Smokey Maverick

A destination for smokey musings, turning it up to 11 and the too-hip-for-it’s-own-good crowd.

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Pod-C’in it up on I-79

September 3rd, 2010

A few months ago I switched projects, to West Virgina. Therefore, instead of flying, I now drive to my project site every week. Unfortunately, this has cut deeply into my reading rate, as I don’t have the airport wait/planes to plow through books. This greatly saddens me, and while I can chip away at a book before bed, I don’t get the same momentum built up.

However, thanks to audio AUX connections found in most of the company cars we drive and the 3.5+ hour drive, I can plug in and power up my ‘roid to play podcasts. I never really got the value of podcasts, but I guess that was before I had my smartphone – and now they help me still explore and learn while taking turns on 79 at the same speed. The podcasts I most frequent are (along with a rating on how much I enjoy the podcasts and how frequent I listen to it’s episodes):

ESPN Radio: Stan and Guy (7/10)
The best way to get my local yinzer sports fix. The only podcasts I listen to daily, by way of the Charleston YMCA (even in this ’slow season’ – when the only major sports going on in Pittsburgh is the Succos). Glad this duo got paired back up again.

ESPN Radio: Thundering Herd (5/10)
Still my favorite nationally syndicated sports talk-show host. I don’t listen to him as much anymore, but scan his podcasts for anything that looks interesting. He routinely gets bonus points from me for his usual spot on social commentary and relating it to sports. Like with all good hosts, you don’t have to believe everything he says, as long as he makes you think.

Linux Outlaws (9/10)
When I started trying out podcasts, I searched for popular podcasts and stumbled upon Fab and Dan’s Linux Outlaws podcast. After my first episode, in which Fab went on a rant about the Iron Man 2 movie, and how the OS appeared to be coded in XML, I was hooked. The “Release” section can get a bit dry, but their other coverage and commentary of the open source landscape (as well as “Crapple” and “Micro Watch”) more than make up for it.

NPR: Science Friday (4/10)
I got into the habit of listening to Science Friday when driving to the airport on Friday afternoons in Michigan. Still nab interesting podcasts and Ira still delivers – however I notice my overall listening has dropped off (I wasn’t always thrilled about all of their topics, but listened anyway to see what topic would be on next).

WNYC’s Radiolab (10/10)
Suggested to me by baristaj9, RL is absolutely, by far, my favorite podcast. Two gentlemen cut up and mash up interesting stories/concepts from various NPR outlets and do some investigating on their own (as far as I can tell). Extremely entertaining and interesting – if you have some time to kill I highly suggest taking Radiolab for a test drive.

This American Life (6/10)
Again suggested by baristaj9, and while good, can be hit or miss at times. But still a great time filler if I’ve run out of other podcast episodes. One of their most recent podcasts was surprisingly outstanding, entitled Rest Stop

NPR: Technology Podcast (7/10)
A weekly no-frills mashup of NPR Technology and Science related reports. Excellent ’shorter’ podcast to stay abreast of any big technology news. The good Science Friday pieces usually find there way into this mashup, which helped to knock that podcast’s score further down towards irrelevancy.

Y-Pod: The Y-Rock On XPN Podcast (5/10)
Decent podcast to do a more deep dive on up and coming indie artists from Y-Rock. Y-Rock and WXPN are my favorite radio stations, but I find myself sometimes getting bored at the Y-Pods if I’m not really into the artists. I need to find some better podcasts that’ll help me explore and discover new music – until then I’ll continue to stream WXPN and Y-Rock as my primary source for finding new music.

NPR: Car Talk Podcast (5/10)
The brother duo still delivers, and if I’m running low on podcast episode options on any given drive, they fill in very nicely. Surprisingly, I don’t enjoy their show as much as I do driving around on a sunny Saturday morning (wonder why?).

