More about podcast tours 

See yesterday's daydreaming about podcasts that tell you what you are seeing as you travel along. (Click on a date on the calender to see that day's posts.)

Somebody's probably already thought about this. Somebody even may be doing it already. If they are, I'd like to work on it.

Some thoughts about how you'd do it:

• You'd have to make the journey yourself as you recorded the tour. Since it could be synched up fairly closely, you'd want it to be as personal as possible, and speak as though you're talking to one person, not an audience.
• You wouldn't have to feel like you had to talk the whole way if there wasn't enough of interest to say. You could fill in with music (preferable local music), or just give instructions for the listener to turn it off, and back on again at a certain landmark, station, exit or mile marker.

I had more about this but lost it when my laptop battery ran down. I'll post it another time, if I feel like it.

Start my new job tomorrow 

There are still a few things I need to clean up from the old web job, so that makes me feel like it is not quite real yet. It's not quite like a brand new job, since it's the same workplace. But new department, new boss, new duties.

On track 

Writing this on the train back to Chicago. Nice to use a blogging tool that has an offline mode.

I'll probably just miss my connection to the commuter train and have to wait two hours. The Metra trains run every 10 minutes or so on weekdays at peak times, but you can be SOL on weekends. I don't mind a 2-hour wait in Union Station.

The food court makes my nerves jangle on any day of the week, but there's a bar open where you can get something to eat, and I always spend a little time in the Great Hall, picturing how it used to be, or how I imagine it used to be in the heyday of rail travel.

The imagining is pretty easy because I've seen North by Northwest so many times. The Union Station scene isn't as long as the New York station scene (don't know if it's Grand Central or Penn station), but it's long enough to get a good little movie in your head started. I use it as a base and do a lot of remixing.

First adjustment I make is the period. I think NbyNW was made in the late 50s, maybe early 60s? The movie in my head is more in the Atlas Shrugged era, 10-12 years earlier. I'm thinking of when it was written, not when it came out, so there's a real Bogey-Bacall 40s feeling in there.

The other adjustments are my own business.

I did miss it 

I did miss my connection. I felt better about sitting in this bar with all men when a Ben Affleck movie was on the big screen. Now it's ESPN and suddenly I feel more isolated. Oh, there's a family. Good.

The OPML "O" 

Note to self to post to the newbie list or let Dave know in another way that the "O" icon looks very similar to an icon I saw on my brother's computer this morning, when we were headed back to the train station. (He has GPS software that works with a receiver you put on the dash and it communicates with the laptop via Bluetooth. It's a neat way to do it, no monthly subscription charge.) I should have written down what the program was. It was a driver for a touchpad. Name was something like Symantec, but not Symantec. Sits down in the system tray of his Dell laptop.

Found it. Synaptics. They make the touchpad, and the driver comes with it. The logo does not look as similar to the OPML icon as the icon looks to the OPML icon.

Finally! I couldn't work out where the images were on the opml server. Finally I looked at the header graphic and realized they're on hosting.opml.org, not blogs.opml.org.

Give a Damn 

Ever hear that Spanky and Our Gang song from the sixties called "Give a Damn?" The group was something like the Mama and the Papas, not nearly so well known. The song is about looking out a train window at a ghetto in New York. "Take a window seat, put down your Times, you can read between the lines." I couldn't help but think of it when I passed the housing project where a gang murder I know about took place. I know about it because I was on the jury, maybe 15 years ago, the first time I lived in Chicago. I still think about it, once or twice a week. Everybody should get outside their world once in a while, even if it does give you shivers.