/dev/zero

Of all the people you have to tell “Don’t drink before coming to work”… astronauts???

NASA takes swift action after report of astronaut drinking - CNN.com

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is all.

First, Happy (belated) Birthday to and . Don’t know how old is today, but turned the big… no, I’m not going to say it. I’ll not reveal a lady’s age.
Cool link posted by : Fly with the Blue Angels.

Work has gotten no less hectic. E and I were running full speed today just to keep up. I’d get the Triage queue all, well, triaged, go to actually work ONE ticket, and there’d be 10, 15 new tickets in Triage again. Never did get time to touch the reload queue. Luckily it was exploding today.
And now that the Data Entry department is the Data Entry / Deploy dept, I have to teach them, in between my tickets, how to use Unix, how to install and license cPanel, Plesk, Direct Admin, how to configure multiple IP addresses in CentOS / Red Hat, Debian, FreeBSD, etc. Imagine trying to teach your basic secretary, who knows how to use Word and Excel, to be an entry-level Unix sys admin. In between getting tickets done yourself. No, I’m not complaining about them. They’re picking up on it pretty fast, but it does add to my work load. Loan (pronounced “Lawn”, not “Loan”. Apparently “loan” will get you slapped, or worse around Vietnamese speakers.) keeps apologizing for taking my time. I’m happy to show her, but it does get frustrating at times. Mostly because I’m out on the floor with the laptop trying to work a ticket and 10 Jabber messages (with their audible alerts) every minute breaks my concentration.

So, along the lines of ’s post about ticket stats, I decided to do some poking of my own. I’d been feeling a little insecure lately due to the number of tickets still in my queue at the end of my shift, the number of times in the last week I’ve ended a shift with 10+ reloads in the Reload Pending queue, occasional ‘dropped balls’, etc.

Agent Summary Report for May 01, 2006 to May 31, 2006
Agent Name              Email Handled   Avg. Response Time              Avg. Time Logged In
Andrew ( Team Lead )    231             3 hrs, 11 mins, 51 secs         2 hrs, 12 mins, 28 secs
D ( Team Lead )         70              2 hrs, 49 mins, 17 secs         1 hr, 33 mins, 2 secs
J ( Team Lead )         165             2 hrs, 15 mins, 50 secs         2 hrs, 34 mins, 55 secs
K ( Team Lead )         242             3 hrs, 18 mins, 16 secs         1 hr, 48 mins, 42 secs
T ( Team Lead )         36              4 hrs, 6 mins, 30 secs          2 hrs, 56 mins, 49 secs
Agent Averages          74 agents       6 hrs, 8 mins, 59 secs          2 hrs, 43 mins, 53 secs
System Averages (weighted) 6551 samples 3 hrs, 43 mins, 45 secs         2 hrs, 30 mins, 57 secs



Average Initial Handle Time Report for May 01, 2006 to May 31, 2006
Agent Name              Samples Avg. Initial Response Time
Andrew ( Team Lead )    109     1 hr, 8 mins, 54 secs
D ( Team Lead )         38      3 hrs, 38 mins, 37 secs
J ( Team Lead )         12      3 hrs, 1 min, 35 secs
K ( Team Lead )         62      4 hrs, 34 mins, 29 secs
T ( Team Lead )         10      6 hrs, 14 mins, 32 secs
Agent Average Initial Handle Time 68 agents
                                        6 hrs, 48 mins, 32 secs
System Average Initial Handle Time (weighted) 3896 samples
                                        3 hrs, 37 mins, 9 secs

The only one who comes close to my numbers is K, and his response times aren’t as good. He’s the master at shuffling tickets, trying to make his queues look good, but if you look at the real numbers, he’s not doing so hot. I don’t know why T’s stats are so poor. He’s been there longer than me, he’s been a Team Lead just as long as me and he’s almost as good a technician.

Anyway, I have an important meeting tomorrow. Wish me luck.

