March « 2005 « dylan tweney

Coasting in.

Driving home last night, stop-and-go traffic on the 101, gas gauge pegged to E, I finally ran out of gas about half a mile short of my exit. Restarted the truck and made it as far as the exit, then a couple blocks up Poplar, before the truck ran out of gas again while I was waiting at the light. Restarted it the second the light turned green, gunned through a right hand turn and up the little hill on Delaware -- up up up, hang on there, don't die on me yet -- until the engine coughed and died just as I crested the rise. I punched the clutch in and coasted another block, wrenched the steering wheel around to pull into the parking lot, coasted along another fifty feet, and then made a final, careful right turn to roll slowly, just as the truck ran out of its last bit of momentum, into the gas station.

Walk this way.

Clara heard "Walk This Way" on the radio last week, and asked to hear it again yesterday. Karen says they listened to it about 18 times yesterday morning (including both Aerosmith and Run DMC versions) before preschool. After she got home, all Clara wanted to do was sit in front of the computer and listen to it over and over again. "I want Arrowsmiss" she said. She must have spent an hour listening to the song. "He said 'flying up in the air'," my little rocker girl observed after awhile. God help us when she asks what "down on the muffin" means.

Fogware Internet Radio Recorder

We've been looking for a way to beef up our music collections without dipping into the ramen noodle fund ever since the iron fist of the law came smashing down on the paradise of free file-trading that was Napster. That's why we were excited to try Fogware's Internet Radio Recorder, a Windows program that, for the price of a couple of CDs, lets us save internet radio streams to our heart's content.

Alas, it was not to be. Internet Radio Recorder lets you save audio streams from internet radio stations as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files, and it will rip CDs to the same formats. It also lets you burn and label CDs of your new MP3 library.

But the program's great achievement is also its biggest shortcoming: It relies on internet radio stations, which are simply too flaky, inconsistent, and low quality to warrant serious recording. Most over-the-air radio stations don't even offer an internet stream, thanks to misguided FCC rulings that have all but shut down the internet broadcast industry. All that's left is a swarm of all-night pirate radio stations from Europe playing a mix of ambient and techno music, with the odd public radio station thrown in here and there.

Internet Radio Recorder lets you browse a huge list of such stations, but its search tools are inconvenient and its recording tools clunky. Most of the time, it's just an annoying and not very useful toy. It looks as if we're going to keep spending our lunch money on CDs after all. -Dylan Tweney

Best Feature: Integrated CD recording tools
Worst Feature: Nearly useless radio station search utility

SPECS:
Fogware Internet Radio Recorder
Price: $40
System requirements: Windows 2000 or Windows XP; 100MB of disk space; broadband internet connection
www.fog-ware.com

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Sad story: Micron CEO, who fought hard to keep U.S. semiconductor jobs, has died in a plane crash. http://t.co/VK3zOuCi by @deantak

dylan tweney if you're bored, you're not paying attention

Coasting in.

Walk this way.

South Park.

How to destroy the earth.

Fogware Internet Radio Recorder

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