Friday, June 30, 2006

How much tech does it take to be a journo?

Just finished the first chapter of 'The World is Flat', by Thomas L Friedman.

There are a few papagraphs about Bill Ardolino, the young reporter who did some of the ground work that broke 'Rathergate'. This is the one where 60 Minutes(CBS) ran a story about George W Bush's National Guard service, that turned out to be based on dodgie documents.

The week after the 60 Minutes story, Bob Schieffer hosted Face the Nation. As Schieffer was leaving the studio, Bill Ardolino button holes him for an interview for his InDC Journal web site.

So how much tech does it take? This is a US book, so assume $US.

Ardolino used a $125 MP3 player/recorder, "primarily designed to play miusic", capable of doing WAV file that can be upload to a computer.

So $100 - $200 to $300, if you want a camera. (Ardolino used a phone pic of Schieffer on his web site). $400 to $500 for a nice recorder and nice carera.

So $200 is all that is needed to get the job done.

Project for the weekend

Well this week, I finally got the net setup at home. Setup to run on a Debian box.

The projects to look at this weekend are setting up an inhouse debian package mirror and sorting through java packages for testing, logging etc.

Want to look at a MythTV box soon too.