MacRadio is listed on Blogger & Podcaster Guide, and has been participating in their online The USA TODAY special which I highly recommend. Basically, if someone does a search for a podcast through the Blogger & Podcaster Guide search tool at the bottom of USA TODAY, they can find you.

You can get involved in it as well right now, including a free month in The USA TODAY through Blogger & Podcaster Guide.

There’s no catch other than after the first month there will be a charge if you want to continue promoting to the USA TODAY’s audience. However, they’ve also arranged a 20% discount for you if you find value in the program and choose to continue on.

To get started, here’s all you need to do:

1. Go to http://www.bloggerandpodcaster.com/usatoday
2. Select “New User” and go through 6 Step registration process
3. In Step 2 be sure to select Option #4 and enter `BP’ in Coupon Code box.

They’ll notify you well in advance of the date you’ll be billed, so you don’t need to be worried about unexpected charges.

So, it started last night. I was busy playing the new Runic game that Pangea has published, and suddenly started smelling this…burning…from somewhere in the room. It’s gotten pretty warm around here, so at first I thought it was coming from outside, someone grilling or burning a fire. Then I could tell it was most definitely not that. Oh yeah, and my screen had started to display strange artifacts.

I shut the G5 down right quick.

I have spent the rest of yesterday evening and most of today (when I wasn’t hauling my kid’s butt to a birthday party) trying to figure out what the problem was. At first, I thought it might be my harddrive. That was due to my turning the machine on again last night after I opened up the side to see what I could see, and hearing the harddrive go, “whirr, whirr, whirr.” I shut it back down very quickly and decided that my next step would be a trip to Fry’s the next day to get a new harddrive.

Yippee! Fry’s had 300 GB SATA harddrives on sale for, like, $70. So I bought two, just in case (can never have enough storage). Brought em home and installed one, then attempted to install OS X on it. And got an error. Then I remembered that these suckers come as secondary drives, and you have to physically reconfigure them for primary. Only, I didn’t have any manual or info to remind me, because they were cheapo because they were OEM drives being sold. And I didn’t have the necessary components to adjust them. Great.

Meanwhile, hubby says he wants to hear this harddrive whirring. So I put the original one in, turn the machine on…and it boots up fine. Yeah, you knew that was going to happen. Only, now I hear the fans churning like a Boeing 747, and my graphics card, an ATI X800, whirring weird.

So, then I got to spend the rest of today doing huge amounts of research to try and find out why this is happening. And I find I get to join the throngs of *other* G5 users who *also* have problems with fans running out of control on their machines. And no one really knows why. Lovely.

What I’ve been able to narrow down, at least for my problem, is this. I think my problem has to do with the FCU (fan control unit). I think that whatever caused the smell may have shorted out the FCU in the drive bay fan (which is the fan it turns out is running out of control at 1000 rpm), or shorted out how the fan is controlled by the FCU.

I may decide to take the whole rig in tomorrow to the nearest Apple Repair center in the U District (if it’s open) and have them look it over.

I don’t feel like having my system take off for Maui (at least, not without me).

Unfortunately, it also means that the Game Review Edition that I was planning for Monday I won’t be able to get done. Ah well. This is a holiday, after all.

Over the weekend I received the great news that Freeverse had updated Sound Studio, which I use to both record and edit many of my interviews, to 3.5. Great, I thought. I had chatted with one of the developers of this app at Macworld and he had said that another version would be coming out sometime soon. Now I get to see what they put in (and if one of my suggestions made it in ;).

Unfortunately, I don’t get to find out. Why? SS is now crashing all over the place. Argh! I first realized the problem when I tried to use the 10 Band Equalizer and listen to the preview. Down went SS…continuously. I deleted the .plist for SS, and when I brought SS back up, things seemed to be fine. I was editing for about fifteen or twenty minutes, then suddenly everything starts crashing again.

I’m sending in a crash log to Freeverse to find out what’s going on, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to save the podcast for today. I can’t edit my two interviews I was planning on having in today’s podcast…I even tried just making a change, then saving the file. I couldn’t even finish the save before the app crashed.

And, no, I can’t use Audacity. It *always* crashes.

ETA: I was able to locate a previous version of SS so I should be able to post my podcast today. Yeah!

