brainwagon

To the nice three people who have ranked brainwagon on podcastalley.com, thanks! It’s great to know that at least three people thought enough of this little endeavor to click a button to let others know about it. Addendum: seven people? Staggering!

Didn’t find out about it until late in the day, but I’d like to wish Tom a happy birthday! Best wishes to you and yours, and health, long life, riches, laughter, music, DAT drives that don’t jam and laptops that work with Linux right out of the box.

It’s cold (or what passes for cold in California) and rainy today, so it’s time to cook up something healthy and delicious. Here’s my recipe (such as it is) for home-made Chicken and Dumplings, inspired by a similar recipe that I saw on Rachel Ray’s 30 minute meals. Nothing about this meal is cast in […]

The other day I noticed that several of the podcasts to which I normally subscribe started having cover art visible when I played them in iTunes. I thought that would be fun, so I tried to figure out how I could do this. I could, of course, just load the mp3 file into iTunes and […]

Sorry the team working on iPodder, but I’ve become too frustrated with it to continue using it. I have been having problems with iTunes crashing periodically, with items which are downloaded and inserted multiple times, and with a situation where a feed which botched once and refused to download again, even after uninstalling and reinstalling […]

Well, I couldn’t resist a sale this morning: Best Buy had the new Motorola MPX220 cell phones on sale for $49 after a $300 rebate. The gadget is a Microsoft Smartphone, and while it is far from perfect (I will try to do a writeup of my experiences soon) it does have a number of […]

My friend Tom and his son Tim showed up for Thanksgiving, and my son and his friend showed up just as we sat down for dinner. Turkey, sweet potatoes w/ pecans, mashed potatoes, stuffing and green beans, chased down with pumpkin cheesecake, a lemon meringue pie and a chocolate cake. Woof. Surprisingly, the 16 lb […]

To all the readers of these humble pages and all the listeners of my podcast, here are my best wishes to all and their families to have a great holiday. Here at my house, we are just getting started: soon, the turkey will be out of his briney bath and into a roaster pan, the […]

I mentioned in yesterday’s audio podcast that it would be nice if ipodder clients did more to manage your collection of online audio from podcasts. I suggested that you might want to pick a size such as 10gb that you are willing to use for podcasts. As new podcasts come in, the oldest would be […]

Cory Doctorow mentioned Ralph Koster’s Theory of Fun, an as yet unreleased (?) book on the design of games. Ralph has prepared 50 page PDF file which describes some of its content. Good stuff.

A classic illusion is the hollow face illusion, where a concave casting of the face appears convex. This is demonstrated neatly here, with a simple cardboard cutout whose head appears to track you as you move around. Very neat. There are lots of other cool illusions on the parent website, check them out too.

Well, it’s finally arrived: Bloggercon. I’m just arming myself with my digital camera and my tiny voice recorder, I suspect that if I brought a more powerful gadget, I would be more tempted to pay attention to it rather than what’s going on around me. So, blinking the sleep from my eyes and armed only […]

While as of this hour Bush has not declared victory, nor Kerry conceded victory, both seem to be inevitable. I’m depressed, and I can’t help but wonder where my country has gone. Don’t think I’ll be up to podcasting today. Four million of you conspired to ruin my mood.

For Halloween, I decided to pick up The Phantom of the Opera: The Ultimate Edition, which I got for $15 or so from my local mass retailer. This is actually a 2 DVD set, which includes two versions of the film: the longer 1925 release version, as well as the re-release 1929 version. I must […]

First thing this morning I decided to try to track my latest amazon order to see when it was going to arrive. I got the following: Date Time Location Service Area Checkpoint Details Nov 01, 2004 09:05:00 AM ALLENTOWN PA WITH DELIVERY COURIER. Nov 01, 2004 07:55:00 AM OAKLAND CA ARRIVED AT DHL FACILITY. Oct […]