The iPod Classic 80GB I just grabbed should take the 15GB of podcasts I currently have sitting on my laptop in stride, with plenty of room for a few tunes when I feel like a break (and also a few videos here and there). I keep running into podcast episodes that run over the 74-minute mark (1hr 14 min), and thus won’t fit on a CD. Plus, I’m tired of burning podcasts onto CD, not just because I only listen to them once, but because burning them to CD (fitting as many as possible in each playlist and labeling each disc) is a royal pain. The podcasts I listen to are good enough to be worth the effort, and I’ve patiently waited for over a year to have the money available for an iPod. It’s part Christmas present from my wife, and part me getting rid of about half of the 31 domain names I own (~$10/yr for one is not much, but ~$310 for 31 makes a much bigger dent!).

The domain names I am not renewing are, sadly, some pretty nice domains. Some are reasonably old, and all are reasonably good if you have an interest in the genre (ranging from Christianity to long distance services to Star Trek, and a few others in-between). If I let them expire, they will probably be registered by some domain-squatter and used for advertising, which I’d rather not do. So, I am considering the best way to dispose of the domains from our budget without literally tossing them out! Should I list them on a domain auction site? That’s probably not a bad idea, but I could also list them here. I’m not necessarily looking to make a killing, but a few bucks on top of the registrar transfer fee would help to offset the years I have paid for the domains (some just a few years, but my first domain is from back when Network Solutions had a monopoly and charged $100 for two years up front!). Any thoughts? Should I list them here? I have ten domains that I am for sure not renewing, and they all expire within the next year (some as soon as December).

But this CD is the first one released worldwide, in 166 countries I’m told, under the Integrity Music label. The idea is, most stores carrying Christian music will likely carry our CD. It’s called Make You Known, and there are 30 second clips from all the tracks available where it’s for sale on our own Lakeview Worship website. I just turned the new Lakeview Worship online store loose today after converting it over to a new shopping cart system. The entire website is getting a facelift soon, but the store was redone in time (barely) for the new CD release. And now that I’ve given you behind-the-scenes information you can’t get anywhere else (on the web), you’re going to buy it, right? Or, just click the Listen Now link to hear the clips. Aren’t you thankful I’m telling you this way rather than the email-a-friend link at the Lakeview Worship site where the person sending the most emails gets an iPod Touch? ‘Cause I’m not… ;-)

Shortest. Post. Ever. (For me. :-)

One tool mentioned in the podcast this time is called Remote Task Manager, which is a remote control (at a granular level, not just a remote desktop viewer tool) for networked PCs. It sounds very useful and worth checking out the demo when I have the time!

And remember, unsubscribing from a blog feed in your feed reader is anonymous and even easier than unsubscribing from an email list, so there’s no harm in adding her blog for a trial run, right there alongside mine and Nathan LaGrange’s (unless you categorize your feeds by topic, of course). Subscribers even get free cake!^*

*Not really, but it made you want to subscribe, right?

Poor Man’s Google Reader Search appears to have a solution that lets you search a public label or an individual feed, but that’s not what I was looking for.

Google Reader Gears Search has a way to search Google Reader using the Google Gears offline post database if you are set up to use Reader offline with Gears, but again this requires a browser add-in. The creator of this option actually talked to Chris Wetherell, the Google Reader creator, about why there was no search, but he doesn’t articulate the answer with any level of detail.

Google Groups has a thread about Google Reader search, which basically asks the same question I do, but provides no answers. Martin Porcheron comments back in May that Google Reader has updated their CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to include hints of search capabilities, but those haven’t yet materialized. This seems to be the most promising reference that Google is indeed working to make this happen.

The most promising current solution that I’ve found came via a Lifehacker entry about a Google Operating System post: How to Add Search to Google Reader. It requires using Google Co-op and Greasemonkey (there’s another browser add-on to install still!), but it is probably the one I’m going to try for now. You also must export your feeds list and re-import it at the Co-Op site every time you update your subscriptions. Why is it so hard for Google to integrate their own two services, anyway?! I suppose I’ll have to live with the workaround for now, but I still think it’s strange for a company so focused on search to eschew it in such a widely used product. And there’s even an updated Greasemonkey script that will display your search results right within Google Reader. So you (and I) can fake it ’til they make it!

