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.

Mark Kleiman wonders why there isn’t more consideration of adopting the VA’s electronic medical records system and concludes that it is in part because the code is public domain and thus none of the firms developing proprietary systems can make money off it. Well, they may not be able to make money off it, but money is in fact being made off of it. Larry Augustine, CEO of Medsphere, talks about it and other open-source enterprise projects at the 2005 Open Source Business Conference, and you can listen to his talk thanks to IT Conversations. The wrong lobbyists get all the attention, though.

I’ve disabled comments on this blog after getting hit with twenty megabytes of comments spam. Much of this blog is either linked-to or cross-posted to my Livejournal, which seems to be free of comment spam problems. There are a great many Livejournal users, and there must be some comments spam in the system somewhere, but I’ve never seen any. There are several options that Livejournal users can select for comments, but allowing anyone with a Livejournal account to comment screening all comments from others seems to result in no problems from Livejournal users and no attempted spam from nonusers, either. Flickr requires would-be commenters to register for an account, too, and is also as far as I’ve seen free of comment spam. Asking people to register to comment doesn’t seem ideal, but it does seem to work, at least for large services like Livejournal or Flickr with millions of users. I don’t think that each and every individual blog could require separate registrations.

I have an e-mail address for comments, blogcomments@mspland.com. I’ll add any good comments to the posts.

Somewhere in the world there is a person actually named Budgie Commodore who simply cannot understand why no one ever seems to read any e-mail he sends.

Dawn and Drew have the best phone number in the whole wide world for their listener comments voice mail: (206) 666-FUCK. It’s easy to remember. It’s great that they have this voice mail setup, because whenever people have the urge to call someone up and say something completely crazy, there’s always 206 666-FUCK as an acceptable outlet for that kind of thing. Two of my outbursts (“more cowbell” and “the lion beeps tonight”) have been played on the show. I must think of more….

What is Pico de Gallo?

It’s one-trillionth of a jug of cheap wine.

While driving home I saw in the distance something on the road. I slowed down, and when I saw that they were large rocks scattered across the road I stopped, pulled over, and got out to clear the road. The motorist behind me also stopped and helped clear the road. As we did so, several people passed by at high speed in the oncoming-traffic lane. They managed to avoid hitting anything. So, you’re driving at night. Two cars ahead of you have stopped. Do you stop too, assuming that something, some hazard, caused those motorists to stop, or do you pass at high speed, certain that they stopped solely to annoy you, that it is inconceivable that the road could be blocked?

The Christmas shopping season really does start earlier every year. I used to think that my parents just liked to complain, but I’m a believer now. The people selling cheap radio-controlled toys from little stands in the mall halls have been at it for at least a month now. Many stores have Christmas stuff up, and at least one I’ve seen was already in full red-and-green holiday trim a week before Halloween. At least they haven’t started playing that music yet.

Inspired by ohiblather’s recently-posted Handwritten entry, I’ve put up my own effort. I think you’ll agree that my handwriting, for all of Debbie’s complaining about her handwriting, is a lot worse.