Peer pressure on the net

I listened to my first podcast today. I've avoided them so far because I don't think they offer me anything - I can get information more quickly from text on blogs and news sites, those sites can link to other information, be copied or saved easily, things I don't care about can be skipped, etc.

But if iTunes is going to do it, I figured I should try. Unfortunately it was as bad as I expected (maybe a bit worse). It had music I didn't care for, talking that wasn't interesting, and I got to wait through 30-60 minutes of stuff to try to hear the information that I was looking for.

I found another good use for Soundtrack Pro though - it's good for figuring out what's going on in a podcast. With the mp3 loaded and zoomed out it was easy to tell the difference between the music and the talking, which allowed me to skip the music and save a fair amount of time :) I don't know how people can stand listening to these things on an iPod...

I'm also trying out NetNewsWire 2, since it always feels like I'm not a true Mac blog nerd without it. I've imported my Bloglines feeds, which works, but doesn't seem to bring over the folders. I keep reverting to using Bloglines though, so I think I'll force myself to just use NNW for a week to give it a fair chance.

Exciting stuff, I know. But at least reading this took you less time than a podcast. :)

Creating feeds?

Does anyone know of an online service that will make feeds for pages that don't have them? I'm getting tired of having to read actual web pages :)

Soundtrack on Apple's HD page

I've posted about one of my old Soundtrack songs before, but I got a surprise when looking at the Apple's HD Gallery page. One of the featured videos is of the NASA Space Shuttle, which has audio I created with Soundtrack (not pro!) 1.0 a few years back. Check it out if you have a fast connection - it's a 45MB movie. The link seems to have stayed up for a couple days, which is better than last time...

(this time it looks like it takes 5 clicks to open the movie from the main page; let me know if you find a faster route :)

A grand clone army of product placement

Half of me is really excited about the new Star Wars movie coming out. The new Lego sets aren't all that interesting, but new is new :) Watched all of the "Clone Wars" animated shorts when they were on this weekend, which were really good. Lisa and I played through the rest of the Lego Star Wars game to unlock the hidden levels and, of course, the mustaches.

But the other half of me is already sick of all the ads on TV - even though we get to fast forward through them thanks to TiVo. The Clone Wars marathon probably had a disproportionate amount of SW3 ads, so maybe this isn't entirely fair. Hopefully the rest will die down in a week or so...

The unexpected thing that's been keeping me entertained this whole time: The Darth Side. Very funny, with better quotes and references than Clone Wars or anything else I've seen.

Cleaning links off my desktop

Over the weekend I got a chance to dig through some of the links that have been accumulating on my desktop - either by reading things and getting rid of them, or by posting them up to del.icio.us.

I've mentioned it before, but here's the link to my del.icio.us account: http://del.icio.us/cflake. It's a really cool service for storing and organizing links, as well as a good distraction to see what other people have been looking at. Going through my links also gave me a good excuse to try the new version of Cocoalicious that Buzz has been working on.

More of my finds to come...

Update: and something related I found today - a pretty big essay from Clay Shirky about del.icio.us-style tagging as compared to how things have been done before: Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Back from vacation

Lisa and I are back from the East coast - our quick trip out to New York and Boston. It was the first time I had spent much time in either city - I think I had a free night in each of them during drum corps, but a couple of hours doesn't really give you much time to explore (though it did give the strangest feeling of déjà vu in downtown Boston).

We borrowed Lisa's sister's pocket-size NFT book (Not For Tourists) to help us get around New York, which was so helpful that we grabbed one for Boston as well. They are really useful little books with maps of each little suburb, showing you not only the usual street maps, but also useful things like restaurants, ATMs, and Dunkin Donuts in Boston. Definitely worthwhile if the city you're visiting has one.

And I got back just in time to switch buildings at work... after a week, I still have boxes of junk to unpack :)

Tiger and Subversion experiences?

Does anyone with Subversion installed have any notes about upgrading to Tiger? (good or bad experiences) Just checking before I try it...