makes jack a dull boy

I‘m working like crazy on this chapbook, so it’s been a day of intense output, with Real Jazz on XM to provide me some inspiring input. I’ve narrowed it down to three stories across about 17 pages, and it’s going to be pretty damn cool, even if I say so myself.

Jesusmotherallahbuddha, I really need to get out of the house, and stretch my legs and my brains. Just walking the dogs around the block between thunderstorms isn’t doing it for me. I’m going nuts here.

I really need to get the hell out of suburbia, man. I think there’s a trip up to Lucky Baldwin’s in my very near future, so if you see a guy sitting at the end of the bar surrounded by empty glasses which were formerly pints of Guinness, scribbling like mad in a Molskine notebook, approach with caution (or with another pint.)

To take a little break tonight, though, I’m playing in my weekly WWdN game at PokerStars. It starts in 20 minutes, so if you’re interested in goofing off with some poker nerds and me (redundant redundant) fire up the client and go to Tourneys -> Private and look for WWdN #17.

Speaking of PokerStars, my friends from the marketing department sent me a TON of hats, T-shirts, and cool ‘Stars schwag to give away at the convention this weekend.

Ryan and I keep quoting this line from Family Guy: "And I, uh, thought that dogs, uh, laid eggs. So, so, so I, uh, I learned something today."

and

"Hey! Where’s my money?!"

Okay, back to work for fifteen minutes, then it’s poker time.

Radio Free Burrito Episode 6

Here is Radio Free Burrito Episode Six, as the great ten-minutes-per day experiment moves on to day two. I’ve already figured out that ten minutes is just not enough time for a long-winded, tangent-prone guy like myself, so I don’t know if trading off manageable time for more content is really worth it. We’ll find out in a few days, I guess.

Thank you so much to everyone who has sent in logos! Holy crap, you are a talented bunch of people. I’m going to try on lots of different ones this week, send them all out on dates with the Crushinator, and figure out which logo will be permanent via a reality tv show in the coming weeks. If you haven’t sent your logo idea in, please don’t feel like you missed the boat; I’d still love to see what you guys come up with, and there’s a very good chance I’ll be able to use more than one logo for different things.

Show Notes:

I am a moran. I know it’s episode six, but I say "This is episode seven" at the beginning. Numbers, like math, are hard. I blame it on the date, the rain, and a bad spot of corned beef.
The website I talked about is ChangeThis.com.
My tune is called Heroes, and it was created in GarageBand. I may release it on its own at some point in the future.
As I mentioned near the end of the show, I’ll be offering a signed, limited edition chapbook preview of a few stories from Do You Want Kids With That at the convention this weekend. If I have any left over after the show, I’ll sell whatever’s left through my blog.
The intro music is Atomic, by Blondie.
Comments can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net, questions can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net. Please use a descriptive subject line.
The image I chose for this show was sent to me by WWdN:iX reader Chuck, from airbrushmypic.com.
Radio Free Burrito is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
This episode is 10:19 and weighs in at 4.4 MB.

Anyway, here it is. Your feedback is always appreciated, and thanks for listening.

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_six.mp3

Update: Torrent Master Brian says:

Here’s Episode 6? (You start off by saying Ep 7)

High (orig):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_six.mp3.torrent

Low (mono, VBR bit rate range 0-24, 1.8 megs):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_six-low.mp3.torrent

Mirror for the Low..
http://www.badmonkies.com/rfb/radio_free_burrito_episode_six-low.mp3

Thanks, Brian! And thanks for pointing out my lameness on the numbering. I’ve updated the show notes accordingly.

how about a wwdnbot for aim?

danger, will robinson
Jason says that AOL is opening up AIM to third party developers. This is pretty cool, and is a strange coincidence, because I had an idea for an AIMBot yesterday.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could build your own bot, which would be relevant to your audience, and let them add it to their buddy list?

For example, if I did a WWdNBot, you could talk to it like an old irc bot, by asking it FAQs, or askng it if I had any appearances coming up, or when the next book would be released, or something like that. I could also use it to automatically tell you when I updated my blog, with a link to the entry.

Or how about a FarkBot, which tells you when a new headline hits the main page (with a link) and would tell you about Fark cliches?

