I realized today that my last post was in early May. Oops. I guess I sorta dropped off the face of the digital landscape for a while. I even stopped updating Twitter and Jaiku. You could still tell I was around because my presence feed was still being updated with last.fm, Wakoopa, Netflix, and LibraryThing updates, but it’s not the same thing, right?

At any rate, I finished with finals and sort of mentally collapsed from exhaustion. We had decided to try a format change on Bits of Silicon Hell, but even that fell flat. I just ran out of steam. Mostly because it was a long and tough semester, but I’ve recharged my batteries a little now. I’ve spent most of my time playing Travian and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and literally not trying to think too much.

I also spent some time writing a paper for the CMG conference which will be in San Diego in December. The paper was submitted last week and I’ll know in late July if the paper made it through the referee process. If it’s published, I should be invited to present the paper at the conference.

Most recently, I’ve been dealing with a very bad sunburn from a trip to the lake for my brother-in-law’s 30th birthday party (photos are up on Flickr). I could barely stand for two days due to the burns on my legs. Also, this week my daughter has had pneumonia and a bladder infection. We had to go to the emergency room twice in one day (don’t ask). She’s doing well, but her immune system is completely taxed and we have to keep her still and away from other people (try that with a 3 year old).

Next week is Cub Scout Camp for my son and this year’s theme is Dinosaur Discovery. Dinosaurs have been his absolute favorite thing in the world since he was about 18 months old. I think he’ll have a blast. I’ll probably end up working at the camp on Thursday and Friday which should be fun too.

Until next time (hopefully sooner than this time)!

I really do it right.

No one knows this, but we recorded episode 101 on February 26th of the Bits of Silicon Hell podcast. I posted it the next day, but somehow it got marked as private. So, it looks like no one actually downloaded as far as I can tell. I noticed this because all of the podcasts sites were showing out latest show as 100 from February 17th. The post for 101 was showing to me because I was logged into WordPress.

The weird thing I usually catch it when a post gets marked as private because it doesn’t download in iTunes and get put on my iPod (I always listen to every show on the iPod just to verify all of the plumbing is working). However, even when I changed the post back to published iTunes didn’t download 101. It just downloaded 102, which I just posted tonight. How is that possible? iTunes can’t be logged into wordpress. Plus, the RSS feed is sanitized through feedburner even if iTunes could login to wordpress.

So, we recorded episode 101 but didn’t post it (essentially) and then due to real-life commitments didn’t do a show for two weeks. It’s a wonder anyone is still subscribed!

I woke up this morning and an invite for Vox awaited me! Yippee! I’m not sure how much I’ll use it over wordpress yet, but it’s definitely very cool and still needs a lot of work at the same time. Come and visit me in my neighborhood. Now I just need to decide who deserves an invite.

To top all of that off, guess what came in the mail!

That’s right, my very own Podzinger schwag. The iPod cover turned out to be for a slimmer video iPod, but I still managed to make it fit my 4th gen.

If you’ve been living under a rock, Podzinger is an awesome way to search audio content (ahem.. podcasts). That’s right, they actually index the spoken word from the audio using some very cool text-to-speech technology.

Bits of Silicon Hell has been sporting a podzinger search box for quite a while now and the schwag was a thank you gift. Thanks guys!

Tags: podzinger, schwag, vox, bits of silicon hell, luggage tag, iPod

I finally got around to upgrading the podcast site, Bits of Silicon Hell,to WordPress 2.0. I’m shy about upgrading major versions of anything as soon as they come out. So, yeah, I let this one go for a while.

It was sorta fun upgrading all of my plugins, discovering new ones, and troubleshooting various issues arising from doing the geek/guy thing and not following the directions to the letter (such as not deleting the old version’s files).

I’m excited about the new version of the forums and support for gravatar (which I never heard of before tonight). The only thing on my wishlist is some way to know when forum replies are made. Either through e-mail notifications or an favorite thread RSS feed like BBpress has.

Next project: Find something to replace the outdated piece of crap called PHP-Nuke that’s currently running Eyejabber without losing any of the 5 years worth of posts, comments, and forum discussions. The site is not mine, but Dudemac is pretty clueless when it comes to this stuff so I hook him up. I just haven’t had time to do a proper job and the site’s only been defaced a couple of times.

Tags: Bits of Silicon Hell, Upgrade, WordPress, Plugins, Forum, RSS