Radio Timeshifting on CBC.ca
Just thought I'd post a note about timeshifting for CBC Radio 1. I wanted to listen to tonight's episode of Dispatches but for reasons beyond my control I wasn't near a radio at 7:29 EST. The good news is that Dispatches is a carried nationally, so all you have to do is dig up a western audio stream (such as Calgary) at the appropriate time and bingo, you have radio timeshifting! Nothing very complicated, but for those of you who listen to the radio a lot or, like me, miss a lot of radio programmes this is pretty nifty. Of course in many cases you can just download an MP3 or Real Audio version of the show these days and the penetration of these formats are growing.
The only downside to the streaming option is that you have to use Windows Media, but I've heard some rumblings that this may be changing in the not too distant future...
iTunes U
Over the past several months I've become a bit more of an iTunes guy, I actually use it to surf for music online and I bought my first iTunes albums over the recent holiday season. So I came across iTunes U the other day (i.e.: I opened my eyes and noticed the link) and it's kind of cool. Basically it contains free podcasts of university lectures from a number of leading American universities such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, MIT and I just noticed that Queen's is there as well. Obviously it's no substitute for actually being in the classes but there are a number of good entry level lectures on topics that I would have loved to study in school but just never got around to or didn't take because they conflicted with something else. Looks like the series of tubes is finally getting connected to something more than porn and warez.
You do need iTunes to play though.
Firebug
As you can tell I've been in the process of migrating to a new site design and toolset over the past few days. I'm trying to avoid too much custom code but I did make a slight modification to the plugin that renders the quotes feed on the rightmost column. In the process of troubleshooting the problem I discovered the Firebug plugin for Firefox. It's most a most excellent debugger for walking through the code when there are issues (as well as flagging that there is a problem in the first place). In addition it can provide some useful profiling information regarding how your page loads, etc. In any event it was very helpful getting the page to render valid XHTML and JavaScript.
The Upside-Down-Ternet
Ha! I just stumbled across the Upside-Down-Ternet in a post to the sage-members list. I love it when sick minds and technology meet to screw with the masses!