Sunday, November 24, 2002

What Exactly is Radio? I have been using Radio UserLand to update my Salon blog for the past six months or so. I never really gave a second thought as to what Radio really is all this time. I know it runs a local webserver on your PC which allows "upstreaming" of content to a host such as blogs.salon.com. My question is, what does it really buy me? I consider myself to be a fairly tech-savvy guy but I can't help but feel radio is overly complicated. Sure, the layman can jump on, bang out a weblog and publish it in one mouse click. Still, once you look under the curtains things start to get very confusing, very fast. Looking at something like blogcity which uses a simple web-based interface to update weblogs I can help but wonder why Radio was designed like it was. Radio is local to the system, I can't just access it anywhere as easily as a web-based system. Using bubblegum and baling wire I was able to allow access my radio "home" remotely and securly. Still, it's not really an elegant solution as far as I am concerned. I didn't even realize there was a full-blown app attached to radio. I just happened to hit the wrong menu item yesterday and this confusing app was launched -- talk about a Mac OS 9 vibe. Using Radio I get the same feeling as when I talk to "XML heads." It seems to me that both Radio and XML take a simple concept and make it into this big, bloated mess. Am I on the money with my observations or am I losing my edge? 7:12:00 PM

"fucktard" It seems Eric does not like my use of the word "fucktard." Oh well, he's the one missing out. It looks like all the hip bloggers are using it. If I recall correctly, he also took exception to the word "janky" last time I used it. Now that's a good insult -- "janky fucktard." You can bet googling for that phrase will only take you here. 5:29:00 PM

What Did We Do Before the Internet? I ask myself that question at least once a month. Last night I was watching Aliens (Special Edition) with a friend, wireless notebook at my side jacked into IMDB. Through the whole film we were wondering what happened to some of the actors and trival things like that. Geeky as it was, I just pounding at IMDB and got all the information we could ever want. Now that's the textbook definition of "killer app." PS: Aliens, 16 years later is still the best horror/sci-fi film ever made. It shows literally no signs of age. Not to mention every videogame made in the last 10 years borrows heavily from it. Plus, those rubber aliens looked a hell of a lot creepier than any CG I have ever seen. 11:20:43 AM

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