Journal: News & Comment

First beauty and cosmetics podcast episode from my family posted

I'm psyched. Lip Gloss and Laptops is a new beauty and cosmetics podcast my wife and her friend have put together, and they launched their first episode today (it's for March 1, but it's already that date in Europe, okay?).

They've already been mentioned on Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast twice, and are investigating possible sponsorships and such. I think they have a great idea going, and can probably make a good weekly program out of it. Watch for episode #2 on March 8. And tell your cosmetics-loving friends to subscribe at lipglossandlaptops.com/subscribe.

Men like a lot of different things in women, but for me being married to someone who has her own podcast is pretty damn cool.

(Oh yeah, I am a nerrrrrrrrrrrrd. Proud of it.)

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Not a phone geek

I'm not a phone guy. I have a really basic mobile phone, nothing special. And I wish it were even more basic—like, could I get a PLAIN SINGLE-COLOUR background screen please, instead of some photo monstrosity that makes it hard to read? I'm glad that Engadget now has Engadget Mobile to hive off the endless latest-new-phone announcements so I can read about other gadgets, which I do like.

My favourite story about mobile phone techie-ness is of a guy (I can't remember who, or where I heard about him) who dropped his cell phone and busted the screen. He said, of course, "Damn, gotta get a new phone."

Then he realized something. "Wait a minute. It still works. JUST LIKE MY OLD LANDLINE. Pick it up, dial a number, if it rings, answer it." So he kept it.

I'd do that.

I did like Phil Torrone's old-school rotary cell phone hack from Gnomedex last year, though. It even has the old electromechanical bells. That is cool.

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Speaking tips from Dave Shea et. al.

Vancouver's Dave Shea (and his commenters, me included) gives some great tips on speaking to an audience. Some of it is contradictory, but that's okay.

I used to work with Dave, and he has an easygoing style that works well for the often very technical topics he discusses. I've added his page to my long list of rants about speaking and presentations at penmachine.com/powerpoint.

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Two free instrumental MP3s: "Hotcake Syrup" and "Marina Bay"

Last night I uploaded two free podsafe MP3 instrumentals, one new, one old.

"Hotcake Syrup" (3 MB MP3 file) originally appeared here almost a year ago, in March 2005, before I was actually podcasting my tunes. In addition to showing up on the CBC Unplugged picket line podcast last summer, it has become the regular theme tune for the diabeticfeed podcast—and they didn't even know I was diabetic when they picked it. How about that?

"Marina Bay" (4.2 MB MP3 file) is new, and both one of the slowest and one of the quickest to record I've ever done. It was slow because I laid down the basic parts (piano and three takes of guitar) in early December, then never got around to my plan of teasing out the best guitar bits and adding more instruments. Then this week I listened to it, tried simply adding some heavy phasing, tremolo, reverb, and delay effects to the guitar, and discovered it didn't need anything else.

Don't forget, if you subscribe to my podcast, you get the new songs first.

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New free Mac multi-protocol chat client

Years ago, Bill pointed me to the Mac chat client Proteus, which handles all the various protocols (AIM/iChat, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber, etc.) very well, and I bought it then and have continued to use it ever since. As of this weekend it's now free, so if you have a Mac and don't like Adium or iChat or the various other options, give Proteus a try.

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Podcasting advice

Last night we recorded the first episode of Lip Gloss and Laptops, the new health, beauty, and cosmetics podcast by my wife and her friend K.A.

UPDATE: Over on Dori and Tom's site, I was so absorbed in reading about Tom's return from the hospital that I completely missed Dori's links to the Wise-Women podcast tutorial. And Todd Cochrane's book on podcasting would certainly be a good read too, though I haven't checked it out personally yet.

The gear

The way the session worked was that the hosts spent the past week or so doing research and prep, then went over their notes while I set up the technical end, which consists of:

• Our eMac, now set up in the same basement studio where I record my own instrumental tunes.
• A new M-Audio FireWire 410 audio interface, which just arrived yesterday, almost a month after I ordered it—which is a whole other story I'll relate in a later journal entry.
• Two condenser microphones: an MXL 990 (photo) (part of the package with the M-Audio interface) and a Samson C01 (borrowed from work) on boom stands.
• GarageBand software to record their voices.

The session

Once we had everything set up and levels checked, I left the room, shut several doors for sound isolation, and went upstairs to wrangle our two daughters and K.A.'s son, to try to keep the noise levels down. It took a couple of false starts before the hosts got comfortable, but eventually they laid down a single continuous 20-minute take that was quite good, and which we'll upload for subscription on March 1.

