Lucky

Sarcoidosis: Doctor visit

Either I’m a deeply narcissistic person who can’t imagine what’s going on with my health happens to other people, or I’m just a ninny. In any case, the idea that more people would face the problem of upset stomachs (and heartburn and threatened vomiting) because of taking an anti-inflammatory painkiller never occurred to me.

It turns out, though, that they do. So I’ve currently got the biggest box of drugs I’ve ever seen, for my Prevacid NapraPAC, which is basically two Naprosyn (naproxen) pain killers, one for the morning, one for the evening, and a Prevacid (lansoprazole) each day to fight acid and to stop the Naprosyn from eating into the lining of my stomach and setting me up for future ulcers. Tasty.

I’m also going in next week for a chest film (which is what the cool kids call x-rays these days) and a blood screen (which is what the cool kids call blood work). For the blood screen, they want me to fast for 24 hours beforehand. Apparently, blood screens work best if you’re irritable.

Ironically, today is a good sarcoidosis day, with just a few random jolts of pain in my fingers, toes and knees.

Congratulations on your new iPod, part three

Last year at this time, I was in your shoes, unpacking my new iPod, burning the other CDs I owned that I didn’t yet have in iTunes (my brother suggesting I do that back at Thanksgiving should have been a hint to me that I was getting an iPod for Christmas, but it somehow wasn’t) and wondering what else I was going to do with this thing.

I started downloading podcasts a few months later, which makes me a relatively early adopter (I did it before iTunes could get podcasts), but not a bleeding edge ubergeek. (And a good thing, too. All that was available early on were podcasts about podcasting or about Linux or Apples. Zzzzzzzz.) My choices have waxed and waned, but the roll-your-own-radio-station notion of podcasting has always clicked with me.

Here’s my current list of podcasts. Whether you use Juice or iTunes, just copy these addresses into your podcasting software and add them to your subscriptions.

• APM’s Marketplace – A weekly highlights show of the great public radio on business, nationally and internationally.
• Bill Handel – Highlights from the Los Angeles talk show host’s KFI morning radio show. This is the one feed I have trouble with, and I seem to miss about half of the podcasts as a result.
• Channel Frederator – A great collection of independent cartoon shorts. If you own a video iPod, you owe it to yourself to get this one.
• Dave Cusick’s Post Modern Rock Show – It’s already become more important to me, musically, than my local radio station (if KROQ in Los Angeles starts podcasting, that might change, but probably not). A great eclectic round-up of new music each week. It’s not always stuff I love, but it’s always stuff that’s interesting.
• Inside the Net – A fairly geeky podcast, this features two professional broadcasters interviewing industry leaders about new Web software, such as Firefox 1.5, Flock and other programs.
• KCRW’s Film Reviews – The first of many shows from LA’s amazingly cool NPR station. It turns out that NPR doesn’t have to be dry and self-satisfied. It can be really hip, fun and self-satisfied. This is a strong set of weekly film reviews by Joe Morgenstern, the Pulitzer-prize winning film reviewer for the Wall Street Journal.
• KCRW’s Martini Shot – Funny weekly reports from television writer Rob Long.
• KCRW’s Minding the Media – Not the best media-on-the-media report, but short and often incisive.
• KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic – Interviews and live performances from the legendary music show. Rights issues prevent the rest of the music from being podcast, but you can hear it streaming at KCRW.org.
• KCRW’s Music Exchange – KCRW and the BBC talk about breaking bands on both sides of the Atlantic.
• KCRW’s The Business – Forget Entertainment Tonight. This is the best show about the entertainment industry. It even has a cool theme song.
• KCRW’s The Treatment – Great one-on-one interviews with entertainment industry figures. Much more interesting than the typical interview circuit subjects.
• KEXP Presents Music That Matters – A music show from a northwest NPR station.
• KFI Tech Guy – The commercial-free version of Leo Laporte’s syndicated tech help call-in show.
• Liz Phair Podcast – She hasn’t done a new episode of Uplands in a while, but it mixes music, interviews with people she meets and her reading her short fiction. Come on, you knew I’d have this, didn’t you?
• NPR: Books – The week’s NPR stories regarding books.
• NPR: Health & Science – A weekly round-up of NPR health and science stories.
• NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories – Ah, the democracy of the “E-Mail this Page” link. This tends to assemble a great 30 minute news podcast each day, although you sometimes end up capturing more of the NPR listeners’ zeitgeist than you might want. And, guys, stop recommending that awful Slate guy’s smarmy movie reviews round-up. Ugh.
• NPR: Movies – You can probably guess. It’s also amusing because the intro’s reader seems amazed that NPR would get interviews with movie industry folks, which suggests that NPR has people working for them who have never listened to their shows.
• NPR: Music – Stories about music, and sometimes some performances.
• NPR: Open Mic Music – Every weekday, a performance by an unsigned artist. Typically very, very good.
• NPR: Technology – A relatively un-nerdy round-up of the week’s tech stories.
• NPR: World Cafe Words & Music – Highlights from the weekly music show.
• Official Disneyland Podcast – Originally created by an obsessive SoCal fan, this is a surprisingly interesting show. (I discovered once I moved to Southern California that I really, really like Disneyland.)
• On the Media – An excellent media-on-the-media show. Great criticism, a great examination of the business and the calling.
• PRI’s Studio360 – Highlights from the weekly interview and performance show.
• PRI’s The World – Geo Quiz – Inexplicably, they’re only giving us one of these a week, but it’s the most fun part of the great daily international news show. Hopefully PRI will put more of The World online as a podcast at some point. It’s not like it’s a commercial broadcast anyway.
• science friday podcast – All of the segments from the great science feature on Talk of the Nation. Interestingly, each of the segments on Science Friday is a separate podcast, allowing you to listen to just what you want to.
• SuicideGirls Radio – The pierced-and-tattooed pin-up girls (I couldn’t make this stuff up) do a surprisingly warm and sweet call-in talk show once a week on an LA rock station.
• this WEEK in TECH – A highly geeky round-table by professional broadcasters and pundits on the latest tech news, but a great show.
• Tiki Bar TV – A very silly sitcom and drink recipe show by a group of folks having way too much fun. Another must-subscribe show for video iPod owners.
• Various and Sundry DVDs – Augie gets snarky about the week’s new DVD releases. He’s one of the first podcasters, and is a great example of how podcasting has opened up radio to the masses like the World Wide Web theoretically opened up the print media to the masses.

