Greg Davis

Came to my attention that controversial “environmentalist” Patrick Moore is speaking in Sudbury this May. Looks like he has a new book called Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: the Making of a Sensible Environmentalist. I plan on giving the book a read but it’s a little pricey so I’ll wait until TPL picks it up.

I recall hearing him interviewed a few times and seems like a sensible guy though I haven’t looked at his positions on all issues. Emphasis on trees and forests, and de-emphasizing wind and solar power sounds good to me.

Here’s a fairly recent radio interview.

Here’s Greenpeace ripping on him.

I find it super awkward when someone recommends a fail of a movie. In fact it totally frustrates me. So if you like any of these we should avoid talking about movies.

Drive (2011).. what the hell was I thinking going to see this? i feel like someone played a joke on me reviewing this..

District 9 (2009).. bad

Synecdoche (2008).. Love Kaufman but let’s not pretend this is watchable

The Hurt Locker (2008).. come on this won what? Much better current war films are out there with a smaller budget like The War Tapes (2006)

The Dark Knight (2008)… so much ruined potential I wish I could rewrite the thing from about half way through. This isn’t so much a bad movie as much as it was just so much over-heralded (word?) as soo good.

Last Samurai (2003).. I love older Tom Cruise movies as much as the next guy but it’s okay to say this movie sucks, not sure what got over people

American Gangster (2007) This one could show up here soley based on having two of the most overrated actors of all time- Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. But it turns out that it IS bad. Everyone wants to love a gangster-mafia flick but come on this is a cheap (but expensive I’m sure) insult to the classics.

50/50 (2011)I can almost always get behind Rotten Tomatoes’ “Certified Fresh” picks but this one really let me down. Ok maybe just the first 10 mins scream cheese and the rest is great but unfortunately the writing and acting were so awkward we couldn’t keep watching.

Graydon Carter’s VF Memoriam

Toronto Public Library has a good obituary with some links to his works.

His last piece in Vanity Fair:

I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Bleak!

It goes without saying that this man could write and speak like very few others. There’s lots being posted upon his death, but I like to think back to how he always had the balls to say outrageous things, like Why Women Still Aren’t Funny. This man made me think, and laugh.

I made the plunge into Android with Motorola’s Droid Razr. (I couldn’t wait for the new Nexus). I do love it.. for all obvious reasons coming from an iPhone 3G.

It’s a bit of a time hog to get everything set up and one of the snags I hit was what to do with podcasts…

I’m huge on google reader so the idea of Google Listen with GR integration was really appealing, but looking in to it Listen seems like a big disappointment right now. BUT installing it allows me to get the “Listen Subscriptions” folder in GR.. and that’s where I started to find a good solution..

Then came Acast (the site seems to have been down for a long time now.. weird but this app works pretty good). It’s a bit heavy on confusing setup options and it’s missing a working playback speed adjustment (it’s experimental and buggy), but I like that it’s focused on awesome podcast features and leaves out any crazy music GUI. Oh, and the point is it syncs beautifully with Listen Subscriptions in GR. So now I can subscribe to any podcast, throw in that GR folder, and it syncs in to Acast. AND whenever I’m on another computer I can log in to GR and straight download / mark read whatever I want and it fits in to the workflow.

So I was a fairly happy camper, but still some awkwardness remaining a full iTunes transition. I don’t really know what to do with my music access from my phone. Motorola has a bunch of apps that I’m not to keen on. Motocast actually looks pretty cool but I started getting a weird crash error that hopefully gets addressed.. cuz that would allow me to just stream or download albums on to my phone’s native Music app, and I’d be happy to just keep that separate from podcasting. Work to be done there.

Now let me just recap a super annoying hurdle to my audio workflow for a long time.. How do you easily incorporate one(or two)-off mp3s that you find, you want to queue them to be listened to, but you don’t want to subscribe to the podcast necessarily. In iTunes I had to either:
(a) subscribe to the whole podcast, poach and listen to the episode, delete podcast when done;
(b) save mp3 file to computer where iTunes is installed, manually add file to collection, then manipulate the file type to get it to show up as a podcast;
(c) use some kind of hack like iTunes folder watch to pull them in to your collection.. good luck getting it show up as a podcast and I just never liked this option

So here’s where I got a bit excited, having found a solution to this problem. Using Dropbox and Dropsync, I synchronized a “podcast one-offs” folder locally on my phone. So from any environment (work, home, my phone).. I can save an audio file in to this folder and it will sync to my Dropbox and phone. Acast has a feature where you can create a feed out of a local folder, so everything I drop in there shows up as a feed in Acast, where I can see new files and queue them up on my podcast playlist. Friggin awesome.

I’m stoked to have this in place, and I’m thinking of just using separate folders for other content (music, lectures, audiobooks, etc.)… but I’m still on the fence about what to use for music, and a minor detail is you’d have to buy the full version of Dropsync.

Also, a potential improvement to this that I tried and failed, was to create an actual podcast feed from your Dropbox folder, which would improve things because right now the feed is appearing only on my phone and not with the rest of my podcast list on GR. If it was just a personal feed I don’t think this would violate Dropbox’s terms of use, so it’s just a matter of figuring it out technically. You could take the folder xml feeds and run it through Yahoo Pipes, or a program like Dropcaster.. but both of these options were a bit beyond me right now.. so if someone where to figure out the pipes option that would be sweet.

UPDATE: BeyondPod, if you download the beta apk, seems to be better than Acast in that it has the GR integration but also has great variable playback speed support.

Paul Jaminet is the man.. I feel like these 20 tips sum up the very best of an intelligent approach to modern health:

20 Tips for Optimal Health & Fitness

No excerpts cuz it’s all spot on.. although I don’t think it’s in any particular order but #10 would be the place to start..