This has been one heck of a week.
I’ve barely had time to breath, let alone keep up with LJ.
Monday was an OK day. It went down hill from there.
Everything’s been fine for me personally, work has just been hectic. I put in 17.3 hours of overtime this week.
The chairman of the board / COO jabbered me at work tonight about a couple of tickets to ask if I could look into them for him. One was a build ticket that was getting old. 2 were server reloads at our other data center. I was already behind on reloads. Not much I could do about the reloads at the other DC, since there was no one there who could do the reload then hook up a KVM for me to finish them off, and I’m a support tech, not a build tech. I had enough reloads to do as it is without dropping everything to go do a build.
He was very polite to me about it, but apparently he got on the phone and started screaming at Jack, the Dir. of Operations about not having anyone at the other DC and people at Savvis not knowing who was on duty.

I had to re-do half the work my one team member did tonight before he took off early to attend to a personal matter.
A customer orders a reload of a box with Debian Sarge, 300MB /boot, 1GB swap, the rest of the 80GB drive in /, 2.6 kernel. What did E load? Debian Sarge (he got that part right at least) with a 300MB primary partition, a extended partition with one “Win95/FAT32″ partition with a 2.4 kernel. What the hell was that? I can understand getting the wrong kernel, but how the hell do you manage to partition a drive with an extended partition with a FAT partition inside it, when you just needed to build 2 ext3 and 1 swap partition? It’s that kind of shit that’s been keeping our ticket queue load so high all week.
Oh, and I wont’ even get started on the 3rd shift team lead who’s idea of “verifying” customer data before marking a reload ticket as OK to proceed is quoting the customer’s initial ticket verbatim and adding the word “Acceptance”. Makes me feel real good about the next guy who asks for a reload and puts my IP address in their form by mistake.
Thank god, I found out from Jack today that this same 3rd shift lead is NOT being considered for the support manager position. I could tell he was trying to maneuver his way into the job, but I, for one, would walk out the door if he got it. Jack apparently realized he would have that kind of situation on his hands and told him no. I also will not be considered, but I wasn’t hold my hopes out much for that anyway.

This is getting crazy.
Lost the Support Manager last week.
Worked an extra 5, 6 hours last night to help the Deploy department dig out of their backlog (while not making much headway on our own backlog.)
Today one of the Deploys up and quits with no warning. And boy did she burn her bridges behind her. I can still smell the smoke.
Worked 8 hours today struggling to catch up with our own backlog with no luck.
And here I am working on Deploy tickets again.

Someone tell me the overtime will be worth it?

>thud!<

> Mr. Andrew <edited>
> NOC Support Team Lead
> ${poe}
&gt
&gt
&gt Please it could teach to me accurately what devor to make in these cases or to send me it edited rasp so that I know accurately I eat leaves it in a next error? This this occurring always that I make the copy of another user of some domain.

Uh… yeah… put down the crack pipe lady…

Me: Why does Plesk take so long to do everything?
Jason: Just to bother you.
Me: Yeah, I’m sure the devs over at SWsoft put in a “annoy andrew@${poe}” subroutine.
Jason: They accepted my ticket, so I’m sure they did…

 already summed up this weekend, so I won’t bother here.

Just a few pics:

More can be found in my gallery.

I always find it amusing when someone on WHT asks about someone who provides “better service than” my employer and someone responds “XXX is better than ${poe}”. “XXX is also located in Savvis, like ${poe}.”
Yeah. There’s a good reason. XXX is located in our cage.
(Edit: Lower in the thread, the owner of XXX even points out they are hosted by ${poe}, and have no trouble with us.)

I just checked my email before popping into the shower.
Yesterday I sent an email out to the local site distribution list about a task that needs to get done, but isn’t “urgent”. As I said in the email, it was an opportunity for everyone to give the Network dept. a hand and get a time consuming, though not overly difficult, task completed and free up some resources.
Someone in another dept responded with “stop writing pointless emails” and telling me that I could be actually doing the work instead of sending “spam”. And he responded to my limited distribution email on a list with a much wider distribution, including all the executives at HQ.
The amount of disrespect is appalling.

Got back in town from the DFW Ufie campout at Turner Falls, OK(which has got to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth. In Oklahoma. Who knew?) at about 3, went to see Silent Hill with Kristell and . Got home, played some DoD, now I crash.
I’ll post a more thorough update, with pictures, later.

One of the Data Entry girls at work today is wearing a t-shirt that says “By reading this you are giving me brief control of your mind.”
I read it out loud and she grinned and nodded. I said “Hmm… so I’m staring at your tits and reading your chest… so yeah, I guess I have.”
She did a double take until she caught the joke.