Security Now! (2/10)
Probably only listened to parts of 2 episodes of this podcast. Just there to serve as an emergency backup (at which point I’ll probably just flip over to my music collection anyway)

Leo Laporte – The Tech Guy (-32,768/10)
I left this podcast in my podcatcher just because I knew at one point I’d be doing a blag post on my various podcasts – and I wanted to remind myself to document how horrendous Leo’s podcast was. He is basically Delilah for Technology. [WIKI] In the first episode I listened to, I already disliked his calming, quiet voice – soothingly speaking of the big technology stories that would be found on the front page of a USA Today’s technology section. He finally sunk for me when a caller called in with a question about what MySQL was, and he went ahead giving a brief description but not before unnecessarily droning on and on about how it was far too technical of a question for his show. His show – entitled “THE TECH GUY” – where he should be encouraging that kind of curiosity! Turrible.

All of these podcast feeds have helped me adapt to my new weekly travel routine and still extract some value out of my 7+ hours in a car per week, and even enjoy it, by way of exploring, learning or laughing. Am I missing any cash money podcasts? Please let me know – I’ve got plenty of time to give’em a try.

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Summer Time Baseball Nostalgia

June 27th, 2010

As hallingpresis notes, it’s Summer in the city. While I prefer the Fall over any season, Summer ain’t half bad.

Mixing the recently arrived summer season (yes, it ‘officially’ just began a few days ago) with nostalgia, we arrive at an email Pixi recently sent out to my group of High School friends. It linked to an article from one of the more word-smith-gifted in the group, which detailed one of our favorite summer past times. The article revived great memories.

For a nice break from my below average writing, hit up Boyd’s old write up of us and summers gone by for a good read (and yea, I’m probably biased).

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Book Buzz: rm -rf

June 20th, 2010

Book: delete
By: Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

Been some time since I’ve last done a Book Buzz post. With changing projects from Lansing MI to Charleston WV, my podcast listening has experienced a boom, while unfortunately my reading rate has suffered. No longer can I churn through books on weekly flights, and while audiobooks are good, I can’t take notes or ear-mark passages while taking curves along I-79 at 80mph.

I picked up delete at a Barnes and Nobles a few months ago just because it looked interesting – didn’t do much research on it beforehand. It has it’s share of noteworthy points, but failed to hold my interest for most of the time. The general premise is that, as technology grows and provides us with countless perks, few stop to consider what they might be giving up to gain said perks. Slowly, we are starting to realize that remembering everything, and having almost any piece of (personal) information at anyone’s fingertips improves our societies connectivity, but also slices deeply into our privacy.

Final Take: I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone else to read. Book could’ve been only 50 pages long and still conveyed the same message – author continuously pounded the exact same points.

Some interesting points from delete:

  • “…should everyone who self-discloses information lose control over that information forever, and have no say about whether and when the Internet forgets this information? Do we want a future that is forever unforgiving because it is unforgetting?” [pg 4]
  • “Once we have perfect memories, Borges suggests, we are no longer able to generalize and abstract, and we remain lost in the details of our past.” [pg 12]
  • Highlights a woman, named AJ, who literally remembers everything. “…remembering everything is both maddening and lonely… She leads a relatively normal life, but spends an unusual amount of time immersed in her past rather than enjoying the present.” [pg 21]
  • “As I have mentioned two out of three teenagers in the United States use the Internet to create and share information with others. They enjoy the vast benefits of what economists have termed network externalities – every new user joining to share information increases the value for all existing users” [pg 85] This is exactly what has caused Twitter to explode from a small, fringe web app to a viable new form of communication.
  • Very interesting story on how the Dutch government created a personal information DB in the 1930’s with the aim to facilitate government administration and plan out welfare. Then the Nazi’s invaded and captured the DB, using the same information to “identify, deport and murder a much higher percentage (73%) of he Dutch Jewish population than in Belgium (40%), France (25%), or any other European nation.” [pg 141]
  • End of the book, details what would be one solution to this potential problem – associating an expiration date with every piece of information as a type of meta-data, that would self-destruct the information once that date came to pass.

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