Made My Day!

Now without wanting to blow my own trumpet too much, I do get lots of emails from viewers who watch ScreenCastsOnline and get a tremendous amount from both the free shows and the paid for membership. I try and keep the content interesting and varied, fully understanding that it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time, but I think I strike a good balance and that is reflected in the large number of emails from delighted viewers that I get. However, occasionally I get an email that just blows me away and frankly, can be pretty humbling. Some background first... I got an email from a partially sighted viewer (lets call him John) a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned that he was having trouble reading his membership panel on the ScreenCastsOnline website. It was dark grey on light grey. Thanks to some assistance from Klaus Lovgreen (my good friend and CSS guru) we changed it to black on grey and increased the fontsize. All was well, so I let John know and he replied back that it was perfect and thanked me. He also mentioned that he'd asked me 11 months ago if I could do a show on Speech on the Mac and if it was any nearer the top of the pile? 11 months ago? Damn! I hate disappointing people. What else could I do but research and put together a show on OSX Speech technologies and I published it this week. I got another mail from John today and after checking that it was OK with him, I wanted to share it with you. So here it is:

Hi Don, A big thanks for this weeks show on speech technologies. When I saw this weeks show I was so surprised I had a little cry. It's always been difficult having poor eye site and using a computer, but with this show it's made my life a lot better. It was worth the 11 months wait. All the very best John

Nothing else to say really.

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Podcamp Barcelona in iProng magazine

Following my recent trip to Barcelona to speak at the Podcamp, Bill Palmer from iProng magazine asked me to do a short write up of the event. Only to happy to oblige and the edition including my section (with some photos) has now been published. You can get a direct link to the PDF or even better subscribe via iTunes. PS Thanks to Chris Pinchen and Mark Pendleton for the photos, unfortunately, the photo attribution didn't get included in the article. For info: Picture 1: Chris Pinchen and myself during one of my sessions (note: Had I known they were going to blow it up that big, I'd have supplied a high res version! Photo by Mark Pendleton Picture 2: Going round the table from left to right. Mark Pendleton, Ben Curtis, David Allen. Photo by Chris Pinchen Picture 3: Podcamp Logo: Designed by mark Pendleton (Multi Lingual, Photographer and Graphic Designer - makes you sick doesn't it - plus he's a musician too!) Picture 4: Late lunch in El Masnou - Picture by Mark Pendleton Technorati Tags: ScreenCastsOnline, Podcamp

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Breaking News

Sorry, couldn't resist :-)

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Bill Gates and Me

Watched the interesting BBC documentary featuring Bill Gates last night. Extremely surprised that Apple didn't feature more prominently as a potential competitor for Microsoft, actually didn't feature at all! What did tickle me though was Bill's computer setup in his office when comparing it to mine: Bills Setup (via BBC iPlayer):

Mine:

So it just goes to show that even though I don't have $50 billion in the bank, at least I have the same computer experience as Bill. Actually no, he runs Vista and I run OSX Leopard. So without $50 billion, I have a better computing experience than Bill Gates

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For Mac Eyes Only

Gary Malpas (GazMAz) from the ScreenCastsOnline forum contacted me recently about having a chat for a Podcast his contributes to - For Mac Eyes Only. So we fired up Skype one afternoon last week and recorded a conversation. The chat has now been published and you can check it out over at the For Mac Eyes Only website. If you listen closely, at one point you'll hear one of the cats making an impromptu appearance. It sort of wandered in and announced its presence during the recording but I just ignored it and carried on regardless. It wasn't until later in the chat that Gary told me he could hear it! Thanks to Gary for the chat and Michael Potter for including it on the podcast.

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