I just finished posting my podcast about my trip to the GDC 2007. Awesome trip, and I learned a lot and made a lot of contacts. Did a lot of interviewing, and have enough content for at least two, probably three, podcasts about the GDC. So I’ll be posting that over the next two to three weeks.

As for where I’ve been? I’ve been prepping for, then attending, the GDC. Heh. And doing a lot of other stuff that took up a lot of time. At least one thing to check out is my overview of the GDC on Mac|Life.

Yay! I posted my third podcast already, and on time too. This podcasting only instead of Internet Radio broadcasting thing is doing pretty good. Heh. I’ll update the site tomorrow to reflect the new podcast, but for tonight, everyone who has subscribed to the feed gets their podcast now.

Now, don’t you want to subscribe? ;)

I’m uploading the regular podcast right now…over 1 hour of yummy Mac gaming goodness! Unfortunately, the images that I need to use in the enhanced version need some work, and when I tried to bring up MacGimp, my G5 told me it didn’t have X11 installed. WTF?? It’s supposed to be automatic. Sigh. So now I have a bunch of stuff to do even before I get to change the images so that I can finish the enhanced podcast. So, later today or tomorrow for that.

But I didn’t want to make everyone wait for the podcast, so I made sure to upload the regular one now. Enjoy. :)

Yeah, I tried. But I had a ton of stuff to do. And they’re taking me out to dinner tonight. Oh, and my husband bought me a Wii. Weeeeeeee!!!!!

So, I should have it posted by no later than 11 am Pacific Time, enhancements and all.

ETA: Okay, add to this the fact that it has snowed again, and that my kids are, again, home from school, and the time may be delayed further. ARGHHHH!!! When are my kids *ever* going to go to school so I can do a day’s work!!!

I have realized already that I have so much to say in this podcast that I was planning on posting today that I may not actually get it all down, recorded, edited, and uploaded by this evening. Add to that the fact that today is a Federal holiday (meaning the kidlet is home) and that today is my birthday (I’m turning, uh, thirty, yeah, thirty today ;), and it all combines for me wanting to wait to finish and post by noon tomorrow.

So, if you don’t see the podcast posted tonight, it will be up by tomorrow. Plus, I’ll actually be posting two podcasts, one the basic podcast, and the second will be an enhanced podcast…so there will be two xml files to choose from (I’ll send out a note to everyone on the newsletter…go here to subscribe.)

Oops, now I’ll *have* to do the enhanced podcast. ;)

Okay, so yeah, no podcast on the 1st. I may do something small on the 8th, but really, I’ve been messing with my new (used) 2GHz dual-core G5 with 2 GB RAM in it. And prepping for Macworld. And working on the site redesign (well, someone else is doing that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have work to do with it). And other stuff I can’t talk about right now.

I will have, like, so cool of a podcast posted on the 15th..no, really I will. I promise. ;) And I will review Civ IV/Warlords because I’ve been unable to stop playing it when my timer goes off and I’m supposed to do something else and I just say to myself, “Oh, just one more turn, that’s all, then I’ll stop” and some multi-dimensional-number of turns later I look at the clock and I’m way over time and I say, “Oh, I’ll just finish that last turn, okay.”

I’m not addicted. No, really. ;)

About a month ago my podcast production client wanted me to move forward with converting his podcasts into enhanced podcasts with chapters. I figured that I’d split the cost since learning how to do so would also teach me for the iGame Radio show as well. I downloaded Chapter Tool and did a little review of it, but today I put my head down and actually worked on it. Ouch.

First off, Chapter Tool is in beta. Secondly, it’s a command line tool…no spiffy “click from the dock and you’re a go” app. Not that I’m a newcomer to using Terminal, but still. Third, though the instructions are fairly good, they are scattered over several documents and websites, and assumed in at least one case the lack of mention of something meant a negative about it. Uh, right.

So, I’ve spent about 12 hours or so trying to get this thing right and finally, after some time of trial and error, succeeded. I now have a fully enhanced podcast, complete with pretty pictures, links, and chaptering. It even works on my iPod mini…well, without the pretty pictures and links, but with the chaptering.

I’m going to write up a step-by-step process for writing an enhanced podcast and post it here, probably tomorrow. But right now I’m busy watching Luke Skywalker get his butt kicked. Is there something wrong with me that my favorite of the first three is The Empire Strikes back?