Thursday, September 30, 2004
That's a hint
I like Leatherwood Online because I like Hugh MacLeod, and I found it in an ad on Hugh's Gapingvoid blog. The ad said
Leatherwood Online - Tasmania's Journal of Discovery - was originally mapped out on the back of a business card. Seriously.
Inspired by Hughtrain. Kidding.
Maybe.
The whole thing is cool, but the Leatherwood blog has been idle since July.
Read it and drool
Blogging.la's best of Los Angeles 2004. The food & drink recommendations are highly motivating for a (slightly) out-of-towner like me.
On the (space) case
Mike Taht and Susan Kitchens reporting from the Mojave on SpaceShipOne. Here are Susan's photos.
Why it's a bad idea to give bad service to bloggers
Oldcasting
FCCinfo, from Cavell Mertz & Davis, rocks. I've been looking for something that provides graphical as well as textual engineering details about AM, FM and TV stations, ever since radiostation.com stopped returning results. (I'm told its perl code failed to keep up with changes in FCC data formats. Be nice if somebody stepped in to fix the problem, whatever it is. Also seems to me there's a case here for the FCC adding RSS feeds to its daily digests.)
For example, here's the data on KGO, the San Francisco AM station that broadcasts from three towers (shown here after the Loma Prieta earthquake) at the east end of the Dumbarton Bridge in the South Bay (25 miles from downtown San Francisco). Above is the directional pattern the towers generate. The larger lobe points toward San Francisco, and the smaller lobe toward San Jose. At night the station's signal reaches up and down the West Coast.
For all my faith that podcasting (now up to 526 finds on Google) will change the world, I'm too much of an old radio guy not to stay interested in the antiquated but sturdy engineering behind traditional terrestrial broadcasting.
Bonus link: MIT's Radio-Locator site, which shows how KGO's directional pattern (above) looks in to listeners driving around California.
Mocasting
Fun listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code for yesterday (which it still is, technically, here on the West Coast). Lots of very nice responding to what I wrote here at IT Garage and said Tuesday night on The Linux Show, which Dave Slusher is now kindly podcasting. Which is very generous and truly rocks.
Bonus link: Dave's three-point definition of podcasting.