Precious subscribers -- promise me you'll never be fool enough to try podcasting!

i've just been woken, on Christmas Eve, one hour before the fat man is due to stuff his sack down my chimney, by a phonecall from a concerned subscriber, informing me that the podcast is not downloadable.

i'm utterly exhausted.

the day started with an 8am champagne breakfast and bloody marys. it ended with nog of the egg, an innumerable succession of celebratory stella artois, a walk around the block to admire the christmas lights, a clutch of carlton extra dry, a brace of tooheys new and a dash of baileys.

But apparently podcasting, that incredible new technology which will be changing our world next year (much like beta video cassettes in 1980) is of such importance that all hangovers must be cast off. So i've roused myself back to perpendicularity, shaken sleep from the eyes, cranked up the thinband internet connection and sent my precious podcast mp3 off to a remote (and generous) hosting server who promises to look after it for me.

Thanks to Gus for looking after it.

It can be safely downloaded from here. Apparently. No need to rename the file or anything.

Merry ******* christmas. I'm off to bed.

I have this hyperactive colleague. He's a problem to everyone around him, me in particular. This week he's inflicted us all with too much podcast hype. So I've recorded a podcast just now and called it 'the used pizza podcast'.

You want to hear this podcast. Because PODCASTING IS THE FUTURE.

Used Pizza is an idea for a restaurant i came up with, just yesterday. The fact that the name of the podcast has nothng to do with the actual podcast is, perhaps, the point.

You have to rename the file to have a .MP3 extension. (My host doesn't let me upload mp3's, so i had to rename the file. If you name it right it *will* work.)

Podcasting, in case you are not familiar with the term, is a way of combining the pointlessness of a blog with the hassle of a large audio file. You may know of it from g'day world, dawnanddrew or the daily source code.

This podcast includes samples from a song known only to me as 'Hexstatic -- Ninja Tunes'. I like that song. Ninja Tunes are good. Kid Koala good too.

I've included an 'enclosure' in the rss feed -- but if this causes breakage, then i'll remove it.

(* I don't know for a fact that Robert has two fat little twins. But let's assume that he does. And thanks to Rory on whom i've modelled my cartooning skill.)

You (or your coworkers) might like to try this quiz:

In other news...

You know you're having a bad day when

The code you submitted to CodeProject turns up on The Daily WTF.

(hey cheer up. remember: you are not inadequate.)

Unless Microsoft can correct this wrong-headed approach to search, WinFS promises to be so over-engineered as to be completely unusable.

Well, it's sounds like something you'd read about.

And as Blog grows up, people could always guess her age. "Oh, you must have been born prior to 2006, when the international court enacted the universal ban on blogging."

I don't know what Robbie Von Scoble is up to on his link blog -- but my corporate net nanny (WebMarshall) doesn't like it!

I'm guessin either he's lost all his usual decency, or he's been hacked.

On the right hand side of this site (if you are viewing this through a browser) i've framed in a version of the feed for my link-blog, available via rss or html from http://del.icio.us/secretGeek

It's rendered from XML to HTML using the BigBold Rss Digest. Sorry about the mis-colouring of the background. It's on my list of fixes.

Google Search Console reports that this short blog post is a soft 404. I hope that by adding extra text here I can correct the error in google search console. Here is a thing which is of little value:

An economic variable can be exogenous in some models and endogenous in others.

Proprietary software is often so sucky. (CD writer software in particular. But let's talk about scanners for a moment.) Here's a snapshot of the software that came bundled with my scanner.

Oooh! Isn't it smooth.

What sucks is that the design deliberately mimics a piece of *HARD*ware.

Does software usually have an OFF button in the middle!? My crappy $36 stereo has that. It's the last place you look when you need to escape. But I expect my crappy stereo to lack usability, because it is hard to fix.

But software should be far more useable that hardware, you gimps!

Software can be improved very rapidly. It is **SOFT**

Hardware is a village idiot compared with software. Hardware should be based on software. Software is where the lessons are learnt!

Ahhh. I don't really mind. I just wanted to share it with you guys and ladies. You seem nice. And kind of cute, too. Keep up the hard work you industious sons and daughter of this electric age.

Much like Bilbo's little sword that glows when orcs are near, i'd like it if keys would glow when near their lock.

That way, you'd be able to quickly pick out the right key on the bulky key ring. Even in the dark. When drunk.

The other problem with keys is that they frequently misplace themselves. What if you could dial a number on your mobile phone and the keys would start rattlin. Perhaps the keys could SMS you back and say "I'm under the sofa!" or "I'm in a strange dark place i've never been before. I can hear a chuirch bell ringing."

Better still: why not dial a number on your mobile phone to unlock the door. Who needs extra hardware like keys? Would open up a tinful of worms around the security issues though.