters set up huge antenna towers and run transmitters so powerful that the electric bill is a significant operating cost. Yet I hear mostly static. On a portable player, the signal cuts in and out with each step. At home, hiss. I’ve bought antennas, built antennas, hung antennas up in awkward positions, and still, the classical station comes in in hissy mono. The local public station comes in with hiss at home and unlistenable cutting in and out when out walking with a portable radio. I’m not out in the hinterlands, I’m in the city of Milwaukee. Back in Champaign, IL, the college’s station was pretty much unlistenable on campus. I get better ham radio reception sometimes. It’s really amazing to me that so much bandwidth, so much power, such a huge antenna, gives such marginal results. Maybe I’m listening to the wrong stations, but wherever I live, this is what I get.

The MP3 player works fine, of course. The crappiest low-bitrate MP3s sound better than radio, though the radio people are better at setting up decent microphones and getting the levels right than some of the less experienced podcasters. The only radio show I listen to is Pipedreams, but not by radio. No one here plays it. I grab it with streamripper and cron from WDAV’s MP3 stream. It would be a lot easier if was just podcast instead of making us mess with streamripper, but the broadcast mentality lives on. I sent in a donation, and now I have a card good for discounts at some Davidson, North Carolina shops. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1300 km away. The unlistenable Milwaukee stations (no MP3 streams, even), continue to hit me up for donations.