It is now less than two weeks before I’m back in TBay. Can anyone say The Hoito? I can’t wait to get back and see everyone. All that stands in my way is 13 days, 6 exams and 1440km…wow…this is going to be a brutal next two weeks. I can’t believe I’ll only have a few weeks home, and then off toWindsor. Damn Co-op!

The most exciting thing in my life still is my iPod Mini. It is so great! I keep on finding more and more features for it. Today I found out that you can rate the songs easily on the iPod and it propagates back to iTunes when you sync. I also started Podcasting, which I’ll talk about later. First I’ll talk about one of the features that I always enjoy on music players. I’m not one to sit down and plan out a full play list, mostly because I’m lazy and because I’d end up making a new one each time I went to listen to my music. What I prefer to do is get a song going and then as it is playing search through my music. when I find a song I’d like to listen to in the specific session, I then add it to the queue (Gah! Algorithms and Data Structures final premonition!) so that it will play when the current one is done. This just makes lots of sense as you can easily expand your play list for the session.

When I went to look how to do it on my iPod, I found it isn’t as simple. I’m a little disappointed that it isn’t as easy as I wanted it to be, but I’ll explain the process how I managed to accomplish the same thing. iPod has a special built in play list called On-The-Go (OTGP). You can add songs to the OTGP by highlighting the song and holding the select button until the name flashes. To set up the queue how I like it, I had to first find a song and put it in the OTGP. I then selected the play list and started it going. The next step was to go through my collection and add the songs to the OTGP, just like a queue. It managed to accomplish what I wanted it to do, just with a little extra work on my part at the start. It just takes a little getting used to and then I don’t even notice the extra work.

The other feature that I’m now addicted to is Podcasting. Mike told me about it a few weeks ago and I read a little about it before. It’s one of those features that you don’t even know you want until you actually get it, then can’t do without it. (Liketabbed browsing in Firefox) Essentially what it is are audio recordings that are downloaded to your iPod whenever you sync with iTunes. Sound Boring? The neat thing is how you get them. You subscribe to RSS feeds of different types of recordings. I got several feeds to start me off including This Week in Tech and iTunes new music podcast. I was a little hesitant to go with an iPod because it didn’t have an FM receiver (Every so often I just want to listen to the radio) but Podcasting makes up for it. It’s like carrying your favourite radio shows with you and being able to pause, scan and re-listen to them whenever you want.

There has been alot of discussion about podcasting and iTunes. The latest version of iTunes has it built right in, and the firmware on my iPod has it built in. The thing is that podcasts are free…so why is Apple writing software for it? They don’t make direct profit from it…but look at the name PODcasting. Though it is generally referring to any music player that can play the feeds, the community of users as adopted the name “podcasting”. By adopting it, Apple just adds another feature that can help sell more iPods, and boy if I knew how good it was, I wouldn’t have waited so long to get my iPod! Some interesting sites to check out are Odeo, a start up for podcasts by the developer of blogger, an article by John Gruber on Podcasting, and the Audioblogging Manifesto. It will give you an idea of what is happening in the new field of Podcasting. (Even though some of it is criticism)

A few notes about my site. There were a few problems with my Del.icio.us feed in the past few days, hopefully it’s been all fixed up. Thanks again to Mike :) I’ve also been informed that I’m using “slugs” (URL is different from title) for the names of my entries, because I like to have interesting titles for my blogs…even if they have nothing to do with the entry.

Currently Listening to: “In The Garage” - Weezer