Caution: Man Working

It's been a crazy couple of weeks, and it's getting crazier. I just got back from New Haven where I was serving on a Yale University advisory committee working on a strategy for online distribution. This week Yale announced that it's putting seven courses online complete with lectures (video and audio), transcripts, problem sets, and solutions, but that's just the beginning. Yale is committed to offering free access to many of its assets. Bravo! It's a great honor to be asked to help with this task along with luminaries (and fellow Yalies) like David Pogue, Mitch Kapor, Real Networks' Rob Glaser, EA's Bing Gordon, and my '77 classmate Donna Dubinsky of Claris, Palm, Handspring, and Numenta. While at Yale I did my radio show from its beautiful CMI2 broadcast center. Thanks to Paul Lawrence and his team for hosting me. And to Yale's associate secretary, Stephanie Schwartz, for smoothing my way in New Haven. Spending five days in Connecticut means I have to jam three weeks of podcast production into three days, because next week I head to Vancouver to tape 15 more Lab with Leo episodes. Then I come back to do the radio show the following weekend. Christmas Eve, Jennifer, Abby, Henry and I are flying to Rhode Island for Christmas with my mom and sister. Two days later we fly to Egypt to see the Pyramids. This has been a dream of mine for years and is literally the trip of a lifetime. We'll be gone and completely out of touch until January 7. I think our hotel has Internet access, however, so I'll try to post pictures and video from the trip as we go. This crazy schedule is already impacting some of the shows.

• Because I was in New Haven doing the radio show last weekend, I don't have a recording of the audio. That means there will be no Tech Guy netcast for December 8 and 9. Sorry.
• As you may have noticed, there was no TWiT this week, but we'll do two more this year on December 17 and 24 (if I can get a cast together).
• The other news-based shows, MacBreak Weekly and Windows Weekly - will slow down, too. We should have new shows next week, but then it's two weeks off. Both shows will be back the week of January 6 and watch for special Macworld Expo coverage the week of January 14 on MacBreak Weekly.
• We're taking this week off on The Daily Giz Wiz but we'll have all new shows through the rest of the holiday season.
• There'll be a new net@nite this week, but then we're taking the rest of the year off. We'll return January 9.

Dane will be here posting the shows while I'm overseas, so everything should come out on time. He's much more reliable than I am. I am also working on a redesign of the blog and Leoville.com. The new design will merge them both. It's based on the very nice Revolution theme by Brian Gardner that makes Wordpress as suitable for a magazine style site as a blog. I'll probably put the new sites up in the next day or two and will be tweaking them until I leave. Please pardon the construction dust. One thing the new design will do is move my Twitter Tweets out of the main blog. (All together now... Yay!) They'll still be here, but they won't fill the page with 140 character drivel. It will also put the blog back into the main Leoville site where it belongs. You can still go to leoville.com/blog, but leoville.com will work, too. Finally, InBusiness.tv has posted my Blogworld keynote address from last month on Brightcove. Six Apart's Anil Dash begins the talk with a survey of Google's Open Social platform; I start around 15 minutes in. As we wrap up 2007 I want to take a moment to thank you. This year has been a watershed for me both personally and professionally, and none of it could have happened without the love and support of my family. That means Jennifer, Abby, and Henry, of course, but it also means you, my extended family. I have so very many friends, those with whom I create the shows, and those of you who watch, listen, and collaborate. None of this could have happened without your encouragement and support. Thanks so very much. Happy holidays. I hope you find your heart's desire in 2008. Thanks to you, I already have.

net@nite Update

Amber and I did our first test recording of the new net@nite yesterday and despite a few technical glitches I think we're ready to go back on the air together. The new show is going to be similar to the old one with a couple of exceptions. First, it's no longer going to be live. It's just too hard to commit to recording it at the same time every week. With a little flexibility it will be easier for us to do it. I'm hoping to record and release the show on Wednesdays, moving MacBreak Weekly back to Tuesday to make room for it. I'm finding that it's better to release the topical shows on the same day as they're recorded whenever possible. The second big change is that I'm hoping to do it as a video show. We tried recording video this week and everything fell apart, but I'm hopeful that the new iChat will make this possible. It supports the very high quality AAC-LD audio codec, the same I use for the radio, and offers video and audio recording. Amber has retooled the content, as well. The show will still be an hour long, but divided into segments:

• Web News
• Best Tech Trick
• Best Web Idea
• Best Music Pick
• Best Web Service
• Best Video Pick
• Web Design Pick

We'll have guests on whenever we've got someone we want to talk with, but one bit we'd like to do every week is our pick for Worst Web Idea. We're hoping we can get the creators of these sites on to defend their pathetic concepts. Should make for some fun. I'll post yesterday's run through sometime this week - it's a little rough but it's still entertaining. We hope to begin the video version the first Wednesday in November. We're just waiting for Leopard to ship. (I'm going down to Cupertino to get a briefing on it next Thursday. If I can get a copy then we'll do a test show next week.) Watch for the new net@nite - I think you'll like it!

Vancouver Tonight, Cloudy Tomorrow

I'm in Vancity tonight for a 24-hour visit. Tomorrow is the Futureshop "debate" with Amber. I don't even know how you debate LCD vs Plasma, but we'll find a way. Tune in at futureshopforums.ca at 11:30a Pacific to watch - free registration required. Incidentally, as a followup to my previous post, Amber and I have decided to take a hiatus with net@nite. Both of us are too busy to do the show justice at the moment. Sunday's are so jammed for me what with the radio show and TWiT that net@nite is becoming a burden. We're going to look for a better day for both of us and we'll let you know when we're coming back. Now back to researching plasma tvs!

Toronto Meetup

Here we go again!

We have such a stellar bunch of people coming up for Call for Help next week we really thought we should do a meetup.

Meet me in Toronto

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Tuesday, October 3, we'll be recording Inside the Net live from the downstairs dining room at No Regrets in Liberty Village, T.O. The festivities and no-host food and drink start at 6:30p. Come by to meet:

• Amber MacArthur
• Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell of GeekBrief.tv
• Merlin Mann of 43 Folders (I think he's coming up just to buy the new Sloan record)
• The Podcast Person of the Year (me!)

and I bet we can talk some other Call for Helpers into stopping by.

RSVP at Upcoming.org - you'll find directions and maps there, too. See you there!