The best ticket subjects in the last 24 hours:

“spam box” (I think he meant “dialog box”, since the ticket had nothing to do with spam, but did mention a dialog box.)
The ever popular “hi there”, “no subject”, “Question” or other title that says nothing about what the customer needs or wants from us.
“I Need port 80″ (thought we had Port 80 firewalled and he needs it for his Shoutcast server. Yeah… we’re a web server hosting company. We get our jollies blocking the single most used port on all our servers…)
“I could not express my problem openly” … yeah… still trying to figure that one out. Reading the actual ticket content doesn’t help much either. He’s still tring to figure out how to express his problem “clearly”.
“please change kernel from i386 to amd64″, because of course, AMD makes Linux kernels…
“The server was rebooted ?” You’re asking us? Check your logs. We didn’t reboot it unless you asked us to.

Walked into work today, entered the data center and started walking to the NOC only to discover they’ve extended the new cages that were being built yesterday. I started to walk around them to the pathway to the NOC, only to discover they extend to completely block the path. “Oh dear god! You’re sh**n’ me?!?” I exclaim loudly.
The electricians working on the PDUs by the wall were giving me awfully funny looks as I walked all the way around to the far side of the DC to get to the NOC.

Now, this isn’t just inconvenient. We have to walk from the NOC to our cages 50 times a day. Now we have to go the long way around these stupid cages. Some sales droid just looked at the floorplan and said “Oh, look! Empty space! I can sell that square footage to another customer!” but didn’t look closely enough to see that they were SERIOUSLY inconveniencing one of their biggest customers blocking the path between their NOC and their cages.
Idiots.

Got home late tonight (no “Dear Customers / Coworkers” entries today. Too tired.) and was working on catching up on Nodwick and falling asleep at my computer. About 5 seconds before crawling into bed the cell phone starts playing the “You Got MONEY!” song (ie: a notice that I’ve received a text message. At this hour, on payday, that could only be the auto-deposit notification from BofA).
Now I’m wide awake and wondering how to spend it.
No, I’m not about to go out and spend my paycheck. I have bills to pay.

Threatening to take all 40 of your servers to another provider every time we gave you exactly what you ordered is getting old. Really.
We thought you would have learned this lesson after the whole Windows server / unformatted second hard drive incident.
So is insisting that we pull miracles out of our ass like resize your /var partition, without any down time whatsoever.
When you fill out your order form and specify exactly how you want your drive partitioned do not, repeat do not waste our time and yours by “proving” “our” partition scheme is all wrong by sending us a link to a web page with the “recommended” partition scheme that is… exactly what you ordered and we delivered.
Please note: there is a factor of 10 difference between “1500MB” and “15GB”.
Note: if you’d just let us partition it with our normal default scheme (2GB swap, 100mb /boot, the rest in /) you wouldn’t have a “too small /var” problem.

Regards,
Your Overworked, cheesed off NOC tech

Dear Coworker number 1,

When you report to me, and I ask you to perform a simple task and you say “OK”, don’t let me catch you, 40 minutes later, warming a chair in front of someone else’s workstation. Don’t tell me you’re working on another task and will get to it when you’re done. That’s not what I told you to do. Don’t tell me you’re in the middle of the task I set you either, when it is physically impossible to perform that task sitting in that chair. Don’t argue with me about it. Just don’t. It makes you look like an idiot.
Don’t jabber me 20 minutes later to say “by the way, I’m going home on time tonight, for once”, then go home having completed exactly 1 server of the 12 that need doing. Your coworker who who worked on the same task and got 4 done in 1/2 the time is putting you to shame (and didn’t leave until they were all done). If you had started when I asked you to, the two of you would have gotten all 12 done.
You’re a good guy and a good tech. Don’t turn into a dick the first time I actually ask you to do something. I did, after all, ask nicely.
Leaving that many un-resolved tickets in the queue at the end of the shift reflects badly on everyone on our shift.

Regards,
Your seriously ticked off supervisor.

Dear Coworker number 2,

If you have suddenly decided you have a problem with me, talk to me about it. Don’t start sending me weird jabbers implying I’m lazy. Don’t start trying to give me orders when I’m technically senior to you. Don’t ask me why I get away with giving orders when 1) it’s my job and 2) you work in a different department and I’ve never given you any order to do anything.

