As I write this, I’m snacking on leftover ice cream, several days past another birthday.

Normally, I try to avoid making my birthday anything special, mostly due to the way birthdays were treated throughout most of my childhood. Add these childhood experiences under the sliced bananas of a stark reminder of the reality of getting older, and I would just as soon sit home alone, quietly, than make my birthday a huge production.

This year’s birthday was a bit noisier than I would have normally cared for, having accepted an invitation to dinner with my in-laws who were in town, and then making the mistake of selecting one of the few places here that carried the Packers-Cowboys NFL game.

As I poked at my salmon dish while sipping on a rum and coke, I realized that even in a restaurant full of people, at a table full of family, with birthday messages I am humbled by and grateful for on my Blackberry from literally all over the world, it’s still possible to feel as if you’re alone on an island, waiting to be rescued.

The saying goes “nobody can know you as well as you know yourself”, and, for the most part, that is true. The problem is getting to know yourself, and then coming to terms and accepting what comes from that. That is something that, despite all my years on this planet, I haven’t quite grasped yet.

Until then, I’ll continue to sit at that table, alone with my thoughts, waiting for the screaming silence that is inner peace.

Technorati Tags: birthday, musing, inner peace, loneliness

My friend, Eban Crawford, writes recently about new media “pirates” and the ostracizing of one in particular. I consider Eban about as good of a friend as one can have in this medium, so I know he’ll understand my writing a response here is a continuation of the conversation and not any form of personal attack.

I write here often that we in New Media should be the new pirates. I don’t say that just to be spouting inane rhetoric. I really believe that we should embrace the spirit of the pirate radio types that came before us. We need to be brash and confrontational, not Touchy-feely. Danny Golden understood that side of podcasting, and his show reflected it. (As much as I hate to admit it, he seems to have understood this even more than me)

I’m all for using the blunt approach and “calling it like you see it” (for lack of a better term). This is one of the many reasons I enjoy reading and listening to people like Eban, Dave Slusher, and Eric Rice — you’re not going to get anything sugar-coated, and they respect other people of the same ilk.

Sadly, podcasters and other new media producers are in a piranha tank where calling these things out or otherwise being critical of intents and results gets you labeled a wet-blanket cynic, simply dismissed out of hand, or actively attacked for daring to speak out. When you take disagreement with an idea personally or outright refuse to accept someone might hold a valid contrary opinion, you immediately close off all avenues of discussion and understanding. From a maturity standpoint, it’s the functional equivalent of a child holding hands over ears while chanting “I am not listening”.

Another thing Danny said in the last WWoD episode that strikes as true is most podcast listeners are from the podcast world. I will take that a bit further, Social and New Media consumers, no matter what form, are usually also producers of said content as well. We need to break down the walls and stop with the support group mentality. It is somewhat incestuous. We have to get out there and get the eyes and ears of those that do not look to New Media for their entertainment at this time, not those already converted to the cause.

Again, spot on. I’ve said before that the ego-chamber is alive and well, still, in podcasting, and it continues to run its circular course through the non-forking family tree that is the so-called “podcast community”. Podcasters (and their network overlords) are still too interested in patting themselves on the back for an infinitely small increase in the infinitely small coverage rate they have in the overall grand scheme of media consumption.

Notice I said millions of other viewers. How many eyes or ears does your new media product reach? They pull in millions with mindless crap. Even the best of the New Media products only pull in a fraction of those numbers.

This is exactly why most of the Top-20 podcasts in iTunes are dominated by old media conglomerates, folks. They already have the eyes and ears of millions. If you think your new media content is going to go mainstream and make you a star, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, and you’re in the wrong business.

We have one group of new media citizens that seems to be trying to do things the way old media does things. That won’t work for us, it has been done and we don’t have the resources to compete.

Another group is those New Media folks that are looking for profits and revenue before we actually make the cut and get into the eyes and ears of the masses. I don’t completely disagree with this as the old adage it takes money to make money is true in most cases. But we do have to be wary of putting the cart before the horse and building an unworkable model.

Sadly, both of these groups include most of your hierarchal podcast networks. With their 30-second ads, the pre-rolls, the post-rolls, and the over-rehearsed advertisements for other in-network shows, they are trying to take chapter and verse right out of old media’s playbook, without the corresponding astronomical marketing budgets. Preaching to the converted, indeed.

