I have touched the new iPod, and it touched me back. I’m literally holding back tears because I know I can’t afford it.

I watched a music video on it and the and the bass is incredible. I could feel it in my chest. How’d they do that?

The most beautiful young woman in a purple one piece dress and long white boots is giving a violin performance with electronic accompaniment. She is amazing. I want to record it, but I don’t want to piss off any lawyer-types. If you’ve ever heard the group of Chinese women who play modern music on classical instruments, that’s what she sounds like. I can’t remember the name of the group. They’re very popular here. I’ll look it up when I get home. (女子十二楽坊, a.k.a. Twelve Girls Band. Thank you Kevin.)

Mattias was right, the iPod has a widescreen setting. Yeaaaaa. Go Apple.

Update: Definitely check out Sarina’s music samples on her web site. I will buy her CD as soon as I can find it. She really was incredible. I’d drink a gallon of her bathwater.

Technorati Tags: sarina, bathwater, apple store, shibuya, ipod

If you do, could you let me know how it displays the widescreen videos I made? Do they play? Do they look smooshed, or does the iPod letterbox the video?

There are only a few podcasts I consider to be the absolute best; the kind that make me feel grateful that podcasting was invented. Number one on my list is Digital Flotsam. Why P.W Fenton likes my podcast back, I’ll never understand. But I’m truly honored. Others that are really, really up there are WGBH Morning Stories, Earthcore (R.I.P.), and 5 Minutes with Wichita.

That’s it. The rest are just filler, except for Daily Source Code, which I listen to because life feels incomplete without it.

Where does mine fall in there? If I weren’t the host, I wouldn’t listen to it. Then again, Stanley Kubrick hated every one his own movies. I can totally relate.

Today while catching up on old episodes of Morning Stories, I heard about…ooooh, earthquake. Second strong tremor in the last couple of days.

All done, I’m still here. Tony Kahn of Morning Stories gave a plug for a podcast called The Seanachai. It’s the kind of podcast where immediately after listening to the latest show, you download every past episode, listen to all of them back to back, and from then on you check for a new episode first thing every day.

Now that I have a working iPod, I have sampled a veritable shitload of podcasts lately, and honestly, the only one that stands out is The Serenachi. Patrick Mclean is more talented than this new form of media deserves.

Work is very, very busy, and frankly, stressful. On the plus side, I’m producing a Japanese language podcast for the Canadian Education Alliance. I don’t do the talking, but I do everything else. I really enjoy listening to the interviews of Japanese who are studying in Canada. My favorite was the latest episode, #3. If Chie had her own podcast, I’d definitely listen to it. Episode 2’s interview was also interesting. If you want to hear what very heavy Osaka-ben Japanese sounds like when spoken by a teenage girl, give it a listen.

After receiving a very nice E-mail from someone at Apple Japan this morning who suggested we meet and discuss the possibility me doing an in-store presentation at one of their Tokyo boutiques (Weeeee!), I hope this doesn’t ruffle any feathers.

First off, the new video iPod looks beautiful. It won’t be long before we start seeing train commuters zoning out on their iPods instead of their keitai. However, it’s not the only handheld video player out there. I just learned that iRiver has one that’s larger, supports more codecs, has a built-in FM Tuner, can record audio and is in the same price range. I’m looking for something (besides a chloroform-soaked rag or a pair of gag balls) that’ll keep the kids quiet on long trips, and the iRiver, with its larger screen, might be better suited for it.

Second, if you want to sync your ipod to more than one PC, take a look at the freeware iTunes substitute Ephpod. I like to load some podcasts into my iPod in the morning at home, then add/delete some before I leave work. I also like backing up my library up once in a while, and Ephpod will not only dump all your MP3s into a specified directory, but also organize and rename the files based on the ID3 tags. Not only that, it also lets you easily edit the tags of a whole slew of files at once. There are many more very, very useful features it offers, like scanning the iPod for corrupt, orphaned or duplicate files.

I also learned through the Ephpod site that Updater 1.3.1 can be used to reformat a 1st or 2nd generation Mac iPod for Windows, giving my old and busted retro-cool player a new lease on life. Armed with that and an after-market replacement battery, some of you out there might be able to pick up a used model very cheap, since it might not look appealing to eBay’ers, Yahoo’ers and Rakuten’ers who aren’t in on this nifty little hack.

Yet again. Any requests on what you’d like to see? I’ll try to make something more similar to a documentary rather than just a series of clips slapped together. I’ll have to be careful not to annoy my family by being more focused on capturing everything on video than simply enjoying the outing.

Doing the post-production on both a podcast and a videocast is such a nusiace that I don’t think I’ve ever managed to put out both flavors, even though I’ve recorded both audio and video on a number of occasions. So this time I’ll try to do enough narration on the video that I can save a copy of just the audio and release it as a podcast.

Unless…would anyone be interested in editing the raw audio?

Even though I’m buried in the bottom of every podcast directory and I don’t have thousands of subscribers and I haven’t been receiving much feedback lately, I love checking the visitor map every day and seeing that there are listeners even in places I never knew existed. That map is all I need. And some positive feedback every once in a while.

Shout out to whoever-you-are in State College, Pa. I graduated in 1990, back when you were, what, two years old?

That was a real Mexican poncho, I’ll have you know. Not a Sears Mexican poncho. Those things were high fashion back then, along with porn mustaches.