First off, I’d like to say Happy Holidays to all, and I hope everyone had a great new year.  Back to work tomorrow, bah.  Oh well. 

I was actually on vacation this week, and it has been wonderful.  Not only did I get to spend alot of time with my family, but I got a decent amount of time to play with my new toy, and work with my blog a bit.  More on that in a minute.

First on my new toy.  All I wanted for Christmas was an MP3 player.  I was burning just a ton of CD’s (to the tune of 7–8 per week) listening to podcasts, and it gets pretty annoying.  Now, I have a ton of podcasts loaded for some archiving and Nimiq out working making sure I am up to date.  Yay, now I’m on top of podcasting. 

Speaking of podcasting, I was going to do a post on predictions and goals for the new year and all that, but I was too busy working on them to talk about them.  I hope to go into more detail on some of my thoughts on the upcoming year in the next week or two, but if I don’t get to it I at least wanted to say podcasting will be huge.  This year, I think podcasting will make huge strides.  I think next year is the year my mom asks me about podcasting, but this year I think alot of the geeks that aren’t yet on board will be. 

Back to the MP3 player for a second.  If you are in the market, I would highly suggest you take a look at the h320.  I plan on posting more about that too, but this thing rocks.  And, with a little firmware upgrade, you even get video.  All for around 250$.  Sweet.

I did alot of thinking about digital media, and content delivery this week, and have some thoughts that are coming together.  I had been wanting to do _something_ with the blog, but wasn’t sure what.  I knew it had to involve podcasting, though, so the first thing that came to mind was to modify this blog to do what I wanted.  Thanks to this tutorial, I was able to add podcasting to .text in just a matter of a few hours.  As I started to dig more into .text, though, I realized alot of the things I wanted to do were going to be difficult, so I decided it might be time to switch platforms.

After some buy/build decisions of my own, I decided to start playing with Movable Type.  So, after installing a few things, I had a test blog up and going.  In a matter of about 30 minutes I had some podcasting support, and by then I was hooked.  So, sometime in the near future there will be a pretty big change to the blog. 

With the cosmetic update, I would also like to make a bit of a philosophical change.  I want to post more, more original useful content, and more personal bullshit.  Along with this, I hope to provide some audio content soon, but you’ll have to wait on details for that.  I think you might like it though.  In the meantime, you can at least see a beta of the new blog.  This is a beta, broken links all over, feeds not right, the url isn’t even final.  Check it out, but don’t change your subscription yet.