My wife and her sister are using my laptop to look at houses right now, so I decided to comandeer my wife's desktop and write up a blog post. I actually have more stuff to talk about than I can fit (or should try to fit) in the update window, so a blog post it is!
First, I want to talk about the podcast. I know, I know. I can hear what you're all saying. Instead of talking about the podcast, I should actually work on the podcast. Well screw you, mister! Besides, I have been working on the podcast. But because Lucy (my iPod) has been such a temperamental wench lately, I lost two attempts before I could collect them for editing/posting. All that's going to change, now! I bought a digital voice recorder! Woo! I got paid this morning, so on my way in to work, I hit an electronics store and dropped some money. Because I got paid a bit more than I thought I was going to, and because I have a few minor bills that haven't come due yet, I decided to spend a little bit more than I was planning to get a recorder that records in high quality and stereo. No more copying and pasting in Audacity to get a stereo track for me! I've listened to some of my test recordings, and they're pretty sweet. It's still a recording from the inside of a car on the freeway, though, so I might have to take surface streets when recording an episode, just to cut down on the noise level.
Another reason why I bring up the podcast is so I can inform you about its format. I don't want to take precious, precious driving minutes to let you know what's going on, so the Corner is the perfect location for it. I started this podcast mostly because I spent a lot of time thinking about my writing while driving to and from work. After a while, I plugged my microphone in to my iPod and recorded them because my ideas were getting pretty good and I didn't want to lose them. Plus, talking through the problems helped me to find solutions, so it had dual benefits. Soon, I realized I could do a podcast -- like I had always planned -- based on the same concept, that talking about my ideas and their problems could help me find solutions, and a recording of the "conversation" would ensure that I wouldn't lose it. So that's going to be the main purpose of the podcast, what I'm going to call "Segment #1."
The other segments will differ greatly. They'll be me talking about cool tech news I've read/heard about, discussions of updates and improvements to the website, rants, reviews of books, music, movies and video games, and two other subjects that are as different from tech reviews as dirt is from dark matter. The first -- maybe not so different, actually -- is eventually going to be a revival of an old podcast a friend of mine and I did a few years ago called "The Bad Movie Review." We watched some of the worst movies we could find (with titles like "Dracula 3000") and made fun of them for as long as it was funny. Not Mystery Science Theater style, more like Siskel and Ebert on Weed. It was great fun, and it feels like the time is right. I haven't actually talked to him about it yet, and as he might be one of the three people who actually checks this site, "Hey, Marc, is it Bad Movie Review time, yet? Panther Squad is getting restless..." In all honesty, I feel like the chances are pretty good...
The final segment really does fit into that "dirt vs. dark matter" category I mentioned earlier, but before I describe it, I have to explain it. I love media, of all kinds. Straight audio (music, audiobooks and podcasts, mostly), movies, television, reading, writing, educational, instructive, entertainment, interactive, whatever. That category covers pretty much every other segment of this podcast. What I love just as much (other than my wife, of course. I love you, Jess!) is cooking. That's right, this tech/scifi/fantasy nerd loves to stand in the kitchen in front of the stove, arms-length from the spice rack, and experiment with food. I've recently discovered an easy, yet kick-ass, tomatillo salsa recipe, and I'm close to perfecting my peanut sauce. I make a quart or so of it every couple of weekends to take with me to work, and I just mix it with a package of microwave-cooked ramen noodles for an easy, tasty, spicy lunch. Fantastic. I've been experimenting with easy (1/2 - 1 1/2 hour prep/cook times) recipes for several years now, and I finally have a medium to share the results of those experiments with, well, EVERYBODY! I love cooking as much as I love coding a new page for my website, and I want as many people to benefit from that as possible.
So that's the podcast news. As I was downloading a few more things to my wife's computer so that I could write this blog post, I realized there were several tools I forgot to mention when I was talking about development. The first is Firebug. While I wouldn't call it a "must-have" for independent web development, it definitely makes things easy to visualize. I was able to correct problems that I would have had a much more difficult time even discovering without it. It has a drawback, though. Depending on how you use it, Firebug sort of competes with your page for screen real-estate, and there are a few other things that are counter-intuitive, but once you get used to it, it serves as a wonderful debugger. The second tool I use on a daily basis is FireFTP. It's a simple FTP upload tool that has completely replaced my old one, Cyberduck. FireFTP and Firebug, as the names should tell you, are both Firefox add-ons, and are inserted seamlessly into your browsing experience. I highly recommend both of them, as well as Firefox, itself.
The final tool I'm recommending today is a simple source-code tool, Notepad++. When I sat down at this keyboard an hour ago, I was about to open WordPad to edit this page, and I thought to myself "Self, 'WordPad' is the result of 1,000 monkeys snorting 1,000 lines of cocaine and raping 1,000 typewriters and text-editors for 1,000 years." Then I remembered Notepad++, a tool I use daily at work. Seriously, I use it literally almost every day in the course of my routine. The most pathetic part of it is this: whenever I've edited my website and web pages at work, I've used the coked-up monkey program WordPad. What the hell is wrong with me? Anyway, Notepad++ is for people who don't want to perpetuate the 1,000 years of monkey-rape. That is all.
Well, that's it for this post. I don't remember what I had on my plate for the next website upgrade, so get used to this format, because I really like it. As always, I'm going to put the links I mentioned in this post on the front page of the website. Right now, though, I have to see to my "husbandly duties." My wife is using Simpsonize Me to see what we'd look like as Simpson characters and needs my profile. Later!
