Another PodCamp Ohio has come and gone! The second annual PodCamp Ohio went extremely well. Confirmed attendance was exactly 200, and factoring in some other missing swag and nametags, I estmate attendance was somewehre between 210-220.

We had some new sponsors as well as some repeat sponsors this year. TechSmith, Blip.tv, Doctor Anonymous, Spaceblue and Blubrry sponsored both last year and this year. Circle of Seven productions, Avitae Energy Water, AssistCoach.com and The OSU Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing (CSTW) are new sponsors.

Doug from CSTW was a great host for PodCamp Ohio this year. Doug and his assistant Judy bent over backwards to make sure PodCamp Ohio 2 worked perfectly at their facility. And did the space work or what! We had more than enough rooms to our disposal as well as plenty of projectors, wireless Internet access, desks, chairs and parking! Thanks so much Doug and Judy!

We had Qdoba fur lunch again, and this time all the food went! Last year I remember finding a lot of quacamole left over that we ended up having to throw out. I’m glad to report all the quacamole along with everythign else was gone. By clean up time, we just had extra chicken, cheese, chips and shells to dispose of. Don’t worry, we didn’t throw the remaining food in the trash.

After party was a lot of fun! The food wasn’t so hot and the bar we picked was out of stock of most of their draft beers but after dinner we made the trek down High Street and visited Jenis Ice Cream. Interesting ice cream, as all the flavors are very exotic. It is definitely worth checking out if you’re ever in the Columbus Short North/Arena District.

On Sunday I met up with Chris and Kim for lunch at BC Roosters. It was great to have one more meetup before winding myself down from the weekend. When you help organize an event like this, there is defintely a day or two of withdraw afteward. It is like a combinatoin of let down that it is over, relief it is over and pride that the job was accomplished.

Whats Next?

I’m pretty confident we will have PodCamp Ohio 3 at the same location as this year. As long as Doug will have us back then it’s a done deal. I would also like to see us create a non-profit organization to manage future PodCamp Ohio events. Last year I had two cases and this year one other opportunity that we missed all becuase we don’t have a non profit tax id. It makes sense to make a non-profit, we certianly don’t make any money from the event plus it is educational. There are a few organizers and volunteers this year who expressed interest so in a month or so once all the PodCamp Ohio 2009 dust settles we’ll start backup the monthly meetings and see what we can get setup.

So, I absolutely love my 2007 Civic Si Sedan! There is one item though that has been driving me crazy for 2 years now: the extremely hot shift knob. You can see in the picture on the right that the shift knob is really nice and shiny. When you drive the car, it’s a great feeling to hold while going through the gears. The only problem is when you park your car out in the hot sun for a while and come to find the shift knob is hotter than a Waffle House grill, we’re talking burning hot.

Up to this point I’ve carried a hand towel in the car to use when I can’t handle the shift knob. It works, but it also sucks.

Tonight, I found exactly what I was looking for: A leather sock shift knob cover! It is available at Rick’s custom Leather, here’s  direct link to their knob-sock covers.

The product description on Ricks Custom Leather mentions the hot shift knob problem with the Honda S2000 stock aluminum shift knob. Lucky for us Honda Civic Si Sedan/Fa5 2007, 2008, 2009 owners, the S200 shift knob is identical to ours. The same shift knob is also used on some other Honda 6 speed transmission models such as the Accord and the  2006+ Civic Si Coupe.

I’m at WordCamp Columbus! It’s great, there are about 100 or so folks in attendance. Now at lunch we’re eating during an open mic, some hard core WordPress folks are speaking about whaty they do with WordPress, asking questions, etc.. I just learned that there are only 6-7 plugin devolopers here today.

I’m looking forward to the afternoon. The sessions sccheduled will be covering topics I’m not so knowledagable. At 2pm I’ll be doing my presentation on setting up WordPress with Podcasting where I’ll cover the plugins avaialble and go into detail on Blubrry PowerPress and WP Audio Player plugins.

Phase one of our first garden is complete. I made a 12 ft x 4 ft garden bed out of scrap cedar pickets, yard spikes, and plastic fencing. The first of 2 rows has a small variety of tomatoes. Phase 2 I have sereno peppers I’m nursing in the house. I actually have about 30+ sereno peppers nursing, I’ll be picking the 8 best to plant in the garden next weekend.

Heather planted 2 other tomato baskets, an up side down tomato plant from TV, plus a basket of strawberries.

In the section picture, check out the simple door I made, all I have to do is pickup the top support over the braces held back by some praces along the parallel rails and lay it down on the ground. Makes it easy to get in/out of the garden.

