When the Story's Out Back

The new Red Sandstone Trail in Potsdam, featured in the Online section below, is my backyard. My family has made its home above Sugar Island Flow since 1983. If you sort of squint at the aerial photo map, that blue dot is me waving at you from the driveway. The quarries, hydro dams and mills along the Raquette were my childhood playgrounds. The sound of swift water runs back through all my memories. Don't forget to dangle your feet in some soon. So cool.

That Old Feeling-Old Feeling

You could call the public radio listener demographic "savvy, upscale and mature," or "smug, comfortable and--well--old." I haven't been feeling too savvy this week--I've been listening a lot, to teens. They have been rescuing me and NCPR from our misconceptions about how to create a regional teen website. The process has also been a good antidote for the smug, comfortable thing. Tuition and home improvements have taken care of upscale, and anyone can tell you mature has never been my long suit. Guess that leaves just the one thing. Sigh.

The Public in Public Radio

Collective pronouns are tricky. Usually you will hear talk about "the public radio community" when someone wants to put their hand in your pocket. And we do sometimes--North Country Public Radio is part of the "gift economy." But sometimes what we want is more complicated. Two examples are below. We want you to write and talk about things that are important to you, and then let us edit it, then play it for all your neighbors to hear. And we want teenagers to give up a chunk of Saturday to tell us things that should be obvious to anyone with a brain. In short, we want "you" to be part of "us." Asking for money would probably have been easier.

It's Not Rocket Science

It's computer science. If it was rocket science, it would work better. Our apologies to the 303 Northnet recipients of this newsletter. All your copies bounced back to us last Thursday. It took until Tuesday to be able to resend the newsletter. At the same time, ncpr.org has been unable to receive and send mail reliably. We are moving to a different mail server which should address that problem. At the same time, our live broadcast streams, both the Real Media format and the Windows Media format, are unreliable and choppy. This is due to yet other, unspecified problems, probably with our streaming distributor. At the same time, our e-mail inboxes have been filling up with "klez" virus-generated blank messages. How did we ever get to the moon?

Lost My Teenaged Mind

My daughter Elena can Instant Message while watching two different TV shows, talking on the telephone, and writing a term paper. I, on the other hand, am lucky if I can walk and chew gum at the same time. Since the Talking Heads are playing on the office stereo and Bill is explaining to Radio Bob why he is looking for tools to edit the boot sector of his hard drive, and people drop by at random to try out the New Media studio's new love seat, I have retired to the deserted and soundproofed production studio to inform you, gentle reader, that I have lost my teenaged mind... and am left with these middle-aged convolutions.