I didn't use eBay again for another year or two.  We did trade negative feedbacks for each other, but in any case, I think it's a little odd that if a buyer rips you off, you can't mark them as being just as dishonest as a bad seller.  Both sellers and buyers have responsibilities and you can usually tell if a seller gave a negative mark just in retaliation to a buyers if that buyer has an otherwise prestine record...

Quoting from techDirt:

eBay has been making some changes lately that aren't sitting well with eBay sellers. First, it announced fee changes that initially were promoted as "lower fees," but the details showed were only lower for goods that didn't sell. The fees on sold goods were actually higher. Now, the company has banned sellers from giving "negative" feedback on buyers.

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Perhaps it was the naïve assumption that most products in Whole Foods were healthy that made me a bit lax about looking at ingredients lists, or perhaps it was just that Whole Foods did not have ingredients listed for most of their prepared foods until recently.  In any case, I’ve been reading these labels recently and have come to the conclusion that just about everything that Whole Foods makes (there prepared foods you buy for heating up at home as well as their hot-bar items) has canola oil in it!  It is already very difficult to find packaged products containing an oil other than canola or a similar vegetable oil in them, but seemingly this is also the case for many non-packaged items as well. 

Now, many of you may be saying “so what, isn’t it the saturated fat that’s bad, not the unsaturated stuff”?  Well, not exactly.  Check out Gary Taubes’ "Good Calories Bad Calories" and you will see a great outline about how this myth came to be.  Even the traditionalists have disembarked from the pure “eat more unsaturated fat” to just “eat more MONO-unsaturated fat.”  Monounsaturated fat (MUFA) is the type of fat that olive oil is primarily made up of and presumably the healthfulness of the Mediterranean diet is based on this.  A diet high in polyunsaturated fats (PUFA’s) has been linked, albeit tenuously, to increased risk of cancer.  It’s true that Canola oil does have a decent amount of MUFA (60%), but it also has a lot of PUFA (almost 40%).

There are other potential health concerns specific to Canola.  Apparently processing of the oil involves a “deodorization” process which converts omega-3 fatty acids into harmful trans-fatty acids.

Of course not everyone will believe that Canola oil is unhealthful.  There’s certainly no incontrovertible truth and intelligent people can still disagree about whether canola oil increases risk factors or decreases them.  Still, because this oil is a bit controversial, especially among what is probably one of Whole Foods’ target audiences, my thought is it would behoove them to use an oil that is less controversial. 

Olive oil is seen almost universally as, if not a perfect oil, at least one that is acceptably low in potential health risks.  The advocates of the Mediterranean diet of course contend that the MUFA’s in it are exceedingly healthy, as are its low levels of saturated fatty acids (SFA’s).  Those on the other side of the spectrum who believe that SFA’s are healthy while PUFA’s are not, view olive oil at worst as a neutral oil, since it’s mostly MUFA with just a tiny percentage of PUFA. 

Likewise, butter is a great option for many items that require fat, especially baked goods.  When I’ve looked at the ingredients of baked goods at my local Whole Foods they invariably list canola and not butter, although very occasionally I will see something that doesn’t have it – for example a pound cake I picked up last night.  Of course, butter is relatively high in SFA and so for the traditionalists who still believe in the diet-heart hypothesis (that SFA’s increase cholesterol levels and that increased cholesterol levels increase coronary heart disease risk factors) despite lots of evidence that refutes this theory, it isn’t acceptable.  Similarly the tropical oils that used to be used a great deal in baking had their reputations tarnished (I believe wrongly) because of the whole saturated fat scare of the 80’s and 90’s.  Only in the last 10 or so years are we starting to see reports about how some of the fatty acids in these oils can actually be heart-protective. 

Even if we just concentrate on olive oil as the least controversial alternative, it is a lot more expensive than canola, and there’s the rub.  If it wasn’t for this factor, we might be seeing a lot more olive oil in Whole Foods’ prepared foods.  As it is Whole Foods charges a premium for their food, and using olive oil would probably make their food that much more expensive.  At this point, though, I don’t even have the option of buying most of their prepared foods because I don’t care to consume canola oil.  So Whole Foods is losing sales because they’ve made it too hard for me to buy lunch there, given the small number of options that don’t contain added canola.

Sadly, few people care enough about this stuff to be aware that there’s anything controversial about canola, and others simply won’t believe that there’s enough evidence to implicate it in health issues.  I contend, though, that the people who pay a premium at Whole Foods for presumably healthy food are probably more aware of the controversy and more likely to use that as a factor when making buying decisions.  Still, I think this issue needs a lot more exposure.  Optimally, I should be preparing all the food I eat myself, of course, but being a busy parent this isn’t always possible, and I would like to not be so constrained in my choices when going to a store that is supposed to be carrying products that are healthful…

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2007 was a busy year for me personally.  My daughter turned two, and rapidly demanded more attention as she became totally super-mobile as well as agile enough to climb tables, leap tall buildings, or at least cushions with a single bound, etc. 

I also started a new job in 2007 where I’ve been kept very busy.  Previous jobs have almost all had some serious downtimes, especially the job previous to my current one.  The business at work means I’m sometimes working late and/or on the weekends.  Since many of my previous jobs were for government contracts where you really couldn’t work overtime, this is definitely different!

But the blogging bug has been gnawing at me for a while.  I’ve actually been keeping my writing going by participating in a number of discussion forums, and a recent reply to a message asking me if I was a professional writer (incredibly flattering to someone who’s never had a piece of writing printed other than a couple of college paper editorials!) has given me that much more motivation to get this thing back on the tracks again.  I really want to put some thoughts down here and there if only in a paragraph or two.  Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for some of my readers -  the long tomes you may encounter by viewing the archives here probably will not occur again, or only on very rare occasion.  I’m going to attempt, however, to at least start scribbling down a disjointed thought or two on a more regular basis - well, hell, on ANY basis – and we’ll see what happens.

I did feel like I needed to write SOME kind of intermediate message, though, explaining my absence for over a year, so here it is. 

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The title of the book refers  to the fact that humans, like some other primates, rats, pigs, chickens, bears, and a bunch of other species, are "omnivores," meaning that they (we) are generalized feeders that can eat both animal meats as well as plant foods for our nourishment. Other species have a more specialized diet, and can only survive by either eating meat (carnivores) or plant foods (herbivores).  While being an omnivore gives distinct advantages, allowing for a wider assortment of nourishment, the flip side of this increased number of choices is the problem or dilemma of what to eat.  Koala bears know they can eat eucalyptus leaves, and that's it.  Omnivores have to figure out what they can eat, making sure not to eat something poisonous, and also trying to determine the most nutritious animals or plants (or parts of these) so that they don't waste their limited capacity to consume and fill up on ones that aren't as very nourishing. Also, since we've developed culture, language, philosophy, and religion, we also need to deal with the decision of what we should eat.  Should we eat meat, for example, or is that "immoral."  Should we eat by the rules of kosher or halal?  Should we eat organic or conventional?  Should we eat something that authorities tell us will eventually be detrimental to our health despite no immediate or obvious danger?  These questions, although they perhaps only infrequently come up for most of us, are ones where we differ from other species, and Pollan demonstrates throughout the book that these decisions can be at times very difficult ones if one really chooses to contemplate them seriously.

 The first section of the book details industrial agriculture.  Specifically, it describes everything about the biggest single crop that the U.S. produces - corn, or more accurately the species zea mays.  The history of corn is a fascinating one as Pollan tells it.  He describes how in the last fifty or so years it has become part of an absurdist spiral that has bankrupted huge numbers of farmers, made the U.S. one of the most obese countries on the planet, and has usurped the vast majority of our arable land.  Most of this, Pollan writes, is due to government subsidies that compel farmers to grow corn over anything else.  Government regulations also favor corn, industrial methods of farming, and the largest of operations.  These regulations are no doubt affected by the lobbying dollars spent, and campaign contributions given, to government officials on behalf of the manufacturers of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and huge industrial farms. 

Corn has become such a cheap commodity, Pollan tells us, that new ways are constantly being devised to deal with the ever-increasing yields and surpluses that would otherwise rot on the silo floor.  So corn goes into all processed foods for various purposes - bulking, sweetening, preserving, or adding this or that quality.  Sweetening, of course, is one of its main functions, as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) found in soft drinks and desert foods and in many other non-desert foods that one wouldn't expect it to be in.  The escalating consumption of soft drinks with HFCS has been proposed by many as a major causal factor in the U.S. epidemic of obesity and diabetes - especially childhood diabetes.

In addition to corn, Pollan also tracks a steer he purchases that will eventually be slaughtered in a factory farm, or has the industry calls it, a Confined Area Feeding Operation, of CAFO.  The steer gets to have a happy few weeks with his mother, eating a natural diet of grass, after which he is shipped to the CAFO and subsequently made to eat a completely unnatural diet of corn, soy protein, and the fat from fellow slaughtered cows.  Corn is the carbohydrate of choice, of course, because it is so cheap, but also because it fattens the cow very quickly (not unlike how it fattens us), and produces the marbling affect that the USDA uses one of its two main variables in how it rates rate cuts of meat.  Such cows are routinely given antibiotics as part of their regular diet due to the unsanitary conditions of the industrial feed lot as well as their unnatural diet.  They are also pumped full of hormones to speed their growth even more.

Aside from the humanitarian, health, and economic issues involved, there is even one of geopolitics.  This is because industrial farming is based around petroleum, and according to Pollan accounts for 20% of the United States energy expenditure!  Not only does this industrial system involve shipping food products across the vast distances of our country, but the fertilizer itself requires a great deal of petroleum to produce.  While technology like genetically modified organisms and new farming methods have made the yield per acre of corn very high indeed, the efficiency of producing it in terms of resources needed is still low.  According to Pollan, it takes something like 50 calories of energy (mostly from oil) to produce a single food calorie from corn.  Of course, all this government subsidizing, and hence cheapening of corn, means that corn and the animals raised on it have become much cheaper to eat.  But, Pollan argues, there is a tremendous hidden cost, or costs, the two major ones being public health and our increased dependency on foreign oil.

The second part of the book is devoted to "industrial organic."  This might seem like a contradiction in terms and Pollan argues that this may be the case.  He describes the origins of the organic movement in the 60's and 70's and how part of the tenets of the movement was about "sustainability" - the ability for a farm to sustain itself without a significant amount of outside "inputs" - chemical fertilizer, pesticides, etc.)  The first farms of this movement grew haltingly, but eventually took off, mainly in the 1980's, after which their products were in such high demand by national chains like Costco that their demand could not be bet via the original ideals of organic movement.  So a more "industrial" approach was adopted.  Still, neither the animal feed nor the crops grown for human consumption via industrial organic can use chemical fertilizers or pesticides.  Antibiotics can only be used in case of an illness rather than as a preventative, and hormones cannot be used at all.  While this takes care of many of the problems of pure industrial farming, it does not deal with the problem of sustainability that was a major part of the movement's initial focus.

The third part of the book centers around the self-labeled "beyond organic," movement, which aims to reinvent the original movement's ideals, although some of its origins hark back even further to the 1940's, when industrial farming was really starting to get started, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides were starting to be used.  The movement preaches sustainability and imitating nature in the closest way possible within the confines of a managed system.  The practice is exemplified by the colorful farmer Joel Salatin in his 100-acre farm in Swoope, Virginia, about two and a half hours west of me here in the Washington DC suburbs.  Salatin has been a tireless crusader for the rights of small farmers like himself, who are often given the short end of the stick because they do not have the lobbying dollars of the industrial organic sector, let alone the non-organic industrial.  Pollan actually spends a week working at Salatin's farm, "Polyface ," for a week, involved in many of the aspects of farming, even including the slaughtering of chickens.  As Pollan describes it, just about everything at Polyface is sustainable.  The Cows graze on a given pasture and fertilize it with their manure, then they are moved to another pasture and chickens are brought in as a "clean up crew" eating the larva that has been growing in the manure.  The chickens in turn deposit their own waste, and in another day or two the grass has grown back to the point where another group of cows can be brought in to feed.  This cycle where different plants and animals participate in a system that helps all involved without the need for external materials or forces (except the farmer to move the animals) is such a huge savings in terms of fuel, raw materials, etc., that one can really see how incredibly wasteful  the industrial systems are in comparison.

