I’ve listened for the last few months as the media have been working themselves up into a feverish pitch about podcasting. From reading the breathless reports you would think this was some life altering technology that will stop global warming, feed all the starving kids in Africa, and give you instantly white teeth. Wow, some dumbass records stuff and you can download and listen to it. You’ve been able to do this easily ever since you could play back audio files on a computer. The only difference is now I can download them to my iPod. I fail to see what the Big Fucking Deal is.

I couldn’t agree more with Rui Carmo when he says (full blog post):

A new form of dispersing media which, incidentally, seems to have some trouble with my corporate firewall - either that or there are far too many people who apreciate hanging on every word uttered by bespectacled geeks’ reedy voices as they stutter through the description of their latest bit of gadgetry.

Or perhaps they’re dissecting a newfangled technique to achieve GTD nirvana using a chopstick with numbered notches, their sentences punctuated by the occasional hiss of static as they forget, time and again, that you’re not supposed to actually touch the mike, or breathe that close to it without taking a hit from their inhalers.

Considering that 99.999% of podcasts are pretty much a waste of time, I’m not exactly enthusiastic about the media. Or the fact that Apple has just added an amazing amount of infrastructure to podcasting, which turned it into a recording industry clone overnight (complete with rankings, meaningless “Top 40â€? lists and a swarming mass of online groupies).

Maybe we’ll be proven wrong.

Wow. We just watched “The Girl In The Café� on HBO. This was an incredibly good movie by the same guy that did “Love Actually� and “Four Weddings and a Funeral�.

Released a new version of Retrospect-GDS earlier today. What’s new you ask?

• Polish language translation by Michal Rudolf
  The addition of the Polish language translation required me to rewrite parts of the language handling functions because they weren’t working well with the UTF-8 or 8859-2 character sets needed for Polish. I also uncovered a problem with gettext when its compiled against certain versions of libiconv. This has caused me some headaches on my development box. Oh yeah, and PHP’s built in htmlentities function doesn’t like some of the 8859-2 or UTF-8 character codes, so I had to stop using it. This means that some pages may not validate as strict XHTML 1.0, but there is no easy workaround for this.
• More CSS cleanup
  
The CSS has been simplified a little bit more. This is an area that is undergoing constant tweaking as I get time.
• Added error handling for unwritable directories
  
There are several directories that need to be writable for Retrospect-GDS to work correctly. Two of them are critical, so if they are not writable you will get a blank page when trying to run the program. I’ve added some code to make sure these directories are writable. If they aren’t, then Retrospect-GDS will die with an error message instead of just choking and giving no output.

It’s a slow Friday, so it’s time for another music update. According to iTunes, my top 10 songs are:

1. Where Is Your Heart from the album “Breakaway� by Kelly Clarkson
2. Mysterons from the album “Dummy� by Portishead
3. Glory Box from the album “Dummy� by Portishead
4. Walking With a Ghost from the album “So Jealous� by Tegan and Sara
5. Roads from the album “Dummy� by Portishead
6. Since U Been Gone from the album “Breakaway� by Kelly Clarkson
7. Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own from the album “The Complete U2 - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bombâ€? by U2
8. Lebanese Blonde from the album “The Mirror Conspiracy� by Thievery Corporation
9. Sour Times from the album “Dummy� by Portishead
10. Island in the Sun from the album “Weezer� by Weezer

It’s funny to see how my music listening habits change over time. Late last year was almost totally electronic music. Early this year was all cheesy pop songs. Right now there’s a little of everything…

The last of the Kauai photos has been added to the Kauai photo gallery tonight. I also burned a CD with all the photos for our Kauai decompression party tomorrow night. While I was at it I created a cool slideshow in iPhoto with a cool Iz song playing in the background. iPhoto lets you export to iDVD, so I tried that out and now I have a DVD which I can take to the party. No need to bring the Powerbook. Slick.