There was a time — until my late 30s, I guess — when most of my radio listening was to music. Then there was a time — roughly the last couple decades — when most of my radio listening was to NPR and talk radio. When that got boring in the morning, I'd switch to Howard Stern.

But there was a problem for me with talk radio, as there had been with music radio; and that was a growing irrelevance. Or a growing awareness of the irrelevance that had always been there.

As a way to ease into the DIY-IT subject du jour, I want to give a quick (and unpaid) plug to my friends at Sputnik, who have grown way past the WiFi access point business (and original ideas) that got them going almost three years ago. Last week they announced the Sputnik Control Center (which Daily Wireless explains in linky detail). Also SputnikNet, which provides Sputnik hosting for control centers, over the Net.

Being good guys, Sputnik is also involved in the deployment of SocalFreeNet in San Diego, which is one of the countless cities that are deploying public wi-fi, usually in partnership with local business and public-spiritied associations of techies. (I wrote about the New York deployment last year in Linux Journal).

Well, it seems one city wants to rise above the rest...

I'm about to leave on a five hour trip (up to the Bay Area from my home in Santa Barbara). There are long stretches of Highway 101 where cell coverage is spotty at best, and — except for the occasional NPR station, and KPIG's two tiny coverage areas — radio sucks.

So I'd like to take advantage of what Steve Gillmor, Adam Curry and others are now calling the iPod platform.

On Tuesday, September 14, something went wrong at the FAA's regional center that controls high altitude air traffic over Southern California and much of the southwest U.S. Two days later, this Associated Press story (carried here on MSNBC) summarized the problem in its opening sentence: "Failure to perform a routine maintenance check caused the shutdown of an air traffic communications system serving a large swath of the West, resulting in several close calls in the skies, the FAA and a union official said Wednesday." That same day, the Los Angeles Times ran a story titled "Human Factors Silenced Airports". Then, on September 21, TechWorld ran a story titled "Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up: Failure to restart system caused data overload". It begins, "A major breakdown in Southern California's air traffic control system last week was partly due to a 'design anomaly' in the way Microsoft Windows servers were integrated into the system, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Here's what the Times story said....

I need some, so I just looked up geek furniture on Google. What came back was...

The latest from former Utah CIO Phil Windley is Firefox Support for RSS. Good read. For me the message is, Firefox doesn't just rock; it rolls. The Monster that is Mozilla isn't just "commodifying" the browser; it's turning into a clearing house for good ideas about what a browser ought to do and be.

Glyph Lefkowitz responds to r0ml's latest post with a thoughtful one of his own...

Due to obligations beyond my control, I can't make Foo Camp (Friends Of O'Reilly) this weekend. But I'll be there in spirit (and, where possible, via instant messaging).

Since one way we can define DIY-IT (I've been told, and I love the definition) is "wherever you see shelves full of O'Reilly books", it seems Foo Camp is a great place to talk about the subject. Plus one more...

Is it time to put a check in the box next to one of r0ml Lefkowitz' Six Missing Open Source Projects — namely the one for CRM (Customer Relationship Managememt)? Could be.

SugarCRM is a new company that makes, its tagline says, "commercial open source customer relationship management". Here's what they say in Why Open Source CRM applications are better:

In A Motive for IT Spending Forbes profiles Motive, a company with the idea Let the technology manage itself.