brainwagon

Well, it’s still a couple of days till Halloween, but I thought I would to this special halloween themed podcast so that you could still have time to use some of the ideas and downloads that I present here in whatever spooky proceedings you may have planned. Here are some of the links I mentioned:

• Murnau’s classic Nosferatu, courtesy of archive.org
• Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, also courtesy of archive.org
• The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, courtesy of, you guessed it, archive.org
• Vintage Scary Music (from vinyl), courtesy of vinylorphanage.com
• Ghouls with Attitude, from oddiooverplay.com
• At Home With The Munsters, of questionable legality, but fun.
• Halloween Organ Music, specifically Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, translated from an unlabelled MIDI file into a wav via timidity and encoded via lame.

In some ways, I’m blown away by the popularity of my podcasts, and yet in listening to people like Adam Curry, Dave Slusher, or even Todd Cochrane’s Geek News Central, it seems clear that far fewer people are listening to my little podcasts than others. For instance, I tried looking up my lowly weblog on pubsub.com and compared it to others.

1. Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code ranked 955.
2. Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles scores a ranking of 1,961.
3. Todd Cochrane’s Geek News Central ranked 4,209.
4. Brian Cantoni’s personal weblog ranked 15,507.
5. My own weblog? Ranked 852,031.

Should I be encouraged or discouraged by this?

Incidently, I mentioned Brian Cantoni’s weblog only because I created a subscription list on pubsub.com that tries to find links to brainwagon.org, and he showed up today and had nice things to say about my podcasts.

My popularity does seem to be growing. Yesterday I had my first day of > 1gb bandwidth consumed, with 87 people downloading my latest podcast. If that keeps up, I may be able to exhaust my 40gb of monthly bandwidth.

In the 1960s, computer scientists at American universities and in the U.S. Department of Defence devised a plan for a network of computers that could all communicate with each other.

After the hardware was put in place, researchers at UCLA attempted on Oct. 29, 1969, to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

…

In order to log in to the two-computer network, which was then called ARPANET, programmers at UCLA were to type in “log,” and Stanford would reply “in.”

The UCLA programmers only got as far as “lo” before the Stanford machine crashed.

Happy Birthday!

The New Yorker endorses Kerry in an essay that in most respects echoes my own thoughts on the upcoming election. We shall see who prevails on November 2.

The BBC has the 1984 Infocom adventure based upon Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy running as a Flash applet. Cool stuff. Don’t forget your towel!