Congratulations on your new iPod, part two

Whoops! I really was lazy yesterday. I spent my vacation in an inexpensive way: Battling my way up the underworld ladder and battling the living nightmares of an ancient druid. But as for your new iPod …

It was the word of the year, and if the jury’s still out as to whether podcasting will eventually become a major way radio and television-style content is released (NPR certainly seems to think it will be), there’s still a world full of great free content out there for you to have automagically delivered to your computer and, thus, to synch up with your iPod.

In other words, podcasting is comparable to what your TiVo does for you. Content that you want, including an increasing amount of professional radio content, is automatically pulled onto your hard drive by special podcasting software. You can then listen to it on your computer, or synch it up with your iPod or other MP3 player.

iTunes now includes podcasting capabilities, and it’s probably the easiest way to get podcasts on your computer: Just find a podcast in the iTunes directory, find it on the net and plug in the download address or find the podcast’s Web page and click the appropriate “add to iTunes” button, and you’re done. New podcasts will arrive on your computer as they’re released.

I don’t like the iTunes software myself. It keeps podcasts segregated, both in iTunes and on my iPod, and lets me do fewer things with podcasts than I might want. (I was getting podcasts before iTunes added the capability, and the fact that I couldn’t smoothly integrate the content together seemed silly to me.) Instead, I use Juice, which is an insanely easy to use cross-platform podcasting program. I have it drop the files in my iTunes directory under My Music under the My Documents folder. Once there, it’s integrated with the other iTunes files.

Once Juice downloads a podcast, I manually set the podcast’s genre to “Podcast,” if it’s one of the few that doesn’t automatically set it that way. I then have a “smart playlist” in iTunes that grabs all of the MP3 files genre, that have a play count equal to zero. This lets me use my iTunes/iPod just like a radio: I play it, it vanishes from the playlist, and I don’t have to worry about listening to stuff twice when casually enjoying it. But the files are still there on my iPod (you can find them under Genre, Podcast) if I still want to listen to something again. I have a lot of music shows that I keep indefinitely, for instance.

Next up, my current podcast subscriptions.

2005 Year in Review: Great stories you didn’t read

Columbia Journalism Review Daily has a list of five great stories you didn’t read, celebrating great journalism that either didn’t get national play or was overshadowed by other events.

The coverage includes:

1. An in-depth examination of the chaos caused by Hurricane Rita.
2. The Memphis Waltz sting
3. The truth about global warming.
4. The stories of wounded soldiers.
5. A harrowing follow-up to a traffic accident in Florida.

Definitely worth checking out.