57 Channels and One Thing On

Some of you listen to NCPR via your cable system. You may not know this, but we receive payment for serving cable customers from an outfit known as the Cable Royalty Tribunal. The catch is: we have to document that a variety of cable systems transmit our signal to customers. If you listen via cable, you can help us greatly by telling us (in writing) where you live, how long you've listened to NCPR through your cable system, the name of your cable company, and ideally, how much you value the service. Send your report to us via email to radio@ncpr.org or via regular mail: NCPR, St. Lawrence University, Canton NY 13617.

Many area cable systems do not carry NCPR. You can also help us (and yourself, if you live in a marginal reception area) by contacting your cable company and asking them to carry NCPR as a public service addition to their audio channel package, or as the default audio of their cable access channel. Thanks.

Sometimes denial is a little lake in Canada

I've spent most of my life in the North Country, but I'm still running across fantastic places I'd never been to visit. Somehow I'd always overlooked the Rideau Lakes country between Kingston and Ottawa, out on the chancy edge of our reception area. Villages like Forfar, Delta and Glen Tay. I helped my friend open her century-old camp--the sole occupant of a twenty-two acre island--so I might be getting an over-rosy view. But it's hard to argue with loon calls, grebes, heron, beaver, woodpeckers, raccoons, sun through oak, twinkling water, food cooked on wood, books read by lamplight, and a soft hammock on a well-screened porch. Remember winter? No, I don't either.

Too Old for Nanotech, Too Young to Die

I hold with the animistic view of computers--I know there's a little wizard and a little devil, somewhere in the box. Yeah, my smarts are a little rusted out; I need my daughter to hip me to the latest gear. Switching back and forth between my Mac and my PC for the last two days, doing web pages on one and print publications on the other, I risk a fatal case of brain bubbles. Juggling two incompatible sets of memorized keyboard shortcuts is seizure-inspiring. My online partner Bill, on the other hand, is serene among the Lords of Geek. His t-shirt reads "Linux: Real Men Write Their Own Operating Systems." As a superannuated English major, it has to be said--I am not worthy.

She's Gonna Blow!

It's hard to believe, but all the stuff we've ever put online, the thousands of news audios, all those pictures and pages, the videos, the thousands of playlists, newsletters, forums, call-ins--all of that lives on a server, somewhere in the Midwest I think, on one hard drive the size of a slice of toast. I can only think that it's really, really dense, like the degenerate matter thought to exist in black holes. Anyway, the bad news is--that little hard drive IS toast, and we are in the process of migrating (picture millions of lemmings inside your radio) to a new server. We hope to accomplish this without mass destruction, but in the event of catastrophic failure, please remember that it is not safe to view with the naked eye; wear welder's goggles.