I produce for Podshow, and while not perfect, Podshow does not deserve a lot of the crap directed in their direction. There are exciting things going on that will be announced in the future that will impact the world of New Media. I find Podshow to be in the something totally new crowd and I am happy to be there.

While I’m glad that Eban is happy with Podshow, this is where I must disagree with my friend. Podshow, and every other for-profit podcast network out there inclusively, deserves every bit of the criticism they receive. These companies put themselves out there as the so-called “torch bearers” for new media, promising to lead the unwashed masses out of the desert to the promised land. Such brass not only invites critical watch over and review of your actions, it encourages it.

Most of your for-profit networks are set up with a few big “stars”, a lower tier of minor producers, and what can best be described as the steerage. It’s the job of the minor producers to promote the big stars (in hopes of one day being granted membership in the court) while helping the stars hold a carrot out in front of the the port window of the bottom deck. Keep eating your vegetables and saying your prayers every night and you too can some day make pennies on the dollar for your content.

In other words, it’s one very murky (and sadly, very legal) pyramid scheme. Only the first-class content producers at the very top (or the early entrants, which are usually the same people) will ever make any real money from being part of the network. The rest of the content producers will continue to chase an unreachable dream that is nothing more than a highly subjective moving target which may not even be there at all when (if) the end of the rainbow is found.

These schemes are not good for podcasting, but they are good for the podcast networks and the first-class content producers, which is why they continue to flourish. The sooner these schemes sink to the bottom of the sea the better off podcasting will be for all of us. Sadly, when that does happen, a lot of good content producers and a lot of good content are going to go down with the ship while the upper classes row away towards the next round of angel funding.

There’s nothing wrong with being a new media pirate. Go forth, sail the seas and explore all there is to see, hear, and do in the new media world. Just make sure you’re on the right boat, lest you be left rearranging the deck chairs.

Technorati Tags: new media, podcasting, podcast networks, pyramid scheme, pirates, new media pirates, podcast networks, Podshow, Eban Crawford

For 95% of people out there, the FeedBurner FeedSmith plug-in is a great way to automatically redirect your feeds over to Feedburner’s tracking system.

The problem with the plug-in is it redirects ALL feeds over to one FeedBurner feed. If you’re like me (or others) and have a podcast with two different feeds for two different types of files (like audio and video, or MP3 and AAC), you can still use FeedBurner for stats tracking, but it takes some manual hacking.

Requirement: You must have edit access to a file called “.htaccess” in your Wordpress root directory and your web hosting provider must support redirects. Some web hosting companies, such as GoDaddy, intentionally obfuscate access to “.htaccess” or just plain disallow redirects from it, usually under the flimsy guise of “security concerns”. Your mileage may vary, so check with your web host provider if you have issues.

Disclaimer: There are multiple ways to skin a cat, so there may be better ways of doing this. This works for me on my provider. I can’t be responsible if you break your feed, unsubscribe all your listeners, kill a kitten, or cause Twitter more downtime using this method.

Using my podcast as an example, here’s what a basic redirect looks like. You would add these lines BEFORE the Wordpress code-block that usually starts with “# BEGIN Wordpress” or the like:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^feed(.*) http://feeds.feedburner.com/SufferingFromSanity [R=302,L]

Here’s how this is translated by the web server:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner

This tells the web server that the rewrite condition we’re trying to perform only applies when the “user agent” isn’t “FeedBurner”. In other words, this rule only applies if we’re not FeedBurner. Side note, without this exclusion, FeedBurner rightly complains of a rather nasty circular reference trying to pull your feed.

RewriteRule ^feed(.*) http://feeds.feedburner.com/SufferingFromSanity [R=302,L]

This is the actual rule. It redirects the prefixed website (which covers someone typing in “sufferingfromsanity.com” or “www.sufferingfromsanity.com”) accessing “feed” with or without the trailing slash “(.*)”. It redirects that access to the FeedBurner address with an HTML 302 code. HTML 302 is called a “temporary redirect”, which means web spiders and search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) won’t permanently replace “http://sufferingfromsanity.com/feed” with the FeedBurner in their indexes. The “L” tells the web server the rule has ended.

