Of course, now I have to figure it all out. I have about a month to put the presentation together.  At this point all I know is that they want me to speak – I assume I’ll have a projector and an internet connection (both of which I need, both of which I could bring). I’ll have to get some new business cards made up, and most importantly – figure out what t-shirt I am going to wear.  Do i go classic black T, or something really geeky? If geeky, how far do I go – something obscure or something anyone can figure out? Do I wear a shirt with my podcast’s logo on it?

Yikes! Tons of work to do between now and then.

Keep watching this space, much more to come.

After that came the plane flight which was very quick – we took off on time and arrived 25 minutes early. Early! The flight was great, with just a bit of turbulence on take off and landing, but it was very cloudy so there wasn’t much to see during the flight.

After that, a quick ride on BART – the train that goes from the airport to downtown. Quite uneventful, but quite loud – no ipod listening happening on this train. I’ve used BART in the past and it’s a really nice, easy, cheap way to get from the airport to downtown.

Of course by then I was starving.  In the past I’ve grabbed something to eat at the airport, but there are so many great things to eat in San Francisco that I decided to wait until I checked into my hotel to eat.  A quick wander down to Fisherman’s Wharf and I found a great place to eat – Boudin, a bakery known for it’s sourdough. But not the big huge restraunt, the smaller one on the pier, that you can just walk right in to without having to wait. I had Chili in a sourdough bowl, but the real star of this meal was the very fresh, very tasty bottle of Anchor Steam (for only $3.50) that came with the meal.  I’ve been looking forward to this beer for almost a year! Well worth the wait

The rest of the afternoon was spent just wandering around the downtown area.  I checked out the City Lights book store, which was a very cool book store, unfortunately I think some of the books went waaay over my head.  I have no idea what kind of books were in the “Typographies” category, and I’m still not sure what “commodity asthetics” means, but the city lights book store has a category for that. 

Of course no trip to San Francisco is complete without a trip to the Apple store, and this trip was no exception.  I did find out one thing – as much as you might want to, it’s just not possible to find the Appe store by ‘feel’. I had to result to using my GPS application, but I was getting really spotty GPS signals because of the tall buildings, so I ended up wandering around for an hour before finding the store.  In the end it was worth it because I got to play with an iPad for a half an hour.  As many people have said, there’’s something about the iPad that just can’t be conveyed without actually touching and playing with it.  The iPad is a game changing thing of beauty, and it’s FAST.  I managed to make it out of the store without buying an iPad, but that was mostly because they were all sold out! Word on the street is that they are getting a new shipment tomorrow, early afternoon.

I ended up having supper at the mall downtown.  The food court there is a great place to eat.  It’s not your typical food court, it is definitely higher end food.  I had a great green chicken curry with jasmine fried rice.  Go ahead and click on that picture – see the dishes? You get your food on a real plate, and you even get metal utensils!  Little things amuse us small town people IO guess. The curry was excellent.  

After supper I caught the cable car back to Fisherman’s wharf, and since it started to rain, I spent some time in the Barnes and Noble book store.  Once the rain let up I was hungry again so I got a Double Double burger at In N Out burger (mmm). On the way back I did se the remnants of the famous San Francisco bushman, all though I didn’t see the man himself. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.

If you enjoyed this post, check back tomorrow for more.  Also you can see all my picutres on Flickr, and follow my travels minute to minute on my Twitter feed. 

All in all, I am quite happy with the upgrade.  I know, Canon will be discontinuing this model later this year, and I got a good deal because of it, but for me, this is a huge upgrade, from a 10 year old DSLR to this camera.

Then came the days of Leo – Leo Laporte that is. When he recorded that first episode of “Revenge of the ScreenSavers” (later renamed TWiT – This Week In Tech) he started a revolution that is still going strong today.  For years I religiously subscribed to every new podcast he started, and many others too.  When Apple included Podcasts in iTunes – happy days!  Now there are thousands, if not millions, of podcasts out there.

But the shiny is starting to wear off (for me at least). Why? There seems to be just one podcast format.  2 (or more) guys (or very rarely girls) get together and talk about this week in something – technology, biotech, wordpress, celebrity gossip, whatever.  Nothing exemplifies this better than Leo Laporte’s This Week In Tech.  Now don’t get me wrong, I (mostly) love, and listen to every single episode of TWiT. But how much weekly tech do I need? What about Diggnation, Dl.TV, Buzz Out Loud, Cranky Geeks, Engadget etc? It’s all the same news, and I only need to hear it once.

Then there’s the how-to podcasts.  Great, and I produce one myself (teachmewp.com) but something like this has such a limited audience. Take my podcast for example… I show you how to do things in WordPress.  But once you know how to use wordpress, why keep watching? Howdoyoudothatohgreatthanksbye.

