Mudbarn Weblog

I was considering the problem of copying links from my desktop or laptop to my iPhone and came up with a solution. Enter the URL into a QR Code Generator then use RedLaser or ATTScanner to open them on the phone. This works great with links from the Free iTunes Downloads blog and others.

Drip, Drip, Drip, is the sound that is near
Right outside the window here.

Clouds rolling past all through the night
Spreading their moister on everything in sight.

Flashes of light can be seen far away.
Anticipating thunder, no sound comes this way.

Plants are all closed till the mornings first light
Soaking up the wetness, on into the night.

Sitting here in wonder, all covered and warm
Wishing for a fire, roasted nuts,and hot cocoa gallore.

With a book in hand, and nothing to disturb
But the Drip, Drip, Drip falling down on the curb.

Oil companies are making 10% profit. Refineries make 4%. Microsoft makes 30%. Businesses that don’t make profit have no reason to remain in business, and 10% isn’t much.
The “record profits” comments are based dollar amounts that seem ludicrous, but the fact is, the industry is paying 9x that to make that profit margin. The reason the number is so high is because of the volume of product sales. Who’s more evil? The oil company for providing the product or the people who are using so much of it?

Moshe Moscovitz at Talkwarrior.com wants to interview me on his show this week. He’s been on a holy crusade against the Church of the Subgenius for the past few weeks, and had some shmoe spreading disinformation about the Church. So I’m going to get some equal time to put things right.

I’ve become sucked into the world of podcasting. It’s best described as audio blogging.
Producers need only a microphone, some time, and some bandwidth to get their message out to the masses. There’s music, news, commentary, comedy… just about anything imaginable being podcasted.
All you need to get started is an aggregator, like iPodder or HappyFish. I use both of these, and podcatcher for UNIX. iPodder seems to be the most robust and friendly, but has this annoying reliance on iTunes. HappyFish has a sync feature that works great with my Rockbox, but it’s finicky about XML syntax and doesn’t work with all my feeds. I’ve had some success in getting feeds to validate their xml and make it work.
Some podcasts to get you started:
Adam Curry: Daily Source Code A podcast about podcasting. A good place to start.
Science@NASA Feature Stories
Dave Emory’s radio show Anti-fascist conspiracy theory at its best
These links are direct to the RSS feeds of the podcasts, so wait until you have a podcast aggregator installed before you do anything with them. Otherwise, they’ll fill your browser with gibberish.

UPDATE: Most of the aggregators listed don’t work anymore. Now all my support is behind iTunes and Google Reader.

I had some free time today, home sick from work with a touch of bronchitis, so I started shopping around for blogs in my boredom.
Spent most of the day clearing out some of the backlog on the Tivo and fixing my next-door neighbor’s computer.
Got a couple hours of EQ time in to make some progress on my Vex Thal key.