Today has been what might be called a high-tech day. It started this morning when I installed a new router. This was a much-needed change, since our five-year-old router kept my laptop spiraling in buffering hell any time I tried to watch a video of any length. Audio isn't that great either. When KM was in town for thanksgiving, she suggested that we try a new router, and boy was she right. The new router makes everything faster on the four machines we have linked in to the wireless network, including our iphone and itouch.
Then I moved on to building my professional online site using the Penn State blogs platform. The platform leaves a lot to be desired, and ought to be more user friendly for as simple as the layout looks, but it will do. Even though right now I only have a front page, I have big plans for the whole site, including adding links to my published work and (more importantly) a resource page for the course I'm directing.
Now it's time to make pizza dough for tonight. Yes, yes, this involves technology in that we always mix and knead the dough with our kitchenaid mixer, but just moments ago I was thinking about how my cooking moments here in State College have been missing something. When I lived in Urbana, I would do any mid-day meal prep (which=prep for the evening meal) while listening to C-U's awesome public radio station (WILL), a station that is all talk, all the time. I loves me some corn and bean report, and I miss it. Here, though, the public radio station plays classical music all day until the main NPR news programming begins at 4 pm. Snore.
A few months ago I tried putting my laptop in the kitchen to stream, but the sound quality wasn't great, our wireless buffering problem was annoying, and I ended up getting flour on my keyboard. So today I did what any thinking person would these days, and what I should have done long ago: I consulted my iphone. Voila, there is a free app called "public radio" that will stream hundreds of public radio stations from across the country. In the past twenty minutes since downloading it, I have listened to public radio stations in Austin, Lexington, and Chicago. So off I go to pop my iphone into my new speaker system (which incidentally reminds me of a boombox I had in the late 80s that I decorated with a rainbow sticker that said "Debbie" on it), so that I can listen to the afternoon magazine while mixing yeast, water, flour, and salt.
