Honda’s ASIMO Conducts The Detroit Symphony Orchestra

February 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

On May 13th, 2008 Honda’s ASIMO conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) as it performed “Impossible Dream” to open a special concert performance with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Now that is something you don’t see everyday!

Honda hopes ASIMO’s appearance will draw attention to the DSO’s music education programs, and particularly the DSO’s effort to encourage and support involvement of children in Detroit. You can read the full press release about Honda’s The Power of Dreams Music Education Fund by clicking here.

While you can find many clips of this performance on the Internet (a YouTube clip is embedded at the bottom of this post) the best quality video is available from Honda’s site. It is a huge file, but the quality makes it work the wait.

Link to Honda’s High Definition Video

Filed Under: Car Tech, Digital Technology, Education / Training Tagged With: , , ,

CNET Car Tech Offers a Good Automotive Podcast

February 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment
CNET Logo

CNET Logo

One of the best uses of computers in the automotive service business is to manage all the automotive information that is made available online. In this previous post I talked about managing content using RSS/XML subscriptions. This same technology (RSS/XML feeds) can also be used to automatically send you audio and video content, and is often called a podcast. This post will focus on audio podcasts which can be played on virtually any computer or transferred to any portable MP3 player for mobile use.

A podcast is made up of individual audio recordings which are sometimes referred to as episodes. Most websites that publish an audio podcast will make the episodes available for individual downloads. One of the better automotive podcasts is produced by the guys on CNET’s Car Tech.

On the Car Tech Homepage you will find tons of information on how technology is being implemented in todays cars. You will also find a link to the CNET Car Tech Podcast page. From that page you can listen to the individual audio recordings or get information on how to subscribe to the podcast using iTunes or any other podcast aggregator.

Click here to hear the “Car Tech Episode 39: Are plug-in hybrids coming — or not?” If you like what you hear, go on over to CNET and subscribe to the podcast you you will automatically receive all future episodes automatically.

Filed Under: Digital Technology Tagged With: , ,

Managing Online Information Via Subscription

February 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

In the last couple of years I have had the opportunity to do technology presentations at various automotive/educational conferences. I often do a presentation titled “Mastering Online Information”. The Internet has grown to the point that we can’t effectively find and manage information just using the Google search feature we have to work smarter!

While there are many options (remember, I can easily turn this into a three hour presentation), in this post I want to cover managing information via a subscription. Often you will have certain web sites, blogs, or news searches that you want to closely monitor. This is when you need to utilize an RSS feed to push information to you automatically. As long as the site you want to monitor publishes an RSS feed all you need is a feed reader (officially called a news feed aggregater). I found a neat video that does a good job of explaining how RSS works, yet uses a simple explanation.

This site offers RSS feeds. If you want to keep up with new information on this site, be tech smart and use them.

Filed Under: Digital Technology Tagged With: ,
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