So, I was just speaking to Crumpet on the phone (she was at the school in the Northern Territory) when suddenly a rat started running around in the school. Then, another one! Then, they ran into the room that Crumpet was in! While she was wearing thongs instead of shoes!

Naturally, I’m crying laughing as she and her sister are freaking out…

Finally I get around to talking about podcasting, and it took the latest version of iTunes (4.9) to make me do it. Previously you had to use a separate client (I use PodcastTuner) to download files and import them to iTunes, but now iTunes does a reasonable job of doing everything itself.

So, what is a podcast? Basically it’s just an audio/video file that you download to your machine to view/listen to at your leisure. They use RSS feeds with enclosures, and your client simply checks the RSS every so often and downloads the files automatically if you’ve told it to do so. Then, when you plug your iPod in, all the files are synchronised to it automatically, ready to listen to on the way to work.

Some of the podcasts I’ve been listening to lately are:

• DVD Talk Radio - DVD reviews and interviews with directors. Also discusses cheesy B-grade flicks, which is a bonus
• LUGRadio - a hilarious UK bi-weekly discussion of Linux and free software
• Reel Reviews - more DVD reviews
• This Week in Tech - a pretty decent weekly tech discussion
• The Animation Podcast - this is pretty new, but has interviews with oldschool Disney animators who worked on the good Disney films
• Slack Astronomy - if you can ignore the shithouse jokes, there’s some good space info here
• Digital Flotsam - entertaining stories mixed with music. The last one was about the podcaster surviving a tornado in a 16-foot yacht

I listen to a lot more, but go check it out for yourself. I just found out that Harry Shearer has a radio show that’s being podcast (it’s called ‘Le Show’), and I’ll be all over it like a fat kid on a cupcake.

The only thing that iTunes doesn’t do that I wished it did is converting downloaded MP3 files to bookmarkable AAC format automatically. When AAC files are bookmarkable, you can stop playing them, play another song, then start playing the original track and it’ll continue from where it left off, even if you stopped it on your computer and restarted it on your iPod. It’s very sweet.

So, some Korean morons (by that I mean morons that happen to live in Korea) left their 4-month-old child alone for several hours while they went to the internet cafe to play World of Warcraft. Kid suffocates and dies. Press goes nuts.

A post on FoH seemed appropriate:

With 2 million people playing the game, shit is bound to happen.

I remember when the guy playing EQ killed himself I thought, “With 400k people, and only 1 person has offed himself, the headline should read, ‘Playing Everquest prevents suicides.’”

Am I alone in thinking that the new Pepsi ads on tramstops look an awful lot like people fending off a tide of pig’s blood from a distance? Or have I just watched Carrie too often?

Gizzy (posting on AppleTalk under his spooky alias of Gringo), alerted me to the re-release of Cardinal’s lovely album (short writeup and interview here).

I’ve been after this album for several years now so I visited Amazon to place my order. Naturally it’s not cost-effective to only buy the one CD… soooooo…

• Third/Sister Lovers - Big Star
• I Am the Cosmos - Chris Bell
• Apple Venus Volume 1 - XTC
• Cardinal [Expanded] - Cardinal

*cough*

Gorgeous.

Band is Trespassers William, one of my South by Southwest finds.

Also, this is clever, and is performed by a goddamn TWO-PIECE, just to make me feel inadequate. Check them out here.

Honourable mention.

Seriously messed up sleep last night. I tried recording some bass and got a couple of ideas, but nothing really stunning. Had some rum & coke, staggered about, watched some Invader Zim commentary and went to bed. Spent the rest of the night dreaming that I couldn’t find a plane ticket for a flight I took 11 years ago. Woke up at 2:30, 4:30 and 6:00, panicking and thinking my alarm clock was broken.

It’s lucky I’m not manic-depressive, or The Happies’ song Ginger & Lime would have me slashing my wrists, wrapped in the ecstacy of spending three-and-a-half minutes in Tragedy Valley.

Oh, wait… I kinda am manic-depressive. Oops.

They’ll heal, right?

When we were kids we thought our mother was telling us to shut the bathroom door when we were having a bath ‘or giraffes will get in’.

A Slashdot post from a Blizzard employee:

A lot of people are leaving, mainly because they feel their hands were tied over WoW. Corporate refuses to put much money into the WoW project, and it frustrates us as much as the customers. When Vivendi forced the game out in November, we literally spent weeks stuck in the office because the servers were constantly crashing. Some co-workers didn’t see their families for a week, sleeping on the floors and couches in the break room. Management was bitching all the time about how much money “we’re” losing.

Many desks are empty now, more and more co-workers are leaving, rumor is NCSoft is promising faster release schedules, and Vivendi not breathing down our necks. The morale is awful, mainly the long cycles for each project, working 4..5 years on something takes a lot out of you, then the massive rewrites because another company came out with a feature we planned to use, or the hardware changed, it erodes you. Ghost won’t be out by christmas, expect it delayed again until summer 06, and the next pipeline project isn’t due out until 2008. It’s expected that WoW will keep the company in enough funds to remain solvent until then. I’ll probably be looking somewhere else, I pity the kids they end up hiring.

I saw this coming back in September-October last year. When management become overbearing, quality and morale suffer and a company goes down the toilet.

Happier news: Anyuzer is back after a 6-month hiatus!