March 2009 Archives

I recently decided to embark on a journey of digitizing a box full of audio cassettes. Those who knew me growing up—especially when I was in junior high and earlier—know I was always goofing off with a microphone and a tape recorder. I operated a pirate radio station at AM 1630 for a while too. It’s broadcast radius covered most of the town of Granger, UT, where I lived.

One of the nuggets I found was actually much later than that. In 1995, I had just published (self-published) a book about the World Wide Web titled Fozziliny George Moo’s Guide To The World Wide Web and was asked by a friend to appear on his radio program.

Now, about this friend: His name is Doran Barons. Freaky, right?! My name is Doran Barton! His name is Doran Barons!

He saw a letter I had written to the editors of Wired magazine a few months before (which was subsequently published in Wired) and sent me e-mail to introduce himself. This triggered a series of e-mail exchanged between us which led to him inviting me on his radio program, Digital Village a weekly radio program on KFPK, 90.7FM in Los Angeles, CA.

Digital Village has an online MP3 archive of their radio program going back to 2000 and they’ve hosted some impressive guests on their radio program like Neal Stephenson (one of my favorite authors), Bruce Sterling (another of my favorite authors), Steve Wozniak (who started Apple with Steve Jobs), Bruce Schneier, and Lawrence “Larry” Lessig. It’s cool that I preceded such giants. :-)

After I did the telephone interview with the radio program, Doran sent me a cassette tape of the program and I’ve digitized it (with Doran’s permission). So, if anyone’s interested in taking a peek back in time to 1995 to hear about the World Wide Web in its relative infancy, here it is:

• http://www.xmission.com/~fozz/podcast/19950917-digital_village.mp3

It’s clear I was fresh from doing lots of research for my book. It’s fun listening to me advise one of the show’s callers to contact the “site” he was getting his dialup access through to see if they offered anything like PPP, SLIP, or TIA so he could “extend the Internet to his home computer over his dialup line” or he could use lynx at the shell prompt on the Unix system he was dialing into.

I picked up this book at the John Wayne Airport after hearing Ben Sherwood on Glenn Beck's radio show and seeing him on Glenn's TV show.

Sherwood's book approaches survival from multiple angles and I appreciated that. Whatever you might think this book is, it probably is just a bit and a whole lot of what you didn't expect. I found most of it to be anecdotal and a bit fluffy, which made it a very easy read, but Sherwood does shower some dense statistics throughout the book for you to dig through that make the subject matter more appealing to the left brain.

Much of the book is the result of interviews with and stories about people who have encounter dramatic and traumatic events in their lives whether it be an airplane crash, a lion attack, captivity inside a Nazi concentration camp, or miraculously escaping one of the NY World Trade Center towers after the airplane has hit the building.

Combining advice from survival experts, doctors, the survivors themselves, and others, Sherwood comes up with a variety of intriguing possibilities for why certain people survive. In addition, he includes recommendations for people wanting to boost their potential survivability. He addresses the issues of good luck vs. bad luck and how strategic thinking and doing some simple preparatory planning for the worst can save you from freezing or "becoming a statue" when the unexpected happens.

So, in conclusion, a very easy read partly because it's well written and partly because the subject matter is a little superfluous and fluffy. It's less dense than Freakonomics, but just as interesting to read.