Idlemind - nickcoster.com
Future gazing from a quiet corner of cyberspace.

I love my iPod as I have mentioned before. I now listen to it almost exclusively and whenever I am out and about with just my own thoughts with a podful of podcasts.

The thing that I have been quietly nervous about is that the amount that i have been using it exceeds the number of daily hours reccomended to get the most out of the iPod battery life. Before the podcasts I really had no expectation of listenign to more than a couple of hours a day of music. Now however i need to listent to that much just to keep up with all of hte feeds that I listen to.

As a result I have been seeing the battery time get gradually shorter and shorter, with the battery indicator sometimes displaying half full before suddenly crapping out at the most undesireable times. This is particularly annoying when I am out for a run, 20 minutes into a 60 minute course when suddenly my head is assulted with the silence of empty speakers.

These shortened times between re-fueling are now becoming a more noticeable issue. I listen to about 2 and a half hours of podcasting now before the battery winks out. At the end of the week I will be traveling overseas (more on that later) which would be a great opportunity to blast through some backed up podcasts while I am on the plane but if the battery craps out before we taxi out I will be very dissapointed , to say the least.

On Sunday the 14th Adrienne and I ran the 35th City to Surf. I have actually lost count of how many I have done now (I think It is around seven) but I always really enjoy the run. The distance is no longer the challenge and the crowds are usually too deep to really clock a proper official time, but the carnival atmosphere of the day is just fantastic.

This year they claimed to have over 65,000 runners at the start line and although I was qualified to run with the lead pack, I wanted to be with a Adrienne and “Team Illy” starting in the “Back of the Pack” group. Team Illy is headed up by Neville Brown, who was determined to see how many slow moving ankles he could tear off with his High Speed uber-chair. This is where Team Illy came in. We ran a security perimeter around him to clear the way and save countless unnecessary injuries.

Neville has reported that we finished in an official 94 minute time, which if correct is pretty damn good for the whole team. I have some snaps of the proceedings of the day up on Flickr.

The next run will be the pub to pub on the 28th of August. I’ll take the camera to that one too.

I wanted to talk a bit about spyware. This is not a new topic in itself. Spyware has been around for some years now. Really ever since web browsers allowed the use of cookies that allowed someone else to watch where you have been surfing I there has been a threat to our online privacy.

But although privacy is important that is not the real threat. There is a real danger that spyware has already found its way onto your computer. Over the last three years there has been a very dangerous convergence between organized crime and the writers and creators of these online nasties. (more…)

Mike (aka The Rock and Roll Geek),

I have been a regular listener to you show for a while now and I love it, particularly the Doc Neeson and the Chrissie Amphlette interviews, being from Australia myself.

But you gota go easy on the product endosements. This is the reason i left radio behind. Put the ads on the website, mention it once in the sho but then let it go!! If i wanted to listen to a vodka comercial i would be subscribing to the absolute podcast.

Help me stay subscribed. I’d really appreciate it.

–nick coster