I have been programming like a mad man for the last few days, so I haven’t really had time to do anything else. Today however, I took a moment to update the feeds I subscribe to and man was there ever a lot of posts to read! In any case, I am feeling a little more caught up – though I still have a couple shows to post at BlogosphereRadio.

The most common type of post I read today was a 2004 year in review or something similar. So, not to be left out (how sad is that?) I will be posting my own in the next two days. Also hopefully a year in review show at BlogosphereRadio.com.

Thank you Megan and family for hosting my 21st birthday party yesterday! My actual birthday is not until tomorrow, but I think Megan picked a good date for the party, as we had a pretty good turnout (considering it is the holidays), including Dickson, Andrew, Lisa, Joe, Nick, Jill and Felicia. Thanks everyone for coming!

We started the evening, and continued for most of it actually, by playing XBOX. The gang gave me Halo 2 and NHL 2005 so that was wicked! We immediately put the NHL 2005 to good use – if there is no hockey on TV, we’ll make our own hockey! Dickson seemed to beat me every time, while Megan and Felicia were pretty evenly matched. Lisa caught on quickly and probably could have taken on Megan!

And we also played some less technical games too, using cards! There was lots of food, and of course, Coke. Megan baked a delicious cake that her Mom made the icing for – apologies for my terrible cake cutting skills! Ah yes, another gift I got was a bottle of Baha Rosa. It shall be put to good use on New Year’s Eve!

Anyway, it was lots of fun, nice to see everyone! Thanks again Megan. You can check out some pictures from the evening here.

Shown to the left is my Christmas present from my parents – thanks guys! It is a brand new, 20 GB Creative Zen Touch, and it replaced my iPod starting yesterday.

I had a first generation iPod, and while it worked well enough, it didn’t do what I needed. The battery life was terrible for one – the Zen Touch boasts a 24 hour battery life at 128 kbps (all my stuff is at least 128, most of it is higher). The main problem for me however, is that my musical life is spent inside Windows Media Player. Ever since version 9, I have used nothing else, and I really wanted a player that would work with WMP 10. The Zen Touch does, as do all WMA-enabled devices. It also has some really awesome features that the iPod was lacking, like creating and editing playlists on the go, deleting tracks without having to connect to a computer, and I like the Creative equalizers.

The TouchPad, which is where the device gets its name, does a good job of replacing the iPod’s ClickWheel in my opinion. At first it takes some getting used to, but only a single day after having it, I think I have mastered it – on the lowest sensitivity setting at least. It’s pretty easy to go through long lists of songs, and once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to move slowly one or two songs up or down.

Perhaps the only thing that I don’t find that useful right now is that the interface is USB 2.0 and not FireWire. This would be fine, except for the fact that I don’t have any USB 2.0 ports in my computer.

Anyway, the title of this post is about podcasting, so I should say something about that. I am going to be testing out the Zen Touch with Windows Media Player and Doppler for podcasting, and I’ll write about how it goes later. I can now finally test our WMA feed at BlogosphereRadio! I also plan to buy the Wired Remote for the Zen Touch, which adds and FM Tuner and a Microphone, so maybe I’ll even be able to podcast on the go!

Anyway, its a sweet player, thanks Mom & Dad!

Does anyone know why we continue to celebrate Christmas on December 25th when the true meaning of the season isn’t shown until the rabid slaves of consumerism descend on stores in droves on the 26th? Just something I was thinking about. Happy Boxing Day week!

Or, for those of you who are picky about that sort of thing, Happy Holidays!

If you have a computer nearby tonight, you might want to check out the 2004 NORAD Tracks Santa website. The North American Aerospace Defense Command has been tracking Santa for 50 years now, and if you ever wonder how it got started, the story is pretty amazing:

This is the 50th season that NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa. The tradition began after a Colorado Springs store’s advertisement for children to call Santa on a special “hotline” included a misprinted telephone number. Instead of Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations “hotline.”

The Commander-in-Chief did some quick thinking and the rest is history! So yeah, check it out. And as cool as the service is, and as great as I think the idea is, their website could sure use some work. It looks like an old Geocities web page!

This afternoon Dickson and I took Sharon to see A Christmas Carol at the Citadel Theatre here in Edmonton. Not only was it kinda cool to do something so seasonally appropriate on Christmas eve, it was a very well done production!

I was quite impressed not only with the costumes and music, but with the stage! The stage and effects were amazing! There was a bed that rose out of the stage, snow falling from the ceiling, ghosts and goblins flying around, all sorts of things.

Now if only it would snow tomorrow 🙂

You know what’s yummy? Smothered fries, chicken strips, and mini burgers from Denny’s. I also didn’t realize how many people would be at Denny’s at 3:30 AM. Mind boggling, really! That is all.

I think I am becoming addicted to XBOX. Instead of writing the entire story on my blog, check out Andrew’s post here and here. My sleep patterns are completely shot, as are my eating patterns. Dinner at 3 AM and bedtime at 7 AM don’t work so well when you get up at noon to do it all over again! Fortunately the last two days/nights/whatever have also included many, many hours of work, so not all is lost!

I am posting this more for future reference, because if you use SuprNova or any of the other BitTorrent sites, you probably already know that they are now offline. Although the SuprNova site doesn’t give an explicit reason for why they are offline, it is likely because of the recent lawsuits launched by the MPAA:

“We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links” to content, said a message posted over the weekend to the SuprNova site, which was no longer available Monday morning. “We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.”

When I first heard the news, I almost had a heart attack. SuprNova has become one of my favorite websites, but I guess that’s why they have been shut down – it was a favorite for too many people! Fortunately, it was not the only aggregator of BitTorrent files, and there are still many sites up and running. It’s also good to know that BitTorrent itself is just the plumbing, and will live on:

None of this means that BitTorrent is going away. The technology is already widely used in legal ways, such as to distribute games and versions of the Linux operating system. It saves the content publishers considerable money in bandwidth by deputizing their own customers to help in the distribution process.

I don’t know why the music and movie industries are attacking their users. If anyone at those two organizations had a brain they’d figure out a way to harness the file sharing technologies so that they can make some money off of it. Shutting down one or two or even three torrent file sites isn’t going to stop file sharing. What happened after they shut down Napster? Better technologies were created to take its place. Maybe the same will happen because of this attack:

SuprNova organizers have been working on a more decentralized version of BitTorrent called Exeem, according to peer-to-peer news site Slyck.com. No word on that project was available after the site’s closure.

Read: CNET News.com