Emeril Lagasse, of painfully failed sitcom and surprisingly entertaining cooking show fame, has released a bunch of stuff to download to your iPod. These include:

• Emeril's Restaurant Finder - so you always know where the overpriced restaurants are
• podMeals - weekly menus to apparently help with grocery selection
• ReciPods & ReciPods Too: 1000 recipes from Emeril's archives. This one is actually pretty cool.

Downloading all but the Restaurant Finder now. The last time I was in Vegas, his restaurants were so ungodly expensive I couldn't afford to read the menu in front of the joints. The time before that, I got to spend something like $25 so Janice and I could split a piece of pecan pie, and get her a quick tour of the kitchen.

It was a pretty busy multi-day session, but we've hammered out what we need to do to get Pachyderm 2 to the place it needs to be for the NMC conference in June, and for the Big Release in October. These face-to-face developer's meetings are always good, and are always exhausting.

This was an especially bipolar trip. Ups included figuring out the project stuff, spending some time with the other developers, hitting some good restaurants, and being in the green lushness of California. Downs included the damned speeding ticket, Tim getting rejected at the border, and realizing just how little time we have to do what we need to do.

The thoughtful and friendly folks at the U of C decided to upgrade the electrical infrastructure in the Learning Commons today. That meant that apollo.ucalgary.ca would be without power. "No problem, thanks for the notice," I thought - assuming they'd be shutting down the server before yanking the plug.

They didn't.

And now the server is struggling to get back up again. I'm kinda remote from the server right now, hunkered down at SSU with the rest of the Pachyderm developers. Trying to show stuff on the pachyderm instance on apollo.ucalgary.ca - can't SSH in to reboot it from California. Can't FTP in. Apache is up, but WebObjects is cranky. MySQL is down. Doh...

Boy, howdy does the wireless suck here. I practically need rabbit ears to get enough signal to maintain a connection, then it drops after a few seconds with no warning. Was hoping to catch up on stuff that is non-port-80 (like filling up my Mail.app inbox) because guest access on the SSU wireless network is restricted to port 80.

On the upside, at least the craptacular wireless was free. I was comped because I signed up for their obsessive-user-tracking Hilton Rewards program (or whatever they call it).

We had 2 blemishes on our pachyderm developers pilgrimage to CDL. First, Tim was refused entry to the States, so missed his flight. He wound up catching a later flight, but will be missing some of the meeting today.

Second, after getting our rental car (a Rendezvous), and having to catch up on some time we lost waiting for Tim. I was going roughly with the flow of traffic on the 101, out of San Francisco. Things were moving along smoothly, until Officer Poncherello pulls in behind us and flashes his friendly lights.

Over the last few years, I have bought a handful of CDs. Maybe $50 per year. I know - not much. I just opened iTunes, and selected the "Purchased Music" playlist. It's got 100 tracks in it. That's $100, in the few months since iTMS Canada opened on December 2, 2004. Extrapolate that to roughly $200 per year. About 4 times more than I had been spending previously.

I know I've been on a binge/abstain cycle with the iTMS - I go for weeks without buying anything, then I slip and buy a bunch of stuff. Lather, rinse, repeat. There must be a 12-step program for that... But I hadn't realized just how much more content I am buying via iTMS compared to "traditional" media outlets.

My old clunky Olympus D-510Z is overdue for retirement. It's only a 2 megapixel camera, and takes increasingly worse pictures. They're fine if there's a LOT of light, but otherwise, all bets are off.

So, I just cashed in my SDLW benefit (a University thing, where we get a small portion of our salary alotted to buying toystools to support our lifelong learning - computers, iPods and digital cameras appear to be the most popular way to do that).

It's not perfect, but this is cool: podscope - podcast search engine.

It seems to do a better-than-nothing speech-to-text index of podcasts, and provides a search interface on top of that.

For instance, here's a search on 'learning' - not perfect, but it provides a good starting point.

I love the functionality - takes you right to the appropriate portion of the audio file when you press the "play" widget.

I searched for some of the stuff I talked about in my last podcast, and it wasn't found - an indication that it's been so long since the podcast that it's trickled off my feed. Need to find some time to do some more...

Update: I'm no longer using the Flickr Gallery plugin. I switched to use FAlbum, and it rocks nicely...

I just installed the Flickr Gallery plugin, which uses the Flickr API to incorporate photo albums from my Flickr account into this weblog. Small pieces, loosely joined. Rock on.

Check out the "Photos" tab on the top of the page (or, if you're an RSSian, try this).

Have I mentioned how much I freaking love Wordpress and Flickr? Hey! You got Flickr in my Wordpress! You got Wordpress in my Flickr!

I've been using Apple's .Mac Backup since it came out, and although it is a tad slow, it has been usable. Until recently. Now, it's insisting on spitting out disks halfway through the burn, suggesting there's something wrong. I can burn disks just fine using Toast or the Finder, so the drive and media are OK. .Mac Backup does take a LONG time to back stuff up (especially to CD or DVD) - there is the initial "how big is the backup" scan stage, followed by the "OK - really backing up now. let's list all of the files" scan stage. Followed by the "OK - I've got the file list, let's start copying them over to the disk image" stage, followed by "OK - files are copied. I'm actually going to burn a backup now" stage. Followed (finally, if it gets this far) by the "Let's verify the backup" stage. Takes for freaking ever. When it works at all.

I just printed off a set of maps from maps.google.com to help navigate while driving from SFO to Sonoma State University (via downtown San Francisco to pick up Tim at SFMOMA). Incredibly detailed and easy to read maps, with great easy-to-follow descriptions.

I ended up printing off about 6 different maps, for different portions of the trip (zoomed appropriately). Much better than having to lug around a big "Bay Area Streetmap" atlas.

I'm just cleaning some files off of my desktop (computer, not physical - although I should really do that, too...) and came across the brief OmniOutliner file I started during the Finding Stuff session at MW2005. Here's my lame/brief notes, posted here so I can find and remember the acronyms later...

• Searching and museums
  • Sculpteur project (european)
    • CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) semantic representation of items in a collection, and the relationships between them (object is a painting, created by a user, who lived in a city, which was home to these other painters...)
      • Semantic representation of properties and relationships
      • Much richer descriptions than Dublin Core
  • CBIR
    • context-based searching
    • find things with a similar colour/pattern to this one...
  • SRW
    • z39.50 search protocol for interoperability