1. People don’t read their email. If they do, it’s not in a timely manner (if I get any email that looks remotely important I’ve read it within an hour almost any time between 7:30am and 11pm, on my Treo or a PC, so this is foreign to me).
2. If people read email, they won’t read long ones. And by long, I mean a lot shorter than what I consider long. I tend to write books rather than emails :-) I’ve had to work on this a lot; shortening communications to just the necessities. It’s good practice, but sometimes my short emails are still longer than people are willing to read for some reason.You have to put the most important information up front.
3. Preferably, use bold, italics, and color to highlight important phrases at the beginning and throughout the email. Action steps, a summary of changes, or some such very short “if you get nothing else from this email, get this” must be the first sentence or two. Provide details after that (some people will read it, and others might if they see from the beginning that it really needs to be read). A bulleted list with under-one-line summaries of steps or changes should either be first, or if you use another short summary up front, end with a bulleted summary.
4. Keep the quantity down, but repeat yourself twice when possible. Announce something as early as possible. Then at least when someone says “I never got an email about that” you can pull up their email box and locate the email you sent (unless they’ve deleted it — if only they would! That and all the other accumulated junk causing your Exchange server to whine and complain. Well, users do seem really good at deleting the daily emails about their mailbox being over the size limit…). But also send an email the day before, or as close to a change as possible while leaving people a reasonable amount of time to receive and read it. Two days ahead of time is too early.
5. This was part of number 3 above, but it’s very important: action steps. Include what is required of the user, up front and emphasized. “You must log out and log back in for these changes to take effect.” Even emphasize if it’s just a notification. “When you log in tomorrow, the icon will be red instead of blue. You don’t need to do anything different, this should happen.”

The problem is not solved. Users will always be…users. But mine are getting better! :-) And a lot of that is due to me working on my emails to make them better and more easily understandable. Any other suggestions I’ve missed?

As a side note, I am contemplating a simple intranet setup as a gateway to our new helpdesk system and to allow for announcements, forms distribution (and eventually business process automation). Posting all IT announcements there should also (hopefully) help. After I get people using it in the first place. (And after the best intranet solution is determined and set up!)

I just thought of an idea — what about pop-up “IT Announcement Ads”? Modify some adware to display ads from the IT department only, and have banners pop up on people’s screens with the information. Now there’s something they’ll pay attention to! (“My computer says I just won a laptop…is that true?!”) Granted, it might negate all the instructions about how users should ignore pop-ups, but might it be worth it? ;-)

If all else fails, I’m with Barry in recommending a ban of all users from the network :-)

Anyway, if you could use a great way to keep track of the books you’ve read, are reading, and want to read, so you can share them with others or remember them yourself, my wife found an excellent site a couple of weeks ago called GoodReads. A free account lets you add books from their database or from Amazon.com, rate and review the books, add to as many “bookshelves” as you want (read: tags), and basically track all that goodness. Now you can return all those books to the library, knowing you can find them later. Or just keep track of what you’re reading and what you’ve read, or use the RSS feed capability to share your favorite reads with others. I mention the service here because it’s where I’ve started keeping track of the technical books I want to remember for my reference and to pass along to others, even if I don’t buy them for my bookshelf. The ability to track the fiction I’m reading is just a nice side-benefit, and the bookshelves feature keeps them all organized. In only a couple of days of using the site, I’d “shelved” 14 books in my account!

If you add enough books, you can also request Librarian status so you may add and edit metadata about the books on the site. My wife had to do this right away of course (and had more than enough books added to her profile in under 24 hours), since she’s a real-life librarian :-) (Did you know librarians need a masters degree? I didn’t either until I married one! Well, I did know before we dated, she didn’t wait to tell me until we were actually married…but I didn’t know until she told me.)

