Here’s a very interesting interview of Lisa See, a journalist and culturalist, who went to a remote part of China to investigate a secret, ancient language used only by women known as Nü Shu 女书. It is the story of well-to-do women who spent their whole lives in isolation in upper-story bedrooms. They developed this language to secretly explore their inner lives and to communicate to other women in similar isolation.
It is a fascinating look at an obscure part of Chinese history and culture.
If you haven’t heard it already, have a listen to Eric Idle’s protest song against the FCC and their ilk. Hilariously funny. And, er, with strong language.
I bought a Don Williams CD from a fairly mainstream music store here in Beijing. It looked okay, had holograms in all the right places, and even had a silver ingot inside the see-through spine, bearing the name of the record label: “Bailey”. When I actually opened the package and turned the disc over, the recorded surface was all pitted and didn’t look right. So I wasn’t surprised when my CD player couldn’t read the Table of Contents. Fortunately, my computer’s CD player was able to read it without problems. But here’s the most interesting bit. The warning that goes around the outer label of the disc reads as follows:
ALL RIGHTS OF PRODUCLER AND THE OWNER REPRODDUCED RESERVED VNATHRISD COPYING HURING LENDING PUBFORMACE AND BROAD CASTING OF THIS RECROING IS PROHIBTEDFGHIDDGHH OFDREDFG ISDSHUE DFGJBCCMNHJ DOIUES FIHBXZSK DFIRUWERITIT REIWE EOERIR FUYUY
As a former Social Studies teacher of mine used to say, “I kid you not.” Spell check, anyone? Nope, not in China. I guess what I bought wasn’t legitimate after all. The music’s great, though.
Imagine for a moment the under-served population of fans of both Mickey Mouse (TM) and the Teletubbies (TM). When choosing her wardrobe and accessories, today’s fan of these cultural icons would forever be forced to choose between Mickey Mouse or Teletubby for a given item, always having to weigh one above the other in her fashion choices. Imagine the horror.
Well, not anymore. Women in the free state of the People’s Republic of China now have more choice than ever. Just today, I saw a woman on the subway proudly displaying her love for her respective “licenced” characters by sporting a purse with a large, jovial Mickey Mouse against a white background dancing purple Teletubbies. The joy! (My eyes are tearing up as I write this.)
Without the restriction of corporate licenses, the fashion and accessory manufacturers in China (truly gods in their fields) are able to create goods for even the smallest niches of the market, including our Mickey Mouse-loving / Teletubby-infatuated subway rider. The free market thrives here, and it is truly wonderful thing.
Here’s a little gem from my audio collection. Actually, I found it in my Dad’s collection of LPs. It’s a self-recorded record, not an LP, but I otherwise don’t know how to classify it. It’s much thicker than a commercial LP, a slightly different colour (not as shiny), and only recorded on one side. LPs are recorded at 33⅓ rpm, and singles at 45 rpm. Well, when I played this back, I had to go to the highest setting on my record player—78 rpm. The record sleeve carried the only marking of the contents—my Grandpa’s name.
The recording is a 3-minute mini-sermon that my Grandpa probably delivered on the radio (CJNB, perhaps) back in his radio preaching days. He talks about Revival and Canadian society, and the responsibility that Christians have in doing God’s work. He starts with the exhortation, “Revival is a matter of everyone sharing the load in God’s work…”.
Unfortunately, there is no date marked on the recording. Given the subject matter, the language used, and the availability of cassette tapes in recent decades, I would place the recording in the 1970s at the latest, but even the 1960s would be a possibility.
It is interesting to note that my Grandpa’s voice on the recording is much higher in pitch than I am used to. Of course, I realize that the recording process and the playback process probably took place at different speeds, thus affecting the pitch that I heard. In fact, as I was cleaning up the digitized audio, I reduced the speed (and hence the pitch) of the audio by 3% to make it sound most natural in terms of my perception of my Grandpa’s pitch and the likely rate of speech.
Here is the audio to give you a sense of what my Grandpa sounded like back when he was younger. We have a Johnson family reunion taking place this summer, so I welcome my family who have come here to download this. I’ll see you guys soon.
Berthuld Thomas Johnson, on Revival (2:59, 1.3 MB)
![[Rev. Bert Johnson at the microphone]](/darren105/BTJohnson_radio.jpg)
Update: Thanks to my Aunt Wendy for providing this picture. It’s wonderful! And, discussion in the comments to this post seems to suggest that the recording is more likely from the 1950s. Wow! Thanks, everyone, for commenting.
Whenever I login remotely to my machine in Canada, the ssh session dies after a while if I don’t actively type something. This is not the server timing out, but rather the TCP connection hanging. Figuring out a way to keep sending it keystrokes automatically is beyond my ability, but I found out that I could just have it send me data continually, and that works just as well to keep the terminal session alive. The following Bourne Shell loop works:
> while date ; do sleep 10 ; done
This just prints the date and time to my terminal every 10 seconds. At any time, I can interrupt it with a CTRL-C and continue to use the session. So now you know. 😛
I’m making another trans-Pacific flight in two weeks’ time, and I’ll want to have a lot of podcasts to listen to for the long trip. The problem is, the 256-MB SD card in my Palm Tungsten E isn’t large enough to hold the all of the mp3s that I need. So, I decided I could record a bunch of them onto minidisc. My minidisc recorder knows nothing about mp3s. It’s just an audio device. So I have to get my computer to play the mp3 files so that the minidisc recorder can record the resulting audio in real time. I do this while I sleep, so it’s not a problem.
