I’m just confused why anyone thinks satellite radio is worth saving. I had XM for roughly two years, and it was nice having a bit more content since Kansas City radio is gawdawful, but the SQ on XM, to put it in Tom’s words, buh-lowz.

Dina said, “ten words or fewer.”

Yes!

I declare personal victory!

Regarding the correct pronunciation of the word, “often”:
when I was going to school here in Canada, I was encouraged to avoid using Webster’s Dictionary as a resource. The reason was and is because Webster’s includes improper spellings, meanings and pronunciations based upon “common use” in speech and writing. In its first edition, Webster’s included common “American” spellings, such as: “center” rather than “centre” and “color” rather than “colour”. By its third edition, however, Webster’s had become very permissive and began to include entries based more upon the input of “usage commentators” rather than actual linguists. Because of this, I prefer to call Webster’s a compendium of vernacular rather than a true dictionary.

Long story short, “often” has only one correct pronunciation and that is with a silent ‘t’. Webster’s includes the improper pronunciation with the ‘t’ sound included, but then again, Webster’s also includes an entry for “irregardless” stating that it is acceptable as a word because of its “fairly common use in speech”. Well, by that logic: “pacific” must be an acceptable pronunciation of “specific”; “ax” must be an acceptable pronunciation of “ask”; and “guesstimate” must be an acceptable alternative to “estimate”! I’m fine with identifying common errors as part of vernacular, but a dictionary ought to clearly define correct spelling, meaning and pronunciation, not adopt all mistakes simply because those mistakes become “fairly common”!

As to why “often” is spelled with a silent ‘t’:

“often” is an extension of the Middle English word “oft”, which shares the same meaning. The compound word, “ofttimes” was extended to “oftentimes” to better distinguish it’s otherwise awkward pronunciation. The ‘t’ remains silent, though because in the original compound word, “ofttimes”, the two, seperate ‘t’ sounds are combined, leading to a pronunciations that sounds like, “off-times”. Thus, the extension sounds like, “off-en-times”, but the ‘t’ is retained in the spelling because the original word is still, “oft”.

That was cool that you mentioned my email about where TV connectivity may be heading. Tom mentioned central servers and possibly more complicated connections, though, and that wasn’t quite what I was thinking. I’ve no doubt that we’ll likely have to go through the stages of central servers and more complicated setups, but I was kind of looking even further down the road. I was envisioning a time when: you bring a display home, you hang it on the wall, you plug it in for power and then all you do is turn it on. Once you turn it on, it connects wirelessly to your Internet connection and that’s it – there are no other connections to be made.

Eventually, faster Internet speeds and better compression will mean that all TV, movie, music and game content can simply be streamed from a subscription service for newer content and a download service could give you the option to buy content at any time. With storage drives getting cheaper, larger in capacity and smaller in physical size, downloaded content could be stored within the display itself. So no home servers, no seperate source boxes. Just the display, the Internet and all the content you can handle!

Tom,

I just ditched XM after many years. After the merger, all the dj blather irritated me. But, my Pioneer Inno did indeed function kind of like a radio Tivo. It had a buffer and I could push record while a song was playing and get the whole song saved on my player. Also, I could note artists that I liked, and if one came on a pop up notified me and a simple button push changed to whatever channel the song was on. Then I could record that if I wanted. It worked really well. When the Inno first came out there was a big dispute with the RIAA or something. Somehow this feature survived. Which is more than can be said of XM-Sirius. I just dumped it and went Zune so I could have the subscription model and 10 DRM-free mp3 downloads each month for $15. Plus, it does podcasts really well, which is what I mostly listen to. Or, for Rob, to which I mostly listen. Remember: never end a sentence with a preposition!

Hey Folks,
Love the podcast, long time lurker, I did not go back to the very beginning but am slowly picking them off when I need to kill some time.
As you may have deduced from my handle, I AM CANADIAN! Congratulations on that Obama thing, I think he may save the world.
This brings us to my problems, both of which would be solved if GW had just invaded us, I can not win any of your awesome prizes and slightly more important, we can not receive any streaming from HULU, or Netflix and the like. The Gov of Can is protecting us again, and I would like it to stop.

Ps Tom : Do not piss off Dina, EVER, if she leaves the show I suspect your audience # would plummet.
PSS Dina : What is the model of Fembot or Stepford wife I should ask for…

I am going to try participate without becoming onerous, so

Bye for now

Tom from Vancouver BC

lol at Jon’s comment!

My grammar police effort is growing in influence!

Unless, of course, the younger generation take their cues from the Obama campaign.

Change we can believe in?

Good grief!

Tom, your car radio Tivo is in the new Cadillac CTS.

Link:

http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=57564

“The system keeps up to 60 minutes of audio on a loop so that you can “pause” a live radio broadcast and listen to it later if you are interrupted or if you have to duck out of the car to pick something up at the shop.”

I’m still holding out hope for Dollhouse to get better. Supposedly they screwed around with the order of episodes, etc like they did with Firefly. Fringe finally got interesting, so maybe this will as well…

(Then again, maybe not)

Dollhouse’s second episode was definitely better than its first. Seems like the less Eliza Dushku speaks, the better, though, which doesn’t exactly bode well :p

“but then I’d have to own a Cadillac ;)”

I’d love to have a 550+HP CTS-V, though 🙂 I probably wouldn’t even need a radio to listen to with that motor…

http://www.motortrend.com/photo_gallery/112_0811_2009_cadillac_cts-v_photo_gallery/index.html

I see that a new poll is up! Before anyone else mentions “20 minutes or less” in the ongoing grammar policing effort, “20 minutes or less” is actually correct! When talking about time, money or distance, using the word “less” instead of “fewer” is acceptable.

So, for example:

“The red dress costs 20 dollars less than the blue dress”

“He travelled less than two miles to be here”

and “We finished eating our meal in less than 30 minutes”

are all correct 😉

And by the way, I voted for you to keep talking as long as you want! As did most other people so far. There is no need to limit yourself to a certain time limit in my opinion. I find it more irritating when podcasts artificially shorten the conversation in order to meet a time limit. One good example is the Dolby podcast. I find it so bothersome when they cut the podcast short before they can properly and naturally bring the conversation to a conclusion! So keep on talking! 😀

Hi Tom & Dina,
Ziv is a real name 😉

lol