We three sat down to enjoy a lovely beverage, and discuss the playstation outage, the end of term and the exciting recent Canadian election. Robin blames China, Ken blames the Russian mafia, and, I kept silent on this, so don't bug me... Robin has been burnt by the cloud, but will not give any details. Amazon went down too, which is, frankly most of the cloud. When it went down the whole damned cloud, or much of it, went down. The problem is that there are many services, but they often rely on Amazon.
We then rambled about the Canadian election that just happened. It surprised us, and some odd candidates got elected, but we wish them luck (though that did not stop us from mocking them....)
If anyone has a blog post idea for Robin, email him, and you can get a free Algoma University hoodie! Oh and Robin is now on twitter, run for your lives...
Enjoy episode 27.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Episode 27 - Passwords, Playstations and Politics
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5 comments:
Oh thank god(s) comments are finally available again! So...
Yes, I have complained about the sound quality in the past, but usually it involved accosting Ken and/or Robin at conferences. And really, there was only one I couldn't listen to when all is said and done.
Ken, your comment about Isamov's Foundation series is timely, given that the science fiction blog i09 has been having a Foundation Week extravaganza (http://io9.com/foundationweek)
I think it was Dave who made the comment about burying books in kegs, which was also a trope in Jack McDevitt's Enternity Road (except that it was in a cave in the Bay of Fundy).
The Road is a great novel - I read it the summer I was travelling around the Maritimes for a family reunion. I also tried reading Oryx and Crake and hated it.
And now I must inundate Robin with blog post suggestions...
Oh I did not mean you Rebecca, I meant a few emails we got from people that had never sent a comment in complaining of audio, so that was a different deal.
Bookkegging was also big in a Canticle for Liebowita, which I try to mention on a daily basis...
Had to listen to the podcast twice, once in front of a computer searching wikipedia when you got into Canadian politics. Nice to know that politics is convoluted, water is wet, and rocks are inedible across the planet, just as here in Texas.
The thing that's always made me very wary of using "the cloud" as a back-up medium is that you simply don't have control of it once it leaves your hard-drive. Say I rip a CD to OGG files and back them up into a storage-locker somewhere. It's obviously not a file format that e-music, Amazon, iTunes, or anyone else uses. But, it still has the album and track information that cddb provides (unless I encrypt it beforehand, which I would have to un-encrypt before using again - so, no 'on the fly music library' for me). Is the incoming data scanned in any way and flagged as suspicious by the storage-locker people? And if not them, what about the ISP? Not to mention the intelligence acronyms that get ahold of it automatically if I send it out over a wireless connection, here in the US, with the complete blessing of the carriers.
...and I'd like to offer kudos to Ken for bringing up Gamma World, at least in passing. The last time I remember seeing my boxed set was when I was 13? I do remember, vividly, getting kicked out of the library when our game got too loud. Kicked out by a Librarian. (The irony drips... drips... drips out.)
Thanks for the podcast - enjoyed it as always.
-jim
P.S. - Not one new recommendation for a book this time, so I recommend 'The Forever War' by Joe Haldeman. One of the stand-out concepts is that when over-population and food aren't in balance, the calorie (1000 of which are measured in kilo-calories), becomes the world currency. Whenever gas prices go up here in the States, there's always a fight over bio-diesel, or ethanol, vs. fossil-fuels. Wondering how long before we give up our dollars (and you-all your Looneys), and we all switch to Ergs.
Hi Jim -- I loved that original Gamma World box. Forever War is a great recommendation -- thanks for that. Have you read Old Man's War by John Scalzi?
Never heard of it, but... You may have guessed by now that I use the podcast as my own personal "good-reads" search engine. Thanks!
And since the sound quality issue has been raised, I've never had a problem with it. Sometimes when you record outside, there's wind, but that's what I hear when I'm outside anyway. If there's ever a problem, I have this 'volume' button thingie on the side of my MP3 player...
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