The final part of the book concerns itself with Pollan's efforts to make a meal that he has hunted and gathered himself.  A friend mentors him both in hunting feral pigs as well as finding wild mushrooms.  Much of this portion of the book is devoted to Pollan's own philosophical and moral meanderings about whether he can justify killing an animal and eating it.  Pollan corresponds with Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation , and has debate both with Singer and with himself about whether eating meat is justifiable.  He does end up going on his hunt, and we get to experience the exhilaration that this brings, as well as the disgust when it comes time to dress his kill.  Foraging for mushrooms, does not elicit any moral dilemmas, but does provide some interesting information about an organism completely separate from both that of the animal and plant kingdoms, and one which we apparently know comparatively little about.

On the whole, The Omivore's Dilemma is a fascinating book that will make many people rethink their entire relationship with food.  The vast majority of us think little about food other than perhaps the cost, the calorie content, the taste, and occasionally the number of grams of fat or carbohydrate contained in it.  This book provides some great insights into aspects of the food chain that most of us know little about, perhaps enough to prompt those who read it to start thinking and caring how the food on their plate got there enough to ask more questions about that food, be it from a grocery store or a restaurant.  Perhaps some will even start to demand more from the restaurants and food shops they patronize.  And perhaps some will even ask themselves more about what they are willing to sacrifice in an effort to eat what they think will be healthy for them, the country, and the planet.

As much as I enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma, I did have a couple of problems with the book, and I'm apparently not alone, given some of the reviews on Amazon.com .  Let me first mention that I listened to this book as an audio book downloaded from Audible.com , so my experience is, I'm sure. slightly different from those reading the book in paper form.  Nonetheless, one of the main complaints about the book I would have to agree with - I think Pollan could have gotten his point across within 3/4 of the pages it actually took, perhaps even less.  The first parts about industrial non-organic,  and industrial organic, are very informational.  In the third part, Pollan puts himself into the story, which in itself is fine and gives us some of his personal insights by letting us experience what he did on the farm, but at a certain point, especially around the issues of killing, Pollan becomes so entangled in his own conflicting emotions and tortured thinking about it, that eventually gets repetitive and you feel like you are reading the diary of a tortured soul.  This continues and perhaps even worsens in the final part of the book, where Pollan debates vegetarianism with himself and with Singer, tries to deal with the guilt over having fun while hunting and killing his pig and his revulsion during the dressing of the animal.  Although these moral musings aren't prevalent in the chapters on hunting for mushrooms, Pollan seems to find other things to wax philosophic about, fluffing the pages out way beyond what they should be, especially at the end of a long book.

Aside from the length issue and some inaccuracies and inconsistencies pointed out by other reviewers on Amazon, my other major issue with Pollan's book is one that might not be an issue for most.  It relates to Pollan's ridicule of restricted carbohydrate diets - Atkins in particular - and disdain for fat in general and saturated fat in particular.  I find it disappointing that Pollan can debunk so much of the standard line about food, even about the "organic" label that marketers would have you believe is the healthiest food there can be, yet he seems to accept all the old dogma about low-carb and saturated fats despite there being tremendous evidence that supports the healthfulness of that way of eating.  Instead he more or less calls Atkins a "quack" and bases this, it seems, on the oft-repeated erroneous claim that Atkins eliminates an "entire food group" - by which he means carbohydrates.  This of course is incorrect, but Pollan, like many, seem to have a bias against diets, and specifically towards Atkins that clouds objectivity and careful research.  This bias seems to infect other ideas of Pollan's.  The most blatant example of this bias (perhaps also combined with some sloppiness that Pollan shows elsewhere when dealing with other technical subjects) is when he claims that the human brain can get glucose only from carbohydrates.  Any first-year biochemist will tell you that this is false, and that protein can easily be converted to glucose as well - Eskimos have survived for hundreds of years on a diet of pure protein and fat (from seal and caribou) for hundreds of years.

Finally, as at least one Amazon reviewer points out, Pollan doesn't really fully deal with the issue of the price of doing things in an organic and sustainable way.  Organic, and "beyond organic" foods are generally much higher in price than their conventional competition.  That's not to say they aren't worth that price for those who can afford them, but Wholefoods, CSA's, and Farmers Markets are often more patronized by those on the upper end of the income scale.  Those who make minimum wage, or even a bit more, would probably have to spend a huge portion of their paycheck in order to buy most of their food as organic.  They simply don't have much choice in the matter.  Pollan suggests that Pollyface's customers didn't seem like the well-healed customers of Wholefoods.  Still, Swoope is a pretty  rural part of Virginia, and so those more well-to-do people just aren't there in large numbers, and those who are probably are not trying to stand out as such. 

Theoretically if the government would stop subsidizing corn and instead used that money to support small sustainable farmers so that their food could be sold less expensively and locally(but without the regulatory requirements that often come with such funding), the food supply might be turned on its head.  This of course, is a pipe dream.  I'd love for it to happen, but how practical is it in a country as large as ours?  Can all the farmland be reconverted into lots of Polyfaces that could serve the entire country?  Even if it could be done, the monumental market forces needed for getting this change to occur just aren't there.  It would take a huge rethinking on the part of most of citizens of this country about the food they eat.  Even if everyone read Pollan's book (which I don't think is a bad idea), there would still be plenty of hold outs who simply don't care about their own health, let alone the health of others, the environment, or the health and well-being of the animals they eat.  I think the best we can hope for, at least for the foreseeable future, is just a level playing field, where small farmers are given the same rights and opportunities as the giant industrial ones and still get to produce their crops and livestock in the way they choose with as little regulation from the government as possible.  This is all that Joel Salatin wants, according to Pollan, and I don't think it's something unreasonable to ask for, even from those who couldn't care less about "organic," "beyond organic," or any other fancy label we might choose to give our food in the future.

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Garlic and Sapphires is Ruth Reichl's fourth and latest book and it describes her six or so years as the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 1990's.  She had previously worked at the LA Times and as she writes, was more interested in reviewing a wider range of cuisines and price ranges.  Up until then, she contends, the reviewers concentrated mainly on the very high-end restaurants like Le Cirque or La Caravel. While this may be the case, I found it a bit odd, since 90% of the places she talks about in the book seem to be expensive to super-expensive.

Reading Garlic and Sapphires wasn't quite like a trip down memory lane, since so many of the restaurants were the very high-priced ones that we never ate at growing up, or they were simply restaurants that were established after I left the city or that I'd never happen to patronize.  The one exception to this was Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.  I went a few times back in the 80's for special occasions, but only for brunch, which I believe was much cheaper than their dinner menu.  Also, as Reichl explains, Windows On the World was renovated and received a new chef and emphasis after the first World Trade Center bombing in the early 90's.  So for all practical purposes I ate at a different restaurant.

Despite the fact that I have little chance of eating in most of the establishments described in the book, it was wonderful, as a foodie, to listen to Reichl describe in poetic detail how various foods would melt in her mouth, revealing layers upon layers of different, sometimes subtle, sometimes very blatant flavors.  Reichl also gives us many of her own recipes (she was a chef and co-owned a restaurant in Berkeley in the 70's), some of which sound great.  The book is also nice for those simply interested in New York City, as Reichl describes a good deal of it - not just the restaurants - in this book.

But this isn't just a book about food or restaurants.  It's also one about human nature.  Reichl describes at the beginning of the book how she's spotted by someone who works for a restaurant on one of her first flights to New York when she is preparing to move.  She's told that every restaurant in New York probably has her picture taped inside the kitchen with a reward for spotting her.  Because of this, she decides she will enlist the help of an old acting-teacher friend of her mother's to create new identities.  She is given wigs and makeup and different clothing to transform herself into everything from a sexy blond divorcee to a meek, impoverished older lady, to even a replica of her own brash and demanding mother.  She uses these disguises to try to understand how others may experience the same meal.  And she discovers that, as we expect, that restaurants (especially the high-end ones) do play favorites and discriminate quite liberally in how they provide service to different people, and even whether they will permit someone to patronize their establishment.

Along with exploring how waiters and other diners react to her in her various disguises, she also has revelations about herself.  She admits to being able to assume particular personas very easily.  It's almost as if she is channeling different aspects of her personality, some of which may be well hidden and seldom seen.  Through this she has some self-discoveries and eventually decides to leave her post at the Times.

We also get to read about various political maneuverings within the Times, stories about her husband and son, and about coworkers and friends who accompany her to restaurants.  There are also memorable parts where she is both fooling the restaurant, but also fooling her guests, who are unaware of whom she really is.

In general, I found it a very enjoyable read.  There were times where I thought she might be exaggerating some things for effect, or even making some stuff up (they just seemed too "perfect" or "predictable" in a kind of theatrical way), but for the most part these were few and far between.

I actually listened to an unabridged audio version of this book via Audible.com which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods).  Bernadette Dunne does a good job of narrating the book and I don't recall any pronunciation errors in all the descriptions of food, restaurants, or place names in New York.  Although I will admit I didn't care for her rendition of Reichl's young son.  Reichl also narrates an abridged version of the book if you'd like to hear the author read her own book, New York accent and all.  The book is available in print as well, of course.

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For a long time with a mapping program I've wanted the ability to figure out exactly how far something was from me.  I try to walk for exercise when I can, and we also sometimes walk to nearby stores instead of driving when the weather is nice, we have the time, and we're not exhausted from the myriad of chores and duties that keep us busy most days.  Using a standard mapping interface like Google Maps itself doesn't quite cut it.  For one thing it means knowing the address of where you are coming from and going to, which is not always known, so you have to spend extra time looking this information up, and it might not even be completely accurate (for example, according to most mapping programs which use the same data source, my house is actually almost a block from where it says it is!).  Secondly, there's no guarantee that the mapping program will design a route that is the same as the way you walk.  It often chooses some other route that it deems faster by car.  Of course, this doesn't even account for some routes which cars simply can't traverse because of a road that's one way in the wrong direction or even no road at all!  I've always wanted something akin to a graphics program where you draw a polymer by clicking multiple times to form the shape.  In my mind, the lines would automatically stick to the roads that were closest to them.

More recently, I've been trying to get more exercise in during the day, and since it's been so nice and unseasonably warm here this week, I decided to skip lunch and just walk around the neighborhood.  I was wondering how much I walked, but other than the amount of time and a vague sense of how fast I was going, I really couldn't gauge much.  So I thought I'd start looking for something akin to what I've described above and maybe, just maybe I'd find something.  Well, I was shocked that I found something perfect almost immediately! 

Gmaps Pedometer is the site/hack, and it is great for anyone just wanting to know how far it is from one point to another on a map, to someone who wants to get detailed information for a walking program, a cycling route, etc.  You can very easily create a walking path and Gmaps Pedometer will show you dynamically not only what the distance is, but even how many calories you will burn on this path.  I'm not sure about how accurate the calorie count is, though, since my 3-mile path I created around my office was rated at 368 calories, which seems a bit high.  Gmaps Pedometer even gives you a graphic of the elevation levels your path is traversing, but as much as I'd like to believe it, I don't believe elevation is taken into account for calories.  The only forum message from the author about this on the site mentions not wanting to use the elevation markers for anything else because elevation data is not available everywhere - it seems to be available mostly for the U.S. 

If you can time your walk, and Gmaps Pedometer gives you an accurate measurement of the distance, you can figure out your speed and then you can plug that, the time, and your weight into some other tool to get a more or less accurate representation of you calories burned.  I tried to find such a calculator on the web, but all the ones out will only let you plug in pre-specified numbers for your pace, like 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, etc. mph.  I did find one shareware application you can download that does seem to have the degree of flexibility I was hoping for.

In addition to what I've mentioned so far, Gmaps Pedometer also lets you save a given route, so for example, this is one route I created .  Also, it lets you export to GPX format with a third party bookmarklet .  GPX is a format for sharing GPS data, so potentially you could load this into your GPS and use it as a way to navigate.  This might be very valuable for hikers, or just walkers or cyclists who are unfamiliar with an area and want to make sure they are taking the right path.  Theoretically, one could use Gmaps Pedometer to design city walking tours and make those available for people to download, along with a set of MP3's for each of the points of interest on the path.  Really, the possibilities are endless with this thing!