Or a SuicidegirlsBot which would tell you when a friend’s journal was updated, a new item was on the newswire, or your favorite girl had released a new photoset?

I know that most of this is just another way of using RSS feed-style information, but doesn’t the interactivity and immediacy of an instant message seem cool?

As I understand it, if you want to hook into the AIM API, you have to cough up a significant fee to AOL, so I don’t see rampant ‘bot development happening any time soon, but if AOL decided to dump the fees (maybe they could add a line after the message that says, "brought to you by [sponsor]" if they wanted to make up for lost fees, and sell the adspace) and a company like blogger or sixapart incorporated some easy to use code for their customers (add "wake up the bot" to "send trackbacks" or whatever), we could have an entirely new — and very cool — method of communicating with each other.

Okay, people who are more tech-savvy than me: tear this idea apart.

(photo via flickr user drp)

Radio Free Burrito Episode 5

15118203_32335060cf_m
I issued myself a challenge a few weeks ago: do one ten-minute podcast a day for a week. Then I went and got sick, and wasn’t in any shape to do begin the challenge . . . until tonight.

I thought that it would be very manageable to commit ten minutes per day to do a show, but don’t know if I like the format; ten minutes is hardly enough time to get started, let alone do an entire show, so I will thank in advance those of you who endure this little experiment with me over the next few days. I am nearly positive that by the end of the week, I’ll be back to 37 minutes at a time.

Oh, and before I get into the show notes: does someone want to do a Radio Free Burrito logo? I am thinking something simple that is inspired by the old RKO logo (a radio tower on top of the earth) or something similar like that. I’m a big fan of simple, 1940s-looking radio design, if you know what I’m talking about.

If any of you guys with crazy Photoshop or GIMP skills want to send me something, I’d love to see it. If I pick your design, I’ll give you credit by name and with a link to your website or blog, and I’ll send you an autographed book. I should probably put in some legal language, like, uh, anything you send me becomes my property, and I can do whatever I want with it, even put it into a shotgun wedding with the Crushinator. You can put "Wil Wheaton’s Radio Free Burrito" and use the tagline ". . . an interesting podcast" if you want.

Here are a few show notes for this very brief episode:

The music comes from Mike Doughty’s "Down on the River by the Sugar Plant," which is on Skittish and Rockity Roll. I just realized that I used a song which you can’t download from his site by mistake, so I hope he doesn’t sue me or kick my ass. In any case, I encourage you to buy his albums, because they totally fucking rule.
Comments can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net, questions can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net. Please use a descriptive subject line.
Radio Free Burrito is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
This episode is 10:16 and weighs in at 4.1 MB.

Okay, that’s it for today. I hope you enjoy the abbreviated Radio Free Burrito. Thanks for listening.

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_five.mp3

(photo via flickr user Eris23)

Update – Thank to to everyone who sent in (or linked to) logos. There are so many cool logos, I will probably use several of them this week before I settle on an "official" RFB logo. I appreciate your time and creative efforts, everyone!

Also, WWdN:iX reader and Head Torrent Monkey Brian has your high and low torrent needs covered:

High (orig):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_five.mp3.torrent

Low (mono, VBR bit rate range 0-24, 1.8 megs):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_five-low.mp3.torrent

Mirror for the Low..
http://www.badmonkies.com/rfb/radio_free_burrito_episode_five-low.mp3

Thanks, Brian!

Handhelds!

Mattelfootball
When I was seven years old, my dad had one of those Mattel handheld football games, and I loved it. I bet if you grabbed a few Gen X-ers and told them to close their eyes, they’d all be able to identify that game by the click-click-click-chirrrrp! sound which is as linked to that game as "D’Oh!" is to Homer Simpson.

As a member of the video game generation, I’ve been through most of the console systems, watched the rise and fall of video arcades, and written extensively about some very memorable games. I am a sucker for anything that celebrates the games of our lives, and Donald Melanson‘s A Brief History of Handheld Videogames at Engadget is hawesome. He starts at the aforementioned (and pictured) Mattel Football, and works his way through the Atari Lynx, past all the incarnations of the Gameboy, to the PSP.

We’ve come a long way in the last 28 years, baby.