Entries from September 2004 ↓

Maybe I’m not reading the “right” Australian blogs, but I find it interesting that I saw no mention of John Safran in any of them so far. John Safran vs. God is a TV show (SBS, Mondays, 8:30pm) presented by, you guessed it, John Safran. He’s a jewish-born atheist who goes around the world, basically, making fun of every possible religion, and experimenting with their rituals.

In the first episode, for example, he went to the American west to try peyote in the middle of the desert; last week, in Utah, he tried to get a mormon movie producer to endorse his “Xtreme Mormons!” idea. This week, again in Utah, he dressed up as a mormon elder (white shirt, black pants, black shoes, bicycle), armed himself wih a copy of “Origin of the Species” and a “John Safran, Atheist” badge and went door to door to preach atheism. “Hello, ma’am, can I take a minute of your time to tell you about atheism?” “We believe in the teachings of a man called Charles Darwin.” Needless to say, the people he visited were, in general, less than amused. Very funny, though.

If you are in Australia and not easily offended (or disgusted), I seriously recommend this show. If you are somewhere else, you can get a tasting from the “multimedia” section in his web site, linked to above.

Right after writing the previous entry I remembered another problem… it is not a problem yet, and it may not be a problem of this specific medium, but I feel it coming in the not-so-distant future: time. That is, time to listen to audio blog entries. With text blogs, it’s relatively easy to scan the headlines and read just the parts you want; that is what I do, most of the time. With audio, if you have a few 25-minute MP3 files, there’s not really anyway to know what is ahead and to skip directly to the “interesting” parts.

Which, I realize now, comes back to the issue of searchability. If you were able to get an “index” of an audio entry (preferrably automatically generated) telling you what is in what part of the entry, that might help. The problem, of course, is that it’s harder to handle audio than text with automated tools. Google, are you listening?

Apparently, this is the “new” thing out there: RSS 2.0 feeds with audio (usually MP3) enclosures containing, basically, the blog equivalent to radio shows. Adam Curry is the most prominent figure doing it (check he latest edition here), but there are others, like the Evil Genius Chronicles, IT Conversations and a few others.

The target audience here is people who have an iPod (or other MP3 player) and who drive to/from work, and hence spend a fair amount of time in an entertainment-free environment. There are programs that can automatically download the enclosures and add them to an iPod, so that when you go out in the morning the content is there, waiting for you to listen to it (the best one seems to be the iPodder, but I haven’t used it).

This is slowly approaching the idea of an “audio Tivo” with content created by regular people. The quality and content of the shows that are already out there is very good, even though we are still in the stage where most of the content is about the technology itself (that is, iPodder feeds talk mostly about iPodder-related technologies).

A few problems that I see as needing to be fixed before this becomes widespread: bandwidth (the publisher needs a lot of it to push his/her content out, and the listener needs some of it to get his/her feeds, which may be a problem in some (most?) countries), searchability (how do you Google for something that was mentioned in an audio post?), and ease of use (none of the software to do this automatically is very user-friendly at this point).

This won’t replace text-based blogging, but is very cool anyway.

Two weeks ago, we went out on a cold, sunny Saturday afternoon to take a walk in the Fitzroy Gardens, a park located at the “border” of the CBD, close to the Parliament. It’s a very nice place, with lots of grassy open spaces and a few areas with dense vegetation. There is a beautiful flower conservatory there, and also a decorative fountain with statues of marine animals (called the “Dolphin’s Fountain”), but it’s now dry because of the water usage restrictions.

Here are some pictures:
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Do not rsync a file system onto the wrong directory. Especially not if the directory in question already had some content.

At least it was early in the day. And easy to recover from, with another (correct) rsync. Which is still running.