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My background is web development, but I chose this book for a few reasons.  One is that it got some good reviews on Amazon.com, and no really bad ones.  Secondly, I bought it knowing that I would be taking a week-long training course in ASP.Net 2.0 in a few weeks.  I wanted a book that was easy enough that I would have a good chance of completing it in a couple of weeks, and I also didn't care if I got the most in-depth understanding of the subject.  As long as I got some familiarity with it, that would be good enough as a foundation should the class go at a faster pace than my brain can process information! 

Generally, what I have found is that there are three or four basic types of computer book.  You have books geared towards absolute beginners which walk you through every little step, every mouse click, over and over again ad nauseum.  Then you have books geared towards programmers, which are written in such a way that if you don't have a formal knowledge of this subject, you will probably eventually get a lost.  Of course for those without any programming experience or knowledge, these books will quickly go over one's head.  Most of these books are about a particular facet of a programming language or environment, but some are exhaustive studies of everything, almost to the point that they are reference books themselves.  Finally, there are reference books, which sometimes double as instructional texts as I intimated, and sometimes are simply streight-forward information about the various features and functions of a given language or system.

Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours, of course, fits into the first category - that of one geared towards beginners.  I often wish there were books that kind of bridged the gaps between beginners and more experienced programmers, and occasionally there are, but they are few and far between.  What I have in mind is something that walks you through some fundamentals at least initially, but soon stops repeating the same steps, challenging you to remember them yourself, and also getting into some of the more advanced aspects a little.  Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours doesn't do this.  That being said, it's still a good book for what it's for.  You just need to understand it's target reader so that if you have experience programming, you can just skip the repetitive parts, or parts that you already know (control structures, conditional statements, html markup, etc.).

Like many in the field of web development (at least those of us who've been at it for close to 10 years or more), I came to it without formal study.  When I started, there were no books on html, let alone classes on it.  Through the years I taught myself how to program in more sophisticated ways using Perl, then Cold Fusion, JavaScript, and ASP.  But while I understand how to use all these tools to create dynamic websites, I'm not sure if I have the same "programmer mentality" that I see in others who mastered C++ or Java in college, high school, or even earlier!   In my opinion there's a kind of middle-tier market out there of those of us who came to programming in adulthood, too late to substantially effect how our brains work.  We can understand programming, but are not "native speakers."  We can program, but books written "for programmers" can still start to sound like Greek if we don't concentrate hard and perhaps reread some sentences a few times!

In any case, Scott Mitchell's book is a good start for anyone like myself, or those who are just starting out in the field and want to gain some familiarity with what .Net is about.  It will take you through many of the things you will do as a developer in creating dynamic sites - including connecting with back-end databases, form validation, file uploads, site navigation, and more.  You will not get much understanding about the Visual Basic or C# languages used to manipulate business logic or to do more advanced stuff with data binding, etc.  But for me at least this was a good primer before going on to read more advanced books and reference guides about ASP.Net 2.0.  I think it created a great "bridge" between my familiarity with plain old ASP and what I know is going to be a much more powerful and deep environment to program websites in. 

The other nice thing about this book is that it comes with Microsoft's "Express" edition of their Visual Web Developer 2005.  This is basically a paired down version of the Visual Studio software that is used by professionals not only to build ASP.Net websites, but also to develop stand-alone Windows applications.  However, this will let you develop any ASP.Net website and test it locally on your machine - it comes with a version of Microsoft's SQL Server Database, and a web server.  You can easily take the files you develop on it and upload them to a hosted server on the internet or a corporate intranet server behind a firewall, etc.  You can download this software for free from Microsoft, but it's nice having the CD that you can use to do a quick install and avoid having to go find it and download it from MS's site, especially if you don't have a fast Internet connection.

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Sarah Vowel has written several books, and this latest one repeats some of the same themes of American history that her previous book, A Partly Cloudy Patriot, started. Vowel is a self-proclaimed "history geek" and also presidential-assassination-obsessed. A lot of what she wrote about in the past was about personal experiences, and that is what she talked about on the radio as well. In this book, too, there is a lot of this. It's not just an historical text, but also partially an autobiographical journey with Vowel to various places of historical significance where she interacts with the tour guides and other tourists, and also the friends that she drags grudgingly to almost every one.

I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). If you've ever heard Vowel speak, you know she has a very distinct voice. You may have even heard her without knowing - she played Violet (the daughter) in the animated movie The Incredibles. It's high and nasaly, which you would never think would be something you'd want to listen to for 7 hours, and yet at least some of us find this voice strangely hypnotic. I've heard her speak a couple of times in DC, once as part of a live This American Life, and a second time as just herself. The second time, she was late. She doesn't drive, and so was taking the train up from her home in New York City. The train lost power. The woman handling the show was talking to her on her cell phone while she was rushing from the train station in a cab and actually put the phone up to the microphone. Sarah managed to keep us laughing and still did a great job once she got there in person. It's a testament to her appeal that 99% of the audience stayed over an hour after she was supposed to be there for her to arrive. The book is available in print as well, of course.

Vowel's dry humor runs throughout Assasination Vacation, catching on oh so many ironic twists of history, so many outlandish actions or quotes that they seem downright hilarious sometimes. She also repeatedly pokes fun at herself for her peculiar geekiness about historical minutiae, her morbid fascinations, and her various allergies and phobias. The book contains not only her own voice, but also that of a number of others - actors, writers, comedians - who ad a little spice to the mix. They recite quotes from the principal characters - presidents and assassins alike. Included are Steven King, John Stewart, Conan O'Brian, and Brad Bird (whom I think was my favorite as Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau).

While I enjoyed listening to the book, and believe I picked up some knowledge from it, I'm afraid that as with most books about history, I will soon forget many details (if I haven't already). Even with the fairly narrow subject matter, there are still lots of facts involved with each assassination, not to mention a bunch of background information about the lives of each president and their various family members, friends, colleagues, and of course their assassins and co-conspirators.  Also included is information on the wars, scandals, and other events that took place before or during the time of a given president. Of course Vowel makes a lot of this stuff more memorable by adding her own humor and passion for the subject, which makes it more memorable, but I still think many of the details will slip away despite this. Then again, this isn't a history text, but more a kind of biographical/autobiographical journey through a few singular parts of history, as well as a journey in the present day to some of the odd memorials and museums for both the presidents and the assassins - ranging from the high reaches of the Adirondack mountains to Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas, a small tropical island 70 miles west of Key West, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Caribbean.

That being said, while I certainly enjoyed Assassination Vacation, I personally preferred  A Partly Cloudy Patriot. Either book is a great listen from my viewpoint, and this latest one kind of follows from the last.  I also think that this book might grow on you and slowly infect you with at least a little of that same geeky obsession for these assassinations that Vowel has herself. Then again, while I'm a geek, I'm not much of a history geek, and so I'm not sure I'll have the dedication (or time) to devote to something as relatively arcane as 19th Century U.S. presidential assassinations!

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I would say a majority of the book is about language and specifically about euphemisms, which Carlin finds repugnant, because they "water down" the language and make a lot of things "meaningless" by couching them in kinder sounding words or phrases that don't impart truth or real meaning. There's a lot of truth to this, but Carlin does belabor the point, and after a while I was starting to say, "Ok, I get the point already!"

He also has a lot of these little "skits" where he will make up a conversation among a couple of people. Some of these are funny, some aren't. A lot are graphic, gross, "dirty" or in various ways the opposite of "political correctness." As I said, he definitely is out to try to offend just about anyone.

There's also some insightful stuff about politics, the irony of various political issues, how politicians are constantly trying to deceive us, and a lot of times doing so by use of language.

Of course there's a lot about various things, not all language-related, that simply piss Carlin off. Some of these are just silly and obviously not to be taken seriously, some are things that most of us would probably find annoying, or at least will once Carlin enlightens us as to why they are so dumb.

I've mainly seen Carlin in some older stand-up routines, a couple of movies, and one other book, Napalm and Silly Puddy, so I don't know if I'm familiar enough with his stuff to comment on how this book compares to earlier work. It was an interesting listen, one with some laugh-out-lound moments, no doubt, but also some interesting thoughts, and a lot of expounding on random stuff that made it a bit repetitive. I wonder if for books like this, a very strategic audio abridgement might actually make it a much more solid listen?

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I just got in the mail an offer from Sprint that might be of interest to anyone thinking of switching over to them for their mobile phone.  Basically, when you get your account with Sprint, within the first 15 days after you activate your phone, you give Sprint the name and number of a current Sprint customer who referred you, and you get credited $25.  So, if you have a friend who has a Sprint account, tell them to go to sprint.com/referralprogram, from which they can email you the offer, and not only will you get $25, but your friend will too.  If you can't find anyone with a Sprint account, I'd be happy to refer anyone, but they limit you to 12 referrals before the end of 2006, and I'm not sure what kind of offers will be available after that.

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In the last few months, however, there have been numerous controversies possibly due to the increasing popularity of Digg.com.  First there was talk about how the top 100 users of Digg submitted more than half of the stories, and so had more influence than the rest of the community who could not spend 10 hours a day submitting stories.

More recently there has been a slew of commentary on how Digg's system for dealing with duplicate entries has been breaking down.  This most recent one got to Digg's front page and generated a huge amount of comments.

Personally, I've found the duplication problem getting worse.  I used to go to Digg and it would take me a while to get through just the first page of stories, so much so that I often didn't even get to the second page.  But more and more, I've been going to the second, third, and fourth pages.  Part of this is due to articles on things I'm just not interested in, but a lot is due to repetition.

I've also been trying to submit articles here and there and when I do searches before submitting I sometimes find not one or two, but half a dozen or more articles on the exact same news item.  And these weren't even items in the top (and up until recently only) category on Digg, technology.

The problem, I think, lies what gave Digg its initial power - that "social" in "social bookmarking.  People are submitting articles so that they are dugg and recognized by others, be they friends or strangers.  It's been called "ego" but whatever you call it, it worked well when there were fewer people because the chance that you were creating a dupe was not as high.  Now that Digg is so popular, chances are that if a story has only been out for an hour, it's already been submitted.  I think this makes some people desperate (since they can't find good articles that haven't been dug) and so they don't search for duplicates and ignore Digg's own warning that their story might be one.

Digg's other tools to prevent duplication don't seem to be working either.  One can mark an article as a duplicate, but what isn't clear is how many of such actions it takes for the duplicate to be removed, or if they are removed at all?  It must be a lot because we still see many of these.  One can comment in the article itself that it's a duplicate, but chances are this won't do anything, other than possibly getting your own comment "dugg down" meaning that your overall rank on Digg goes down.

The problem seems to stem from the idea that people want to be recognized as being special, and that this impulse has superceded the idea of making Digg a better place for the community at large.  I think part of this has to do with what's probably a fairly young demographic at Digg, and we all know that when we were young, we tended to think about ourselves a little more than when we got older and realized the world didn't revolve around us.  Then again, there are plenty of people for whom age has not meant added wisdom in this area!  Anyway, you can be recognized on Digg in at least a couple of different ways.  You can do this in a couple of ways on Digg.  One is to have a high ranking of diggs; the second is to get a story you submitted onto the front page. 

If we agree that the motivation is simply to get recognition, then I think the only way to solve the issue is to remove this recognition.  Otherwise, people will always figure out ways to "game" the system, and given a finite number of new things happening every day, and new articles published on the web, people will simply post duplicates hoping that they can some how pump up their ranking and get their submission on the home page by getting their friends to digg it, or creating duplicate accounts, etc.  But how do you remove recognition from a social site like Digg.com? 