Mozilla Thunderbird: Version 2 has a mostly nice newsreader features. I have my feeds sorted out into folders and it has good new item notification, starring of good items, and color-coded tagging options. The main feature I like, however, is that for feeds that don’t include full content, it automatically loads the original post URL in the reading pane. This is huge. No opening up a new window or tab to view the full text of a post, it loads just like an HTML email would in a preview pane (which is basically what it’s doing, given that Thunderbird is first and foremost and email client). This is really nice for branding, so I see the original site design while reading the article, and it’s nice for reading comments since they’re live from the site right after the post. It’s not nice for reading offline (not that I do that often), since nothing will load at all in that case as opposed to pre-downloaded full text.

Google Reader: I’ve tried this over the past week, importing my feeds using an OPML file that Thunderbird exported. The export/import process worked flawlessly and all folders and such were maintained in Google Reader. The reading interface is nice, but very different than what I’m used to in Thunderbird. Full text feeds are great, I can read them easily and in one tab. I don’t like it to mark items read automatically, so I turned that feature off. I can star items, like in Thunderbird, and then easily see one list of all starred items (across all feeds) in a “virtual” folder view, which Thunderbird lacks to my knowledge. But there is no tagging feature, which I use to mark items Important, To-Do, Work, Personal, Later, etc. in Thunderbird, which color-codes the items for easy visual reference in the future, in addition to the starring feature that both share. But feed items that don’t have full content show a small snippet and I have to click to open the original source in a new tab. Then I have to remember to go read it. And with my Firefox instances tending towards 20-120 tabs open at any given time, the last thing I need is to open more tabs! I just want to load the source page in the reading pane (scripts can be stripped out; Thunderbird does this).

Reader also has a nice mobile web interface that works well on my Treo 650. However, I’d like a separate list of feeds marked “mobile” that are the only ones that show up on the mobile interface, because some feeds aren’t worth taking the time to load and read on the Treo. The full-content issue shows up again here, as loading a new page is painful on the Palm browser, so I don’t want to see partial content at all, another reason for separating out a subset of feeds for mobile use. I’d also like to see the mobile interface provide checkboxes for marking read and unread, and starring, because each time I click the links for these options, the browser has to redisplay the post, and then I can return to the feed list or go to the next feed item. And a link to the Reader mobile home at the top would be nice, so I don’t have to wait for the full page to load every time just to go back (yes I know I have a browser back button).

Because of the issues I have with the partial content feeds on the full and mobile versions of Reader, I’ve pretty much trimmed out all the partial feeds from my subscription list, while leaving my full feed list intact in Thunderbird. This duplicates my read-feed management, but makes Google Reader feasible for mobile and on-the-road use. I currently have 51 subscriptions in Google Reader, while I have 70 feeds from Thunderbird. For the mathematically challenged, that means I’ve pared out 19 feeds from Google Reader that I still want to track but I don’t want to read partially or via mobile. I’m still working on this so Reader may get pared down even further. I do like the Reader Trends view, which made me aware of a few feeds that haven’t been updated since the middle of last year that I’ve removed from my subscriptions altogether.

Reading feeds, at least the full ones, offline, used to be one reason I stayed away from an online reader. It hasn’t been much of an issue, with wireless at home and work and showing up more places, but it is nice for traveling, especially car rides and airplanes, and hotels that charge for internet access. Ever notice that cheaper hotels are more likely to provide free internet access compared to higher-end hotels, which tend to charge around $10/day for the privilege? This isn’t just something I’ve noticed; a company that we’ve worked with that does a lot of hotel WiFi installations told me this based on their client base. There are obvious (yet annoying) reasons for this, but I digress. Offline use isn’t usually important to me, but can be useful. Google just fixed this problem by releasing Google Gears, initially using Reader as their test service. You install the browser add-in, and Reader can then be taken offline, using Google Gears to synchronize and store the data offline. I have yet to try this, but I’m going to install it in the next couple of days. I expect possible hiccups, being a beta service, but it’s a bonus feature anyway. Gmail support for Google Gears will be much more interesting! As long as they address security issues first. Ross Hollman has some good additional Google Gears info, as does David Berlind at ZDnet; I won’t rehash here for now.