Regards,
Your perplexed coworker.

Got an email from the Dir of Operations today that he wanted to have all preformance reviews done by the 15th, but some of us “still have not turned in our self evaluations”.
Except the only self evaluation form we were ever sent we were later told not to use.
Now I’m told I do have to fill it out and send it to him.
I’m wondering if I should do it “straight”, or with some personality.

List objectives you met or exceeded during this performance review period.
1. Got hired.

List objectives which you did not meet during this performance review period.
1. Get promoted to TSG

List your key strengths
1. I breath.
2. I don’t smoke crack.

List skills you need to develop further.
1. The ability to not want to choke the living crap out of the next customer who tells me he’s taking his business elsewhere when we tell him we won’t do things we said we won’t do in the freaking contract.
2. The ability to not want to choke the living crap out of the next coworker who tries to blame me for his screwups.

List your primary goals and objectives for the next performance review period
1. Get a job that pays a real salaray.

Your objective is simple: Soul Accumulation

Your motive is a little bit more complex: Mom never loved me

Stage One:

To begin your plan, you must first Traumatize a Rock Star. This will cause the world to sit up and take notice, stunned by your arrival. Who is this Evil Genius? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good as an Intelligence Transferred into a Computer?

Stage Two:

Next, you will Desecrate the Statue of Liberty. This will cause countless hordes of Computer Programmers to flock to you, begging to do your every bidding. Your name will become synonymous with the Spice Girls, as lesser men whisper your name in terror.

Stage Three:

Finally, you will Activate your Opening of the Seven Seals, bringing about the Apocalypse. This will all be done from a Abandoned Church, an excellent choice if we might say. These three deeds will herald the end, and the citizens of this planet will have no choice but to elect you their new god.

Trust us, it’ll all come together in the end.

Make your own evil plan.

Please, please, PLEASE open a new ticket to ask us to look at your existing trouble ticket. We LOVE being told how DOUBLE-PLUS IMPORTANT your ticket is and will we please get to it right away!

Also, be sure to tell us all about how you’re going to take your 40 servers to another provider because we didn’t format your secondary hard drive. Really, we know EXACTLY how you want it partitioned and formatted. I mean, it might take you all of 30 seconds to right-click on “My Computer” select “manage” and partition and format your drive yourself! Gee, and in 5 minutes, you might have to click the “OK” button when it’s done formatting! GOSH! How much work we’re making you do! Shame on us! Shame on us for not making you READ THE F’ING CONTRACT!

I just sent this message to both Wal-Mart and Discount Tire Company

To Whom It May Concern,

You can guess which company will receive my business.

A while back I sent an email to the site-wide distribution list letting people know I’d bought a bunch of clipboards and put them in the supply cabinet, so STOP STEALING MINE!
Since then, my clipboard hasn’t been stolen once. The ones I put in the supply cabinet got snapped up within 5 minutes.
However, when I come to work today, while the clipboard was sitting on my desk… everything clipped TO it had been swiped. Not like we were out of pens or paper in the supply cabinet. They just don’t have the kind of pens I buy for myself. And someone was too lazy to walk the 5 feet from my desk to the supply cabinet to get their own pad of paper.
<sigh>

