While coming home from the PLUG meeting on Google Internals the other night
For those of you too lazy to click (I know I probably would be) the story is about the evolution of a popular Alternative Rock radio station in the Philadelphia area, Y-Rock 100. It was an FM radio station for 12 years, when that died (and left the Philadelphia area without an Alternative Rock station!) some of the DJs recreated it as an internet radio station, and just recently this very popular internet radio station was picked up by the folks over at XPN as Y-Rock On XPN. It’s pretty much commercial-free, the exception being a few seconds when you first connect to the stream. At the end of this month they’ll even have some FM radio time on XPN a few evenings per week. Cool.
Now I don’t listen to music radio much, I never listened to Y-Rock FM when it was around. Most of the stuff on the FM radio is littered with shamelessly promoted garbage and I hate commercials, gossip, and stupid DJs who don’t know when to shut up, I will change the station before listening to any of this. I listen to NPR via WHYY most of the time. When I want music I’ll usually fire up the interesting mix offered by plain old XPN or just pop in a CD of my own. At work I listen to Podcasts and WHYY and XPN streams.
But there are times when I just want to turn off my brain and chill out to some good Alternative Rock. I’m very happy to have this great option via internet radio now. (And thanks to
While at PLUG the other night I was asked what sort of techie stuff I’ve been up to lately. I had to confess that I had been doing “Nothing!” I’ve been working with Ubuntu-Women stuff, but that’s more sociological than technical (even if I am learning all the ins and outs of wikis). There are certainly a few causes 1) too hot to be near my computer (there is AC up there, but it can only do so much when it’s 100F out) 2) working a lot of overtime at my real non-IT job 3) other stuff like writing and reading taking up a lot of time and I enjoy them more when it’s hot. Still, it was a bit depressing. I think I’m going to resume my work with Perl-TK in the near future.
Speaking of which, has anyone read Perl Best Practices? Or are there any links/books you can recommend that discuss good Perl (or general) programming practices? I really need to work on writing code that has some sort of quality, in the past “working” has been good enough for me, and that’s the reason I’m a lousy programmer ;D
The heat wave we were having that got us close to 100F for almost a week has drifted off. It’ll only get up in the high 80s today, and the next few days look like they’ll be nice and sunny. Going to the gym in this heat has been tough, it’s air-conditioned of course, but when you’re sweating even before you walk into the gym and the humidity creeps in doing 30 minutes on the elliptical at a reasonable pace and resistance gets really tough – today was the first day I actually made it to 30 minutes.
Finally, I’m delighted to say that I’m going up to Iselin, NJ with Nita tomorrow! We’ll be shopping for my wedding dress, hopefully will find something wonderful and within my budget that I can take home right away – I don’t want to drive all the way back there to get something that’ll need to be fitted/customized. I’m so excited! I’ll have to bring my camera.