Rocket Propelled Grenades are the subject of The 3LA Podcast for today.

Episode 8 of The 3LA Podcast is about PEI.

I’ve been experimenting with Amazon’s S3 web service, something that’s a sort of cross between a “remote hard drive” and a “remote database.” I’m testing it as a possible repository for a client’s nightly backup of about 40GB of data and scripts, and so far Christopher Shepherd’s PHP scripts (which use Geoff Gaudreault’s PHP S3 class to talk to S3) are the leading contender for a useful S3 toolkit.

I also did a lot of experimenting with s3sync, an rsync-like S3 backup solution in Ruby, but ran into some crashing problems seemingly related to some HTTP timeout problems in Ruby itself, so I left it aside for now.

I’ve enjoyed my thrash through S3 so much that I created an episode of The 3LA Podcast about it. If all of the above is Greek to your eyes, try giving it a listen — I attempted to sum it all up in rather less buzzwordy language in the podcast.

And, yes, I know that S3 isn’t a “3LA”.  But it’s awfully close!

The DVR — or Digital Video Recorder — is sometimes known by its most popular manisfestation, the Tivo.  Indeed to “Tivo” something has become a verb.

You can think of a DVR as a Video Cassette Recorder, but with a hard drive instead of video tapes used for recording.

More importantly, however, is that DVRs are also computers, albeit ones with a features limited to TV recording and controlled by a remote rather than a keyboard.  And because they’re computers, they can be a lot more powerful and easier to use that VCRs.

I don’t think anyone ever got user interface on the VCR to the point where it was universally usable.  And it’s not that there weren’t attempts — the crazy “VCR Plus” system comes to mind.

With DVRs, things are getting pretty close to “anyone can use this.”  The printed TV Guide is gone, replaced by up to two weeks of electronic TV guide, navigated on the TV screen with a remote.  Want to record something?  Press the “RECORD” button.  That’s it.

DVRs can also be used to record entire series — you tell the DVR to record every new episode of your favourite program and it just does it.  Indeed more sophisticated DVRs, like the Tivo, can be set to record automatically based on other criteria, such as actor, or genre.

Because DVRs automatically invisibly save some amount whatever you’re watching “live,” even if you’re not recording a program you can generally “pause” and “rewind”.  Which makes it a lot easier to watch credits, and listen to confusing dialog again.  To say nothing of making for easier washroom breaks.

We’ve had a DVR for almost a year, and perhaps the greatest change it’s made in our television watching life is that we simply don’t watch commercial anymore.  We’ve got the DVR set up to record the programs we want to watch, and we generally watch them anywhere from an hour to a day after they’ve aired, which means that when commercials happen, we just fast-forward through them.

Most cable and satellite providers now have DVRs available, usually as a more expensive version of the digital box you need anyway.  We pay an extra $10 a month for ours.  It’s not without its quirks — two or three times a month it won’t record something, it’s “crashed” on us a couple of times, and the interface could use some polish.  But it’s also changed the way we watch TV completely.

A bonus episode of The 3LA Podcast tonight wherein I take a stab at explaining why the airport code for Charlottetown is YYG.

Today’s episode of The 3LA Podcast: ZIP, a brief tour through the US ZIP code.

Today’s episode of The 3LA Podcast pulls apart RSS. In two minutes and fifteen seconds.

A sure sign that the procrastination gremlins are in full form: another episode of The 3LA Podcast. Today’s subject: PMT.

While I tipped my hat to friend Ann (who has nothing to be ashamed about for not knowing how to use RSS in a sentence) there’s something else at work here: perhaps like you, I get lots of ideas in the shower, or on the way to work, or when I’m falling to sleep at night. Usually these ideas involve creating some sort of grand thing — a newspaper, a hovering rocket ship, a website for father with one child. And usually they go nowhere, as real life overtakes (and I realize that parts for hovering rocket ships would probably be too expensive anyway).

I’m pretty sure that if I carried out all of my crazy shower schemes I would explode or be homeless (although I might be homeless and happy). But it occured to me that the effect of so many ideas not carried out was beginning to be a downer. So I decided to take just one — it happened, perhaps at random, to be exposition on three-letter words — and just do it.

The idea actually started off in the shower as a CBC radio series. Then I realized that to make a CBC radio series I would probably have to write a proposal and send it to someone. And there would be meetings, and studios to book, and scripts to write, and T4s to receive. It all seemed Very Complicated. And so I gave up. Then I realized that if I just went ahead and did it — in an hour or two — I would, at the very least, get it out of my system. Wouldn’t be perfect, might not even be useful. But never underestimate the power of actually doing something.

Who knows — I might keep going.

My friend Ann wrote the other day to ask me about RSS. I wrote her back a little description of what RSS is. This morning she wrote back to thank me, and added:

That’s a nice set of gloves to throw down, and inspired me to whip up a brand new podcast: The 3LA Podcast. The idea is that in each episode I’ll decrypt a new “three letter acronym.” Like RSS. Or GPS. In two minutes or less.

Episode one concerns the three-letter acronym TLA.

You can grab the podcast feed, and learn more, over on 3la.ca.

Recorded on the Magdalen Islands during a family vacation in 2006. We both had stuffy noses.