October 2004 Archives
Just after Fox ended its coverage of the Red Sox victory in Game 7 of the ALCS last night, a Nike ad aired in which a fan in the seats ages from 1919 all the way through 2004 as the years tick by below the frame.
The ad, which will strike a chord with many Red Sox fans, can be viewed or downloaded at Nike.com.
In a clever visual gesture on the page containing the ad, some Morse code appears in the frame surrounding the viewing area. This is a reference to the scoreboard on the Green Monster at Fenway, which renders the initials of former team owners Thomas A. Yawkey and Jean R. Yawkey in Morse Code.
But, as you might expect, the Nike page goes a step further. The Morse code in the frame does not represent the Yawkey's initials.
Here are the two codes:
.--- ..- ... -
-.. --- .. -
I took a second to decode it. You can probably guess what the code says:
.--- ..- ... -
J U S T
-.. --- .. -
D O I T
ps. You'll notice in the last few sequences of the ad, the fan is wearing a Red Sox jacket with a Nike logo on it.
Resource: Morse code alphabet
Update (2006-01-16): I completely revised the code that generates the RSS 2.0 feed. It is much more stable, since it uses a Radio Paradise-generated XML feed as its source, and creates the feed using the DOM. Please use the new feed. Here is the source code.
...
My friend Mike recently introduced me to Radio Paradise, an internet radio station that plays commercial-free indie-rock, with some classic stuff thrown in. I became addicted to it almost immediately, in part because it's great music to have on in the background when you're working on other things, and you're guaranteed to be exposed to all kinds of stuff you've never heard before.
Radio Paradise has a page that lists its most recently played songs, going back about 6 hours. I thought an RSS feed of this page might be useful/enjoyable for some people, including me, but Radio Paradise doesn't offer such a feed yet. So, I spent a few hours last night writing a PHP script that "scrapes" the "recently played" page, and translates it into an RSS feed. Update: I also wrote a script that creates a feed for RP's recently active forums list.
- Here is the RSS feed of Radio Paradise's recently played list.
- Here is the Atom feed of Radio Paradise's recently played list (very unstable -- not recommended).
- Here is the RSS feed for Radio Paradise's "recently active forums" list.
- Here is the source code for this project
Update (10/27/04): I have released the source code for this project. This allows you to generate the playlist feed from your own website. The only requirements are that your server can run PHP with the CURL functions. All you have to do is copy this file to your server, remove the final "s" from "feed.phps" and access it in your browser or RSS reader. Note there are some slight constraints on your redistribution and use of the code. Please see the comments in the file.
Progammers will notice that a single script determines whether to return an RSS feed or an Atom feed, as determined by a parameter the user passes on the URL. I think this is somewhat uncommon.
The feed will generate automatically every time you access it. In other words, it will be in perfect synchronization with Radio Paradise's page as long as you refresh it.
Now that the information is in this standard format, I'm sure someone could write another script to do something interesting with it, or you can just add it to your RSS/Atom news aggregator, and see what the station has been playing, without having to visit its website.
The script is more stable than it was at first, but I would still expect bugs from time to time, including critical ones. Email me any bug reports, and I'll see what I can do.
If you use this feed, please leave a comment, so I can report your interest to the Radio Paradise staff, who are aware of this project.
Friday night was the final round of Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions. I was surprised to see that one of the categories for Double Jeopardy was "Blogs." Here are screen caps of each of the "answers"...read it, think of the correct question ("Who is...", etc.) and then click to see if you are correct. They're pretty easy if you know what a blog is, and not too hard even if you don't.
