mike

These Friday night Arrested Development marathons on Fox are incredible. I can’t imagine there is anyone who doesn’t like this show. In fact, it may be added to the list of things that I can’t be friends with you if you don’t like. Sort of like how I can’t trust someone who likes Leno. I thought AD wasn’t coming back until January but actually the season premiere is September 19th. That’s a little over a month away. I cannot wait for this new fall season.

CSS gets more fun every time you use it. Its such a pain but so cool once you get it the way you want it. My latest are the boxes on the right side there. They were kind of a pain at first because with my new blog software I just redid their basic design so that I didn’t screw anything up. Problem with that is there are a whole bunch of CSS classes that I have no use for and some of the ones being used have extra definitions that aren’t being used until you try and make cool boxes float like this. But you didn’t come here for this babble.

On the side right now is just some basic stuff, which will likely change when I find something cool that I want. First up are My Diggs. You will want to digg.com check out Digg to get the idea. People submit links to news stories, mostly tech related but some other interesting stuff too. Then you can ‘digg’ them, when a story gets enough Diggs it moves to the main page and if a story gets a whole lot of diggs during the week it will be fetured on their Diggnation podcast. It also gives you an RSS feed of the stories you dugg so that you can put a handy thing like this on your site, along with all the other thigns you can do with an RSS feed. This site is really something special, I can only hope they expand, or create other versions, to include other topics.

One of the stories on there now announces the release of Yahoo! Messenger Version 7. This new release looks very cool. It obviously has all the features that make Yahoo! better than all the other IM clients, as far as features. With Version 7 they have added calling, they have had voice chat for a while but these calls are much simpler. You can have conference calls as well. Its almost identical to Skype. It also has voicemail, for free! This is my favorite feature. Skype lets you pay for voicemail. I haven’t had a chance to try out any of these features yet, since I don’t know anyone on Yahoo! So get yourself on Yahoo!

Finally I added some links to a bunch of my favorite sites. I’m not sure if I like it like this, so I’ll continue to tinker. The Phillies links are most worth checking out if you love to read about the Phillies on a daily basis. If you visit all of those then we’ll have nothing to talk about since this is where I get just about all of my news, rumors, etc on just about everything. Let me know if you have some cool sites that I might like that aren’t listed.

I fooled around with some of the podcasts when iTunes 4.9 came out and wasn’t too excited about the whole thing. Most of it just seemed pretty boring and while there may have been some good ones out there it was going to take a lot of time going through bad ones before finding something decent.

J. River Media Center, which I’ve talked about before, has not been playing nice with my iPod so I’m trying again (I think this is my 3rd attempt) to get iTunes to work the way I want it. My biggest problems: Last time I tried it after a week my database just disappeared from iTunes, ratings, play counts, everything just vanished. I didn’t have a backup so I was out of luck. In J. River those things are saved to the music file, nothing has happened to my database with that but if it did I would just reload all the songs and that information is there. The second issue may seem minor but was driving me nuts, when you delete a song from the library it doesn’t ask if I want it removed from the hard drive. I finally found that I had to change the setting for the iTunes Music Folder to point to the correct place and now it gives me this option. This is a really terrible way to do things but at least it works now. I was a little sacred to try it since I don’t want iTunes touching my file or folder names and so far its been good. So I restored my iPod and sync’d it to iTunes and things have been OK for nearly 24 hours.

Back to the Podcasts. In iTunes they are starring right at you so I decided to check out the directory and see which ones were popular and check them out. Most of the ones on there are tech-related and I also had seen mention that some other sites I usually visit had podcasts too. I added a couple and have been listening to them last night and today.

Here are the ones I recommend so far:
Engadget
this WEEK in TECH
KFI’s Tech Guy
Diggnation
These are all tech ones and the last three all are from people who were on TechTV (the channel that Comcast bought, merged with G4 and then fired everyone even though TechTV was worth watching and G4 is garbage).

Besides Tech Baseball Prospectus podcasts their weekly radio show which is very good and a lot less staty (probably not a word) than their web site. Hopefully Baseball Musings will podcast soon, I’ve listened before and its also good. Both baseball shows are much better than anything I’ve heard on MLB Radio.

From my use iTunes has a very nice setup for the user. The directory will give you some of the most common ones but you can also add any feed you want. From what I’ve heard it is much more difficult for the producer of the podcast, bandwidth gets sucked up real quick if you get at all popular. Most of the other pocast clients allow use of bittorrent. My problem so far with those is that it can’t hook into iTunes well enough. All this isn’t too much of a concern but it is something I’m thinking about trying.