My 3rd grade sone did this awesome animation using Stickman, so I have to show it off.

 

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 High Qulaity version: Download (2663)

I had a pretty interesting day yesterday.
After being up till close to 2am I woke up at 5:30am, showered and drove to the airport to do my 10am talk at WordCamp 2007.
My flight landed at 8:30am and I was picked up by my old buddy Joe Engo. After a couple wrong turns we finally got to the event location at 9:30 in time to get setup.

I finally had a chance to meet Matt Mullenweg, and was thoroughly impressed, this is one young man to watch. To think that at 23, hes at the head of a project thats impacted so many people, and has gained so much interest and respect, and has managed to build a business model around an open sourced app… no easy feat.

So then it sets in. I’m the opening presenter to this conference… I’ve really been too busy to have thought much about my talk at WordCamp the preceding couple of weeks because work has been crazy busy. But standing there getting setup to open the conference I got a bit nervous. Its also been a couple years since doing one of these types of things, so I really started feeling completely unprepared.

Matt introduces me and I ask the audience a few questions about whos familiar with podcasting (everyone) and how many podcasters are out there (a few). Well, this kind of took some thunder out of my slides intended to be used to help explain podcasting basics. I had to think quick to adjust my talk and explain my views of how I feel podcasting to be a little more personal and blah blah. Was a bit of a slow start.

So I figured I could launch into the stuff about podPress and show of the features and talk some praise of WordPress, which I started… and then the Internet connection went dead. Just as I was starting to feel a little comfortable…
With some quick action by the Automattic team I got back online and was quickly followed by the audience and was able to start cracking some lame jokes and getting into a groove about podPress, podcasting and WordPress.

Even with the slow start, I felt like I was finally able to connect and coherently discuss some of the things I am passionate about, and hopefully show how easy it is to get into podcasting, the cool features of podPress and the amazing platform WordPress provided that enabled me to create the feature set. The talk was video taped, so as soon as I get a copy of the video I will be adding the media to this post so it will end up in my feed as a video podcast.

As soon as my talk was over, I chatted with a few people in the lobby for about half and hour, and then headed to the airport to get back home. Next year, as a speaker or not, I’m going to make sure to plan better so I can stay for the entire weekend.

Update: The video is now available.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Podango the MightySeek/podPress forums are back online!

Back in the early 90’s, yes back even before most had even heard of the Internet and the geeks spent most of their time on BBS’s there were a few online services trying to get going. AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe were fairly well known, but there was one other that stole my heart. It was the ImagiNation Network and primarily MedievaLand and its first game The Shadow of Yserbius.

Way back before World of Warcraft, Never Winter Nights, Ultima Online there was The Shadow of Yserbius which really set the bar for online gaming.

The whole network was unbelievable in its scope. You could play the D&D style Yserbius, card games at the club house, gamble at CasinoLand, have simulated dog fights in the Red Baron game, play the popular Boogers game, and ever get help with your home work.
To this day I have not seen anything to match the fun and variety that I had the privilege to experience back in the days when I was spending thousands of dollars and endless hours experiencing life “online”.

I have cherished my memories of those days and have copies of all the old software and hacks which I have kept faithfully for the last 15 years. I have joined a couple efforts to re-create the world, but all have failed… until now. A guy that goes by the name of byoung was able to re-create the server so that the old client software is able to work in DosBox which redirects the modem calls over TCP/IP. His website has all the software and directions to get setup very easily. It took me all of 10 mins to get everything installed and working. **To make it even easier to get started use the installer I created**

I spent about 4 hours online yesterday playing The Shadow of Yserbius with a few other people and building up my character. Oh man have I forgotten a ton, but the memories flooding back are a total blast. Even if you never played back in the day, I encourage you to get setup with it and join the growing community of users. If you let me know you will be in, I will be glad to join you for any game you like. Im having fun re-discovering all the cool stuff in this world of ImagiNation.

