WNYC - Soundcheck: The Year 2004 in Jazz, Poetry & Spoken Word (January 05, 2005)

WNYC - Soundcheck: The Year 2004 in Jazz, Poetry & Spoken Word (January 05, 2005): "The Year 2004 in Jazz, Poetry & Spoken Word
Wednesday, January 05, 2005

The jazz world experienced many highs and lows in 2004. The biggest news was the long-awaited opening of Jazz at Lincoln Center's new $128 million complex on Columbus Circle. The most ambitious and expensive jazz venue in history, it opened in October to rave reviews. But not all the best music happened in big halls or on big labels. Artists like trumpeter Don Byron and pianist Vijay Iyer were busy pushing the art form's boundaries. Joining us today with a look back at the year in jazz is Gene Santoro, critic and author of Highway 61 revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Roots, Rock and Country Music. Also on the show: Bob Holman, WNYC poet in residence and proprietor of the performance space Bowery Poetry Club. He joins us here to offer a roundup of the best in spoken word and poetry from this past year, from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, to late greats Allen Ginsburg and Lenny Bruce."

UPS Tracking With RSS

UPS Tracking With RSS: "UPS Package Tracking With RSS

Note: This article was originally in the form of a post on my blog.
Overview

I always hated the fact that there was no good 'push' mechanism for getting UPS shipment tracking updates. I don't want to go to their website every hour to see where my package is. I want to be notified when it moves. Of course I immediately thought of RSS, but I couldn't find anyone who had turned the UPS data into a feed. I then decided to make it myself in ASP.NET using C#!

I threw together a working version. The url is in this format: http://www.young-technologies.com/utilities/packagetracking/rsstracking.aspx?Type=UPS&TrackingNumber=XXXXXXXXX where the XXXXXXX's are the UPS tracking number you want to track.

It doesn't use screen scraping, which can be unreliable. If I wrote it that way, I would have to change my interface every time UPS decided to change their website. I found out that UPS had an XML interface to get their tracking information directly. I wrote a .NET dll to make the request, and process the response into an object.

To turn the actual data into an RSS feed, I used a handy class called RSSMaster. They did a great job of making it easy to create an RSS feed from a data source."

I'd rather get Alzheimers...

Boing Boing: Curry cures Alzheimer's?: "Curry cures Alzheimer's?
The pigment that makes curry yellow, curcumin, does a better job at treating Alzheimer's than the majority of drugs being tested. (Interestingly, India has one of the lowest Alzheimer rates in the world.)

The new UCLA-Veterans Affairs study involving genetically altered mice suggests that curcumin, the yellow pigment in curry spice, inhibits the accumulation of destructive beta amyloids in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and also breaks up existing plaques.

Link "