As engineer and cable rassler, I spent part of this morning mixing their vocals with music and promos from other podcasters, and tweaking levels, then sent it to the hosts for approval. Since I had received the M-Audio interface and MXL mic not an hour before we set up, I didn't quite know how they worked and made a few mistakes in my setup, so I had to use the Audacity sound editor to do some more in-depth sound editing, which shouldn't be necessary for future episodes now that I know better what I'm doing.

Resources and advice

Although I have lots of experience recording music and my own solo voice, I haven't previously done anything like this podcast—which has two others hosting it, and which we are trying to give better-than-average sound quality. So in prepping for the session, I used some handy online resources to help figure out what I needed to know:

• Doug Kaye's audio processing advice for the volunteers at IT Conversations.
• His suggestions for setting up Skype interviews (would also work with iChat), which we haven't done yet but may in the future. That's the kind of setup diabeticfeed used when they interviewed me a few weeks ago.
• O'Reilly.com has links to more information (with Doug Kaye yet again) about what pioneering podcasters do: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
• Podcastrigs.com, a great site about stuff, most of which I will never, ever buy.
• Finally, IT Conversations' Podcast Academy recordings, so far including talks about advanced editing, mobile devices, and gearhead geek-outs.

The last session implies that I should probably hook up a dbx 266XL compressor/gate to the chain before our next session. Why that particular model? Because I already own it and it's stored in a portable rack case in the same recording room—we use it in my band for the bass drum on my kit, and otherwise it's just sitting on a shelf in the meantime.

In the long run, I'll probably want to get something like this to make the editing and mixing process smoother.

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Mackin' on cupcakes

Ian Schafer of ClickZ writes about that SNL video:

According to "The New York Times," NBC threatened video-sharing site YouTube with a lawsuit, asking it to remove about 500 NBC-related clips from its site, including the newly popular "Lazy Sunday" clip from "Saturday Night Live" ("SNL"). Sounds logical. The copyright holder and content producer own said content and don't want it distributed willy-nilly across the Web.

Here's the catch: "Lazy Sunday" was viewed over 5 million times on YouTube. It almost single-handedly is helping revitalize the "SNL" brand and appeal. This is arguably the best thing to happen to "SNL" in a decade.

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Yummy CBC podcasts

CBC is getting ready to go podcast crazy. You can sign up to be in early on the game.

And, while it raises a good point, doesn't this article almost reading like something from The Onion? Almost?

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Taking an iMac on the road, maybe in a VW?

Via Bill M. at work, here are three very brilliant Volkswagen ads.

Speaking of threes, here are three photos showing how I packed up a 17" iMac G5 into a standard carry-on piece of rolling luggage so I could make a presentation last week. It would have fit entirely inside the bag had it not been for the metal foot, so an iMac can make a very nice substitute for a laptop if you have a power outlet available:

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My first video podcast, and a "re-pod"

Over at the Penmachine Podcast, I've done something different: since I changed my subscription feed a couple of weeks ago so I can use Apple's iWeb to update the podcast more easily, the huge list of old songs and other tracks I posted there no longer appears in the feed. So I'm starting to insert some of those older tracks in among the new material.

NOTE: By the way, if you were subscribed to the old podcast feed, you should have been automatically redirected to the new one, so you need not do anything. The new feed address is http://www.penmachine.com/podcast /audio/rss.xml, if you want to know.

Anyway, I posted two things yesterday:

1. One is new to the podcast, both in content and format: a promotional video (19 MB MPEG-4 video direct download) I made a few years ago for my band, The Neurotics, in iPod video format. Yes, it's my first video podcast.
2. The second is a tune I originally posted last October, "How Tall Jennifer Is" (3.7 MB MP3 file direct download) which also happens to be the first track on my album that you can (and should!) buy.

And if you're subscribed, you've probably got 'em already. How 'bout that?

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Testing the Qumana blogging tool

I'm writing this from within the Qumana blogging tool (Mac beta 2), to which I was pointed by Qumana guy Tris Hussey.

So far it's interesting, and we'll see if I'm compelled to keep using it.

Hmm. The title didn't come through when I posted, so I had to edit the post in my browser. Still some bugs to work out.

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Embarrassing typos

My favourite/most embarrassing typo of all time is this 1996 cover of Ms. magazine, which misspells "feminism." As an editor, the irony makes the empathetic pain I feel even stronger.

