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Showing posts from September, 2008

I love over the air television

For the first time in a long time, I'm watching television over the air. It's a wonderfully amazing idea, when you think about it. A device that can receive a signal that contains a program I want to watch. I've got a ton of work to do this weekend before I go back to work on Monday, but I really want to watch the Virginia Tech game. So, I dusted off the antenna I bought from Big Lots a few years ago, and voila! Of course, there's less than five months until this antenna is rendered useless. Maybe I'll buy the box to get the digital, but maybe not. In a perfect world, you wouldn't need cable. In a perfect world, local broadcasters could beam out niche programming over the airwaves. Maybe the new digital world will get us that. I have to get back to work, but I did want to comment that it's pretty amazing I'm watching this programming in my office without needing cable. I feel like I'm getting away with something, but didn't we all do this for mo

Great article on Buford football

Charlottesville is damned lucky to have a writer as good as Will Goldsmith writing stories like the one he wrote in today's copy of C-Ville Weekly . Careful readers may know that I live incredibly close to Buford Middle School, and lo and behold, this fantastic article helps fill in the details of what I see every day. To me, this is the kind of article that should win awards. It illuminates something social going on in my community that I did not know about before, and it gives me a sense of something I didn't know before. But, more importantly, read the way that Will writes about football itself. One of the first drills involves pursuit angles, one of the basics of defense. A player has to work a complicated math problem that involves the speed of the guy with the ball and their own speed to calculate what the shortest line would be to that point. Of course, kids don’t have time to work through the geometry in a game—it must become an instinct that’s built up through repeti

BBC Radio 4 program on American history

Who are we? I wonder that a lot as I drive around in this land where my parents decided to move over 40 years ago. Who are we, and how did we get here? I half-heartedly studied history at Virginia Tech because it helped answer questions, but it was not until I became a radio journalist for WVTF Public Radio that I thought about telling stories myself. I'd still like at some point to figure out a way to tell stories of the past in order to help make a better future. But, until then, BBC Radio 4 has begun a new series on American history called America, Empire of Liberty that is worth taking a listen to. If you click, what you'll hear are four episodes of the series, which is being aired daily on Radio 4. Each episode is a 15-minute chunk of history, in a style that is not popular on NPR. Yet, it's what I want to do here, and have done here in the past. One narrator speaking, punctuated with actors reading quotes where relevant and appropriate. I just wish they'd turn

Tinkering with sidebar

I've tried to declutter my sidebar. First off, I'm using a little trick I learned on Alan Rimm-Kaufmann's blog about using your starred feeds on Google Reader . While I prefer Bloglines to Google Reader, I have set up an account so that I can see what it looks like. With the proliferation of posts on the Charlottesville Podcasting Network , I have been looking for ways to feature particular posts. This week, Ray Nedzel did an interview with the director of Live Art's Doubt . Dan Daniels recorded a talk on the Siege of Petersburg by Bill Bergen . My boss, Brian Wheeler, was a guest on Charlottesville--Right Now ! I would like to figure out a way to highlight my favorites among the dozens of podcasts we're posting every week. So, I used the trick I found to use Google Reader to power the first box you see to the right on the top of the blog this week. I also went ahead and de-cluttered the rest of my sidebar, which was kind of littered with widgets and things. I do h

ESPN bidding for rights to English Premiership

The International Herald Tribune is reporting that ESPN is considering bidding for the rights to show the English Premiership in the UK. ESPN is considering a challenge Fox and its News Corp. cousin, British Sky Broadcasting, for Premier League rights starting with the 2010-11 season. If ESPN succeeds, it could be the spark to increasing ESPN's presence in England and perhaps beyond on the European continent. I hope this is a two-way street. I think it would be interesting to see a wider audience fior US sports in Europe, because I personally think American football is a fascinating sport. It's the only sport I continue to watch on a regular basis, in part because it's a seasonal thing. But mostly because there are a lot of interesting story-lines woven into the way the games unfold. I watched a good portion of the Jets-Patriots game in part because the image of Brett Favre playing in a Jets uniform is compelling to me. When I'm in England, I often try to explain the s

Documenting my file-related cluelessness

When I started the Charlottesville Podcasting Network three years ago, I immediately began posting file after file after file. And then posted more files and more files. There was a lot, quickly. That meant I filled up my allotted storage amount. I upgraded, but then filled up that amount fairly quickly as well. I kept having to take files off line because I could not figure out a solution, and couldn't afford to spend more money. So, over the summer of 2005, I deleted several podcasts and backed them up to my computer. And then, to a CD. I had a computer I'd bought in 2002, and a laptop I bought when I launched my company and CPN. The two together really weren't up to the task of powering a website. Somehow, I've neglected to back up some of those podcasts. Still, requests for some of the files occasionally come through, and I can't locate that they're looking for. I was pretty clueless. Now I'm a little more advanced, but still fairly clueless. In any cas

Follow-up to last post: Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch

In the last post, the second clip has footage from the debate between members of Python and conservative Christians in England regarding whether or not the Life of Brian insulted the spirit of Jesus Christ. Well, this sketch from Not the Nine O'Clock News is a take-off on the idea, which features a young Rowan Atkinson. Again, I'm amazed that YouTube allows me to easily view British television history.

On watching a Life of Brian documentary

I'm watching a documentary on the secret history of the Monty Python's Life of Brian, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I remember watching it at Jeffry Cudlin's house when I was 10 or 11 on his dad's Betamax machine. Now, with nothing better to do, I'm watching a Channel 4 documentary on how it was put togheter. I don't know if this is typical, but often I work into the night on one computer while the other one is showing something entertaining. Nothing live, as we don't have cable television anymore. But, this is even better. The documentary ends up being about the documentary meeting the opposition of Mary Whitehouse, a crusader in the United Kingdom who went after anything she considered blasphemous. The documentary at about eight minutes in begins talking about Whitehouse's history. And then after two minutes, goes back to being about the writing of the film. The documentary is weaving two different threads at the same time, which may