Well, one way to do it is to make the ranking system specific to the person ranking you.  So, for example, if I rank X as being digger whose articles I think are reliable and like to read, then I give them a digg, and if I think they are obnoxious, then I "bury" them (give them a negative digg).  But my ratings are only for me.  They don't get posted anywhere else, save at most on my profile page, but maybe not even there.  The point is, that removing the ranking removes one of the purely selfish reasons for people to submit stories.  You could also opt to make invisible those stories that have been submitted by users who you've previously buried, and highlight stories of those you've dugg.  Or simply have a color-coding scheme to easily pick out the buried users' stories from the dugg users' stories and all the rest.  As for users overall ranking, I think Digg could still tally this, but it would only be for their internal use.  Possibly, people could see their own rankings, but not those of others. 

The second idea is to remove credit to the person who posted a story as soon as it goes on the front page.  That way, no one could say - "hey look, my story was posted to the front page, aren't I great?  Love me!"  However, you could still be dugg or buried by a given user, so your articles might be seen by more or less people depending on how reliable you are.

Whether these suggestions or something else entirely are adopted, I think the problem needs to be addressed by Digg.  We are now seeing "duplicates" submissions of articles about duplicates!  And this blog entry itself is contributing, of course!  Kevin Rose or Jay Adelson, the founders of Digg, need to come out and talk about the issue, be it on Digg, or wherever, or if not talk, then simply do something.  The latest news is about how they are in negotiations now to sell Digg, so this issue, even though it seems to be escalating daily, may not be the first thing on their minds!  If Digg is sold to a large company like News Corp, or another, the problem may get worse before it gets better.  Then again, if we see a massive influx of cash, these guys may have the resources to get their programmers some reinforcements to make some necessary changes.

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Most of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is about Sedaris's odd family.  Stories about them are accounted both from his childhood and adulthood. Sedaris is gay, and often makes fun of his clichéd feminine proclivities growing up.  Even so, this oddness seems to pale in comparison to the personalities of some of his (heterosexual) brothers and sisters.  Possibly it's because we are all used to these clichés by now from TV and movies, but even so, the Sedaris clan all seem to be exceedingly odd.  One can scratch ones head and wonder a bit about this, but then most families have their oddities, and sometimes that accounts for most of the family!  Of course Sedaris makes even the most bizarre and repugnant characteristics cutely funny ones.

A few of the stories Sedaris relates are about his current life with his partner in France, and while I loved his stories in "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" about his trying to learn the French language, and just trying to make sense of French culture, in this book, I preferred the family stories to these. The main exception to this was his relating how he uncovered the Dutch version of Santa Clause and how bizarre he seemed compared to the U.S.
version. This particular story, as well as one or two others, was taken from recordings in front of a live audience, as opposed to the rest of the book, which is your normal, studio-produced audio book.

In the end, if you love Sidaris, you'll probably love this book, and if you hate him, you'll hate this book. If you're unfamiliar with him, here is a selection of audio featuring him on Nation Public Radio.

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It was largely an entertaining read. It covers Conroy's history as a basketball athlete from
the first time he handles a ball (at 10 or so) to his last game as a player for his college, The Citadel. While it's primarily about basketball, including lots of play-by-play reporting using sports lingo which isn't always explained but still understandable, there's
also a lot of about Conroy's life that  has nothing to do with basketball per se - his incredibly cruel father, his discovery of literature and finding his own voice as a writer, his ordeals as a Plebe at The Citadel, and much more. I like the way Conroy mixes in some poetic flourishes into hid descriptions book - kind of like dabs of florescent color on an otherwise straightforward, albeit very interesting picture.

I listened to this book via my subscription to the online audio book service, Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods).  The book is available in print as well, of course. The narration is skillfully handled by Chuck Montgomery, who is also an actor and composer in addition to narrating many audio books.

I only have two minor quibbles with My Losing Season.  The first is that about halfway through the book, I realized that Conroy loves superlatives. Everything is "the best" or "the most" of his life. Most of this has to do with a particular game standing out in some way or another, or a particular performance by himself or another player. Someone I mentioned to, said something to the effect of, "well of course he loves superlatives, honey, he's Southern!"  This was said by a Southerner, of course.

The second qualm is that the ending takes a little while to come. Conroy doesn't just end on his last game at the Citadel, but goes on to talk about players and coaches in subsequent years. The book was written in 2002 and his last game was in 1967, so there's a lot of ground to cover. He talks about the history of his relationship to The Citadel, about his changed relationship with this father over the years, etc. Don't get me wrong, I was certainly interested in finding out about all of these things, but there's gotta be over an hour, maybe two of this "afterword" stuff. I suppose when you're reading a book, you can see clearly something marked "afterword" and you understand that it's seperate from the book itself. But listening to it, either it wasn't marked as such, or I missed it.

These two complaints are pretty minor and I'd definitely recommend it to most people. I know almost nothing about basketball and never watch it, but it does give you a great deal of appreciation for the game and even a desire to learn more about it - although the book is more about how the game was played in college in the 1960's rather than how it's played today, either in college or in the pros.

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For those who enjoy non-fiction, Mountains Beyond Mountains is a fascinating look at a Doctor who's devoted his life to curing disease in one of the poorest countries on the planet - Haiti. Dr. Paul Farmer and his organization, Partners In Health, have been involved for 15 years or more not only in Haiti but in treating multi-drug-resistant TB in Peru and Russia, as well.

The author, Tracy Kidder, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Soul of A New Machine, covers Farmers life growing up, going to college, and his initial experiences in Haiti.  He also covers the perspective of some of the other principles of Partners in Health, including the director, Ophelia Dahl, and others.  The different personalities of these people as compared with Farmer (who it seems is a unique individual), makes for some interesting interpersonal reporting, so it isn't just a story about a saintly doctor who came to a poor country and made everyone well.

I didn't really know much about this book when I started listening to it, since it was one of my wife's selections. I just started listening and thought if it was interesting, I would continue. I did. The narrator, Paul Michael, does an excellent job as usual - he narrated The Da Vinci Code, and as with that one he has lots of fun with the various accents from different nationalities in the book.

I've never been one to watch the commercials for charities showing all the malnourished kids.  I find them incredibly depressing, and the underlying issue to be one of such huge proportions that it's all but insurmountable.  While this book was similarly depressing in some ways, it was also very hopeful. It detailed many of the improvements going on in world health, concentrating on those pushed ahead by Farmer's group.  I found myself routing them on like a sports team, even though I haven't been a real sports fan since I was a kid and following the New York Yankees in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As for Farmer, his life sometimes does seem at times to be that of a saint. On the one hand you admire everything he does, but on the other hand you sometimes wonder if he's actually human.  While he's someone you would might want to emulate, his selflessness, courage, and dedication are so superlative as to be almost unatainable, at least by most of us.

It's probably a great listen for when you might be feeling a bit sorry for yourself, and realize that there are so many people who are living in such wretched conditions that you should be grateful to live in a country where all your creature comforts are taken care of - even if you happen to be within the poorest 10% of us. On the other hand, it also could induce a lot of guilt for not wanting to devote your life, or at least a fair chunk of your time and money, towards helping those who are so less fortunate for the simple reason that they were born in a horribly poor and mismanaged country...

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However, I have been up to some other things besides parenting, specifically as it relates to what I am listening to these days vis-à-vis digital audio.  First a quick bit of history:

I got involved with audio books and what might be called a forerunner of podcasting (at least in terms of subscribing to feeds of magazine, newspaper and radio shows) about 6.5 years ago when I subscribed to Audible.com. I've listened to a lot of books and other programming, but after I got involved with my now wife back in late 2001, the listening slowed somewhat.

Then in late 2004, I started listening to what was then the very new phenomenon of podcasts. Because there were so many, they completely pushed out my audio book listening.  Sure, I could have alternated. But as kind of a news junky, it's hard to start reading history books when there's lots of current event non-fiction or news articles, etc. I also have this tendency to want to complete lists of listening, and the method that seems easiest is to do the shortest things first, thus getting through a large number of list items right away. Unfortunately with podcasts, they just keep piling up! You can subscribe to just a couple, but I was subscribed to 20-30, and even though these were on average a small fraction of the length of an unabridged audio book (and also that I was speeding these up by 50% or so), I was still barely keeping my head above water. All this time my audio books sat dormant, and continued to pile up. I was also spending a considerable amount of time just doing the processing that would speed these podcasts up, organize them in the proper folders, downloading them and transferring them to my iPod, etc.

Back last December I finally axed my Audible account because I simply wasn't listening to books at that point, and didn't want yet another growing pile of content that I was ignoring. Several months later, though, I took advantage of an offer to become a member again for $10/year with a free audio book offer.  There was a book that had just come out, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dillema, that had just come out and was available unabridged at Audible.  I thought I'd spend $10 on it, or half the price I would have had to normally, and gain back some of the priveleges of membership - such as the ability to take advantage of sales, to gift audio books, etc.

In August, I burned out on my podcast habit, and felt like the only thing to bring back a bit of calm was to quit cold turkey and go back to my kindler and gentler days of mainly just listening to audio books.  It's odd, since I now have over 100 audio books that I haven't read, most of them unabridged, that I wouldn't feel the same compulsion to finish them as soon as possible.  But I guess the difference is that these are not podcasts of news events that I feel compelled to be familiar with or else be "out of touch."  Many are novels, but there are plenty of non-fiction titles as well.

I think the seed for this move was generated when I bought my Treo 700P back in May.  I was surprised to see that it had come with a $100 off coupon for some types of Audible memberships.  I was resisting the temptation because at the time I was still totally committed, nay addicted, to podcasts, and so feared digging myself an even deeper hole! I wanted to have some chance of actually finishing what was on my plate! But by the time I had burned out on podcasts, I think I had given up on the thought I'd ever be able to keep up.

The $100 off an Audible.com makes each book "credit" cost about $5.42 (most books are 1 credit), at least if purchasing Audible's Annual Platinum plan. This price is great when you compare it with what you would normally pay at a bookstore or online, save for maybe a used version of some book on eBay.  Then when I was actually trying to sign up when I looked a little more closely at the offer. There's some fine print at the bottom which says "Offer valid for new Audible customers only." Doh! The only way around this is to actually create a new account with Audible and apply the coupon to that new account.  Yes you can do this.  Theoretically you can have as many accounts with Audible that you want.  I don't think Audible cares, as I know many who have multiple accounts.  The one problem with this scenario is that if you want to have all your audio books on your iPod (or other compatible player), you can't.  Well, unless you have only one, or at most two accounts.  You can't activate more than two accounts on a given player.  I suppose you could buy two or more iPods and then rack up accounts in order to take advantage of these discounts, but the added price of the player would kind of defeat the purpose.  In any case, my problem was that my wife had an account as well, which had a number of books I hadn't read and really wanted to.  So I managed to dedicate most of my free time towards reading some of those books, and a few others I ended up skipping after I determined that I wasn't enjoying them enough after the first hour or two to devote another 10+ hours.

So I signed up for the new account that gave me 24 credits.  What do I do with those credits?  So far, the only ones I've used were for a podcast!  Well, that's what Audible calls them anyway.  They are basically the same type of subscriptions that Audible gives you the choice of downloading in the old more manual way or via a feed address.  Unfortunately, as I've found, when you set it up in iTunes as a podcast via the feed they give you, it downloads a file that cannot be sped up as all other Audible content can be on the iPod.  Yes, I still speed things up!  Although I do this via the iPod's built in ability that will only speed a file up by 20% or so, not the 50% I was doing in a much more belabored process with my podcasts earlier.  I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker magazine.  Then I discovered a couple of free audible shows, one of which only comes out every month or two called Ear to the Ground, the other which comes out twice a week, called This is Audible.  Both of these contain excerpts of audio books, interviews with authors, publishers, and others who talk about the books.  Then just a week or two ago I discovered that my new account came with a complimentary subscription to the New York Times!  So now I have around 27 hours of subscription/podcast content via my Audible account!  I can't escape the podcasts!