It seems like after the shiny wore off of podcasts, everybody just went back to what they knew, which was talk radio.  Does this mean I think we need to start being more like TV?  Nooooooo please no no no! Again let’s look at Tekzilla – a totally awesome video podcast, which is just like a TV show… two people (including gasp a girl!) standing at a desk, talking tech and answering questions. It’s like a techie morning show.  Now don’t get me wrong again, I love it, but I really don’t want to watch 10 video podcasts that are exactly the same (Cranky Geeks, CommandN, Geek Brief TV etc).

So you know what I think we need?  We need to break free from this ‘talk show’ mentality and start making some truly creative podcasts.  Again, no offence to any podcast I’ve mentioned (or not mentioned here) there are a ton of entertaining podcasts.  I’m putting a call out for creative podcasts.

Let’s start thinking… Scuba Radio (ok not a perfect example because it’s a radio show turned into a podcast) I’ve listened to it in the past. If you’re a scuba diver, it is an entertaining way to kill a few hours, but it gets boring after a while.   Why not grab a camera, and show yourself doing some maintenance on your equipment.  Take us to your local diving hole.  Heck, put the video camera in a baggie and take it diving with you!  Harder work than just sitting around talking about SCUBA but certainly more entertaining.

How about hiking – I am a hiker wannabe. I’m sure there are some good hiking podcasts, but again how long can you sit around and talk about hiking locations and equipment?  We have almost ubiquitous 3G nowadays… why not go on a hike and stream it live (using ustream or stickam or one of the others) and do a Q&A while you’re running from bears? Or better yet, let the audience choose whether you turn Right, or Left at that fork in the trail…

How about this… and this is something I’ve actually done. Find books that are public domain, and turn them into a weekly podcast.  I did this with Cory Doctorow’s Someone comes to town someone leaves town.  Creative, yes. Entertaining, well maybe.  Both listeners (which were probably Cory and Me) thought so, but not many others…. not all creative ideas pan out.

Enough with that… it’s tough to think outside of the box, and I can already see that the first two of my suggestions are just ‘taking a video camera with you’.

What are your thoughts?

• How can we break away from the ‘talk show’ style podcast, or do we even need to?
• What is your creative idea for a different type of podcast?
• What is stopping you from doing a creative podcast?

Let’s get the conversation started, and the creativity flowing.

Trans-fat is basically fat with hydrogen bubbled through it.  Food manufacturers add trans fat to food for a couple of reasons.  First, it tastes good… darn good. Second  is that it extends the shelf life of the food as it doesn’t spoil as fast.  Trans fat is linked to all kinds of health problems and is (in my opinion) very dangerous – possibly the most dangerous thing we are putting in our food today.  Over the past few years there was a major trans-fat scare and many companies started removing trans fat from their foods.  But in the last year or two, it’s quieted down, and I have noticed that many companies are quietley putting trans fat back in their food.

So I’m avoiding trans fat.  Easy right… just read the ingredients. Manufacturers list trans-fat in the nutritional information on everything now, right?  Well, sort of.  I’ve noticed an increasing number of food products that list 0% trans fat, but still include hydrogenated/partially hydrogenated vegetable fat on the ingredients.  Well, it turns out that if a product contains less than .5 grams of trans fat per serving, the FDA (in the U.S.) says that they can claim the product has 0G or 0% trans fat.

So you have to look at both the nutrition information and the ingredients.  Sometimes a product will show 0% trans fat but you will find hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil or vegetable oil in the ingredients.  Sometimes the product will show 5% trans fat on the nutrition information, but the source of the trans fat is disguised in the ingredients, by using a different name.  You have to be very careful.

My first step for a trans-fat free year?  I gave up McDonalds completely.  I don’t eat there that often right now, but occasionally. Unfortunately I found out their food is loaded with trans fat.  Looking at the chart I just linked to I notice that in Canada on the fries package it shows they contain trans fat, but on their nutrition page it doesn’t…

I’ll try to get a picture of the fries package.

So, today I went out for a walk and thought I’d have a snack when I got back.  How about some Oatmeal, that would be healthy.  We have some

QuakerInstant Oatmeal, and it even says on the box “Soluble oat fibre contributes to healthy cholesterol levels”.  Yay! I i know, ‘instant’ probably means that it’s going to have some not so nice stuff in it like artificial flavour and lots of sugar but at least it has no trans fat right? Why in the world would you put hydrogenated vegetable oil into oatmeal?   A quick check of the nutritional information confirmed my guess – 0 g of trans fat. Woohoo!

Then I had a look at the ingredients, as I have started doing recently. Yup, sugar and some artificial stuff as I thought. But wait – first ingredient under “Vitamins and Minerals” “IRON (COATED WITH HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN OIL)”. Oops. What? Iron coated with hydrogenated soybean oil? Why would you do that? This makes my brain hurt.

Sigh.  I ate an apple instead.