Errors on the covers of major magazines and books are pretty rare, but Darren points to a recent one, a typo of "launch" on the cover of a new O'Reilly tech book, and back in 1983 even Time misspelled "control."

Of course I make typos and spelling mistakes here, but I do try to minimize them, and they're a lot easier to correct online than in print. Plus I don't have a proofreading staff, other than you my readers. And you sure let me know if you spot something.

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It sucks to record drums

None of my original tunes on my current or previous podcast pages, or on my album, include me playing drums. This even though I'm a drummer in my band and have drums set up in the room where I record my stuff.

That's because drums are awkward to record. Here are some examples of drum mic techniques, via Ian's Tape is Rolling blog.

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Links for SFU students, Feb 22

As of tonight, www.penmachine.com/sfu takes you to my list of links from this evening's SFU "What Editors Do" session.

In the future, www.penmachine.com/sfu will go to the latest post for my SFU sessions, such as for my upcoming March 2 session at the Surrey campus.

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Another Artigiano latte

Oh, right on. My favourite coffee joint, Caffè Artigiano, now has a blog—or one of its employees does, anyway—with RSS, even.

I think I'll drop in and have myself a latte right now.

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End of radio

Tod Maffin thinks that Chicago's recent move to implement widespread Wi-Fi access across the city heralds the end of broadcast radio as we know it.

And I don't think he minds all that much.

Wonderful photo by Carrie Musgrave.

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Mass email software for the Mac, or on the web

Sending email campaigns can be a pain (and I'm not talking spam!), and it's worth paying a bit of money to make it work right. So far, Campaign Monitor looks like one of the best options for commercial email. For stand-alone Mac software, Mail Drop appears good, and would work out cheaper in the long run for large sendouts.

I'm not affiliated with either organization, just so you know—they're just the best results I've come up with after a quick search. Tuglet is also interesting, but when I tried it out, it didn't work all that well. I'll give it another shot and let you know the results.

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What Editors Do at SFU Downtown and SFU Surrey, Feb 22, Mar 2, and May 11

As I seem to do every semester, I'll be speaking to a class of students in Simon Fraser University's "What Editors Do" class tomorrow night, February 22, at the downtown Harbour Centre campus. Very shortly after that, on March 2, I'll do the same thing to a different class at SFU's new Surrey, B.C. campus, and again May 11 downtown. I enjoy these sessions a lot, so if you're in one of those classes, I look forward to seeing you there.

Sites I linked to at the session

• penmachine.com/sfu brings you to this page, or whatever the latest version of my links and info is
• My podcast, which includes not only music, but also two audio episodes about building websites
• Lip Gloss and Laptops, my wife's podcast
• Editors' Association of Canada
• Jakob Nielsen's site
• Jakob's Law is in this article
• Dave Shea's CSS Zen Garden
• Mountain Equipment Co-op
• Westbeach, a pretty but less usable site
• Homestar Runner, a great Flash-based cartoon site (Flash isn't good as the basis of most sites, but it works well here)
• One cartoon about technology
• Another cartoon about websites
• Ha'aretz in Hebrew (right to left)
• Ha'aretz in English (left to right)
• Google Canada
• Google China (try searching "Tiananmen" here and compare to Canadian results!)
• Amazon Germany
• Amazon Canada
• Chapters
• Cypress Mountain
• Navarik, my employer (I blog there too)
• Women in the Web, the original dense version
• Women in the Web, same words, restructured for the Web

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The first podcast PR coup

As far as podcast publicity goes, it certainly doesn't hurt to get your promo played on Adam Curry's Daily Source Code and Todd Cochrane's Geek News Central—two of the world's premiere long-running podcasts, with tens of thousands of subscribers each.

I guess Air and Kerry Anne are committed now.

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First posted pics

Someone got a MacBook Pro already, and you can see how similar it is to its PowerBook predecessor. Not that it stops us Mac-heads from gawking, of course.

UPDATE: Other World Computing has taken one apart already.

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Why you don't need search engine optimization (SEO)

I wrote a slightly controversial and rather popular article called "Boosting your search engine ranking: it's no trick" almost exactly a year and a half ago. My thesis was:

I'm not in the business of search engine optimization, and don't have much expertise in it. The reason is that, on the modern Internet, well-built and well-maintained websites do not require search engine optimization.

There's no trick to it: make a good website, and your search rankings will improve. Any site that is built logically, with valid, well-structured code and good content is already as easy as possible for search engines to index, and for other sites to link to.