In an effort to try to organize things better, I went through my very long wish list on my old account to look for stuff that I could get rid of. I hadn't done this in a while and I had lots of old stuff, and as it turned out a good amount of abridged stuff which Audible
never did offer an unabridged version of. I made the rule that I wasn't going to have anything abridged on the list, nor books that were more than 100 or so years old, since that would put them in the public domain and I could possibly get versions for free via Libravox or the Guttenberg Project. I used to add books to my wish list because they seemed interesting, and that's fine, but after 2 or 3 or more years if they had no reviews and a rating of 3.5 or less, I didn't have the confidence that these were books worth  listening to. I was able to get my list down from a whopping 308 to a much more manageable 60 or so. Of course, I've also been adding new ones to this list due to hearing some of the books on This is Audible or Ear to the Gound which really interested me.  But I've also paired things a bit by actually buying a few titles via special sales that Audible has had in the last month or so - they seem to be having sales pretty regularly now, maybe gearing up for even bigger ones towards the holidays in an effort to make some big sales numbers by the end of the year?

The point of this is that I've been listening to a lot of stuff, and have even managed to post a bunch of short reviews on an Audible Yahoo Group, but I thought I'd start posting them here as well, since I'm not posting much else these days!  So watch for a bunch of these reviews as I have time to find them, spruce them up slightly and post them here.

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When I moved to the Washington DC area, I marveled at all the events that were taking place on a daily basis. While DC is smaller than New York, if you take into account all the outlying areas, which had their own community events, you couldn’t do half of what was out there even if you didn’t work and dedicated all your free time to going to these things around the region every day.

Yet, whenever I had guests come to visit, I would often look in the Washington Post and not really find anything that interesting. Sure, there were museum exhibits and concerts, but after a while, trekking through the same museums gets a bit tiresome, and concerts can get expensive, and the smoke and noise eventually made them not the best venue, especially for older guests.

A couple of years ago we moved out to a suburb of DC called Vienna (Virginia). It’s a cute town that isn’t filled with the big box stores that you find in many other places. It does have some small strip malls, but about the only chains are a few grocery stores, and fast food restaurants, a Michaels, and that’s about it. Most of the stores are small one-shop deals. While it's not old compared to many New England towns, at over 150, it also isn't like some of the newer suburbs not far away that are filled with townhouses and McMansions.  Among the more unique businesses in Vienna is a place that’s a coffee shop, music store, and concert venue in one, called Jammin’ Java. There are a couple of high-end wine stores that have just opened up this year. There are some great bicycle stores (The W&OD bike path runs right through the center of Vienna), some wonderful bakeries, a surprisingly large collection of ethnic restaurants, and also more high-end gourmet places in addition to the fast food, diners, etc.  There are a number of gardens and parks in Vienna, some of which  host outdoor concerts or movies, and there two weekly farmers markets.  Vienna hosts street fairs, parades, a large variety of classes and events at its community center, town hall, library, and various businesses around the town.

The feel of Vienna to me, at least, is that of a “small” town, but it has a lot of resources, and things to do and see. The charms of this town weren’t lost on Money Magazine, which recently named Vienna it’s 4^th best place to live in the country.

Vienna’s website lists some of the more official events like parades, town meetings, etc., but I always thought there should be some organized list of events that was more comprehensive. Of course, we don’t just stay in Vienna all year, but travel around the region, and to other states, but the idea of having a list of things to do within walking distance or slightly more had some odd appeal to me. Maybe this had to do with growing up in Manhattan and being able to walk to many things. Or maybe it was just the fictionalized places on TV that charmed me – like Sicily, Alaska, or Everwood, Colorado.

Still, even for this small town, compiling such a list would have been a big pain. There have been online calendar systems out there for a while, but when Google launched theirs earlier this year, it impressed me as being easier and more powerful than previous ones. You can create your own calendars for private use, or use with a select group, or have one that’s completely public. You can have as many calendars as you want displayed, or you can “filter” out the ones you want to see at any given moment. 

A bunch of people or businesses have started public Google calendars meant to help promote a business or resource and aid clientele. So, I thought, why not create something for Vienna? I searched for something like this but couldn’t find anything. I searched for calendars by Vienna businesses or associations and the only thing I found was one for the large concert arena called Wolftrap, whose address is technically Vienna, but which is still even further from the Vienna town center than the large business and commercial center called Tysons Corner whose postal address is McLean, VA.

So, I decided to start my own Vienna Google Calendar. Luckily some businesses like Jammin’ Java and the local Wholefoods at least have an online calendar, and of course there is the Vienna Virginia website’s calendar. To these I added some other events that I found from the local Michael’s, the Vienna-Tysons Regional Chamber of Commerce, Fairfax County Parks & Recreation, etc. I’m sure I’m missing a lot, but even so, it seems there’s stuff going on just about every day of the week, and usually multiple overlapping things, forcing you to pick and choose. Now I’ll admit that some of these things may not be of interest to many people, but still, it’s nice to know that there are lots of things going on just a few minutes away.

I’m trying to update the calendar as often as time allows, but for one already busy person, it can be a challenge. That’s why I’d like to make a request for some help. If you are a Vienna resident and come across this blog entry and would like to help out with the calendar, I would be grateful!

You can view an html version of the Google Calendar by clicking on the following link:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=0819geutosia1q06k831pnokv8%40group.calendar.google.com  

But I recommend a more powerful way to view the calendar – create your own Google Calendar account. You can create your own calendar(s) for personal/family/friends, etc. And then you can search for public calendars of some interest and add those as ones you “subscribe to.” In addition to my Google Calendar, I also subscribe to Wolftrap’s, to one for Washington Cultural Events, and one for another eclectic coffee shop in Falls Church, VA. To find the Vienna Google Calendar, just go to Settings/Calendars/, hit the Add Calendars button at the bottom of the page, and then enter “Vienna, VA” in the Search Criteria, and it should be the first one that comes up.

In any case, it is kind of ironic that I’m doing this now, since I have an 11-month-old child that demands most of my free time and the only place she likes to be taken to is the neighborhood park!

Oh, I forgot you can actually embed Google calendar's in web pages, so here's an embeded version of the calendar:

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Another key new feature is the Treo 700P's ability to handle memory cards that can hold more than 2GB, the limit of previous Treos. Although installing a hack could let you work around that limit on those older models, it required some degree of technical expertise to do. Now you can just plug in your 4GB SD card and it will work as a 4GB card without any extra work. Presumably when 8GB SD cards and even 16GB and 32GB SD cards come out in the next year or two, these will all work as well without additional software or hacking.  While 4GB is still low compared to the storage on some MP3 players, it's large enough to hold dozens of albums worth of music, not too shabby for a card the size of a postage stamp.

Motion Apps’ mOcean is an MP3 player for the Treo that syncs with your iTunes library and actually has an interface that looks and acts a lot like an iPod. Obviously the Treo doesn’t have the famed iPod “clickwheel,” so instead mOcean provides a graphical version of the clickwheel that you can use via the Treo’s touchscreen. In fact, Apple is rumored to be coming out with similar touchscreen clickwheel interface for a future Video iPod that will do away with the physical clickwheel in order to recoup space for an expanded screen. It almost feels like I have a future iPod in my hands when I’m using mOcean! mOcean actually improves on the iPod in some ways due to the Treo having a keyboard – for example you can skip to the S's in a large list of songs my just hitting the 's' key, rather than have to scroll with the clickwheel until you got all the way to the s's. Although though there are some minor inconsistencies that probably in many cases only advanced iPod/iTunes users would notice, for the most part it is an extremely close replica of the iPod/iTunes experience, and Motion Apps appear to be constantly working on new features and functionality. The only obvious shortfall is the lack of ability to play AAC files and video files, but other programs are available on the Treo that that will do this, like the free TCPMP. 

MyTunesRSS is a streaming server that you run on a PC that’s connected to the Internet. It syncs up with your iTunes library and makes your PC a streaming server for any audio and even video content that is in your iTunes (although for video you have a really good, fast connection for it to work well). For those of us with tens of gigabytes of audio and video files in our libraries, this allows you to have immediate access to your entire library without having to go out and buy ten or twenty 4GB memory cards, or have to wait until they come out with larger capacity cards. Of course, your ability to play these files is dependent on being in an area where you can get a data connection, and probably even an EvDO connection, which is still mostly in major metropolitan areas. So, for those who spend any time traveling or in more rural areas, this may not be a great solution.

Earlier this year, a company that has been making other well-known and useful software for the Treo and other Palm devices for years came out with a way to do this all wirelessly. Some quick background first. The wireless technology which I’m referring to here, and which you’ve undoubtedly heard of by now, is called “Bluetooth.” It was designed specifically for devices to communicate with other devices at short range (30 feet or less) and at relatively slow speeds (much slower than wireless networking known as Wifi). Probably the most popular use for this technology so far is the wireless headsets for cell phones that you might see planted in or over people's ear.  If that ear is on the side of their head that's not visible to you, it's easy to initially think they are talking to themselves when they are actually having a phone conversation. While Bluetooth has been very useful for this use, it does not, as you might expect, allow you to listen to audio other than that of a phone call. To listen to stereo music, you need to have a phone and a device that implements something called an Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, or A2DP, which allows wireless digital streaming of different types of digital audio formats fromone device to another.  Unfortunately even the latest greatest Treo does not support A2DP. Fortunately for us, the genius programmers at Softick worked around this lack of capability of the Treo so that it could actually do A2DP with compatible Bluetooth stereo headsets that have started to become available in the last year or two. So now you don’t even have to bother with taking the Treo out of your pocket or off of your belt to answer a call while your listening to something. You can do everything wirelessly, including pausing the audio and skipping to the next or previous track. I can see one really nice use of this for me – I can now do yard work with a headset on and keep my Treo on the deck, safe from getting wet or full dirt!

Finally, through yet additional third-party software and services, you can listen to or view a slew of additional content on your Treo that will not be possible on an iPod unless Apple actually develops an iPod phone that does EvDO, or an iPod with Wifi built in. Orb is a product that lets you use you stream all your audio, video, and even pictures to any computer capable of receiving them, and it has been tested successfully with the Treo 700P. Not only that, but if you have a TV Tuner card in your PC you can actually stream all the live channels you get through that tuner card as well. A similar service/product called Slingbox also will also let you do this, although they are still working on the software that will let you do this with a Treo. For those who subscribe to Satellite Radio, there is a way to use your Treo to stream your XM or Serius channels directly to your Treo. There are other streaming servers like Gloonet, and I’m sure ones that I’ve not even heard of yet, but the ones I’ve listed are probably the best known.

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Quoting from Engadget:

I think this is a great step forward.  Finally, one of the big players, Apple, is allowing their machines to run both OS's.  Then again, MS doesn't make machines themselves so they weren't exactly preventing this.  In a sense, the ball was really mostly in Apple's court all along.  And there were ways to run Windows in a slow emulator mode, but now that Macs come with the same Intel-based CPU's that have been running Windows all along, it was that much easier to get this to work.  And hackers did get it done.  Thankfully, instead of being obnoxious and trying to sue or putting up more technical roadblocks, Apple wisely saw that potential users still needed Windows for some applications which are not available for the Mac.

Personally, this makes me a lot more likely to buy a Mac as my next computer.  I have been using Windows now for about 15 years, and am completely comfortable with it, but much of what I do with my home system now could just as easily be done in OSX.  Having the added protection from a better security model that guards against viruses and zombifying and such is a big plus.  Oh, and of course some of the applications on the Mac I've heard about also appeal (Final Cut Pro and iLife come to mind).  But there are still applications that only exist for the PC which I need - specifically ones I use for programming.  So until now, I couldn't go completely Mac without having a second computer with XP on it.

