2005.05.28
Helpful hint: if you're at all attached to your car radio presets, used to certain stations being linked to certain buttons, write them down now, before something happens to 'em--like your car battery needing replacement, that kind of thing.
And so given my compulsion to share pointless Kirk trivia on this site, here are my Boston-area Car Radio Presets: (Hmm, in looking up one station I found a site with profiles of all the local stations...cool. I made links to the stations below...exciting!)
FM (first set...why do all radios have two sets of FM presets, and just one for AM?): 90.9 (public radio) 89.7 (also public radio, but sometimes has music, and I think it's the one with the Garrison Keillor show I always forget to listen to) 96.9 (FM talk, haven't actually listened to it much), unused, unused, and 104.1, which has Howard Stern in the morning for which I previously explained / apologized, plus sometimes decent music.
FM (second set) Except for starting out with 102.5 classical, is a big undifferentiated mix of popmusic that I click through if I'm in that kind of mood... 92.9, 93.7 (no link...odd,) 100.7, 107.9, and 98.5
AM...I've drifted away from "keeping tabs on the (christian right wing fundamentalist) enemy" with 590 (WEZE...if I was the rapper I'd be irritated by their callsign) and its sister talk station 1150 (WTTT--"the Boston T party -- changing the way Boston talks"--cute.) There's 1030 news (its "one commercial every few minutes" drivetime format is sometimes relaxing when one of the other stations is on a huge commercial streak,) 680 talk, 850 sports talk (I do like their "whiner line", as well as the Pats and Sox games) and then 1510, the perennial sports "also ran".
And now you know. And I have place to check if my car's battery runs out.
Tool of the Moment
So last night I was reading Wired, and it has coverage of Spielberg's upcoming "War of the Worlds" remake, including this sidebar comparing the original book, the infamous radio broadcast, and the 1953 film. I just thought that "Thunder Child" (from the original book) is the coolest warship name ever...so cool I decided to download the Gutenberg E-text of the book for download into my Palm's memopad.
Which led me to finally getting around to making a tool I've been talking about with LAN3 for a long while...Gutenberg E-texts (and also things from Usenet) usually have a lot of extra linebreaks to force 80-column width. My Palm of course has much smaller columns and the extraneous linebreaks are annoying. So, Enter The FATLINER. It can inhale even very large texts and spit out a version with the extra linebreaks removed.
Let me know what you think LAN3!