The discs hold 74 minutes of audio in stereo mode, or twice that in mono mode. That’s 2 hours and 30 minutes, approximately. (The newer MDLP minidisc standard can hold 2X and 4X in stereo, but my recorder is too old to do that.)
I’ve already prepared the 2-hour long, four-episode series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future by Douglas Adams from the BBC. I’m not sure what will be next in my backlog of podcasts. But I’ve got about 37 episodes from the back catalogue of Evil Genius Chronicles from September to December 2004, that I haven’t listened to yet. In total, they take up 18 hours of playback time. I’ve been listening to these early shows of Dave’s (from August 2004) to track the evolution of podcasting. Where I’m at in the stack, he still hasn’t used the word “podcast”—it hadn’t been invented yet. I love the Evil Genius.
I’ll close by saying that, even though it’s limited to real-time transfer, I continue to love the minidisc format. It rocks!
To scratch an irritating itch, I sent the following email to Chris Lydon from Radio Open Source, a podcast I often listen to.
Dear Chris and company:
I enjoy listening to your program. It’s entertaining, informative, and compelling. But I have one serious issue that keeps coming up with each episode—Chris keeps cutting off his guests in mid sentence to go to a commercial. This is a tremendous disservice to your listeners, and, for a podcast, this is completely unnecessary. In fact, it strikes this listener as asinine every time I hear it happen. You have all the time in the world so you don’t need to take breaks at pre-determined intervals.
Please, for the sake of your listeners and for your guests, stop trying to be a radio show. It is too limiting, and the quality of your show suffers because of it. You are better off as a podcast.
Thank you.
In case you’re not familiar with the show, the commercials are not actually there in the podcast, but the interruption of the guests still occurs. I’m curious to see what his response will be. Maybe he will think I am just another nut job, but maybe he’ll see my point, even if he isn’t free to act on it.
Have you ever researched a certain topic on the Internet, gotten a bunch of promising results back from a search engine, and tried to access the links, but ultimately you were blocked from being able to read the articles because the websites hosting the information said a subscription or a fee was required? How did you feel? Pissed off, certainly. What did you do? You opened your wallet and became a subscriber? I highly doubt it. You most certainly moved down the list to the other content you could actually access. What does this mean to a content provider?
When traditional print publishers were introduced to the World Wide Web, they didn’t get it at first. They wanted to charge for their content. Some still don’t get it. In a fascinating interview about his highly influential IT Conversations, Doug Kaye spells it out plainly why content must be free. I’ve never heard anyone explain this before, and so well, even though I’ve always held the belief. And Doug Kaye is not some anti-capitalist quack. He’s a very well known entrepreneur in the IT business, and his IT Conversations, which offers audio recordings of conferences and interviews in IT, science, and technology for free download, is listened to by the most influential people in the industry. Here’s what he has to say, transcribed from the interview:
People are listening to the shows, but more importantly, people are linking to us… This is why the content has to be free… When content can be linked to, the value of that content goes way up… It’s the linking that allows people to essentially participate in the remix culture, as Larry Lessig says… It’s the remix and reuse of the content that actually makes it more valuable. When you do something like The New York Times is doing and put your content behind a toll gate of 49 dollars a year, you’re taking it off the market. You’re saying, “This stuff cannot be reused, it cannot be remixed, nobody can link to it.” And what you’ve done is, you’ve killed it. You’ve taken all the value out of it.
Listen to a 2-minute clip of the above text here:
Doug Kaye on why content must be free (2:18, 814 kB)
The entire interview is actually worth listening to. In it, you’ll learn about Doug Kaye’s business background before and during the dot-com era, how he started IT Conversations, and where he plans to take it in the future. He also throws his support behind BitTorrent, as he intends to use it for distribution in the new project. You can catch the entire interview here:
In his keynote speech at Gnomedex 5.0, podcasting pioneer Adam Curry tells the story of how he and Dave Winer accidentally created podcasting. He uses the analogy of Chocolate and Peanut Butter from the legendary Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercial and the analogy of switching places from Tom Hanks’ movie Big (1988). It’s a very entertaining tale of how it all got started, and Curry covers where we are today, the impact that podcasting is having on music producers and music listeners alike, and he gives a call-to-arms regarding things podcasting developers should fix right now.
Wonderfully, Curry makes the announcement that he is going to embrace BitTorrent as a distribution mechanism for his Daily Source Code podcast. This is important because, politically, as a peer-to-peer technology, BitTorrent needs some high-profile examples of legitimate, non-infringing use. Through its peer-to-peer design, BitTorrent is able to reduce the bandwidth costs for the podcast producers and increase the download speed and efficiency for podcast listeners. Curry’s announcement parallels Doug Kaye’s intention to adopt BitTorrent for his new IT Conversations venture.
If you are at all interested in podcasting, or just curious about this new medium (by the people!), I encourage you to go download and listen to Adam Curry’s speech.