Greetings from Sydney

Mikkel Aaland and I just arrived in Sydney on the way to Hobart, Tasmania. Qantas took great care of us on the way - it was my first time in the "bubble" up top of a 747 and I slept like a baby. Maybe that's because they give you your very own set of jammies.

Photo Credit: Mikkel Aaland

Aussie Mike met us at the gate and got us into the Qantas Club. I took a much needed shower and feel like a new man. I'm headed off to the "meetup" at the SYD Starbucks. Hope to see a few of you there!

Home Again

I'm back home again from Egypt. What a fantastic trip it was, I am going through a little withdrawal. We did so much, saw so much, met such great people, it's a little hard to go back to real life. However, I am going to get back to work. I am suffering from a hideous cold right now so things are ramping up a little slowly but by the end of the week all podcasts should be back to normal, and I'll be back live on the radio Saturday and Sunday. I also have a ton of pictures and video to go through. I'll post them a bit at a time - and I hope to find some time to blog a little about my experiences, too. It truly was the "trip of a lifetime!"

Greetings from Cairo

What an experience this is. Egypt is a fascinating country with a unique culture. It feels like an Arab nation to me, but the Egyptians say they're neither Arab, nor African - they're Egyptian. They're very warm and friendly, that's for sure. Egypt is much more than ancient monuments. Tourism is an important part of their economy so they take very good care of us. The Tourist Police are everywhere we go and they're all carrying guns. It's a poor country, too, and many of the people we meet ask for "baksheesh." It's hard not to give it to them. There are five Egyptian pounds to the dollar, so giving someone a couple of pounds means more to them than it does to us. The children love ballpoint pens. We visited a weaving school where 6-14 year old kids sit all afternoon making oriental rugs and the guides gave out pens. Population growth is probably the most pressing issue Egypt faces today. It's a big country but mostly desert. The entire population lives on just 6% of the land and grows by one million people every 10 months. Cairo itself is the third most populous city in the world with 16 million people. It sometimes seems like everyone of them is on the road at the same time, in cars, trucks, or donkey. Cairo abandoned traffic lights a few years ago and there don't seem to be any rules of the road - even lane markings are ignored. Pedestrians blithely thread in and out of the traffic at will. There seem surprisingly few accidents. Perhaps it's due to the language of the car horns, which are used constantly and can express a wide variety of meanings. Today we visit the oldest mosque in Cairo then celebrate New Year's Eve Bedouin style. Tomorrow we board the Sun Boat IV to sail up the Nile. It will be good to get out of the city. I've uploaded some pictures on the Photos page. I'm also taking some video, too, but I'm trying not to be too much of a tourist. There's so much to absorb I don't always want to have a camera in front of my eyes.

Cairo via Providence

OK - I've wrapped up the last TWiT for the year. Four Tech Guy shows are in the can. Tomorrow morning bright and early Jennifer, Abby, Henry, and I fly to Boston to spend Christmas with my mom and sister in Cranston RI, then it's off to Cairo for 10 days touring the pyramids. I'll post as many pictures as I can here and on Flickr. We return January 6 and I'll be back to work making netcasts soon after. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2008!

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.