1. Go here.
2. Pass it on.

1.~How did you meet arwenoid? Went to Silzz and Squiz’ wedding
2.~What would you do if you had never met joedecker? Be less interested in photography
3.~What do you honestly think of lrc? A true geek
4.~Would or did tvleavitt and densaer go out? No, but they might
5.~Have you ever liked hubs? As a friend
6.~If needo died tomorrow, what is one thing that you would need him/her to know? ?
7.~Would misseianna and gothchip make a good couple? Actually, probably yes
8.~Describe el_gecko in 3 words: don’t know well
9.~Do you think magn0lia is hot? Not really
10.~Would needo and dconnect make a lovely couple? No
11.~What do you think of when you see densaer? Sadness at a lost friendship
12.~Tell me something humiliating about gothchip: Don’t know anything
13.~Do you know any of karmasunra’s family members? Yes
14.~What’s drkmiss’s favorite color? Black
15.~On a scale of 1-10 how cute is hopeforyou? 8
16.~What would you do if sinboy just professed their undying love for you? Be flattered
17.~What language does tvleavitt speak? English
18.~Who is haela going out with? Her husband
19.~Is phoenixparkle a boy or a girl? All woman
20.~Would chuck_lynn and sinboy make a good couple? No
21.~Who do you think vulpine137 would be great with from this list? Misseianna
22.~When was the last time you talked to magn0lia? At least 3 years
23.~What is hubs’s favorite band? No idea
24.~Does misseianna have any siblings? No idea
25.~Would you ever date karmasunra? Yes
26.~Would you ever date el_gecko? No
27.~Is vulpine137 single? Yes
28.~What is drkmiss’s last name? Millard
29.~What is chuck_lynn’s middle name? No idea
30~What is lrc’s fantasy? A big ass computer
31.~Where does phoenixparkle live? Davis, CA
32.~Would you make out with arwenoid? Yeah, probably
33.~Are joedecker and karmasunra best friends? No
34.~Does el_gecko like drkmiss? They don’t know eachother
35.~How did you meet chuck_lynn? She came to Dallas
36.~Is magn0lia older than you? Yes
37.~Is dconnect the sexiest person alive? No

Wow. It’s been a long time since I posted here. Over 2 months.
Well, at least this time I have some good news:

(With apologies to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the entire civil rights movement for co-opting that expression…)

Employed at last! Employed at last! Thank God Almighty, employed at last!

It’s no where near as senior a position as I used to have in the industry, and no where near the pay, but $X > 0. With full benefits from day one.

View this post on my blog

I know readers are probably getting tired of hearing about iTunes by now, but there’s one or two more features I forgot to mention (for those considering getting into podcasting).
With the addition of podcast support in iTunes, you can now read the show notes for each episode, in iTunes. I gripped already that, though iTunes has an integrated browser, you can’t click the links within show notes.
However, the nifty thing is it also puts the show notes on your iPod, so you can read them while listening to the show.

View this post on my blog

Now that I’ve been playing around with it for a couple of hours and actually using it to listen to a few podcasts, subscribed to a bunch, etc, I have more, more educated, thoughts.

1. Forget what I said earlier about not converting to AAC. While everything I said was true (there’s no facility to automatically convert to AAC, doing the conversion is a pain because it convets to m4A instead of m4B, the manual conversion from A to B is a pain), it’s completely unnecessary. Just as the difference in iTunes / iPod’s handling of m4a v. m4b is entirely within the software, so is the handling of “music” v. “podcasts”, in mp3 format. The iPod (and presumably iTunes 4.9) handles an mp3 “podcast” the same way it handles an m4b. It will bookmark your file and resume where you left off if you stop it and listen to something else and come back later. Yay Apple! They got that one right. mp3 is smaller than aac (all files I converted to aac ended up being larger) and that’s the native format of almost all podcasts. This means less disc space, less bandwidth and I don’t have to wait for the terrible CPU suck while iTunes converts the file.
2. As I put in the edit to the last post, no Bittorrent support.
3. It appears if you are a podcaster and you want to have your podcast listed in the Apple Music Store (ie: in the podcast directory in iTunes) you have to have an iTunes Music Store account. These are only available to residents of certain countries, so if you don’t live in the US, Canada or (the UK?), you’re SOL. Your podcast doesn’t get listed. An Australian podcaster was complaining about this in the support forums. I’d say it’s a legit complaint. Will Apple simply open membership to everyone? Open membership to everyone but not allow downloads of purchased music, to comply with copyright regulations? Create a “podcasters” account type that is only good for adding / editing podcast listings?
   Better yet, just let anyone with an Apple ID list a podcast, instead of having to have a Music Store account.
   However, there’s more to this than it seems: “Life Stories Radio“, a podcast out of Sydney, Australia, is in the iTunes podcast directory / iTunes Music Store. The Music Store got it’s initial directory entries from the ipodder.org directory. The question is, will it continue to update it’s offerings from ipodder.org? Thus, if you’re an Australian podcaster, if you list your podcast in ipodder.org’s directory, will you show up in the Music Store automatically?
4. Like just about every other podcatching software out there, there’s no per-podcast settings. All the settings for scheduling downloads, how long to keep them, etc, are all or nothing. The only per-podcast settings available is to control which podcasts get synced automatically with the iPod.
5. You have the option of setting the frequency of podcast downloads: Every day, every hour, every week, manually. You do not get to set when the podcasts are downloaded. If you select “daily”, iTunes decides for you what time of day. On the surface this would suggest that every iTunes 4.9 process will try to download podcasts at the same time every day (and even the differing time zones doesn’t avoid this: I’m in Central Daylight Time. My iTunes says it will download at 7:00 PM. Dave Slusher’s says it will download at 8:00PM. I believe he’s in Eastern time. That means they will both fire at the same time.) This effectivly creates a DDOS on a podcaster’s server.
   However, there is some evidence to suggest that iTunes actually changes the time it will do it’s download run each day, setting it to a pseudo-random time after each run. Sounds like, just as it did today when it was released, when all those new installs hit their first daily download mark all the podcasters will get DDOS’d, but after that each iTunes will be set to a different time and after a couple of days things should settle out. Still, it would have been nice if Apple had given a field where the user could set a time that was best for them.
6. No facility, it appears, to add old, already downloaded, podcasts to the Podcast menu. Normally this wouldn’t be too big a deal, other than loss of sorting / searching features, but that also means old mp3 downloads get treated like standard “music” mp3s, not like “podcast” mp3s with bookmarking. Apple: how ’bout adding some facility to tag a file as a “podcast”?

