Kevin Newman has been mentioning Global National's podcasting project for the last couple of weeks, but I only checked it out on Monday. This could be one of the coolest things to happen to Mass Media and podcasting so far this year. The entire audio portion of the Global National newscast is available via a podcast subscription, with only a minor delay after it goes to air (they do have to encode/publish the audio of the live newscast). It's also available directly from the iTunes directory.

I finally got around to letting Autostitch crunch through the two pano sets I shot while down in San Francisco last week. The first one was taken from the restaurant on the 36th floor of the Grand Hyatt on Union Square, looking west-ish toward the sunset (and Sutro Tower) The second one was taken from the observation floor of the de Young Museum Education Tower, looking north-ish over Golden Gate Park toward the Golden Gate Bridge.

I think this might be the first time my blog has made it to a short list of anything. Josie just posted the "short list" for the 2005 Edublog Awards, and yours truly was nominated in the "Best designed/most beautiful edublog" category. Not sure how to take that, since I use the K2 template for WordPress and have only done some minor tweaks. I suppose it's a vote for a combination of navigation structure, and those funky panoramic banners I swap through the header.

That last post was essentially a triple-modality experiment. It began life as a dead-trees offline notebook entry, then was recrafted as an audio recording (podcast), and then as a text-only blog entry.

This little experiment highlighted some of the strengths/weaknesses of each modality.

offline notebook

• my handwriting officially sucks. I have trouble reading it myself, which is why I try to force myself to write in all-caps block letters
• writing on a moving city bus doesn't help, either. shaky bus = shakier writing = can I read this?
• paper is a nice medium - can spatially organize stuff easily. can add sketches, doodles, whatnots easily
• paper is harder to share, though. Scanning to Flickr helps, but is not exactly an invisible part of the process
• not searchable. I was scanning through a decade's worth of old notebooks over the weekend - wishing there was some form of index or searchability in them. chronology is nice, but makes it hard to find a specific piece of content unless the exact date it was written is known ahead of time...
• the most private of the three modalities, which can be good for framing thoughts that you don't want to unleash into the ether

audio/podcast

• audio quality can be a problem
• distractions while recording - my dog started whining to be let out into -30ËšC freezingness during the last couple of minutes of the recording.
• really like it for the freeform thinking-out-loud style. not sure how valuable that is to other people, but the 1Ëš purpose of this blog is for me, so screw everyone else. well, ok, not quite that far, but as long as it's useful to me, I'll keep doing it
• publishing process is still quite tedious. have to upsample the audio to 44.1KHz from 8KHz, massage the audio so it sucks less. put in intro track. convert to .mp3. upload. etc...
• opaque medium - unsearchable without relying on external tools.

text-only blog entry

• I think I'm most "at home" with this modality
• can pause, rethink, and take time to write
• it's still legible. I can read it. And The Goog can read it.
• easily taggable, searchable, linkable

Update: The podcast audio file was borked (thanks for the heads up, Brian!) so if you downloaded a 6 minute version, it's truncated. The whole thing should be 18 minutes long, and is available here. Sorry about that...

So, I'm still not using the computer when I'm "off duty", but that doesn't mean I can't stretch out on the couch with my iPod and TuneTalk microphone and think out loud about stuff after Evan's gone to bed...

Sometime in the last day or two, this blog's wordometer ticked over 200,000 words. At the pace I'm blogging, that's about 25,000 words per month. If anyone suggested I'd be writing that much I'd have told them they were completely daft. And yet, here I am. Almost 1,000 words per day, just by osmosis. It's therapeutic, and helps manage my outboard brain, but I had no idea this blog would become so verbose...

The Mavericks online exhibit went live on Wednesday. The event featured several of the Mavericks (or family members) attending to answer questions. I missed the event, but it sounded like a great one.

The project is really quite cool, presenting a history of the prominent figures in Alberta's history from the 1700s to modern day. Themes such as settlement, ranching, Mounties, oil, politics, war, and immigration are covered in pretty impressive depth. There are over 1400 screens of content (images, text, audio, and video), as well as a full teacher's resource for use as part of the curriculum.

I just dropped the latest version of iPodLinux on my iPod to test out recording at higher sample rates. I cranked it up to 44.1KHz, and the recording from the TuneTalk microphone sounded freaking amazing! I'll have to do some more playing/testing to see how it works for longer recordings (how fast does it suck down the battery? does it still have the high-pitched whine in the background?)

But, while I had linux running on the iPod, I poked around at what else is offered. It's got some new games, including a non-playable demo of TEMPEST! That is so cool! Apple, please include Tempest as a default game! That is SO perfect for the iPod controller... Oh, and it's got a version of an Etch-A-Sketch program that is pretty cool. Yay, linux!

On the left, what it's like in The City this morning. On the right, what I'll be landing into in a few hours. Sure, it's "rainy" here (that means the streets are damp, but you can walk without getting wet), but at least things are liquid. I wonder how much shoveling is waiting for me at home...

Update: The TV news in SF was calling the weather "the worst storm of the year so far" and travel advisories were being issued. I kept looking for the storm on the way to the airport. All I saw would have simply been called "rainy" or "a shitty day" back home. Traffic was backed up pretty seriously on the 101 due to a weather-related accident, so my rocking driver hopped over to 280 to bypass the schmozzle. Oh, and I left the hotel 3 hours before my flight - you know, planning ahead in case something happened, so I wouldn't miss my flight home...

On the way from the hotel to the restaurant for supper tonight, Tim took Josh and I on a short walking tour of what I called "art bars" - two very cool bars/clubs that were one part bar, one part art gallery. Very interesting stuff.

Then, to Osha (a Thai restaurant, coincidentally themed inside with elephants everywhere) for supper with the Pachydermers. I'd been crashing since about 10am, after working with Josh to stem the flow of negative Whuffie created by some miscommunication. (we got the Pachyderm authoring app up and running after an intense round of forensic analysis to find out wtf happened - then got to deal with a different but recurring problem, as described in the previous post)

I got the chance to play with debugging a running WebObjects app today, with the added fun of having a roomful of 20 users of the app taking turns to mention "did you know that [X|Y|Z] isn't working?"

Long story short, if you need to get the status of threads of a running WebObjects app, jdb provides some great tools. I have only scratched the surface of it, thanks entirely to the great intro document by Andrew Lindesay. (Andrew recently moved his website to .Mac from some New Zealand host, so I'm linking to help throw some Google Juice his way so others can find his article)