Those are my thoughts. I don’t have any conclusions yet. I also just found some new-ish software called FreeRange WebReader. I’m running the beta on my Treo now, and for reading full content posts, it’s very nice! It’s a service, through their site for management, and you can keep your feed list in your account with FreeRange or you can link to your Google Reader feeds. So far it’s caused my phone to reset twice, but it is in beta, and it’s a nice interface. It also doesn’t download full posts until you want it to, which saves memory card space. Navigation is a bit buggy but is fast and easy, and it’s well-formatted for small-screen use. The downside is that for more than 10 feeds, there’s eventually a cost (although so far I haven’t been asked to pay, perhaps it’s a beta thing?). This might be a useful alternative to Google Reader Mobile, but less than an hour’s use is too soon to tell.

Interesting side note: you are the reason I decided to try Google Reader after using Thunderbird for so long! How’s that? FeedBurner tells me more subscribers to my blog use Google Reader than any other feed reader of any type! I figured, there must be a reason! Bloglines is second most popular, but I’ve already used them in the past without being fully impressed. They were the first feed reader I ever used, now that I think about it. If you think your reader is better, leave a comment and let me know! Or if you know something I missed about Thunderbird/Reader, etc. feel free to chime in.

Technology ‘casts:

• In The Trenches with Kevin Devin & George Starcher
  An excellent, long-running podcast about technology and technology careers.
• Casting From the Server Room with Matt, Bill, Rich, DJ, or some combination thereof
  A technology-in-education podcast with news, tips, discussions, and rants. Very enjoyable!
• Church IT Podcast hosted on TalkShoe.com by Jason Powell of Granger Community Church
  Get people working in Church IT together for a twice-monthly conference call, and record it. Awesome! And it’s the only podcast (currently) on which you can hear yours truly once in a while.
• Church IT Discuss hosted on TalkShoe.com by Jeffrey from IT Discuss.
  I haven’t had a chance to listen to the first episode of this discussion but it’s on my list!
• Security Now! with Steve Gibson and Leo LaPorte, from the TWiT (This Week in Tech) network
  Steve talks personal computer security with host Leo. Entertaining if not 100% accurate all the time. Steve has his detractors, but he and Leo put on a well-polished, entertaining show — and I learn something new every episode. Steve has a knack for simplifying complex topics in terms suitable for an end-user. This was the first podcast I ever listened to, and I’ve heard nearly every episode.
• Daily GizWiz with Leo LaPorte and Dick DeBartolo, from the TWiT (This Week in Tech) network
  Leo and Dick are a slick comedy-and-technology team, bringing a short (10-20 min.) daily dose of gadget. Hilarious!
• CyberSpeak Podcast with Bret and Ovie
  Hosted by two former federal agents who investigated computer crime, this is a technology Podcast covering Computer Security, Computer Crime and Computer Forensics Topics.
• A Day in the Life of an Information Security Investigator by Security Monkey
  The blog is better than the occasional podcast, but both are excellent and entertaining (and downright funny) for anyone interested in computer security and investigations. I couldn’t find a podcast website, so the link is to the RSS feed.
• Network Security Podcast by Martin McKeay
  Martin loves security and is the new Cobia product evangelist, but he keeps his own blog and podcast separate and both are very interesting.
• Run Your Own Server with Gekitsuu, Thud314, and Segmental
  Nice topical cast with useful information on running your own web server, primarily Linux-based. Plenty of useful tips and good conversation.
• Security Catalyst with Michael Santarcangelo
  Michael is doing some great work in the security field, especially with security awareness and training.

Christian non-technology ‘casts:

• Just Thinking and Let My People Think from Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM)
  Possibly the best apologetic speaking I’ve heard in my life.
• Lakeview Worship Podcast from the Worship & Creative Ministries at Lakeview Church
  A podcast put out by my homies here at Lakeview!

Other ‘casts:

• Manager Tools with Mark Horstman and Michael Auzenne
  Mark and Michael do topical casts based on their years of experience training managers in management. I’ve picked up a bunch of tips from this podcast and they are very entertaining as well.

That’s most of ’em, at least the ones worth mentioning (this post is called Podcasts that Rock after all). If you can keep up with that list and still have time for more, you live too far away from work or you have way too much time on your hands! Or maybe you work somewhere you can listen to podcasts all day.