Thursday, April 14, 2005

A Morning Coffee Notes podcast for the day before Tax Day in the USA. A virtual interview with Shel Israel, co-author of The Red Couch. 

Press release: "The BBC is to podcast up to 20 more radio shows – including sections of the Today programme and selected Radio 1 speech content - as it extends its download trial, it was announced today." 

Gizmodo: "I apologize for any times I might have implied that Apple wasn't run by total dorks." 

Punk News: "Addison's Marc Alghini discovered the band via a podcast from Ohio based indie-rock webzine Donewaiting.com." 

Canada.Com: Ottawa's premier podcasters. 

Marc Canter's tour of Korean food -- in Korea. 

I'm fed up with Gender Spam, too.  

Little-known fact, there's a debugger for podcast feeds; it tells you if a feed will work with audio.weblogs.com, and if not, why.  

I found a lovely radio program on the BBC, Sounds of the 70s, poifect for a guy about to turn 50. It's done by a grizzled old British guy, opinionated, no commercials, great songs. Wowo. The Internet is still cool.  

Tod Maffin: "The owner of two radio stations in Wyoming said it has sold the stations and is concentrating on podcasting." 

Upcoming travel, all tentative: Seattle, Atlanta, San Jose, New York, London. I want to be in Europe on May 2, for the Big Five-Oh.  

Brian Russell: "Open Space conferences have no keynote speakers, no pre-announced schedules of workshops, no panel discussions, no organizational booths. Instead, sitting in a large circle, participants learn in the first hour how they are going to create their own conference. Almost before they realize it, they become each other’s teachers and leaders." 

I've got my spam defense tool for Frontier/Manila documented, tested and ready to go, pending approval from a few people who are reviewing it. I have it running on two servers now, and the software it was created from has been running almost six months. But a little more burn-in can't hurt.  

The Nation: "DeLay always has the same pathetic excuse: liberals." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "The end result looks like the out-of-wedlock love child of LiveJournal and de.licio.us." 

Steve May, via email: "I've been attending conferences for 30-plus years and it always pissed me off that speakers and panelists either didn't speak on the promoted topic or used the opportunity to bore us with a shameless commercial for their product or service." 

Thanks to Chris Pirillo 

After running the bit about Mr Picky yesterday, I got several emails saying that there are others who say the same thing -- "If Dave's there, I won't be." So it seems likely that Chris Pirillo was under the same kind of pressure when he invited me to keynote Gnomedex, and that makes me all the more appreciative of his support. Thanks Chris!

And to everyone else, listen to what I do at Gnomedex, I'm sure it'll be recorded. People slime me and it's not fair. I work hard at conferences to make sure everyone gets good value. I work for the "audience," a term that needs updating in the age of the blog. There are always a few people who feel otherwise. As they say in France, c'est la vie!

What's up with Abe Simpson? 

For the last few days I've been rotating Abe Simpson through Scripting News. I've been asked what this means. Here's what it means. Nothing.

Is it a comment on the post it's next to? No. Is it related? Only in that it's next to it. Why do you do it? I like it.

I like to put the picture next to a big post with lots of text that needs a little visual relief. Since Abe is my favorite Simpson's character, and I want to see what he looks like from every angle, that's where I'm going for visual relief, these days, in April 2005. Next month it'll be something else.

The issue of who's my favorite Simpson was raised in a radio interview with Brad Bird, one of the producers, who said that Krusty the Clown is his favorite. Krusty's good, but no one is more soulfully pathetic than Grandpa Abe Simpson.

A true story about Joan Baez 

I lived in a nice house with a garden on three beautiful acres by a creek in Woodside, California, from 1992 to 2003. I sold it to one of my neighbors, who used my land to add to his, which, according to Woodside's zoning regulations, allowed him to build a bigger house, which he wanted to do.

My old house, built in 1929, with thick walls that kept the house cool in summer, a fantastic place to throw parties, and a place that could be pretty lonely, at the end of a long driveway, was deleted shortly after the deal was done.

Anyway, one day, a couple of years before I moved, the phone rings, I pick it up and a woman at the other end says "Hello this is Joan Baez." I knew she was a neighbor, but we had never spoken. I guess I was too nervous, star-struck. She's a famous folk-rock star, dated Bob Dylan, played at Woodstock, stuff like that. She said she was going to get baby sheep (or goats?) to live in her yard and they would make a lot of noise at first because they were separated from their mothers, but eventually they'd calm down, and she wanted to let all the neighbors know.

I said okay, no problemmo, but why are you getting sheep?

"I've always wanted them," she said.