There are a couple of downsides though.  One is that you can only run one OS at a time.  This is expected, of course, but wouldn't it be great to plug in two monitors and have one running XP and the other OS/X off of one system?  If it were even possible, it would probably be sluggish even on a pretty high-performance machine.  A more realistic downside is the price.  Apple's systems generally have come at a premium due, no doubt, to lack of competing forces as with PC's.  Apple is the only company making Mac hardware.  Some argue that you get what you pay for and the quality of Macs isworth the extra money.  Yet, there have been hardware problems with Macs that even I have heard of (not being someone who keeps up with the Mac world), and while I've had my share of problems with home-built PC systems, some systems I've bought, say from Dell, have lasted many years without problems.  I know others who have had constant problems, so most of this is anecdotal I realize.  I'm not that concerned either that my computer having to look stylish.  I just want it to work well and not to have to spend a small fortune on it.  This summer, my Dell laptop, which serves as my main (only) computer, will turn 3 years old.  It got a slight upgrade a few months back when I added a gig of memory, but typically three years is about the longest I've gone before upgrading over the years.  With a new child, though, that may have to stretch a bit longer, and as much as I might love to get a new Intel Mac, I fear that I really couldn't justify the difference in price at this point now that my money goes to feed more than just my own mouth. Maybe I'll just have to settle for getting a bare bones Mac Mini?  Then again, in another year, both that Mac Mini as well as my 2Ghz plain P4 laptop will be even more noticably sluggish as I continue to challenge them with more video and photo editing tasts, video encoding, etc.p>

In any case, for many of you out there, I think this may become a turning point where people no longer have to pick and choose wich platform to use.  They can have both Mac and Windows.  With MS delaying Vista even longer, this becomes that much more tempting for those getting frustrated with Windows' security issues or those simply being curious to try out the Mac.  Now all Apple has to do is allow their OS to run on non-Apple hardware.  This would allow people to buy much cheaper machines and I think could only increase Apple's market share.  Then again, Apple is constantly saying that it is a hardware company first and foremost.  Perhaps, though, with their foray into media with the iTunes Music Store, their collaboration with Disney and other media players to bring digital video to the masses, etc., they will see that they aren't mainly a hardware company, but a company that has many facets - an OS company, a hardware company, a software company, a media company, etc.  I doubt this will happen any time soon, but part of me feels like Apple's need to control the hardware end of it is a confession from them that they can't produce hardware that competes in terms of value.  Instead they need to artificially limit competition so that consumers only have one choice.  Oh well, at least they are now giving people the choice of what OS to run on their Macs!

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We're sorry, but there's been an error delivering this podcast. Please contact podcasts@npr.org for updates and more information.

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Think Secret can confirm recent rumblings that Apple is nearing completion of a completely revamped video iPod that will shed the ubiquitous mechanical click wheel for a touch screen and will sport a 3.5-inch diagonal display.advertisementThis video iPod, which has been in development and on the table since before Apple released the 5G iPod last year with video playback, will feature a display that will occupy the entire front face of the device. Sources who have seen the device report that it features a digital click wheel, one that overlays the touch-sensitive display and appears when a finger touches it and disappears when the finger is removed.

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I urge you to also read some additionl material that will really reduce your frustrations with your new iPod.  Because Apple has a reputation for making things as easy as possible, they often don't put information about how to do things they deem too "advanced" into the paltry manual that's included with their product.  While this is good for our trees, and perhaps a fair decision considering a lot of people won't read manuals anyway, it often means that when people do want to do things that aren't quite basic, they get lost.  Well, luckily, there are plenty of places where you can get information online, so I thought I'd mention just a few.

Ilounge.com: this is a great place for information about iPods, an incredibly extensive collection of iPod accessory reviews, and a very active forum of users, some of whom are very knowledgeable (much more than me!) and are very willing to help those new to the iPod.

Apple iPod Yahoo! Group: If you're more comfortable with an email list than a bulletin board, than the Apple iPod Yahoo! Group has some great information and users willing to help (including myself).  One of the resident experts is a guy named Kirk McElhearn, who's written a number of computer books, including a bunch on the Mac and the iPod.

Apple: Apple has a great support site for the iPod with answers to frequently asked questions, forums, and a special area called iPod 101 which has some great tutorials for beginners which go into a lot more detail then their manual.

But lets get back to Video, shall we?  Where to begin?  Probably the thing that comes to mind before even thinking about the iPod itself should be "what kind of video am I going to put on my iPod and where will I get it?"  It's a very basic first question that probably most of us don't think about because we already have a specific source of video in mind.  Even so, many people may also be unaware of some other kinds of video that may prove as valuable as the one they did have in mind! There are at least four major places to look for video that I can think of:

Where to Get Video

1. DVD's: the source probably most people think of first is that of their own DVD library. You can't simply tell iTunes to take your DVD and put it on your iPod. You need additional pieces (or piece) of software.
   
2. Home Video: probably the second most obvious source is video that you've shot yourself via a camcorder. You will probably need to convert this into a format that's compatible with the iPod. 
   
3. Online: Not quite as obvious is video you might find on the Internet. Ok, one of these is very obvious (iTunes), but the rest may not be:
      
   1. iTunes: the iTunes Music Store (which you can get to only through the iTunes program that came with your iPod) has a growing collection of TV shows ranging from really old ones to currently running ones, all selling at $2 a pop. It even has some free videos - short clips from Saturday Night Live, previews, short featurettes akin to what you might see on a DVD, etc. So far, there are no feature-length movies, but I have no doubt that these will come at some point. None of the iTunes video content require any real additional work other than making the purchase transaction and waiting as your file gets downloaded to your computer.
      
   2. File Sharing: there are certainly ways you can download copyrighted material illegally off the Internet. The entertainment industry, as it's done before, is bungling yet another paradigm shift to online media.  The can't think  creatively about how to work with this new world, but instead want to impose their old rules which just don't work here.  Eventually they will catch up, but in the mean time, they are forcing many people to illegally download material because they aren't providing a legal (or affordable) way to get it legally.  While we can all disagree on what should and shouldn't be legal, I'm not going to suggest that you do anything that is obviously not legal, like downloading a movie that you've never paid for legally, and which you could easily do by buying the DVD or even renting it. 
      
   3. Free Stuff: Why limit yourself (and put yourself in legal jeopardy) by downloading illegal material when there's plenty of perfectly legal stuff out there? This massive amount of free video can be found primarily as:
      
      
      1. Video Podcasts: if you haven't heard of "podcasts" you may have been living under a rock for the last year. Podcasts started out as just audio, but now come in video as well. They are basically just audio or video files that are hosted online for people to download. However, they usually are not just isolated single files, but an ongoing "show" that comes out at some regular interval and which you can, with the help of software like iTunes, subscribe to so that they are automatically downloaded and then transferred to your iPod whenever you plug it in. This makes the process of getting new episodes to watch something that doesn't require any additional work after the initial setup. As I said, iTunes lets you subscribe to podcasts (just choose the "Podcasts" genre within the iTunes Music Store), and there are a bunch of other podcast applications out there as well. While not all of these video podcasts will play on an iPod without conversion, I think more and more are being offered in iPod-compatible formats.
         
      2. Public Domain: this content includes old movies and TV shows which have gone into the public domain mainly due to their copyright having run out, although some may have simply been offered to the public domain to start with or as a gift to the public way before the copyright would have expired. You can download these from the site Archive.org. There may be other online sources, but Archive.org is definitely the biggest.
         
      3. And More: there are still other sources of free content which aren't podcasts and also aren't on Archive.org. These include Google Video (here's Google's instructions on downloading video for your iPod) , and various other sources. There are at least a couple of websites that  provide an ongoing list of new sources of video specifically made for the iPod which are very helpful: freeipodvideos.org and podguide.tv.
         
4. TiVo: yes, you can take the programs that you've recorded on your TiVo and transfer them to your iPod. Currently this isn't supported by TiVo, although they have stated that they are planning to offer this functionality soon. In the mean time, there's a third-party application that claims to do this from TVHarmony.com. I tried it, but it seemed to go so slowly that it would have taken many, many hours to convert just a 30-minute video, so something must have been wrong. Whether you use this or an upcoming TiVo product, you still have to get your video from your TiVo box to your computer, and that can sometimes be a slow process depending on what kind of setup you have. If you have a different DVR than a TiVo, in particular one made by a Cable or Satellite provider, chances are you won't be able to convert video programs on it to your iPod. This may change, but for now you can't do it as far as I know. Some of these companies have stated that they will be creating the ability to put the video on a portable device, but that device is not the iPod.

Adding Video to your iPod

Ok, so you've gotten your video that hopefully is in iPod-compatible format (if not we'll deal with that later), but now it's still just on your computer, you need to actually get it onto your iPod. While this is an easy task for anyone who's owned an iPod before, for new iPod owners it may not be. If you buy videos (or download some of the free ones) off of the iTunes Music Store, then you don't really need to worry - they are automatically added to your iTunes library and transferred to your iPod the next time you connect it to your computer. The same should hold true if you subscribe to a video podcast via iTunes.

If you've gotten a video from somewhere else, though, you will need to add it to your iTunes library. First, open iTunes if its not already open. Then in the File menu, choose "Add File to Library." This will open up a dialog box that will let you browse through your computer's file system so that you can locate that video file. Once you find it, select it and hit the Open button, and the file should then appear in your iTunes library.

There are a couple ways to look at your videos.  One is via the "Videos" area in the "source" menu on the upper right:

If you don't see such a menu item, than you may have it turned off in iTunes.  To make it visible, Choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click on the "General" tab, which is the first, leftmost tab on the window that comes up, and make sure there's a checkmark next to "Videos":

Clicking on the "Videos" in the Source  menu brings up a special page with a black background and thumbnail images representing the first second in each of the video clips, their title, and their duration (see screen capture above).  Unfortunately, when iTunes displays this page, it needs to look inside each video clip to grab that thumbnail, and so it can take some time, especially if your computer isn't the fastest and/or you have more than a handful of videos.  Personally, I like to use the regular iTunes Library listing.  You can see a lot more information, like when the video was added to your library, a rating if you've made one for it, comments, etc.  However, if you have a ton of music on your iPod, you may not see the video file that you've just added right away in your library, let alone others that you've added before. A good way to filter your library to only show videos is by activating the search bar in iTunes. You do this by selecting "Show Search Bar" in the edit menu. If you only see the option "Hide Search Bar" that means the search bar is already visible. Here's what it looks like:

Just click on the "Videos" and you will only see the videos in your library – this is a good way to keep track of these files if you have hundreds or thousands of music or audio book files on your iPod and don't want to keep scrolling through these to find your videos.

Once these files are listed in your iTunes library, they will be transferred the next time you plug in your iPod. However, if the video isn't compatible, you will get a warning from iTunes when it's transferring to the iPod, which brings us to our next subject:


Video Compatibility

The iPod can't simply play any old video file. Just as you can't play a tape in a CD player, there are different file "formats" for video, and not all are compatible with the iPod. The iPod will only play a couple of different types of video file formats. They are both types of the file format known as MPEG4. One is called H.264 (also known as "AVC" or "Part 10"), and the other is sometimes just called "MPEG4," but to be more exact should be called "MPEG4 Simple Profile" or just "MPEG4 SP." If you look at the actual file, you might see a file extension (a few letters/numbers after the main file name) of ".AVI" or "WMV" or ".MP4" or ".M4V" or ".MOV." Only the last three are possibly (but not always) compatible with the iPod. Even if the file is in H.264 or MPEG4 SP, it won't necessarily play on the iPod. There are some other settings within the video file that may not allow for this.

So how do you deal with this issue of compatibility? First of all, you can avoid it completely by using video content that has been made specifically for the iPod, downloaded from the iPod Music Store, and other places online. If you can't find video that is already in iPod Format, however, you can actually convert it, which can be easy or hard depending on the tool you use, and perhaps a bit of luck. In order to convert video into an iPod-compatible format from a non-compatible one, you need to use at least one of a number of different programs:

Converting Video

Video clips are a bit more straightforward than convernting DVD's, so lets go over these first. There are a few free options as well as many that will cost you, but usually not a very large sum.

