I’m a big fan of listener supported radio stations like KEXP in Seattle and KCRW from Santa Monica, CA and I’ve given money to both but I really hate the long winded pleas for money. So this weekend in the mountains I came up with an idea that will rock the radio pledge drives. Stations like KEXP have a huge internet audience. The problem with the old school pledge drive is that it goes on FOREVER. Give me the chance to make it stop on demand I will gladly donate on day 1.
Heres the idea:
- During the pledge drive you promote the URL krcw.com/keeplistening.
- When I, the listener from across the ether goes to that URL I can easily register an account and donate money
- As soon as I donate the minimum amount I am given a login and password that allows me access to a private streaming feed that brings me the usual awesome streaming indie rock that I love. I don’t have to wait for 3 week long pledge drive to end.
Pay to Play!
I’m sure your bottom line will more than double and I can keep listening to commercial free radio.
On the heels of Matt Cutt’s review of the Firefox release candidate 2 I decided to give it whirl. I installed the soon to be version 2.0 on my Mac and have experienced many spinning beach ball of death while browsing. The browser locks up on everyday sites and I no option but to kill the process. I guess Matt isn’t on a Mac as he reports no crashes so my advice to the Mac users is to wait for the official release. I also didn’t see much improvement. I don’t really know if I like the fact that it implements SessionSaver by default. Isn’t that a memory hog? On the other hand Firefox doesn’t appear to be using near as much memory as before.
I keep seeing the ads for the movie Borat and I couldn’t remember the name of the Turkish guy’s website that it reminded me of from the late 90’s. Finally wikipedia hooked me up and I found it. Mahir! Yeah they aren’t the same guy but Borat must have been derived from Mahir.
I was always annoyed at how Flickr couldn’t keep my photos in order of date taken when I created a new set. After some messing around I discovered that they have added this feature. Go Flickr! The screenshot below should show you how to change the ordering. Hey Flickr… this should be the default behavior 
I went to the Raleigh ruby on rails group hack night last week with David Black and had a good time chatting with local programmers. I spotted someone with a MacBook Pro and headed over to ask for some advice on how to get lighttpd running properly. Not only did Jared of No Fluff, Just Stuff help me with a better choice of RoR web server (he suggested Mongrel and after spending a weekend with it I whole heartedly agree) but he also sold me on the whole Parallels thing.
Once I switched to Mac I really never had any desire to waste any of my precious disk space on Windows. I use Remote Desktop to take care of my few Windows needs. However RDP often fails to work properly and is slow. So when Jared showed me how freaking fast and reliable and how little disk space a Windows XP install took on Parallels I was convinced. Its crazy. Boot XP in 30 seconds, in FULL SCREEN mode and it feels like you are on the fastest PC available. Not only that but you can boot just about any OS such as SusE or Fedora in Parallels.
Important one: It functions way better if you follow this tip from Jared (reply to my question about two mouse pointers and slow response):
Regarding the double cursor..
Load the Windows VM, then make it a partial window (via [alt]+[Return]).
Then, from the menu bar, go to VM/Install Parallels tools. I think that takes care of it. They enhance various OS level integrations.
