Christmas in Belgium

I was mucking around in Linux at the time (and only had one computer available), and as such didn't have access to play a Windows Media stream using any “official” (Microsoft) means. Additionally, mplayer so wasn't chewing on HTTP streams for me, so I wound up using a combination of wget, tail and mplayer to get the thing player, with a little script that would rotate the temporary ASF file to safe disk space on my little 6 GiB hard disk.

Breakfast presenters Mike Gardiner and Debbie Spillane were wondering what their listeners, around the world, were up to, so I dared drop them an email. After all, I didn't really have much else to do.

To my surprise, it was read on-air quite promptly, and hearing that I was able to make someone chuckle on the other side of the world was satisfying. However as I munched on the Tim Tams my Mum sent me as a part of my Christmas care-pack, someone else was listening: Scott's girlfriend, Georgina, who was spending her Christmas with her parents in her home town on Canberra. Within 15 minutes of my email being read, I received a response from her in the form of another email being read on-air, shared on Australian national radio.

For my own entertainment, I've archived the two segments here (and cleaned most of the verbal fumbles up for clarity, since I still have the radio post-production itch).

• Listen to my email
• Listen to the reply from Georgina

For the archival obsessed, you can hear that chunk of the stream in its complete, original format. This broadcast is Copyright © 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.