TODAY'S TOURBUS STOPS: Frontline / Leo Laporte on KFI

Howdy, y'all, and greetings once again from deep behind the orange curtain in beautiful Irvine, California, where you should immediately consult your doctor if an allergic reaction to this product occurs. :P

I apologize for Tourbus' recent absence. I've been busy cramming for CompTIA's Network+ certification exam, and I haven't had a chance to lift my head out of the books until today. Now all I need to do is get up the courage to actually TAKE the exam.

TOURBUS is made possible by the kind support of our sponsors. Please take a moment to visit today's sponsors and thank them for keeping our little bus of Internet happiness on the road week after week.

On with the show...

Frontline Audience: Everyone with RealOne or Windows Media Players

For the past 20 years, Frontline has been the flagship public affairs series on America's public television network. Frontline presents long-form public affairs documentaries that "fully explore and illuminate the critical issues of our times." In fact,

FRONTLINE remains the only regularly scheduled long-form public- affairs documentary series on American television, producing more hours of documentary programming than all the commercial networks combined.

[Quotes from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/us ]

Now for the cool part. If you head over to the Frontline web site at

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/

you can watch nearly three dozen Frontline episodes in their entirety, online, free of charge.

No, really.

Frontline's web site offers 26 episodes from the past three years on topics ranging from an inside view of what it will take to stabilize Iraq to how Wall Street betrayed the public's trust during the dot com bubble. You can also watch six classic Frontline episodes on topics ranging from the 1993 ambush of American soldiers in Mogadishu [an episode that inspired the movie "Black Hawk Down"] to what really happened in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.

Each Frontline episode is divided into 12 minute chunks, and both high (DLS/Cable) and low (dial-up) versions are available. While you can't actually save the video chunks to your computer without using special stream recording software [which I am NOT going to talk about], the 12 minute chunks are available in both streaming RealPlayer and Windows Media Player formats. Just click on the episode you want to watch, click on the clip you want to play, choose your bandwidth, and you're off to the races.

A few of Frontline's episodes also have links to analyses, interviews, chronologies, discussions, and even teachers guides. Look for the links somewhere on the episodes' homepages.

Frontline's web site offers some of the highest quality content available on the Internet. One word of warning, though: Frontline's site can be a bit slow at times, and I can all but guarantee that sending 100,000 of your fellow Tourbus riders to the site is going to slow things down even more. Please be patient. The site is WELL worth the wait.

Enjoy!

Leo Laporte on KFI Audience: Everyone with Windows Media Player

I tend to spend my weekends either standing in line at Disneyland or curled up in bed watching Tivo. But on those rare occasions that I'm chained to my computer or stuck in a southern California traffic jam on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I make it a point to listen to Leo Laporte's new show on KFI.

Leo is pretty famous in the technology industry, hosting both The Screen Savers [ http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/index.html ] and
Call for Help [ http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/index.html ] on cable's TechTV network. Since Leo has no discernable social life, on the days he isn't on TechTV he hosts a live, call-in computer show on Los Angeles' KFI AM 640. Leo's only been doing the radio show since January, but the show's good enough that I fully expect it to be syndicated nationally. Until that day comes, though, if you have Windows Media Player on your PC or Mac, you can listen to Leo's show live on the Internet at

http://www.kfi640.com/interactive/streaming.html

Just click on the link at the top of the page. A pop-up window will appear and about 30 seconds later you should start hearing KFI on your computer's speakers.

Leo's show is broadcast from Noon to 3:00 PM Pacific time (GMT -8) every Saturday and Sunday. [You can see the rest of KFI's programming schedule at http://www.kfi640.com/prog/schedule.html.]

And, if you can't wait until Saturday or Sunday, Leo offers both detailed show notes from and even a free, MP3 audio archive of his most recent KFI shows at

http://leo.typepad.com/radio/

Just click on one of the shows in the Recent Posts column on the left side of the page, scroll down a bit, and look for the "Show Archives" table. As I write this post, MP3 audio archives of shows 10 through 16 are available. There's a week lag between when a show airs and when the MP3 archives are available, so MP3s of last weekend's shows—- shows 17 and 18--will be posted this weekend.

Neat, huh?

Good News from the Alabama squirrel Front! Audience: Everyone

Finally, longtime passengers of our little bus of Internet happiness will remember that my web site Netsquirrel.com is named in honor of the squirrels at University of Alabama who so bravely--and routinely-- gave their lives to disrupt power to the campus. Last year alone these self-propelled short circuits plunged the campus into darkness nearly half a dozen times.

Well, I am happy to announce that the University of Alabama's student newspaper The Crimson White [motto: "All the news that's fittin'"] is reporting that that, thanks to a massive squirrel-proofing effort undertaken by Alabama Power [motto: "Hey, Bubba, watch this!"], the days of mass squirrel suicide at Alabama may be a thing of the past. You can read the story at

http://www.cw.ua.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/03/04/4046ca67ef327

Personally, I'm not convinced that Alabama's squirrels have been totally put out of business. Only time will tell.

Requiescat in pace brave, bushy-tailed tree rats.

That's it for today. Have a safe and happy week and we'll talk again soon!

           .~~~.  ))
 (\__/)  .'     )  ))       Patrick Douglas Crispen
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{o_,    \    {              crispen@netsquirrel.com
  / ,  , )    \            http://www.netsquirrel.com/ 
  `~  -' \    } ))    AOL Instant Messenger: Squirrel2K
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---..{____}                  Warning: squirrels.