I’ll be there - will you?

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Here’s something that used to happen a lot that doesn’t happen to me very often anymore, I call it my “grand slam” and its the rare week now when I publish an episode of each of the shows I’m involved in..

• Mostlytunes last Saturday
• Canadian Podcast Buffet later today
• CatFish Show minutes ago
• Bob and AJ Show later this week

I do end up with a great sense of satisfaction, if not tired ears by the end of a week like this. I’m still having fun though.

I guess if Podcasting really is dead, I didn’t get the memo…

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Since I switched to Mac for all my non-day-job functions, I’ve needed to run Windows once in a while for whatever reason. Whether it was to show Audacity techniques on WinXP, or just to see how a website renders under IE, there’s always been a compelling reason, to keep that old Dell under the desk.

This winter I downloaded the trial version of VMWare Fusion, and it performed flawlessly for my needs. If you’re looking at virtualization as a day-to-day solution, this really seems to be a great way to go. I used it in my Audacity workshop at Podcamp Toronto when someone said ‘Yeah, on a Mac maybe, but it’s not like that in Windows’ - so I fired up a WinXP virtual machine, and did the same steps in Windows.. I was rather pleased with myself

For me, the need is very occasional, and not worth shelling out $80 for the effort. (All the money I make podcasting goes to supply my habit of watching clouds go by- and just barely …) …

Anyway, I just tried out the new version of Virtual Box, the free virtualization offering from Sun, which now has an official Mac OS version. It lets you install WinXP or Linux or DOS or pretty much whatever Intel-OS you need as a virtual machine on your Intel-based Mac (or linux or whatever). My first impressions are that while it’s not as polished as Fusion, and certainly not as feature-rich - it will do exactly what I need for that 10 minutes a month when I need to pretend I have another computer. It’s also a cool alternative to dual-boot, which for me was too much of a pain anyway…

The price sure is right,

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Enough bad vibes, here’s a great podcasting story….

Terry Fallis has won the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for humour!

Here’s the link to the press release from Joseph Thornley’s site, it’ll give you the whole story. Now when you see the names like Pierre Burton and Mordecai Richler, you can say Terry Fallis in the same breath.. Very, very cool.

When he couldn’t find a publisher for his book The Best Laid Plans, Terry self-published, and read every chapter as a podcast episode. The episodes ended up doing really well in the iTunes store, and with today’s big news, I imagine he’ll see a bunch of new listeners checking out his work..

You can find the first episodes starting on his blog in January 2007 , or better yet, go to Terry’s site and buy the book.

Terry’s been a strong presence in the Canadian podcasting space, a well-respected member of the community (there’s that word again), and a great participant and supporter of our activities like the Podcasters Across Borders conference. He isn’t in this space for a quick hit, he’s one of us. I first interviewed Terry in August 2006 for the Canadian Podcast Buffet, and upon hearing this latest news, Mark Blevis called him right away to congratulate and interview him for this week’s buffet.

Congrats again Terry, we’re quite proud of one of ‘our own’ doing well,

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“We have never believed in user-generated content as a business, or even as a sustainable entertainment offering,” said Ron Bloom, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, MEVIO.

Wow.

What else can be said? I for one, welcome the indie podcasters back to the fold, there’s an awesome community here waiting for you. In fact, we were here before these jerkoffs, we’ll be here long after.

Connect with people, build a following, have fun!

Have a glass of wine, forget the broken promises, the bullshit, and enjoy connecting with people. THAT, my friends is what podcasting is all about..

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Like a lot of you, I spend a lot of my time reading. When it comes to my day-job, it’s the endless emails, technical docs, proposals, etc… When it comes to personal time, I read many blogs, a few magazines, the paper every day, and of course the Bathroom readers for time spent in the library… What? you don’t know these books? You have to check them out - they are truly awesome - I’m a loyal customer…

Anyhow, with the constant flow of information, it’s only normal to not catch everything in the first read. Often, I find I get something new out of rereading something I’ve read before.

I had an example of this as I was re-reading Hugh Macleod’s How to be Creative again while having a coffee this morning. I’d read it before, but this time around, the bit that stuck out was the “Sex and Cash” theory. Here’s the theory verbatim : “The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.” I’ll let you check out his deeper explanation.

This one hit home for me, and I’m sure it does for a lot of people in our “space”.. I recently caught myself telling someone that I was almost regretful at being really good at what I do for my day job and how I’d love to spend more time on my creative pursuits (media, podcasting, music etc..)… Hugh brought it home for me, and his message is quite simple, once you learn to accept the duality of your existence, you end up moving forward much faster.

So I’ve latched on to the Sex & Cash theory, though I’d read it a few times before. It strange how the brain works.

Now if I can figure out why I take life advice from a guy who draws on business cards, I’ll be even further ahead…

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So I finally put pictures up of our time on Michel Dumais’ Citoyen Numerique show on CIBL-FM - Seeing the pictures again reminded me what a great time it was.

When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter if it’s radio or podcasting, it’s about people communicating. That’s where the fun and passion are.

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Laurent’s poster pretty much says it all, eh?

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As of this morning, I’ve opened the registration for Podcasters Across Borders 2008, affectionately called PAB2008. Mark and I have been hard at work behind the scenes selecting speakers, timing the sessions, and doing a lot of preparation for this year’s event.

Today though, is the transition from “We could do.. ” to “Here’s what we’re doing. ” It all becomes real right now. The sessions have been announced, we are accepting registrations, the event is now building it’s own steam. The next challenge is for Andrea and Cat to tolerate us until the event is over

Even though it’s our 3rd year doing this, it’s still very exciting to me. The excitement of seeing the registrations pour in is as thrilling now as it even has been. The only less-thrilling part was actually having more speakers than timeslots this year, and boy did we try to find a way to squeeze everything in… Turns out though, that there are only so many hours in a day, and there’s a minimal time you can give to a speaker and still have them be able to deliver a message.

I’m quite proud of the fact that all our speakers are active community participants. To me that says more about the event than anything. We’ve never been about selling the speaking slots, and we’ve held firm to that again this year.

It’s going to be a great time, and I hope you get a chance to come out - the boat cruise is longer and bigger this year, and I have it on good authority that there should not be snow or any sort of that crap in June. If you check out this picture, you’ll see the cruise boats, the foreground glass-domed one is what we rode in last year, and I think this year it’ll be the paddle-wheeled one in the background.

If you’re still not sure what you’ll see at PAB, check out the flickr pictures from 2006 and 2007

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