To do this for different Wordpress categories, just change the appropriate feed being redirected:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^category/podcast-main/feed(.*) http://feeds.feedburner.com/SufferingFromSanity [R=302,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^category/podcast-enhanced/feed(.*) http://feeds.feedburner.com/SufferingFromSanityEnhanced [R=302,L]

When you set up FeedBurner, simply give it the regular feed to look at (e.g. “http://sufferingfromsanity.com/feed/”) and it should handle the rest. With this method, the number of available redirects is theoretically limitless — although if your “.htaccess” file gets really big it might bog down your site’s load times just a bit.

I hope you’ve found this useful. If you found a better or different way of doing this, feel free to leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Feedburner, redirect, category

Three tomatoes are walking down the street: a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and smooshes him… and says “Catch up!”

Uma Thurman — Pulp Fiction (1994)

The buzz of the weekend was the viral e-mail spam assault brought on by a new “social network startup” named Quechup. I was fortunate enough that by the time the e-mails started rolling in, C.C. Chapman had already posted his apology/rant, and I was able to successfully avoid burying my own contact list in a wash of unwanted invites. Others I associate with were sadly not as lucky. This site’s privacy policies being what they are doesn’t surprise me, however. Let’s be honest here: almost every commercially-minded web site will collect some form of personally identifiable information.

So what have we learned from today?

Being An Early Adopter Isn’t Always A Good Thing

Sometimes being the bleeding edge, or trying to follow the bleeding edge, means you end up the victim of these things. If I wanted to take the cynic’s view of it (and why wouldn’t I?), I would say these are the exact people being targeted. The so-called “A-list elite early adopters” are going to be the people with the largest address books, and, consequently, the best fish in the pond for harvesting.

Social Engineering Is Alive And Well

For all our redundant firewalls, intrusion detection systems, network address translation schemes, and password security rules, nothing beats a good, old-fashioned round of social engineering on a social network sized scale.

One of the reasons why this went on for as long as it did is because the people clicking on the links trusted the people the invitation e-mails cleverly appeared to have come from. We want to trust the people that we know and associate with the most, and our usual initial reaction is to believe these people would not intentionally be malicious and subject us to spam, viruses or harvesting. There’s an argument to be made that it was the sole intent of the operation was as a social-engineering experiment.

Look Before You Leap

The domain has a Great Britain domain address with contact information under a e-mail domain registered in the Cook Islands (Pacific islands southeast of Samoa for those geographically unaware). The linked parent corporation specializes in “projects in online dating” and is domain-registered in Nevada. This worldwide round-about has more holes than the strainer I ran tonight’s angel hair pasta through.

Everyone wants to be the next MySpace, and some are willing to cut ethical corners to get there. After all, bad publicity is better than none at all, right? It pays to spend a few minutes checking out a site and searching around the Series of Tubes before clicking on the “Sign Up” button.

First Impressions Mean Everything

Whether through intentional shady practices, very poor judgement without malice, or just very bad programming, this site has destroyed any chance of success it had. In fact, I would go so far as to say it doesn’t matter why or how this happened. You can not repair a first impression any more than you can unscramble an egg. Enough bad press and angry blog posts have been created to permanently stain the name, assuming it was any form of legitimate business to begin with.

As a final thought, it was nice to know that I was important enough to be on so many GMail address books.

Technorati Tags: Quechup, spam, Pulp Fiction, early adopter, social engineering, social network, first impressions

It would be slightly amiss if I didn’t write something about the two year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall into the Gulf Coast region.

What have we learned in the last two years? I would venture to say: not very much.

While the news coverage will concentrate mostly on the “feel good” stories, and they no doubt deserve to be told, we still have a long way to go before we can even think about considering New Orleans “back”. The Lower 9th Ward is still an unimaginable mess, and it was only recently that new housing started being rebuilt in an area that took an absolute beating at the hands of the storm and its subsequent floods.

In consideration of the entire bumbling of the relief effort by FEMA, I think we can put the conspiracy theories regarding FEMA taking over the country to rest for a bit. It’s safe to say FEMA isn’t going to be taking over anything much larger than a child’s sack lunch anytime soon.

Environmentally, Katrina caused as much devastation and contamination (9 million gallons, by some accounts) as the 10.8 million gallon Exxon Valdez oil spill. What will be the legacy of this floating swamp of pollution? The after-effects of something this large and wide won’t be measurable for decades or generations as we monitor cancer and other death rates from the survivors, their decedents, and the people brave enough to move back.