We’ve been making some home improvements this month. In the past couple weeks we replaced most of our door knobs, installed new door hinges and added two new night stands to our master bedroom.

The door knobs in the house are complete junk. When we first moved in, we had 2 doors that had a sticky feeling when trying to open them. When I finally took the door knobs apart to see what the problem was, I had myself a pile of plastic pieces from inside the door. From observation, I think we were lucky the door knobs even worked. When I replaced the door knobs, we purchased new nickle plated ones that had a very modern look. We purchased the house brand sold at Lowes which use metal (rather than plastic) mechanical parts inside. 2 years later, 10 of our doors still have old worn gold plated door knobs. So this month we replaced 6 more of the door handles, leaving 4 more left to do next month.

Since we had our baby in January, we’re both finding that our squeaky door hinges are very annoying when either of us wake up in the middle of the night. So last weekend we got new nickle plated hinges to match our nickle plated door knobs. When I first started installing the new hinges, I did it by hand. After 2 doors, a light bulb went off and I grabbed the cordless drill. The process of replacing the hinges went from taking just over an hour a door to about 10 minutes a door. I’m almost done, I need 6 more hinges and 2 door stops to complete the project.

Last are the new night stands. Our master bedroom is rather wide, mainly because we have a queen size bed. At Ikea night stands are pretty small and also low to the ground. So we ended up getting their smallest dresser to use as our night stands. They’re at the perfect height for our bed and fill our space perfectly. If we ever get a King size bed these night stands may be a problem but for now they’re great!

We love the nickle finish and we’re eventually going to replace everything that has a gold finish with the nickle finish. Luckily, the door hinges, knobs and other finishing items are the same price as the gold plated ones. We’re certainly not using bronze or chrome!

I had a lot of fun at PodCamp Toronto! Made lots of connections and got to meet a lot of on-line friends including Whitney Hoffman of the LD Podcast. The PodCamp Toronto organizers did an excellent job putting on what I observed as a perfectly executed PodCamp.

For me, one sponsor stood out during the PodCamp. Molson Canadian hosted a Saturday evening party that was definitely worth remembering. PodCamp attendees were given tickets tickets to sample from the many beers brewed by Molson Coors company. I quickly became fond of the Molson White, which I thought tasted a lot like Blue Moon. I later found out that it is Blue Moon relabeled in Canada.

On top of the free beer samples, anyone who had a sample of Heineken received 6 free beer glasses. These are not cheap glasses either. Check out the attached photo.

I’m heading to PodCamp Toronto this weekend, I’m pretty pumped! I wanted to go last year but things didn’t quite work out with my schedule. This year though I’ll be there!

Link: http://podcamptoronto.wordpress.com

This will be the first PodCamp where I will not only be representing my company RawVoice/Blubrry and PodCamp Ohio but also my new Plugins Wordpress plugins podcast.

So I just printed out directions, I’m looking at a 7 hour drive plus/minus traffic. so if you’re not doing anything tomorrow afternoon and you have my cell number, please give me a call I got some time to chat.

So I keep getting emails from Microsoft and today I decided to unsubscribe. When I click the unsubscribe link, I am directed to a Microsoft Passport sign in page. I then surfed around the site and came across this page: http://www.microsoft.com/info/unsubscribe.mspx Which in any of the three options, requires me to sign into my Microsoft Passport. Unfortunately, the email they are sending spam to is a Google Email address, and when I enter my Google Email address in the forgot passport password page, it tells me that my Passport account does not exist. I’m not about to create a MS passport account simply to unsubscribe to their annoying mailing list. Is this Microsoft’s legitimate way of verifying email addresses, something spammers do to confirm that the destination is a live recipient? Crafty Microsoft, nice work.

This is just another sign how Microsoft is out of touch with what is happening on the web. Their horrible web browser and piss poor podcasting support in their operating system is an obvious sign of this but the little details such as this one just put into perspective that Microsoft will not be leading anything in the web technology sector anytime soon. My prediction, Microsoft will need to spin off or shut down some of their piss poor divisions so they can focus on being an Operating System company.

Oh and let me unusbscribe from your horrible news letter without having a passport!

We had a baby girl! Melanie Gail Mandato was born today, January 10, 2009 at 12:42 AM. She’s a healthy 9 pounds 0 ounces and 19 inches long. Here’s a picture at 12 hours.

Heather will be blogging more at our new family blog, www.mandato.com.

Hanging out at the Parma Buffalo Wild Wings with friends. Been a long night, gave another friend a ride from Columbus airport to Medina. Fun times, getting a lot of baby tips!