My 5th Gen (video) iPod broke within the first week of ownership. The hard drive was clicking and it was showing a sad iPod boot screen, despite several reset attempts by holding Select (middle) and Menu (up) and putting it in disk mode by pressing Select and Play (down) when the Apple logo is displayed. I took it back to Mac-Pro where my wife bought it, and they sent me to the Apple Store, where it was promptly replaced. It’s working fine now.
Broken iPod
November 21st, 2005New iPod
November 16th, 2005My wife got me a new iPod over the weekend. It’s the 30 gig video version. I’m still getting used to it, but it’s a LOT of fun.
Oil company profits
November 16th, 2005Oil 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?
I’m a grandfather! Again!
September 10th, 2005My granddaughter was born early this morning.
New job
July 6th, 2005I started a new job on Friday at Bitpass, Inc. Out of biotech and back into the web world. I’m very happy about this.
Podcast interview
May 13th, 2005Moshe 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.
Podcasting
May 12th, 2005I’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.
Congratulations! It’s a tumah!
May 12th, 2005Well, not really. It’s actually just something growing inside my head.
It’s kinda neat seeing these images. My doctor gave them to me on a CD with a viewer app, and I can explore my brain with it.
I’m a grandfather!
February 22nd, 2005My grandson was born this evening.
High weirdness in your ear hole
February 17th, 2005I’ve always enjoyed the chaos of the Hour of Slack but haven’t listened to it because of the inconvenient times and my general dissatisfaction with streaming radio. But I decided to go looking for show archives and found the above link. YAY! My Rockbox hasn’t sounded this strange in months!