Posted Friday, July 22, 2005

Podcasts for Your Weekend Listening Pleasure, and an Apple Store "Squatter" Update

I'll be in the car for several hours tomorrow as I drive to and from the iLife seminar that I'm doing in Santa Rosa, CA. We have a nice crowd (but a few seats left!) and it's going to be a blast.

And the drive is beautiful: it begins on the stretch California's famous Highway 1 that you see here, then continues for 56 twisting and turning miles—through a redwood grove, then through the vineyards of Anderson Valley and past towns with populations in the double digits. My kind of places.

Then it's onto Highway 101 and into Sonoma County and progressively thicker development and traffic. Sonoma County used to be a rural paradise. Much of it is still spectacular, but it's also a great place to be a bulldozer.

Again with the digression.

The Sound of the Road
I'm going to need audio for my trip, and I'm taking some podcasts along. I'm looking forward to listening to a couple of editions of Skepticality: Science and Skeptic Thought. I've already downloaded their interview with Skeptic magazine publisher Dr. Michael Shermer. (Shermer also writes the monthly Skeptic column Scientific American.)

I'll also snag their interview with James Randi, another of my pseudo-science-debunking heros. Between these shows and a couple of podcasts of Harry Shearer's Le Show, I'll have plenty of company for the ride.

And for You? Me
If you're looking for some weekend listening, start with the links I've provided above. Or download the archive of the radio show I did on Wednesday. After a brief salute to the tenth anniversary of the .MP3 file extension (hey, it's a geek show), we shifted to maps, GPS, and the growing "location-based" industry. My guests were Rich Owings, author of Make Your Own Maps, and Nathan Torkington, co-chair of O'Reilly Media's Where 2.0 conference.

Point & Click Radio isn't yet available as a podcast (gonna do it!), but in the meantime, you can snag the MP3 archive (12MB) right here.

The Apple Store Squatter: An Update
On his Cult of Mac blog, Wired News' Leander Kahney reports on yet another sighting of the San Francisco Apple Store "squatter." A correspondent sent some cell phone photos that do indeed show the woman who I wrote about last month (and erroneously identified as a man—I'm a geek, Jim, not a doctor).

Wacky!