View this post on my blog

Apple just released iTunes 4.9, which has podcasting support built in. Now you can subscribe to and download podcasts through the iTunes music store interface.
If you own an iPod, be sure to also grab the iPod updater software 2005-06-26, which which installs the needed functions on your iPod.
This is why I got an iPod in the first place. Now it all comes together.
Thoughts on iTunes 4.9 so far:

The minuses -
1. No support for converting to aac? Apple, what were you thinking? If I’m listening to an hour long podcast, there’s a good chance I can’t listen to the whole thing in one sitting. I don’t want to have to start from the beginning again when I come back to it. That’s what m4b is for. If you’d been really smart, you’d have set up something in the interface that pre-converted everything for us, so the file we download in the first place is an m4b (taking a page from the IT Conversations book.) I can understand where this might be problematic, since Apple isn’t actually hosting the files, making the conversion is CPU intensive (just take a look at how much CPU iTunes takes up under windows when converting from mp3 to aac. Forget about getting anything else done.
2. While you can manually convert your podcasts to aac, and they’ve add a new “podcast” quality level to the AAC quality selection, they haven’t fixed my chief complaint with this: it converts it to an m4A. To make it an m4B, you still have to go through the extra steps of right clicking, select “show file”, manually renaming the extionsion, close the window, right clicking again, select “get info”, get the error dialog that it can’t find the file and would you like to locate it manually, click yes, click on the m4b file, the close the file info window. Considering the only difference between an m4a and an m4b is the extension and how the software handles it, based on that extension, there should be some provision in iTunes to select which form of aac you want to convert to.
3. Along with the above: when you (manually) convert a podcast from mp3 to aac, the new aac version of the podcast appears in the library menu, not the podcast menu. You lose all of the advantages spelled out below.
4. FINDING the podcast you want seems to be hit or miss. There’s plenty of search functions and so on, but let’s face it, it’s the Apple music store. Not the best layout.
5. “Download all episodes” appears to be broken. I selected this, and the first podcast I subscribed to after doing so only downloaded the most recent episode automatically.
6. No facility to tag podcasts you already have in your library as “podcasts” to be handled like all the podcasts subscribed to using the new interface. While it obviously can’t associate the files with a given podcast, it would be nice if you could move all those files into the Podcast menu hierarchy.
7. Subscription interface: OK, subscribing is easy. But once you click “subscribe” on a podcast, it takes you to the “downloading” page that shows all your current subscriptions, all your downloaded and downloading episodes and so on. To get more subscriptions, you have to click on the “Directory” button again and navigate your way back to where you were. Apple, couldn’t you have put a checkbox or somthing, so you could select multiple podcasts, then “subscribe” all of them at once when you’re done selecting?
8. Irony of ironies: Fully half of Adam Currys’ Daily Source Codes are broken.
9. This one’s an actual bug: In the settings window, Podcasts tab, second item: “When new episodes are” with dropdown list containing “Download all”, “Download most recent one”, “Do nothing”. “When new episodes are” what? What does this setting item do? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
10. Minor nit: if you right click on an episode, select “Show description”, you get whatever “show notes” the podcaster created. Since iTunes already has a web browser built in (eg: it uses the IE API), couldn’t you have made links in the show notes clickable?

