Author: George Wood

I was born in California, but have lived in Sweden since 1975, working at Radio Sweden. I spent many years writing and presenting our program for shortwave listeners, “Sweden Calling DXers”. With the gradual phase-out of shortwave in favor of the Internet, I’ve since moved on to being our webmaster. My big claim to web fame has been that I was the first person in Sweden to post a radio program on the Internet, in 1994…the first person in Europe to post a radio program in English.

Streaming music is another name for radio

The past is the future. Streaming music online is called “radio”. Last month’s issue of “Wired” has a fascinating article by Steven Levy, mostly about Spotify, the Swedish-based service for streaming music. He uses the article to explore the growth…

Sopa and the EU

The American Congress is debatting a bill called Sopa (the Stop Internet Piracy Act). Apparently drawn up by the music and film industries, according to Wikipedia: The bill would remove the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act…

The Capital of Christmas prepares

Christmas market in Strasbourg going up, originally uploaded by radiowood2000. Place Gutenburg, November 15, 2011. Strasbourg calls itself the Capital of Christmas, with special Christmas markets all around the center of the city. The huge tree at the Place Kleber…

Armistice Day in Alsace

Today marks the 93nd anniversary of the end of the First World War. November 11 is not a public holiday in Sweden, which was not a combatant in either of the World Wars. It is a holiday here, and on…

Off of my cloud?

The new iCloud certainly seems like a work in progress, especially the way it works (or does not work) together with the iTunes store. Being able to use an ios device without having to hook it up to a computer…

Strasbourg by Water

Our friends recently visited us from Sweden, and on the last day of their visit we took the Batorama boat tour of Strasbourg, which travels around the central island of the Old Town and then out to the European institutions,…