Day: July 11, 2005

Instant buzzword: Boomcasting!

July 11, 2005 /

Why hasn’t anyone started using the Griffin Roadtrip or similar devices as personal pirate radio transmitters? They’d be perfect for coffee shops, student unions, seating areas of city parks–especially places that don’t have free wi-fi yet. All you’d have to do is set out the big LCD screen so passersby can see it, turn on your mp3 player of choice and be the ultralocal DJ. I’m totally going to do this whenever I cave and buy an overpriced hard drive with a stereo jack on it.

It’d be better to increase the gain on your tiny transmitter, of course, maybe by adding bigger batteries or using a higher-watt AC adapter, but I’m not an electrical engineer and I don’t think I know any. Also, I think boosting an FM transmitter above a certain level is illegal, but then that’s half the reason to do it anyway. It’d also be pretty cool to trump the LCD screen by wearing a t-shirt with your band of choice real big on the front. 88.5: ME RADIO!

I wonder if printing up such t-shirts would qualify as willful inducement? I hope so.

July 11, 2005 /

Crystal’s Adventures is pretty amazing. She’s in Asia on a grant this summer (she’s in grad school at Tulane, although I don’t know her degree program); in May she wrote for an adolescent health website in Bangkok, after which she and two friends traveled overland through Laos to Hanoi, where she’s working on a sustainable community development grant proposal.

This sounded a little scary and exciting to me, as somebody whose only knowledge of Laos and Hanoi comes from old Doonesbury comics. Crystal’s account–which is well-written, clear and reasonable–makes it evident that this is a batshit loonball psycho death trip. Also that she is an action hero. Check out the part where she watches a cargo truck flip off a mountain, almost has her own bus do the same, stays in a house that uses old bombshells for dishes and scares a biker gang into carrying her down the mountain for three bucks. Man!

I found Crystal’s blog through her domain-co-resident and fiancee, Clinton Roosevelt Nixon, a name very familiar to indie RPG geeks who don’t read this. My Nobilis ballers may recognize him as the guy who wrote The Shadow of Yesterday (and, ergo, invented Keys).