The financial impact is still being measured. The National Flood Insurance Program, already on shaky ground before Katrina, is now $20 billion in the hole and showing no signs of getting on the level in the immediate future. Musicians, once one of the beautiful and amazing pillars New Orleans was built on, are leaving in droves. A city in one of the poorest regions in the country, desperate for capital, is only at 60% of the population it recorded in 2005 and isn’t forecasting a pre-Katrina tax base available before 2009.

Have we forgotten about Katrina? Perhaps a little. There’s a tendency for people to not hold things close to the heart that do not affect them directly — this is why you don’t read or hear as much in the U.S. about the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake/Tsunami that killed hundreds of times more people than Katrina did. The further away from us something like this happens, in both time and distance, the more disconnected we feel of it.

I do question throwing more money at a system that was so diluted in waste, fraud, and downright mismanagement that it’s hard to imagine how we were able to spend $100 billion and have so little to show for it. I applaud the *idea* behind Podcamp New Orleans — I just hope the people who chose to attend that event realize that it’s more that just “making a presence” and putting their credit cards down on the desk of national hotel chains that aren’t hurting that much. If that’s all that’s involved, I’d rather give my money to a more worthy and direct cause.

It may cost another $40 billion or more and another decade to bring New Orleans back to its former glory. What we really don’t need, but unfortunately are always left with, are politicians using this mess as an opportunity to push agendas and photo opportunities. That, more than anything, proves to me we’ve learned absolutely nothing from this mess and are destined to see the same tragedies repeated when, not if, another natural disaster strikes.

Technorati Tags: Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Gulf Coast, Katrina anniversary, media, FEMA, flood insurance, United Way, politicians, natural disasters

It’s been four months since I railed hard on Twitter, and about three months since I paradoxically started actively using it. Looking back, my rants do come across as unjustified. Now, I think three months is enough time to allow the product to settle during shipment, as it were.

Social

Twitter has become a purely social object for me. Whatever its original purpose, the users have morphed it to become this large, incorporeal IRC chat room — a large stream of disembodied voices, if you will. For some reason, watching the comings and goings of people throughout their day has gone a long way to eliminating some of, but not all, the general feelings of isolation I’ve had in new media spheres.

Connector

There is a significant selection of people on Twitter that I follow and who follow me that I would not be aware of were it not for Twitter. Either through plucking them off the public timeline or off other “friend’s” lists, I’ve made several new connections I would not have made otherwise. Yes, you will have to deal with “rejection” in this space of people that don’t follow you back, and sadly the spammers are still causing their fair share of genuine concerns, but there are literally thousands of connections out there to be made — the network is built for it.

Soundboard

I’ve enjoyed bouncing ideas or questions, philosophical and otherwise, off the Twittersphere and getting several responses. Sure, I’ll never get the immediate flood of responses someone like Robert Scoble or Chris Brogan would, but it still serves its purpose, and it helps provide additional perspective. From it I’ve been able to take serious stock in some of the projects I’m involved in and am moving one in a different direction I had not even thought of. This change would not have been possible without the simple feedback from soundboard group of followers.

Pointed

You have to really have your act together to get a concise, intelligent thought across in 140 characters or less. Many times a single item of this type will turn into a Twitter conversation, but even then each exchange must be fluff-free, or it just won’t fit into the character allotment. When you’re on a serious subject, you can boil the salt out of the surrounding water pretty damn fast when you’re limited to the length of less than an SMS message.

Promotion

Twitter has pushed some traffic to this site as well as the two podcasts, and yes, it’s a valid use of the sphere (as long as it isn’t overdone like the last steak I ordered), but I try to avoid self-promoting through it (or really any channel) as much as possible. People will find my content if they want to. I’m slowly developing a following of people who are promoting it for me, which takes the gut-punched feeling away that I get trying to promote my own stuff. All that being said, as long as it doesn’t go overboard, a bit of shameless self-promotion seems to be tolerated, even encouraged, inside the Twitterverse.

Niche

Let’s face it — it’s not going to be for everyone. My wife tried it for a couple of days and it really didn’t stick with her. Some people get into it and find they just can’t handle the stream/noise or aren’t interested in what amounts to a constant, ongoing conversation. Of course, that’s fine. Not everyone likes asparagus either.

