zhasper.com

Courtesy of Youtube, the latest hit video from the Westboro Baptists

My favorite lines are... well, there are a couple

God hates the world (He hates you!)
And all her people (That means you!)

You'll eat your kids (Yeah, you'll eat them)
You hateful people

You every one face a fiery day
For your proud sinning (so just stop it!)

Enjoy it, it's hilarious!

Yes, this is genuinely from them: it's even listed as "featured" on their website.

Wow.

First, the podcatching. Way back in the dawn of time, when the earth was young and the rocks were still cooling, I tried out a few podcatchers. The one I liked best was iPodderX - almost entirely because it allows you to specify that the mp3s you download should be converted to bookmarkable AAC files[1] as they're imported into itunes. There are a couple of other nifty features too, including the ability to have it subscribe to an RSS feed and run the Mac's inbuilt text-to-speech over the contents, thus turning any blog into a podcast of sorts.

However, as time has passed I've become less and less happy with this product. Partially it's the fact that the product is slow and clunky, and hasn't been updated in well over a year[2]. Partially it's the fact that when I made some feature requests on their forums, the forums immediately got hacked/corrupted/deleted/went away for some reason - and when they were put back, all previous content was lost. Apparently the developers hadn't made a note of any feature requests or bug reports anywhere but inside the forums, for the asked their users to please re-report all the bugs and feature requests as they now had no documentation.

Largely, it's because late last year, the website and forums and such all went away, to be replaced with a "Coming soon!" page. That page points at transistr.com - which is itself nothing but a big "Coming soon!" page. That site has been promising an update in "probably be at least a week, maybe two" ever since they missed their originally planned launch date in march.

What's really pissed me off now is: iPodderX was busy doing it's thing last night, downloading and importing podcasts. That's fine, but my little laptop isn't the gruntiest beast, so the overhead was causing other things to be slow. As a result, I closed it and iTunes. A couple of hours later, as I was going to bed, I started it up again - only to be presented with a dialogue informing me that "Your 30-day trial period is over" and requesting that I pay once again for the software.

There used to be a rant here, about how I couldn't find a way to contact the developers. However, this was just because I wasn't looking hard enough; I did eventually find a contact form, filled it out, and heard back from the developers within an hour. The problem isn't resolved yet, but that's largely because I'm not home to try out their suggestion yet. I'll update this if/when it gets fixed.

So. I'm looking for a new podcatcher. It needs to be able to convert mp3s to AACs as it imports them into iTunes (no biggie - it's just a few extra lines of Applescript), and.. well, it has to do the standard podcatcher things as well, of course. It shouldn't, however, require me to pay money more than once (once is fine, I have no problem with rewarding developers for their work), it should be developed by a team or company that is contactable, that maintains lists of feature requests and bugs somewhere other than their forum. It should respond to mouse clicks in under a second, if it uses a GUI at all - given how little time I spend looking at a podcatcher, I'd be just as happy with it if it ran as a cron job or something.

Oh, and by the way, if you're reading this, I've update my version of Drupal at last. Isn't it exciting? I've switched back to one of the bog-standard supplied themes for now, but that will probably change soon. I'm very excited by some of the new features - in particular, the ability to be an OpenID consumer[3] - but more on that later.

[1] I find this invaluable; I often get interrupted in my podlistening, but because all my podcast files are bookmarkable, I can come back to exactly the same place and pick up where I left off. This is particularly useful with podiobooks, where the chapters tend to be long and complex, and I often go weeks between listening to them.
[2] I think. As far as I recall, the new version came out around February/March last year. I could be wrong about this, and I'd welcome correction. Normally, I'd check on the products website for this kind of information - but in this case, the company has taken the entire website offline, so there's nothing for me to check.
[3] I've just discovered that in order to make use of this, I need to upgrade from php4 to php5. This is not something to be attempted lightly... so it may be a while before this works.

Update: Thunderstone got back to me within an hour with a suggested fix; I didn't understand their email, so asked for clarification and had a response within about 15 minutes. I got home just now, tried the fix, and it worked. I now feel moderately dumb, because the "fix" was to click a button that I'd ignored (which, in hindsight, was the first button I should have pressed) and re-enter my registration code. iPodderX is now humming fine - Thanks Thunderstone!

I'm still looking for something new though... if transistr does get released sometime soon, I'll give it a try...

As soon as Dubyah was confirmed for a second term, I expected the attempts to repeal that section of the US constitution limiting presidents to two terms would be on the way.

Now Dvorak points out that moves are already afoot to do exactly this...

I have to admit that Dvorak comes across as a bit of a raving nutter to me; he seems to have the typical conspiracy-theorist trait of connecting widely disconnected snippets, taking them out of context, and mooshing them together till they seem to form a connected pictured. That doesn't mean that he's wrong though... and most of the things he mentions there (eg, the existence of a bill to repeal the 22nd amendment) are verifiable fact (which I've not yet verified myself).

The next step I'd expect to see would be some reason why the president has to be granted extra-ordinary authority permitting him to, eg, suspend elections during times of crisis, followed by the declaration of a crisis. A war would be perfect for this - particularly a war on a vague, loosely defined enemy, that could suddenly pop up anywhere, at any time..

This, combined with other things that Dvorak mentions about how the religious right is starting to gain power in the US all seems vaguely familiar.. "Future History", anyone?

Please keep in mind that I'm Australian; we don't have anything equivalent to the 22nd amendment here, nor do I neccessarily think that such a thing is good or neccessary (nor do I neccessarily think that it's bad - we've had Lil Johnny in power for, what, 4 3-year terms now? That's not a particularly good thing..). I'm just making a comment on how un-surprised I'll be when Dubyah makes official his intent to never let the power of being president out of his family...