Free Options
iTunes	This is a very new option as of this writing. Just last week, Apple came out with a new version of the free iTunes program (version 6.0.2), that I believe uses the same conversion engine that's in their $30 QuickTime Pro application. Pros: it's free, it's integrated into iTunes so you don't have to run a separate program, and it's very simple – you just add the video file to your iTunes library, then choose "Convert Selection For iPod" in the Advanced menu. Cons: it takes a very long time compared to other methods and it's not as flexible. For a 14-minute video I tried, it took about an hour and a half. If you extrapolate this out, converting one 2-hour movie would take around 12 hours! It also doesn't let you control how your video is converted. *
Videora	Videora iPod Converter is the other free application that until last week was the only option for Windows PC users if you didn't want to pay to convert. Pros: it's very flexible, and it's free. You can tell it how to convert your files in many ways – by the screen dimensions, the frame rate, the quality/size (bit rate), even what kind of audio quality you want along with the video. In addition, you can queue up a series of files you want to convert without having to come back to your computer after each is done. It also can convert files in a much shorter time than iTunes or Quicktime Pro – as low as around 15 minutes or so for a 14-minute video. Cons: the major downside to Videora is that it is not particularly easy to use. It's free and the people who created it haven't come out with a new version for over two months. It's beta software, which means not all the bugs or user interface design issues have been worked out, and while they have a very useful discussion forum, it's the fellow users who provide the answers, not the programmers, so they can only guess at some things, and of course can't make fixes to the actual software. There is no real official support. If you are not afraid of spending some time trying to figure things out, it's perfectly usable, but you will probably have to look through the discussion forums a lot as you run into inevitable problems. I've also posted a couple of entries (here and here) myself that go into a fair amount of detail about converting using Videora that might be helpful.
ffmpegX	ffmpegX is a UNIX application that was ported to Mac OSX (which is a varant of UNIX).  While it may be more streightforward than the typical UNIX command-line application, it may not be as simple as many other programs made for the Mac.  Since I don't own a Mac, I can't really speak to how simple this is to use or how well it works, but the engine it uses is used by many of these other converters Windows.  If you are a Mac user and have used this, some feedback would be great!
iSquint	Another free Mac converter, iSquint looks like it will give you a lot of recommendations and hand-holding, but still let you tweak settings if you need to.  Since I don't have a Mac, I couldn't evaluate it directly, but it seems to be the preferred converter out there for Macs.  If anyone has used it, feedback would be great
3gp Converter	3gp Converter is a free Windows program that I don't think tons of people use or even know about.  It apparently is developed by a developer or group of developers in Japan.  They don't have an English language site, but here's a Google-translated site which you might be able to at least glean a little from.  Fortunately the program itself does have different language versions and there's a simple but good tutuorial on how to use it here.  The program itself is very simple.  You just drag your video file onto it, and it converts it.  It lets you pick a few different options in terms of bit rate settings, that yield a H.264 variations, and one high-quality, high resolution MPEG4 SP version suitable for outputting to TV.  It converted all the video files I through at it, but I didn't test every conceivable file, so their could be ones that it still has problems with.  Still, for a free program, there's no reason not to use this one until (or if) you run into problems.  The one problem I did encounter was that it doesn't seem to be able to format widescreen videos properly.  There are no options for dealing with different aspect ratios, so it just stuffs everything into the same standard dimensions, so widescreen movies get squeezed and so look wrong. Maybe a new version will deal with this (the developer seems to come out with a new version somewhat regularly, although the last version was almost two months ago), and looking at their configuration files, one might just be able to change the resolutions there, but that would mean some extra work that detracts from the simplicity of this program. I would say, though, that for programs that are not widescreen, this is by far the easiest program I've used, albeit with few ways to customize the output.  But if you're looking for something that requires no learning curve and still gives you more output options than iTunes and does it several times faster, this is probably your best bet.  It also happens to be one of only two programs (the other being iTunes) out of all of these (shareware and commercial ones included), that automatically adds the video to your iTunes library.
Nero Recode	I know that a number of people have gotten this Windows application to work, but I could not.  Nero Recode is one of the many products within the collection of products branded as Nero.  Initially I was confused about this and thought you could only use it if you bought the commercial product called Nero Ultra.  That includes Nero Recode, but you can also download Nero Recode for free.  In any case, I was able to convert files that would play through iTunes, but no matter how careful I was to customize these according to the settings that I knew would work on the iPod, these videos would not transfer.  So, while you might be able to get this to work for you if you work at it, it's probably not going to be easy for the beginner.  It lets you see a lot of information and particularly for DVD conversions (you still need a seperate program to remove a copy-protected DVD's encryption - see below), it looks like it would be very useful as far as picking a given audio track, subtitles, etc.

* What does this mean and why would you care? When converting a video file, just like when converting an audio file, you can make the end product smaller (so that you can fit more on your iPod). This size goes hand in hand with the quality of the video and is expressed as a measurement of "bit rate." The higher the bit rate, the higher the quality and the bigger the file (and the longer the conversion will take to some extent).  In addition to how small you make the file itself, you can also change the actual dimensions of the video as seen on the screen. ITunes just converts everything to the exact dimensions of the iPod's screen, which is 320x240 pixels. In most cases, that's fine, but if you ever want to be able to show these videos on a TV (or your computer), the small dimensions blown up to a 19" Monitor or 27" TV will not look good at all! More ondisplaying your video from your iPod to your TV below.

Of course, you don't have to go with the free options at all. Even if you are on a budget, most of the options that cost money are only around $30, and hey, you spent $300-400 for that iPod and probably a bunch more for a case and/or some other accessories, right? So what's another $30 for a program that will do all your video conversion chores? These are all Windows programs - I've yet to see any for the Mac that aren't free except for Quicktime Pro which is now somewhat irrelevant now that iTunes can do the same conversions it can

The problem really is in choosing the right one of these programs for you. There are a growing number of these programs and probably a lot of similarity between them.  I've tried out a bunch of these to test them, but haven't spent nearly the time on them that I have with Videora, so my personal recommendation would actually be to read these micro reviews and then download and try out the ones that sound good to you (or all of them for that matter), since they all have trial versions for free download.  Those trial versions have limitations that make them unusable or at least very impractical for anything but testing purposes, but they will give you a good idea about how easy they are to use and how well they work..  

Options at an Added Price
PQDVD	PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter is the application that I seem to hear mentioned about most online, probably because it also lets you record DVD's (see below).  You can convert many different types of video files with it and specify quality/size (bit rate) settings, dimensions of the screen, whether you want to crop or stretch the image to fill more/less of the iPod's (or your TV's) screen, etc.  It makes many of these options fairly easy to understand in a graphical, uncluttered way, and the conversion (as with most of these non-free programs), is pretty quick. However, PQDVD doesn't have quite the flexibility of some of the others.  Basically you sacrifice some flexibility for ease-of-use.	$35
Cucusoft	Cucusoft iPod Video Converter is more flexible in some ways than PQDVD, as it lets you specify the type of encoding you want to use (similar to Videora).  But unlike Videora, it also gives you recommendations for the best choice of settings and also gives you more information about how various settings will affect your final video. Cucusoft also, like Videora, has a batch feature so that you can give it multiple files and then let it run for a long time without the need to come back and tell it to convert each and every one.  Unfortunately Cucusoft was the only program of the ones here that I got to work in the first place which didn't automatically determine the correct dimensions for the widescreen video I fed it, so this means a bit more work in figuring that out for different videos.	$29
Xilisoft	Xilisoft iPod Video Converter lets you customize settings, but doesn't give you much help in this area.  There are pull-down lists of possible settings, but many of these have just one option, and so if you don't like it, you have to type in your own.  If you don't know what you're doing, this could very easily create files that aren't compatible in some way with the iPod.  So it seems that it doesn't provide much in the way of ease-of-use. To me, this seems the closest program in some ways to the free Videora, except that it doesn't allow the user to set up different profiles for different types of convesions, and it costs $30. I attempted to convert a test .avi file (which converted fine on all the other products), but the end result couldn't even be added to my iTunes library, let alone to the iPod.  This was using the default settings for the program.  Perhaps I needed to change them, but the point is here that this is not a program for beginners so I'm not sure why anyone would pay $30 for it when a similarly difficult program is available for free.	$29
ImTOO	I'm not sure which of these programs came first, but it appears that ImTOO is just a rebranding of Xilisoft or visa versa.  The prices for each of the conversion programs, the dvd-ripping programs, and the bundles are identical.  And if you look at the screenshots of Xilisoft and of ImTOO, and you will see they are also virtually identical!	$29
WinAVI	WinAVI 3GB/MP4/PSP/iPod Video Converter (maybe they need to come up with a catchier name?) has some interesting features which I'm not sure I'd use, like being able to flip the image upside down and soften it.  (What I'd really like to see is something that would increase the brightness of an image since some darker videos are difficult to see if you have a protective screen that produces glare and you're not in a dark room.) WinAVI lets you control the dimensions of the video and the bit rate settings, although the numbers they use seem not to coincide with what the standard bit rate options are.  It will also let you split the output file into multiple files, or merge multiple input files into one output file.  I'm not sure what I would use those for, but I know some people have uses for these features. A batch mode also adds to the functionality.	$25
AVOne	AVOne iPod Video Converter seems the least polished of any of these programs.  First of all, it took much longer to convert the file.  It's batch feature doesn't seem to work.  It has only a few built-in profile setups, and while it lets you create your own profiles with many settings options, it gives you absolutely no help in figuring out what those settings should be.  Finally, after a couple of tries of specifying exactly where I wanted my output file to be saved, after converting (which took a lot longer than the other programs), I simply could not locate any output file on my computer.	$25
Total Video Recorder	Total Video Recorder is the most expensive converter.  It is fairly easy to use and understand, and has a lot of customization features if you want to tweak things.  Unfortunately, while it was able to convert some video files, it was unable to convert one that I had downloaded from a digital camcorder.  The other programs didn't have such a problem, except for Videora which also couldn't convert it.  The resulting file when played in iTunes was covered with green and red blocks constantly moving.  At first I thought this was feature that prevented one from using a trial version for real use, but after converting another file that wasn't from my video camera, it played fine in iTunes.  I was able to transfer both files to my iPod.  So far so good, except when I tried to play either one, not only did the iPod not play the files, but playing them actually caused the iPod to reset!   I did not use any special settings for these conversions, so while there may be some ways to avoid these problems, it's another case of a program that takes a lot of extra work.  While I didn't mind this extra work for a free program like Videora, it seems a bit too much when paying $45!  Some people have no problem with this program, so, as I stated at the beginning, you might want to try it out - even though I didn't get it working doesn't mean you might not have great luck with it.	$45

Once you convert your video to an iPod-compatible format, you still need to add them to your iTunes library in order to have them transferred to your iPod, so check out the section about doing this above.

ITunes to iPod

As I mentioned above, if your video isn't compatible with the iPod, it won't transfer to it even if you've been able to add it to iTunes and even if iTunes can play your video.  iTunes can play many kinds of video files, but as I've detailed above, the iPod has a lot more limitations.  However, there does appear to be a problem that some people have run into when trying to transfer video to their iPod even when it is compatible.  That problem is in a setting in iTunes that turns off automatic transfers of videos.  Some people have suggested that this is actually the default setting, so I would recommend also double-checking that you have this set correctly.  You will need to first plug your iPod into your computer, and when your computer recognizes the iPod, choose Preferences from the Edit menu.  Then go to the iPod tab, which is the second from the left.  Here make sure that the topmost "Automatically update all videos" is selected:

Note that this only applies to those who have their iTunes set to automatically synch their files. If you have it set for manual transfer, then this tab will be disabled. In this case, like with music files, you just have to drag the video file from your iTunes library onto the iPod icon in iTunes in order to transfer a video to it.

DVD's

For DVD's, it can be a little more complicated than converting a video clip that you download off the Internet from one of the free sources I've mentioned, or via the iTunes Music Store. DVD's were never meant to be converted or copied. They contain an encryption scheme called CSS (Content Scrambling System) that is supposed to prevent this. Within just a couple of years after DVD's hit the market, though, CSS was cracked and this crack, known as DeCSS, became widely available on the net both as pure code, as well as parts of numerous programs designed to allow the average user to "decrypt" their DVD's. Depending on which country you live in, these programs may or may not be legal to use. The whole issue of legality is very confusing. On the one hand, in the U.S., "fair use" seems to dictate that one should be able to freely make backup copies of a DVD you own for personal use. On the other hand, part of the Digital Milenium Copyright Act specifically forbids compromising the copy-protection for a DVD. There are numerous court cases that are trying to determine exactly what is legal and what isn't, but in the mean time, such programs are available and being used ubiquitously, making things that much more uncertain.