In the end, having heeded the advice I received from people I trust, I now grok Twitter a lot more than I did three months ago. It still has some flaws, technical (scalability, reliability) and practical (signal-to-noise), but as a simple communication tool I think it serves its purpose decently.

I’m finding the key to it though is to remember it’s just a tool, and tools can be used in the right hands or misused in the wrong ones. The tool does not make the person or the social circle — a good tool only enhances the existing social circle and makes its expansion easier.

If so inclined, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/abiteofsanity.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, social, chat, social network, connecter, A.Connector, soundboard, feedback, concise, conversation, promotion, self-promotion, niche, Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan

Today’s sermon from the Church of Sanity ™ will probably be a wake-up call for some and will probably upset others, but I feel it needs to be said.

Podcasters are irrelevant. Void of worth. Lacking of importance. A deficit of meaning. Zero value.

Yes, this includes myself.

Why would I take up this radical opinion at a time when podcasting is booming? Why, indeed.

Resistance Is Futile - The Corporations Have Assimilated

Go look at the top one hundred podcasts in iTunes. Go look at the “featured podcasts” page in iTunes. Count the number of shows “sponsored” by large corporations and large non-profits like NPR versus the number of completely independent productions. Come back and tell me with a straight face that the corporations, which were practically ignoring this medium a year ago, haven’t now “embraced” it to the point of completely taking over. The independent voice has nearly been completely squelched by the PR machines and those who seek their pots of gold.

Dash, Cash, Crash - Bigger Is Not Always Better

For every podcaster out there with a great idea for their show, there will always be someone who will be doing it with a bigger budget and better publicity. If one podcast has podsafe music, the next will have “exclusive” podsafe music. For every show out there playing by the “podsafe rules”, there are many more skirting those rules as it suits them in order to grow or keep their audience. For every jingle heard to start a show, you’ll find half a dozen professionally polished musical works-for-hire.

For every video show done with a bedsheet backdrop and a cheap digital camera, there are shows with video equipment budgets that would make charity directors cry. For every great show on a headset mic, there are shows with an audio setup rivaling the cost of a small used car. For every show done with love from the basement with horrible acoustics, there will be another done in a professional studio with enough sound equipment to make my tweaking daughters sound like gods.

For every “amateur” show, there are three done for profit with sponsorships and advertising flowing from every crevice of the MP3 file they can be slimed into. When was the last time you listened to a podcast with sponsorship and the ads weren’t either the usual 30-second spots or painfully rehearsed scripts read by the host?

Go ahead and try to complete with these people — come back and let me know how you do. It’s just not reasonably possible to stand up to groups and companies with budgets and marketing departments that have been trained like Doberman Pinschers to sink their teeth into any medium such as podcasting with such low barriers of entry.

This Bird Has Flown

If you weren’t into podcasting before the iTunes 4.9 release, you missed the boat — period. The signal to noise ratio now means your chances of being heard in the space are slim, and your chances of succeeding to the point of profitability are practically non-existant. The average podcast these days has less than 100 listeners. Short of selling your soul to a guy holding a pitchfork with a bad sunburn, you don’t have much of a chance of getting noticed by the self-described “stars” of this space, who already have their audience and have absolutely no vested interest in helping you develop yours.

Networks Are Now Greater Than Their Parts

Search “podcast network” in Google and watch the results scroll on, and on, and on. The usual course of things is that being part of one network excludes you from all the other networks. It’s like high school all over again, only without being stuffed into a locker by the jock you refused to do homework for. Podcast promotions are increasingly no longer about shows, they’re about networks (and hand-picked shows within same) or the elite immediate circle.

We Attach Relevance Where None Should Exist

Podcasting awards. Podcasting conferences. Podcasting unconferences. Podcasting conventions. Podcasting newsletters. Podcasting websites. Podcasting directories. Podcasting networks. Podcasting feuds. Podcasting software. Podcasting podcasts.

How many people outside the immediate sphere of podcasting care about any of this? Go up to anyone on a corner and start talking about any of these things and you’re going to get looked at like you’re a crazy fool. Go put “won a podcasting award” on your resume and see if it opens any doors.

Instead of trying to promote the medium outside itself, podcasters are too interested for patting themselves on the back for their less-than-one-percent global media consumption rate. Sure, many podcasters have dropped radio and television as their media avenues of choice, but when only 13% of the population have ever even listened to even one show, the overall penetration rate is not anything to cheer about. The echo-chamber (or ego-chamber as Spin puts it) is alive and well in this space, and the majority of people in it still don’t get that it’s not the messenger or even the message that should matter, but the medium of it.

