BeigeJournal

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.

I live in the northwest corner of the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from an “office park” to which has been added in the last few years a small shopping center with an American Bread Company restaurant. On occasion I walk over there for lunch, something I wrote about a year ago. Walking was obviously not intended. You are supposed to drive a car. Let take a walk anyway and see what happens!

We begin with Fond du Lac Avenue, the street I live on. Here at the northwest end, it look like this:

Not really an inviting place to walk, but at least wide.

The intersection of Fond du Lac Ave. and 107th Street is perhaps not too welcoming to pedestrians, either:

The next section of the journey is over Highway 145, a six-lane controlled-access freeway with virtually no traffic on it:

It was not at all hard for me to get a daytime photo with no cars visible. There is actually more traffic noise from the two-lane Fond du Lac Ave in front of my apartment building than from this six-lane freeway behind it. Total waste of pavement.

Next comes this segment of 107th street:

Welcome, pedestrians!

Then, another giant intersection, with Good Hope Road:

We are now nearly there! That building with the green roof at the left, in the far distance, is it:

But how do we get there from here? Remember, we were supposed to be driving a car, not walking. We could take the sidewalk north on 107th street, walk a long way, then follow a long curvy road back to the southwest, but we are not crazy, so we will walk on the grass.

We now discover a fundamental fact about building design in the US: each building has one front side, and one back side. The front side is prettier, and the back side is really ugly, windowless, with utility connections and dumpsters. What if one side of your building faces your parking lot and a small access road, and the other side faces a busy six-lane road, near a freeway ramp, along which many of your potential customers will be traveling? Well, the parking lot and access road side gets the windows, and the busy road gets this:

Hey, I like gas meters as much as the next guy, but is this really the face you want to present to the public? I thought the building was still under construction for a long time after it was done. I kept waiting for the windows. They did eventually take down the temporary banners and put up the permanent signs for each business, at least.

Once you get around to the parking lot side of the building, it looks a bit nicer:

Note the beautiful outdoor seating area in the parking lot:

There is a Starbucks and Qdoba on 124th and Capitol with an outdoor seating area right by the intersection of those two major roads, separated from them by a tiny strip of grass. It is such a strange place to sit that I sometimes go there just for the experience of drinking mocha while watching twelve lanes of traffic intersect. I mean, you wouldn’t want to do it very often, but occasionally, it’s so bad it’s fun. I don’t think the Atlanta Bread parking lot is bad enough to be fun. It’s just ugly.

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.

Flickr has removed the Flash from the photo pages! I think they did a nice job of doing something useful rather than <BLINK> Tag Writ Large with it, but without Flash it’s faster and now the page can be scrolled with the mouse pointer on the image—no more carefully moving the pointer off the image to get the wheel or the page-up/page-down/space to work.

Yea Flickr!

The Big Red Button. Via Tess.

Via Dave Slusher, a deeply bizarre and wonderful flash animation in the Schoolhouse Rock style by those wild and wacky folks at Hitachi, of all places, about their new “perpendicular” hard drive technology: Perpendicular Animation. A must-see.

Update: They are giving away 230 “Get Perpendicular” t-shirts (230? Because they have achieved 230Gb/sq.in.). Enter here by 2005-05-06.

Since I have the Beige Alert/Journal/Photos theme going, I had to get a picture of this Chicago-area billboard:

I just bought a new cell phone, an LG 6100, which I use with Verizon’s service. I tried activating the web access on my old phone, a Motorola vc120, which I wrote a blog entry about around six months ago. I concluded at the time that it wasn’t very useful. My new phone, however, has a bigger screen with color and WAP 2.0 support. This time around, I’m a lot more impressed.

Specifically, the killer-app, for me, is weather radar on the color screen. That’s genuinely useful. There are various sources of weather data formatted for cell phone usage, including several on Verizon’s menu, the best of which is probably Accuweather, which offers limited but better-than-nothing animated radar loops as well as satellite images. My overall favorite weather site is Weather Underground, which offers a cell-phone page with conditions, a radar still, and the forecast all in one page. I’ve tried WxServer, a pilot-oriented weather site for phones, and while I think it’s a very good service, those of us who are not pilots will probably not be able to justify the fee for just the weather information. The airport information might be very useful for pilots who do a lot of cross-country flying.

There is other fun to be had. The Onion has a mobile page. Flickr has a WAP interface to your contacts’ pictures, comments on your pictures, and more, which is a great time (and airtime) waster. There are gateways to post to LiveJournal. My phone has T9 text entry, which makes things like Livejournal posts tolerably painful.

The browser is really slow and unresponsive. Expect to wait a while after hitting the scrolling buttons. Even the backlight doesn’t brighten immediately upon a button press. I haven’t found any way to bookmark sites by navigating to them and then selecting some sort of “add bookmark” option, the way all browsers on the desktop operate. Instead you have to record the URL somewhere and painfully type it in manually on the keypad, or possibly add it using a regular browser on a regular computer, if you can figure out how to log in and do that. Verizon’s whole user interface approach to their “portal” seems to be airtime-maximization rather than customer-satisfaction, as you’d expect from a phone company. The tiny screen and limited browser still make ordinary web sites mostly unusable—only phone-specific sites are really usable. If anything, the color screen and WAP 2 make that problem worse than on the old phone, because it will try to render the colored sidebars and such that decorate web sites but which are entirely unusable on the tiny screen. The browser will crash from time to time, occasionally requiring pulling the battery to reset the phone, which (so for) has been non-destructive to the phone’s configuration settings and stored information.

Overall, I think it’s a useful service, and this time I plan to keep it enabled. The weather information is what justifies the fee, and there is plenty of goofy entertainment available as well. I’ve signed up for a package of web access and 500 text messages per month for $8/month. Weather Underground can send severe weather alerts by text message, and Hz.com can send TAFs and METARs, among other things, via text messages, so that feature is useful, too.

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.