Its crazy… I really just dont get this crazyness over an insanely priced cell phone. Now keep in mind, I live with my video iPod, it goes everwhere with me and most of the TV and movies I see these days are on the thing. I also look forward to the day that I can have a single device so that I dont have to carry the iPod and cell phone.

However, the iPhone just isnt it for me. Its cool, and its heading toward the dream of having a single device, but for $600 and having to switch to a crappy cell phone carrier, NO THANKS. Aside from the price and cell phone carrier monopoly, I really just cant stand touch pad phone buttons. I need to be able to dial without looking, and can only do that with actual buttons. Touch screens wear out, and become a pain to push the button you want. Im sure you are all experienced in using the touch screens at the market when you pay by debit card, and the hassles when they start wearing out. Do we really want that on our cell phone, where we have a $600 price tag to replace the thing. No me.

I had been using vBulletin for a little over a year when I started podPress and wanted a place for users to create a community and to provide support. The forums have been very successful and tend to have on the order of 20-30 postings a day, with many more viewers.  Now vBulletin is commercial software, so I had to pay $85 to use it, and figured that donations would cover the costs and I mistakenly had thought the way the licensing worked is that after one year I could keep running the forums, but could no longer get updates which seemed fair enough to me.
Well, the license I did buy doesnt allow for that, and I had to find out the hard way. After my license had been expired a couple months I received an email saying I was in violation, which I ignored on the assumption that it was a mistake or SPAM. I mean, why would software I paid for become invalid to use? It does when you purchase leased software! Read the rest of this entry »

As a long time podcasting fan and supporter of the community I have been a fan of many shows, and impressed by a bunch of them. Some of my favorites (and I know I’ll end up forgetting some) have been Slice of Sci/Fi, Escape Pod, Filmspotting, The Signal, The Bitterest Pill, Verge of the Fringe, zeFrank, TikiBarTV and numerous Podiobooks (Sigler, Selznick, JC Hutchins, etc), along with many many more.

So when I say I was blown away by the efforts of Stranger Things (http://www.strangerthings.tv), its not from a lack of experience with the brillance and creativity in this community. Its because its quite an impressive accomplishment. Audio is one thing, and it takes skill and hard work to do it well. Short video clips like those from zeFrank andTikiBarTV are also quite a bit of work and take great talent. But to produce a 30 minute long episode with decent acting, a cool story (from self-pimping Sigler) and very nice special effects… and to make it a free podcast. Wow.

I have a hell of a time just trying to get my show out once a month, and even that is wayyy behind on getting some episodes out (one is coming soon btw).

Anyways, my props to the Stranger Things team, and I hope you are able to continue gaining an audience and some sponsorship/donations to help keep your show going.

I did an interview thats been posted on CrazyEngineers.com.

Go check out the interview, along with the forum thread discussion.

I know its been fairly quiet from me. No new versions of podPress and no new podcasts. The absense has been due to an extremely busy schedule, and a slight bit of lazyness on my part. Ive been doing TONS of reseach, and not had the energy to push out my findings just yet.

Well thats all changing now. Today I released a new version of podPress and am preping to push out a podcast in the next day or two.
Thanks for all of you still out there watching, I’ll make sure to avoid big gaps like this again.

Seek3r

While at the PPME I met up with the legendary Evo Terra and got to sit in on a recording of the great Slice of SciFi podcast, which was quite alot of fun. It was recorded in Evo’s hotel room with a bunch of us hanging out in there. Amoung the live audience Mattew Wayne Selznick (author of Brave Men Run), podcasting “good guy” Paul Puri (founder of the Podcasters Guild), podcasting “mean guy” Steve Eley (Escape Pod), and fellow security podcasters Michael Santarcangelo (Security Catalyst) and Martin McKeay (Network Security Podcast).

I was pretty silent thru most of it, but toward the end Evo went around the room introducing each of us and asking a few questions. I hassled them a little (all in good fun) and got quite a laugh/boo out of it. It was a great time and it alone was worth getting to the PPME for me.