Just booked airfare and conference registration for NorthernVoice - the Canadian webloggers' conference (Saturday, Feb. 19, 2005 at UBC in Vancouver). Kinda like a Great White North BloggerCon.

I'll be getting up rather early (have to be at the Calgary airport at 5am) - and am leaving Vancouver on a 7pm flight. That's going to be interesting. But at least I'll be there for the whole conference. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the Canadian weblog geek scene is up to!

Since I'm totally addicted to my iPod, iTunes and the iTMS, I might as well participate in The Great Playlist Meme of '04. It goes like this:

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the "shuffle" command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That's right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It's time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don't have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you'd like.

Here's my list: (a couple embarrassing tracks included)

I just got an email from Brian Lamb to let me know that 2 of the amigos are going mano a mano in the 2004 Weblog Awards: Best Canadian Blog category.

Not sure why I got nominated over the many many (many) other excellent Canadian weblogs. But I'm flattered. I'm getting my ass kicked in the poll, but I'm flattered ;-)

Anyway, vote early, vote often. Now, if only they had the Diebold Vote Multiplier 3000 installed for this...

I've been waiting for this for quite some time now. I activated my account, provided my visa number, and eagerly entered the store.

And, was completely paralyzed by the selection. Which album to buy? Which track? Where to go first? Completely paralyzed. I eventually bought U2 - How to dismantle an atomic bomb - comes complete with liner notes in PDF. Bandwidth is surprisingly slow, but that's not really an issue, and I'm guessing they're getting hammered pretty heavily right now.

Landing in San Francisco this morning, we had an interesting experience. We were escorted in by another plane (no, it was not an F-16). I've never seen, nor been a part of, a tandem landing. A bit of an odd experience, to say the least... I'll update with a photo (I snapped a couple of shots). The two planes landed on parallel runways with about 2 seconds between them...

I'm in the Pachyderm project update meeting now, at the Grand Hyatt. Great group of folks!

Found this gem on the Wordpress Wiki: Auto shutoff comments. It includes code that you can use to create a plugin to automatically close comments after a set number of days - handy for keeping those evil spam roaches at bay.

I just copied the second block of text (the one by Scott Hanson) into a file called "Autoclose.php" and uploaded it into my Wordpress plugins directory. Went to my admin console and activated the plugin, and it seems to work just fine! At least this will keep the roaches confined to a small subset of posts on this weblog, instead of letting them roam unfettered over the 476 posts accumulated over the years...

Rob Reynolds has just posted an interesting piece on the coming LMS Wars. He likens it to be on par with the telecom industry's battle with legacy/enterprise protocols (ATM) vs. upcoming anarchy-driven protocols like IP. (IP is now in the lead, by the way)

The existing LMS industry is analogous to the IT industry, and democratizing tools such as weblogs, wikis, rss, podcasting, etc... are the underdogs.

I think the LMS vendors are smart enough to try to incorporate the best of these tools if they want to survive. Because if they don't, the subversive tools will overtake them very quickly.

I volunteered to manage an Education node of the iPodder.org podcast directory.

It's kinda empty at the moment. If you know of any education-related podcasts, please let me know if it should be included in the directory.

I babble a bit about Pachyderm, and then talk about a few of the interesting items to come over the wires. Grab a copy here

Links from today's episode:

• Pachyderm Project Weblog
• Stand Up Eight: My First Podcast
• Unmediated: How content aggregators change navigation and control of content
• James Farmer: More Podcasting
• James Farmer: Enterprise Blogging in Drupal
• Open Artifact: Ending closed learning tools
• James Farmer: 2004 Academic Weblog Awards
• Flickr: SFMOMA Skylight
• Auricle: Web page commentary as an educational tool?
• Kathleen Gilroy: Blogosphere Data
• Brian Lamb: WIKI Radio

David just published a great post on developing with WebObjects. He really boils down the WebObjects development experience into a few bullet points, which I will copy/paste here for searchability...

The last point is really the best one - I've come across this so many times on CAREO and Pachyderm. We'll be building away and I'll just stop and say something lame like "Wait - this is getting too complicated. There has to be an easier way..."

I just checked the Apache logs and grepped out the lines dealing with the podcasts, and it looks like the podcasts have been downloaded a total of 1377 661 times! (see update below) Holy crap! Who is downloading this stuff? No, really. I'd love to know. If you've downloaded any of the experimental podcasts, please let me know!

The simple and not exactly efficient command I call to count podcatches is:

Well, they're opening one in Toronto. Looks like the Rest of Canada has to wait until at least the middle of 2005 before more Canadian Apple Stores will be opened.

Come on Apple Store Calgary! They're just finishing up renovations on Market Mall - that would have been perfect timing to sneak in the black barricades for construction of an Apple Store... Oh, well...

Actually, wait - that's too close to my house. I can't afford having an Apple Store that close. I'm still looking for a way to fund my impending addiction to the iTMSCanada...