All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

I write about this topic because of a personal experience. My friend, Andy, is into his second year as a 5th grade teacher. He came to me a week before school was about to start, and asked me if I could host his class website.

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I think I’m definitely going to join in with the Blogger Idol crowd. I haven’t heard of it until a few days ago, but it’s better late than never. Hopefully you’ll like the idea and do the same. At least we’ll be more productive! Perhaps lesser read blogs will gain more readership? You know who you are, and if it makes you feel any better, I think I could use more readers.

That’s my way to get you to think twice. Am I talking about you? I guess you’ll have to ask me…

I don’t mean to get emotional, but I can’t help it. Things are going on in my personal life, and I don’t know how to deal. Friends are going through tough times, some more than others. I don’t know the answers, but all I can offer is what I know is right in my life, and my prayers.

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My schedule is hectic now that I’m taking more classes than last semester. I quit working for awhile in hopes I could catch up on school. However, I took a new part-time job in Los Angeles and scheduled school for Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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Sorry to the oldtimers who know all this already, it’s for those who don’t.

I have 20+ blogs/sites I frequent. How do I know when they’ve been updated? I use their RSS feeds. What is RSS? I feel the Wikipedia article explains it pretty well. Yahoo also has a good RSS Syndication FAQ, too.

Would you like to save time? If so, use RSS. (Time is money, you know.) For me, it helps friends and family keep track of my site as well, without having to literally visit it every day.

One of my friends who’s new to blogging wondered how I read one of his latest entries so quick - RSS is the secret.

If you use Firefox, you can install Sage (a Firefox extensions). Wherever you see an RSS link on the website, you can add that to your Sage Feeds folder. Then, when you access Sage and click the refresh button, and sites are updated, their text will turn bold. Simple, yet horribly described by yours truly.

For other news aggregators, you can try Google because I don’t know of any good (and free) standalone ones. If anyone can recommend one better than Sage, that carries the same price, I’d be more than happy to switch. I’m always up for new stuff.

I created a new music category for posts like this…

I was about to head to bed until I heard on Jay Leno that Alter Bridge was going to perform. (If you don’t know, they’re made up of the initial Creed members, except for Myles Kennedy, the new frontman.)

So, I stayed up to see them. Wow, Mark Tremonti is one of the best guitarists I’ve ever seen (in addition to Eric Clapton, Tom Morello, and a few others). They’ve really gone back to hard rock with quite a few drawn out guitar solos.

I don’t know why this was down earlier. When I woke up at 7am PST, it was down. I first emailed my host, then tried restoring a previous database backup, but that didn’t work. I also tried overwriting the files on the server (in case they got changed somehow), but that wasn’t it either. I have a cron job setup to check my blogroll link to see if any has been updated, and I deleted that in case that was the problem. All seems to be fine again, but I don’t know if my host had anything to do with it. It’s all weird because I’m webhosting two friends for their classes (they’re both elementary school teachers), and those were fine. The forums were fine, too, so that ruled out a MySQL error. So…I don’t know. I’m going to school, and I hope things stay fine - at least until I get back in about 5 hours. (Not before I do a backup!)

A Trendy Name was down for quite sometime last week. I feel bad for Chris Lin, especially since he had to get all his posts back from last September - by hand. It stinks that his last backup was so far back, but I’m glad it’s all up. His design is awesome!

On a good note, I try to backup my whole site at least once a week, and my databases more frequently if there’s a lot of posts in the forums or I’ve written a bunch of entries here. I’m happy to say that if something ever happens, I’m comfortable. I’m sure my host won’t go bad - I’ve been with him for about 16 months, and he hasn’t let me down.

I haven’t written about Podcasting just because I wanted to get a feel for it. So far, it’s been pretty neat. (Don’t be intimidated by the long scrollbar on that Wikipedia definition. There’s a lot of external links.)

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve started listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. I guess the very first podcast I heard from him was when he just arrived in South Beach, Florida, and he was doing the podcast from his hotel bed.

Jumping ahead to today, I listened to the DSC for yesterday and today (while I was getting ready for work, plus during the drive). Adam Curry got ticked because Podcasting was described incorrectly. Wikipedia is your friend. Then again, Dave Winer has a more simple definition. In any case, it’s all quite new. Until I scrutinized the Wikipedia definition, I didn’t realize it was developed in August 2004.

How do I feel about it? I like that you can listen to it whenever you want. I can pause, fast forward, rewind. It’s an MP3, and on my iPod, I can treat it as such. I like how Adam Curry has show notes. When he was talking about this one podcaster, “Madge Weinstein”, she was pretty - grotesque. Not for the kids. Some people don’t mind - I do, and I skipped later into the podcast. He might swear occasionally, or more when he gets into a deep rant, but at least it’s not like music where it sticks in my head.

I like the fact that he’s just talking. It sounds personal, he doesn’t have to promote anybody, and if he feels a topic needs to be discussed more in depth, he’ll dive into it. Once in South Beach and in today’s podcast, he did a podcast sound-seeing. He got his mic, plugged in, and went about part of his day to do his podcast. Today was pretty funny because he was going to Starbucks to get his Cappuccino Grande and go online (his broadband connection isn’t up at home). He talked about parking, and how he got a ticket for touching one of the lines. It’s really funny because in a meeting last Friday at work, someone mentioned to watch how you park next to a handicap spot, because you can get a ticket if you’re on their line.

In any case, if you:

• have any type of MP3 player
• can listen to that MP3 player in your car
• have a commute to work or school

…you should give listening to podcasts a shot. Really. Not just a geek thing - maybe a little bit.

Note: Podcast doesn’t mean it’s for the iPod only. That’s a misconception. It’s just derived from the name of the iPod.

I think the 2+ hours that went into this post should be enough, don’t you think?

Oh yeah, I use iPodder.

Good Update: Things are fixed, and all Gmail users are good to go once again. See that Slashdot post for more details. I came home to 77 new messages, so that scared me (I set my Google Groups settings incorrectly, don’t worry).

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