Here's the latest evidence—the website for Lip Gloss and Laptops, the health, cosmetics, and beauty podcast that my wife and her friend are starting. If you search Google for beauty podcast, it's already on page 1 of the results, at #10. Even better, try cosmetics podcast. Top of the list!

And get this: they haven't yet recorded a single episode. They only registered the domain a little over a week ago, and the site has appeared in dribs and drabs since then. A few days ago your lovely hosts recorded an audio promo, and the first actual podcast goes out March 1. They've had some visitors, a few subscribers, and links here and there (such as the ones in this journal entry).

But all we did was build a well-constructed website, with useful information on it—even before the podcast goes live—and made sure that search engines, podcast directories, and other podcasters know about it. And there you have it.

Oh, go subscribe, will you? Thanks!

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Incandescent vs. compact fluorescent light bulbs

You never know what will get people rolling on a discussion. Over at Lockergnome, an article about compact fluorescent light bulbs set off quite a conversation.

The followup at Chris Pirillo's site is particularly informative. I learned lots that I didn't know, and which will inform my future CF purchases.

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The Gnomedex song: first draft lyrics

Chris Pirillo asked me (either that, or I suggested it, I'm not sure which came first) to write a theme song for the next Gnomedex conference in June. Here's my first crack at lyrics for "The Gnomedex Song":

CHORUS
Gnome-dex! It's geeky fun
Gnome-dex! It keeps us out of the sun
Gnome-dex! For the girls and boys
Gnome-dex! With all the high-tech toys

VERSE
Podcastin', aggregatin', video bloggin', crazy taggin'
Photo galleries, startup salaries, Chris and Ponzi running madly
And of course don't forget
All the free schwag
To be had

[SUBMITTED QUOTES GO HERE]

BRIDGE
The audience might heckle you on up the stage
Your choice of web feed format might cause a rage
Is it the world's heaviest usage of Wi-Fi?
I don't know, but we sure are gonna try
To blow that bandwidth (all that bandwidth)
Sky hi-i-i-i-gh

VERSE
Forget CES and Macworld, OSCON and Foo Camp
MacBooks, Tablet PCs, mobile phones say "Look at me!"
Don't know what makes it so good
We'd write an algorithm to explain it
If we could

CHORUS
Gnome-dex! Tickets are hard to get
Gnome-dex! Is it Web 3.0 yet?
Gnome-dex! It's geeky fun
Gnome-dex! It keeps us out of the sun

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Lip Gloss and Laptops audio promo

My wife and her friend Kerry Anne have prepared an audio promo for their Lip Gloss and Laptops beauty and cosmetics podcast, which will launch March 1. Go give it a listen.

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Enhancing iChat

Miraz has a cool idea for instant messaging software like iChat.

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People on the Google Earth

Until recently it was hard to see people in the satellite photos on Google Maps and Google Earth, until recent improvements in the resolution of the images. Now Antonella is asking people to highlight places where you can see people. There are lots.

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Getting started with blogging

If you subscribe to my podcast (and of course you do!), you already have the latest episode, which is the audio transcript of a Northern Voice panel I participated in on February 11—with Kamloops city councillor Arjun Singh, WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg, and Vancouver superblogger Roland Tanglao.

It's about "getting started with blogging," and if that's something you're interested in, it's pretty useful. It makes a nice compliment to the previous episode (actually recorded a few days later, confusingly), entitled "build your website in 15 minutes or less."

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Round the bend

These British Columbia circle routes provide fascinating paths through B.C., some short and close to home, others immensely long and shockingly remote. I wonder if I'll ever complete any of them.

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I appreciate the sentiment. Probably.

In her Valentine's post, Ponzi wrote: "I so love Canada! I just want to fold up all my Canadian friends into little squares so I can stuff them in my pocket and take them with me where ever I go. You guys and gals ROCK!"

Right on. Er, I think.

Since our daughter's birthday is on Valentine's day, my wife and I didn't go out for dinner by ourselves. In lieu of that, we're going to do something else romantic tomorrow, Friday night: we're going to record a promo for her new podcast!

Now, Ponzi and Chris may have a pretty good time together, sure, but is my wife not the most awesome partner for a geek like me?

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Making Apple's iWeb publish proper RSS feed links on your own web server

A reader of mine, Heath from aeriaeffect.com, emailed me today with a question about Apple's new iWeb, how it handles publishing websites to a folder (rather than to Apple's paid .Mac service), and how to make RSS feeds work properly with its Subscribe button. I thought the answer might be more generally useful.