The Finality

I’m not saying podcasting is dead, only that it really needs to change direction quickly if it wants to survive. Podcasting has gone off on that path of old media because we think that’s where success (and the almighty dollar) lies. If we continue down this road we’ll be confined to our own little niche in the corner (ironically, by the forces we seek to emulate) and the so-called revolution will amount to no more than a few people firing blank shells from a toy gun.

Stop looking to other podcasters jealously for inspiration. Stop trying to make yourself look so much better, smarter, or richer than the next guy. If you’re going to produce media, produce it because you want to and because you love what you are doing, not because you think you’re going to be the next hot thing or because there is money to be made. Stop trying to be something you aren’t — stop chasing money that doesn’t exist — and stop caring about what the guy next door has done.

If we continue to make the podcasters more relevant than podcasting, we will all lose in the end.

Technorati Tags: podcasting, podcasters, relevance, echo-chamber, ego-chamber, Eric Rice, podcast awards, podcast conferences, advertising, corporations, podcast consumption, subscribers, podcast networks

One of the disadvantages I give myself with this blog is I don’t really write every day or “when the iron is hot”, if you will. So, while I am flattered to be blog-tagged, I’m horrible (horrible!) at keeping up with them. I need to get my proverbial act together with this stuff — think less and post more.

With that, I’m going to kill two proverbial birds (sorry, Birdman) with one post and clean up a double blog tag from both Mark Forman and Eric Rice.

Eight Random Things About Me

1 — I think in song lyrics, sometimes to the great confusion and annoyance of people around me. Think of it as the musical equivalent of Martin Tupper. I once participated in a party game where you had to play one song lyric off someone else’s and managed to go nearly a full 45 minutes with it.

2 — I have a rather sizable collection of keychains with city/country names on them from various places around the globe that I have either been to personally or have had friends or family bring back for me.

3 — I consider myself a pessimistic realistic cynical idealist — I have lots of ideas, but then realize I have not the time, the publicity, the talent, or the resources to bring them to reality, or to any form of reality that will stand up to the professional types.

4 — I came out of college as an English major with a specialty in journalism (and photography), which is ironic since i misspell so many words. I loved shooting pictures before the wife and kids — my mother seemed to think I had a natural eye for it. Every now and then I wonder if I shouldn’t get back into it seriously, then I remember Item #3.

5 — I’ve referred to my daughters as my “twinks” in mixed company. It serves as a feel-out for other online game players rather quickly, or gets me more confused looks as in Item #1.

6 — I love baseball and love watching it in nearly any form. I don’t really follow any one team in particular, though. I stopped going to Little League games though because people who watch too much sensationalized news would get creeped-out that I was watching and didn’t have a kid playing in the game. I guess I’m the creepy-looking psychotic kidnapper type.

7 — I have a grass pollen allergy — I have to hire out my lawn care every year. When I was a golfing semi-regularly, I would call ahead to get the groundskeeper’s schedule so I wouldn’t get a tee-time within 24 hours of them mowing the fairways and greens. I haven’t even swung a golf club since before my youngest daughter was born though (six years or so).

8 — I agonize over any purchase more than about $20 (USD), and that includes meals — it takes me forever to order off a menu. Forget large things like cars and houses — my wife handles those purchases and I just write the checks (with predictable results). I bought my Mac only after two months or so of weighing pros and cons of all the models together and worrying I was going to make the wrong choice.

Technorati Tags: Five Things, Eight Random Things, blog tag, meme, Mark Forman, Eric Rice, Martin Tupper, Dream On, keychains, travel, souvenirs, journalism, photography, writing, idealism, twinking, online games, baseball, allergies, golf, indecisiveness

Today, July 1, represents the one year anniversary of the abomination that was my first podcast (over at Suffering From Sanity for those of you new to the cause).

I’ll save the tearful, mushy moment and just take the time to say thank you to all those still listening after a year, and all those who have supported me through the year, including artists and other podcasters. I’ve come to associate with some truly wonderful people over the last year — I just wish I would have had the guts to start podcasting much sooner than I did.

Here’s to the next year and beyond…
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