In any case, in order to put your DVD's into an iPod compatible format, you will need to transfer the file to your hard drive, remove the encryption, and then finally convert it to a format that's compatible with the iPod. This can require one or two different programs depending on what kind of functional is included.  Again, there are both free ones and ones that have a price tag:

Free Options
DVD Decryptor	The developers of this Windows application were forced to remove it and they were eventually bought by Macrovision.  One can find the application on the net, but it's legality is in question.  It will allow you to break the encoding of a DVD and transfer it to your hard drive, after which various conversion applications can be used to make it iPod-compatible.  Videora has a tutorial on their site on how to use it to create the inital file.  Be forwarned, though, this is not a program designed with ease-of-use in mind.	$0
DVDFab Decryptor	DVDFab Decrypter is another program that's similar to DVD DecrypterThis is another program similar to DVD Decryptor but with a simpler infterface.  It copies the files from the DVD to one's hard drive and removes the encryption in the process. Just note that it, like DVD Decrypter, will not create a file that is iPod compatible. You will still need to convert it using one of the programs listed above.	$0
Fair Use Wizard LE	This Windows application takes a slightly more user-friendly approach than DVD Decrypter, guding you through the process of converting your DVD a little more.  But it's also different in that it doesn't just decrypt, but decrypts and converts to an xVid format video file.  This process itseld could take a couple of hours, and then on top of this you will have to reconvert it to an iPod-compatible format.  The same site has a $20 program that will supposedly convert to iPod-compatible formats (see below).	$0
HandBrake	HandBrake is the one free Mac option that will remove the encryption on a DVD and save the resulting file to your hard drive.  Since I don't own a Mac, I couldn't evaluate this myself, but if anyone does own this, feedback would be great.	$0
Options at an Added Price
AnyDVD	This Windows Application will remove the encryption from a DVD, after which you will need another program to convert it to an iPod-compatible format.  At first I thought it might be more of a wizard than DVD Decrypter, but really what it's meant to do is to do the decryption transparently.  That way you can tell a conversion program to look at one of the files on the DVD itself, or maybe  you still need to copy it to your hard drive, but the decryption happens as you copy.  The problem is that there's no good way of figuring out what files are for what on the DVD.  Sure some may be simple if there's only one file or a few with similar names, but that's not always the case.  For some movies, you have many files each representing a different chapter.  On DVD's of TV episodes, you can have one or more files representing each episode	$39
PQDVD	Yes, I already mentioned PQDVD above, but it also will let you convert DVD's.  However, I'm not sure if it actually removes the encryption from DVD's like some of these other programs, but rather streams the dvd video at faster than normal speed and somehow "captures" it and converts it on the fly.  You will actually see the DVD playing while it's converting.  I'm not sure if I was simply doing something wrong or if my system did not have enough free memory or processor speed, but while it did convert a small clip for me successfully, when I played it back both in iTunes as well as on my iPod, the audio was badly distorted.	$35
Cucusoft	Cucusoft also makes a DVD to iPod Converter for Windows which seems to work very similarly to PQDVD, but gives the advanced user more access to custom settings.  Of course many of these settings will be meaningless if you are at all a beginner at this stuff.  I also experienced the same audio distorions with this product as with PQDVD, so chances are it's a problem with audio on my computer.  The other thing I could not figure out with this program was how to limit the program to just a specified length of time.  This would be helpful for recording a bunch of TV episodes on a DVD into seperate files (especially if these are not seperated into seperate files on the DVD), but it doesn't seem like there's any easy way to do this here, whereas in PQDVD, one can scroll through to find exactly where one episode ends and another begins, and then you can specify when you want the start of the recording and the end to be.	$30
Xilisoft	Xilisoft makes a DVD to iPod Converter for Windows as well, and it seems to work in a similar way as the previous two.  Unfortunately I could not get it to work at all.  Others I know have been able to get it to work, and I know there have been some complaints concerning audio syncing.  But without even being able to record anything myself, it's impossible for me to say much about this tool.	$29
Fair Use Wizard	Fair Use Wizard also offers a "Full Edition" that provides some additional features.  Whether those features are worth it, I'm not sure, and there's no way to try them out, since the Lite edition is the only one you can download from their site without actually paying.  However, from what I can tell from the Lite Edition, it has some option for iPod Video, so it might be useful as an all-in-one DVD conversion tool.	$20
Total Video Recorder	Total Video Recorder also has a DVD recording facility that works somewhat like PQDVD and CUCUSoft, except that it doesn't actually play the DVD while recording, at least not in a way that's visible to you.  It offers a good deal of flexibility and it's pretty easy and straightforward.  Unlike PQDVD and CUCUSoft, when I played the sample I had recorded in iTunes, there were no problems with the audio.  This could have just been a fluke, but it was still very promising.  Then I transferred the video over to my iPod and started to play it.  The same thing happened as with the non-DVD video clips I had converted with this same program - when starting to play the file, my iPod would reset itself.  Not good!  Again, maybe I was doing something wrong, or I wasn't setting something in the right way, but for a $45 program, I really don't think it should be reseting my iPod unless I really screw with the settings in a very creative way!	$45
DVDFab Express, Gold, Platinum	DVDFab Decryptor is a free program, but the same developer has made several other versions that have various other capabilities which may be useful for some people, but aren't necessary to get one's DVD video onto an iPod.  Still, if these extra features appeal to you and you can afford the price, than it might be a good option.  I chose not to try these out myself since I successfully tested the free version and can't imagine these would be that different.	$40-60

TV Playing

One other issue that I alluded to above is that you can actually take your iPod to a friend's house (or on vacation, or on a business trip, etc., etc.) and play a video for them not just on the iPod's screen, but on a TV that you hook your iPod to in the same way that you would hook your DVD player to your TV. Unfortunately the iPod can't do this "out of the box" but instead requires the purchase of an additional cable. Apple sells one for $30, although you can get it for a lot cheaper at Amazon.com  or even cheaper at Handhelditems.com and a retractable one to boot.

Because the iPod screen is so small, the standard iPod-compatible video is pretty small in resolution – 320x240 pixels. When this tiny image is then blown up to fit a much larger screen, everything gets that much fuzzier. In order to avoid this, you can convert the video in such a way that the resolution is higher, and some of the applications I've listed will actually guide you with the words "TV." However, not all programs let you do this, even if you do it yourself with customized settings.  If you convert something to a higher resolution for this type of usage, it will come at the price of added conversion time and storage space, and you won't be able to convert to just any resolution - at some point you also bump up against a limitation of what the iPod can handle, so you will never get, for example, a DVD-quality video image played from your iPod to a TV. It may look very good, and you might not even be able to tell the difference on a small TV (19" or smaller) between a video played through your iPod and one from a DVD player.  Still, for anything bigger than a 19" set,  the picture will be inferior.  And compared to a true high definition picture, forget it! If you do want to convert to higher resolutions, I would recommend taking a look at the two entries (here and here) I posted about converting with Videora. Whether you use Videora or not, these will at least give you some ideas about what issues to look for.

Final Notes

When Apple came out with the Video iPod back in late September of last year, they did it very tentatively – at least as far as video was concerned. They provided only a handful of TV series in their iTunes Music Store, and in order to make other sources of video play on the iPod, Apple would only tell you that you needed to purchase their QuickTime Pro at $30 additional charge. As you can see, in the proceeding three and a half months, a slew of new content has come out both within the iTunes Music Store and on the net in free form. In addition, many companies have been developing programs that make getting your videos onto your iPod. It's still a little confusing for the average consumer, though, but if the progress during these first few months is any indication, things should get easier and easier, sooner rather than later. In the mean time, I hope this guide has helped some of you get your mind around the various tasks, options, and concepts concerning getting video onto your iPod.

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(Note: after writing this article, I've done much more research on putting videos on an iPod and wrote up a new article that covers this in more basic terms - A Beginner's Guide to Video for the IPod. I urge you to read that article first, especially if you don't have much or any experience with digital video, the iPod, or both together)

Great, I thought!  Now I can at least use one format for displaying on the iPod or the TV.  But wait, it gets better!

I decided to copy an episode of Six Feet Under onto the iPod and test out another hypothesis by the moderator of the Videora iPod Converter forum, Sketchy, that you should make sure that your resolution was divisible by 16, since MPEG4 divides the screen up into 16x16 blocks.  640 and 360 are both divisible by 16[it turns out 360 is not divisible by 16, oops, but read on], so maybe that was the key to flawless, higher-resolution video on the iPod.  The previous 544 x 408 resolution wasn't [and it turns out that it wasn't even the highest resolution allowable - it's 552 x 414].  544 is divisible, but 408 isn't.  In order to maintain the 1:33 aspect ratio, the highest resolution you can use that doesn't go over the total pixel count of 230,400, but which is still divisible by 16 in both width and height, is 512 x 384[oops again, it turns out that it is 528x400]  So, I encoded the program using this and voila, perfect-looking video!

Great news again, right?  Now I can do the same thing with full-frame videos and just use that one resolution for both iPod viewing and TV viewing.  Sure 512 x 384 isn't HD, or even DVD quality.  But it's perfectly watchable on even my 34" TV.  Yet again, though, it gets better, or perhaps better and worse at the same time?

I thought I should update the spreadsheet with this information, so I dug out the old 55-second clip, and proceeded to convert it again but this time using the new 512 x 384 resolution instead of the older 544 x 408.  I did this for all the various modes, 1-pass and 2-pass, and put them on the iPod.  I started watching them and they all looked great!  This wasn't a big surprise, since the Six Feet Under episode also looked great.  But here is the weird part – I also reloaded the old 544 x 408 clips for comparison sake and when I started watching some of these, they also looked absolutely fine!  No banding whatsoever!  I was flummoxed.

So I bring my iPod into the bedroom where my wife is still half awake and ask her to look at these since I'm starting to not trust my own eyes anymore.  Only when I play them for her, the banding is back!  And it's not just back on the old clips, but the new clips as well.  Huh?  When I was first playing them back in the office, my iPod was plugged into the computer getting charged, so I thought, hey, maybe that has something to do with it.  So I plug it into the wall and try again.  No go, the banding is still there.  I than decided to try one more thing – I reset the iPod.  Once I did this, no more banding was visible!

So, to conclude, the problems with banding are not unavoidable.  If you experience them, just reset your iPod.  My guess is that putting the iPod in and out of video mode can produce this artifact, but if you just watch one program straight through, there shouldn't be an issue.  Of course resetting can be a nuisance, but if you were interested in only storing one format for a given file which you plan to view on both the iPod and a TV (or your computer), then it might not be that big a deal.

Based on this further development, I've edited the spreadsheet and included the new information.  Based on this new information, my conclusion is a bit different.  Basically, if you never see the possibility of wanting to play these files on a TV or computer, then you should stick with one of the 320x240 resolutions, preferably one that has a higher bit rate that would produce less artifacting.  As I said above, H.264 > CBR, 1 pass is a good option since it's fast to convert and small in size.  This will allow you to convert an hour's worth of video in a little over an hour and will produce a file that is about 380MB.

However, if you do want to have a single file for multiple uses – iPod viewing, TV viewing, computer viewing, then choose one of the 544 x 408 552 x 414 resolution ones, again with the higher bit rate (or lower Qscale).  I've found I can't really tell the difference between the higher bit rate (lower Qscale) versions.  They all look incredibly crisp and clear, with no artifacting.  However, the one that seems to come out on top in terms of both a smaller size file as well as a faster conversion is the plain MPEG4>CBR yet again.  For a one-hour piece of video, the conversion time will likely be between two and three hours, perhaps closer to three.  The file size will be about 1GB.  That's not really much better than the video stored on a DVD, which is definitely better quality.

Obviously the tradeoff of having the flexibility of one file for all purposes is that it will take a lot longer to convert your video and it will also take up considerably more space – maybe three times as much!  For some people, though, this is a good compromise.  For others who want to store more on their iPod but still want the possibility of displaying their videos on a TV via the iPod, yet another option might be worth the additional time – actually encoding it in both a 320x240 version specifically for viewing on the iPod's screen, and an additional version at 544 x 408 552 x 414.  This latter version could be archived on your hard drive or even DVD-R, although at 1GB/hour, you might need a lot of DVD's to store a big collection!

Personally, I don't have the time, patience or storage space to convert my DVD collection, so I suppose I will just convert things as I feel the urge to watch them and will probably use the higher resolution unless I have no intention of watching a given video via the TV…

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