Heath's question:

Having recently purchased a new mac with iLife 06 and iWeb, I've decided to try my hand at webdeveloping. I am having some issues getting the site to publish correctly and I ran across the following post of yours:

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/ iweb/topic3885.html

I took a look at your podcast page and saw that you were able to get the RSS button to work correctly on the Blog template using a non-.mac webserver. I've been trying to get my own site to work, to no avail. If you have the time, I was wondering if you might be able to send me some hints on how to get it working.

My site, www.aeriaeffect.com is set up with the Blog page, but the RSS feed is pointing to:

http://www.aeriaeffect.com/ www.aeriaeffect.com/News/rss.xml

When I published to the local folder I put in the base url: http://www.aeriaeffect.com and then clicked publish.

The folder that my site is saved in locally is located at /users/ haeria/Sites/www.aeriaeffect.com/ and I think that for some reason it is trying to populate the feed with that local folder. I've tried not putting in the url when I publish and that hasn't worked either.

Any ideas you might have would be greatly appreciated, but I understand if you do not have the time to look into this.

I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but here's my understanding of what iWeb does, and my top-of-mind suggestion.

iWeb uses the name you give the site (the top level, globe-icon thing in the Site Organizer source list on the left side of the iWeb window) as the name of the folder it makes on your hard disk when you save. So if you've called that www.aeriaeffect.com, and it makes that the name of the folder on your hard disk, which could be the source of the problem because it expects you to upload it to a folder called www.aeriaeffect.com on your web server (i.e. http://www.aeriaeffect.com/www.aeriaeffect.com/ !).

To rename it, click on the globe icon in the source list, then from the top menu bar choose View > Show Inspector. In the inspector window, click the globe tab at the top and then rename the site in the field. The problem is, iWeb doesn't let you leave that blank, so if you rename it to "home" for instance, it will want to put the RSS feed at http://www.aeriaeffect.com/home/News/rss.xml -- as far as I know, there's no way to make it just work as the root of the website that way (i.e. http://www.aeriaeffect.com/News/rss.xml). So you might have to put all your website content inside a folder called /home (or whatever) on your web server to make it work.

In my case, I'm only doing my podcast entries, not my whole site, so I've called it "podcast" in iWeb, and I drag the whole folder called "podcast" into the root of my web server. So it lives at http://www.penmachine.com/podcast/ and also at http://podcast.penmachine.com/ (which are the same place). I set the podcast.penmachine.com on my web server, so that's a different thing.

One workaround would be to upload to the site root as you are now, but use a different button (not Apple's default one, which you can click on and delete), like a standard orange RSS/feed icon:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/ 2005/12/14/503778.aspx
• http://gtmcknight.com/buttons/feeds.php

Download one of those, drag it into iWeb, click on it, and set a hyperlink using the arrow icon in the Inspector. Type the actual place the feed is (http://www.aeriaeffect.com/News/rss.xml) and you should be okay, without having to move where the rest of your site pages are.

I hope that helps.

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I'm writing this from the EAC meeting

Hey everybody from the Editors' Association of Canada Vancouver monthly meeting!

UPDATE: Okay, I'm home now. I've posted:

1. Audio of my 1 hour 23 min talk (about how to build your own website in 15 minutes or less) on my podcast (as well as the EAC-BC podcast).
2. My slides from the event.
3. The websites we started with Blogger and with WordPress.

You can also read about what a blog or a podcast or a web feed is, my album, and my wife's upcoming podcast.

I'll post more info to penmachine.com/eac and the EAC-BC site soon.

FURTHER UPDATE: At my podcast there is audio from a separate (but related) Northern Voice panel I participated in on February 11—with Kamloops city councillor Arjun Singh, WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg, and Vancouver superblogger Roland Tanglao—about "getting started with blogging."

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Make a podsafe video, win $2000 USD (or maybe $5000 USD)

Lucian over at the Planet TV Show is putting together something very swanky: he's offering at least $2000 USD, and up to $5000 USD depending on the number of entries, for the best podsafe music video.

You need to watch his video podcast to get details right now, but there will be a website at podsafemusic.tv fairly soon, and he describes some of the scoop on his February 10 episode. I'll also be writing the theme music (Lucian uses "Washing Off Like an Aardvark" from my podcast as his theme for Planet TV now), and I'm planning on giving it a "Friday Night Videos" sort of vibe.

