Episode 2: The Revenge of These Green Saviors

Episode 2 of the podcast formerly known as ROTSS has been posted. This week join Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and me, as we discuss journalistic credibility, car stereo support for iPods, LAN Party addiction, and more. Also enter our contest to win a box of Patrick's crap - all you have to do is come up with a new name for the show. Runners-up receive web hosting from Vizaweb and Jinx Hackwear. Send your entries to leosprogram@gmail.com. Theme music this week is courtesy of John Selvia Subscribe to the TLR podcast to get each new episode by midnight every Sunday, press the play button to the left, or download it from the links below. (The podcast will have its own dedicated feed once we get a new name.) Plain MP3: Coral Mirror - Local Ogg Vorbis: Coral Mirror - Local

Difficulties Getting ROTSS

I apologize if your podcast client is having difficulty getting ROTSS. We totally overwhelmed the Coral mirrors and Coral isn't failing gracefully. I don't think they've ever seen demand quite like this. The direct link does work however: http://leoville-downloads.com/tlr/TLR20050424.mp3 - as does the Vorbis link: http://leoville.tv/tlr/ROTSS002.ogg. Your podcast client will get the file as soon as the flood of requests dies down. I will move the feed from Coral to bittorrent later today and for all future releases. For those who are confused about which podcast feed to subscribe to, ROTSS is on TLR http://leoville.tv/podcasts/tlr for now. Once we get a name I'll set up dedicated feeds. There will be four feeds, high and low quality MP3, Vorbis, and bookmarkable AAC for ipod users. I'll give you those URLs as soon as we settle on a new name for the show. Thanks for your patience.

Playing Hookey

I'm supposed to be at the gym right now but I'm playing hookey. I'm soooo tired. I know I would probably feel better if I worked out, but I just can't force myself to. I'll do it tomorrow. This new schedule is going to take some getting used to. TechLive is much more work than I thought it would be. I have to ad-lib so much that I actually need to know what I'm talking about. That means I now have to be an expert on finance and tech news, too! Well I've always enjoyed a challenge. Plus 90 minutes of the Screen Savers ends up being about twice as hard. Maybe that's because we're packing so much stuff into the new show. I watched the repeat last night and I did enjoy all the different segments and the fast pacing. But please shoot me if I ever wear that sweater again! I looked like an inflatable Pat Boone. Here's the weird thing: I'm working without a contract right now. My deal expired on Monday and even though Greg and I supposedly agreed on the main points of a new contract a month ago (see the Archives), I haven't seen a single piece of paper yet. I wonder if they wanted to see how TechLive and the new Screen Savers worked out before committing to me? Of course, that cuts both ways. I can take a new job, too. Anybody got a gig for an overfed gray-haired goofy techno-geek?

Four Feeds - No Waiting

OK I've set up BitTorrent feeds for both ROTSS shows in four, count 'em, four formats. As usual, please keep your BitTorrent client running even after the download is done to help others get the files. (These are the official BT feeds for now - please redirect your client from the old leoville.tv/bt feed.) As always, these files are Creative Commons Share-Alike licensed so you may redistribute them in any fashion for non-commercial purposes.

MP3 64KBPS	Direct links	RSS Feed
MP3 32KBPS	Direct links	RSS Feed
Bookmarkable AAC (for iPods)	Direct links	RSS Feed
Ogg Vorbis	Direct links	RSS Feed

If anyone with BitTorrent tracker experience would like to help me set up a better system (I'd like to run my own tracker and automatically seed it from four different servers I run) please email me! I'd like to do this every week but it's a bit much to have to seed these files by hand from home each time.

ROTSS: TNG

I can't believe the response we've been getting for The Return of the Bleep. The BitTorrent tracker I've been running for serving the torrents has logged 984,000 hits on announce.php in less than four days. I don't know how that correlates to actual downloads, but it's a lot. (If anyone knows how to correlate these hits to downloads, please let me know!) We're getting ready to unveil a name along with new feeds and a new web site. We've received over 2,000 entries in our contest to name the show, and I think we've got some good candidates. We'll reveal the new name and new feed URLs on Sunday. The response to this is so incredible - better than anything Patrick, Kevin, and I have ever seen. It's given us new excitement about bringing tech programming directly to you without involving mainstream media. To that end, I've added a Paypal subscription button to the torrent pages. The podcast is free, and always will be, but we'd like to avoid putting advertising in it. If enough people contribute a modest amount to the show, we won't have to and we can upgrade the production and maybe even do a video version. Who knows, we might even be able to re-grow TechTV from the ground up. Cick the button below to pay just $2/month. That's 50 cents a show. Your subscription will renew each month until you cancel it.

As always, thanks for your support. You're proving that it's possible to create quality tech shows by users for users without involving big media.