The pluses -
1. The interface for subscribing to a podcast is great. Once you’ve subscribed, selecting episodes to download is simple.
2. Once you install the iPod software update, it adds a new menu level: Podcasts. This very nicely fixes an issue I’ve had with every podcast / podcatching software I’ve tried: Munging the mp3 tags such that I can find every episode of a given podcast, in order, on my iPod (or even in iTunes). Adam Curry puts the name of each episode in the Album field, with date and episode number or some such in the Name field. Since he sometimes has guests on his show, they get listed in the Artist field with him. This makes finding all Daily Source Codes problematic with the stock menus / mp3 tags, since MOST will be under “Artist” Adam Curry, but not all. There will be literally dozens of “albums” by that artist, each “album” having exactly one track. Any “album” with a guest won’t be found under “artist” Adam Curry though. Until now the solution was to use podcatching software that creates a unique playlist for each podcast, but even then it doesn’t solve the dozens-of-albums-per-artist problem. This new menu item takes care of it.
3. Along with the ability to download podcasts and sync them to the iPod, it also includes functions for when to delete them, with options such as “Last X” episodes, “most recent” and “Unheard”, so you can automatically remove any podcast you’ve listened to. Some podcatching software has features for removing podcasts from iTunes (or WMP) under various criteria, but none of them had any concept of whether or not you’ve listened to them, since, if you’re using iTunes or WMP to do your listening, the catching software wouldn’t have any way of knowing if you’ve heard a particular podcast.
4. No longer having multiple copies of each podcast on your hard drive!
   With Doppler, it would download the podcast, then copy it to the iTunes library. This meant having at least two copies of the podcast on your had drive: the Doppler copy and the iTunes library copy. If you were converting to m4b, that was 3 copies: the original mp3, the converted m4b in Doppler and the m4b in the iTunes library. If you count the copy on your iPod itself, that’s 4. All other podcatching software I’ve found had the same problem. With iTunes doing it directly, just one copy on your hard drive. However, see my complaint above about no facility to convert formats automatically.

[Edit: Dave Slusher at Evil Genius Chronicles posts about Apple linking to his podcasts' Bittorrent feed rather than his alternate direct MP3 feed, but not including Bittorrent support. I was afraid of that. I hadn't actually added his podcast into my subscriptions yet (hadn't gotten that far down the list) but I had a feeling I would run into that. I didn't know he had a direct MP3 feed, so I'm glad I actually looked at his text blog today and saw his comments. Now when I get that far I'll know to bypass the Apple music store entry for his podcast and use the Advanced menu to add his alternate feed.
Also, Dave, you mention that your iTunes is scheduled to download every day at 8:00 PM and you can't change it, and ask if everyone else is the same. No, mine says 7:00 PM. But then, I'm in CDT. If you're in EDT, then we'd still be firing at the same time.]

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Martin ( to LJers) landed a job back in San Francisco. He’s now on his way back from Fort Lauderdale, FL.
He’ll be stopping in New Orleans tonight, then tomorrow he stays the night at my place.
Just got off the phone with him. He’s currently in Tallahasse.

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Due to a combination of problems with my RSS aggregator, being out of town and general laziness, I haven’t read my friend’s LJ entries in about 3 weeks. I apologize if I’ve missed anything important. I’m slowly going through them over the next few days, but I probably won’t go all the way back 3 weeks on all friends LJs. If there’s something particularly important you want me to see, let me know.

In Taos, N.M., helping repair some of the homes on the Taos Pueblo.

[NOTE: If you're using Firefox and the pictures don't load, blame Yahoo. They're service just doesn't work with Firefox. Since they're not my photos, I don't control where they got posted.]

Photos here, here, here and here.

CNN.com - Actress Anne Bancroft dies - Jun 8, 2005

Like David Gulliver, Keeping the Faith is one of my favorite movies. I loved her character. I will watch it again tomorrow.

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