Only after listening to the "Friday Night Videos" audio clips at that website do I realize, more than 20 years later, that they're sort of '80s overproduced knockoffs of "Baba O'Riley" by The Who. I guess I shouldn't have expected to notice that when I was 13.

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What is that Gnomedex thing anyway?

BlipTV is another video sharing site, and a cool one. It has a clip of Vancouver's Sarah Pullman interviewing Chris and Ponzi about Gnomedex, which I've written about repeatedly and am going to again in June. Gnomedex is a bit hard to describe, but since Chris and Ponzi organize it, they do as well as anyone.

Incidentally, I am composing and recording the Gnomedex theme song this year, and you can contribute. It probably makes the most sense if you've been to the conference before, or are going this year, but that's not required.

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Build your own website in 15 minutes, tonight at 7:30

Tonight I'll be giving a talk at the monthly Editors' Association of Canada meeting in Vancouver about how to set up your own website in 15 minutes or less.

Of course, I'll go on for more than 15 minutes (get me talking about websites and I'm hard to shut up), and in fact I plan to set up two websites using two different services, probably Blogger and WordPress, as well as talk about some other easy tricks to make your site effective. I'll be focusing on websites for editors, but it will probably be useful for anyone.

The meeting is in the Welch Room of the YWCA Health Centre on Hornby Street. Admission is $10 for non-EAC members, $5 for students, free for members. Maybe I'll see you there.

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Eight is never enough

Eight is a significant age—in our society, you're no longer a little child. You're most of the way to ten, closer to puberty than to diapers, starting to learn some actual math and reading books without pictures in them. You look out for your younger siblings.

Our oldest daughter turned eight today, and all those things are true for her. This year she will get to visit Hawaii and fly on a plane for the first time. She is a great girl, on the way to becoming a fabulous woman like her mother. Happy birthday, M.

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Mixed emotions

Cool! (Via Kottke.)

Sad, in a lost-puppy sort of way. (Via Bill.)

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Bring back Da Vinci, on air or online

Here's what I wrote today to Chris Haddock's company about the cancellation of Da Vinci's City Hall:

Sorry to hear about the cancellation of Da Vinci. It remains the best drama on TV (not best Canadian drama, just best drama, period).

As a bit of informal market research/suggestions:

1. If you can bring all the seasons to DVD, I'll buy every one.
2. If you make future TV movies or other Da Vinci shows, please make them available on DVD, and maybe on the iTunes Store, too. I'll buy 'em.
3. Obviously, if CTV or another network were interested in taking over broadcast of the show, I'd be all over it.
4. More radically, if you could make NEW episodes, even half-hour or 22-minute ones, and put them up for sale on iTunes for their standard $2 or something, I'd buy every one. Heck, I'd subscribe if there was a way to do that.

TV isn't the only way to get new shows out there anymore. I don't know what an episode costs to produce, but if you had a few hundred thousand people around the world paying $2 for each one, it might work. Perhaps it's worth thinking about, anyway.

Thanks for such a great show.

It can't hurt to try.

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Change your Penmachine Podcast subscription

Updating the web page for my podcast of original instrumental tunes has become a hassle, even though I'm preparing new material all the time, so I'm beginning a transition: as of now, podcast.penmachine.com goes to a new page that uses Apple's iWeb for maintenance and updates, which should speed things up and let me post more often, even though it gives me less control over the look and code of the page.

All the old tunes are still at penmachine.com/musicpages/demos.html and on the Podsafe Music Network, and of course some of those are on my CD too. But the new tracks (and there are four today already) are on the new page now.

So what does it mean for you? Well, if you want the newest tracks I post, you should go to the new page and subscribe in iTunes or your favourite other podcatching software. (The new podcast subscription is at penmachine.com/podcast/audio/rss.xml.) I'll redirect the old subscription URL there soon enough so that the change happens automatically for everyone, but for now you should make the change yourself. All new tunes will get posted to the new feed from now on.

This also helps me prep for producing the Lip Gloss and Laptops podcast, a beauty and cosmetics podcast for the thinking girl, run and hosted by my wife Air and her friend Kerry Anne, which will premiere March 1 or earlier. We'll have a feed for you to subscribe to there pretty soon too.

Exciting stuff, eh?

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CBC kills its best show

What? No more Da Vinci? What kind of insanity is that?

That sucks. One less reason to watch television.

Sheesh. Time for them to get more than just the first of eight seasons on DVD, I would say.

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