Well, I am pretty excited. I have my first “podcast” up. It’s nothing fabulous - just an introduction to my podcast so listeners know what to expect. I didn’t use my show intro/outro and didn’t do any real production for it. It’s just me talking for about five minutes. The fully produced shows should start showing up very soon! So, if you click on the orange icon below and to the right, you will be able to listen to my show. I will be adding in the iTunes subscribe button shortly.

Chowder Radio Promo       First promo for Chowder-Radio.com - click the words to the left to hear.

Tonight I went to see Flags of Our Fathers in the movie theaters. I had bought the book for my Dad a few years ago for his birthday or Christmas or something, and he had talked about how good it was. For those of you who don’t know, it’s about the Marines in the famous photo on Iwojima during World War II who raised the American flag, and about what the fighting was like there. It was definitely a good movie. When the credits were rolling at the end of the movie, there were real photos from Iwojima. Not a person left the movie theater during this, and no one said a word. It was almost…respectful.

It’s a little strange to think that just 60 short years ago the world was at war. Not that long ago. Now when you look around and see kids with the cell phones, newer and faster cars, music videos, all the pop culture scene…it makes you wonder if anyone thinks back to what happened during WWII, and all the sacrifices that were made.

I was reading the Sacramento News and Review, the local “what’s happening” publication. Their feature article this week was talking about what goes on in the light rail trains, our local mass transit system.

Now I’ve only ridden on light rail a few times, but never had any issues. I’ve heard horror stories, of course, but you have to agree you will get these with any major city train or subway system. The one that really stood out to me in this article was about a man on the train who pulled down his pants and took a dump in the middle of the aisle, then went back to where he was sitting. Can you imagine sitting on the train and watching that? I guess it isn’t that funny, but it makes me laugh to think about the look on everyone’s face watching that - and the look on the face of the person sent in to clean it up.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that nugget.

Hey all - don’t let the lack of change on the website fool you. I have been working in the background to get things ready for the website and for my podcast. If you take a look, you will see I added a forums section, so hopefully everyone will make good use of that later on. I am also adding a gellery section which will feature photos from my various road trips.

I almost have my promo complete. I should have that up shortly and my first podcast soon. In the meantime, I’ll start blogging more regularly.

Yesterday our company held its first annual golf tournament. For those of you who don’t know, holding a golf tournament is a great marketing tool for reaching customers - everyone haves fun, you can get a wide selection of your customers all in one place for four hours or more without having them take off, and the clients have a great time golfing for free and playing hooky from work.

We had our tourney at Empire Ranch Golf Course. Of course, I didn’t get to golf. My job was to sit on the 18th hole and tell the golfers if they hit a hole in one there, they would win a Harley Davidson.

Might sound boring, but it was actually pretty cool. The 18th hole at empire tees off from on top of a hill and the hole is 190 yards and downhill. I had brought my Ipod and my portable speakers, was wearing shorts and sandals, and was sitting comfortably under a tent next to a pony keg of good microbrew, listening to Bob Marley’s greatest hits, and just enjoying perfect weather. Not a bad way to spend a Friday at work, eh?

I know the website has changed a little bit recently. I tried a new theme for Chowder Radio. It looked like it would have a lot more functionality and some cool new features, but it turned out to be too much of a headache, so I am back to this theme.

I’m sure there really aren’t too many people reading this right now anyway, but the site should be upgraded and ready to go in a week or so. I am pretty anxious to get podcasting, but there are a few technical issues that I need to take care of first.

So hang in there! Better things are on the way.

So, I had a little bit of time today to kill, so I took a look at some features available for Wordpress (the blogging software I have chosen to use). So if you take a look to the right side of my website, you will see a “Latest Visitors” box. It’s called ClustrMaps (no, that isn’t a type-o) and if you click in there, it will bring up the physical locations on a map of the latest visitors to my website. How cool is that? And if you click on the “pin” where a visitor logged in from and click “satellite”, you can actually hit the “+” sign to zoom in to a satellite image of where the user was from, down to the street level. Sweet!

Right now it just shows me, and it probably won’t have too many locations for a while, but I am hoping eventually to have tons of little pins in my map from all over the world. That would be something!

The website is finally up! It may not be the most impressive, but it will get there. I am surprised how much work it was for a non-technical person just to get this far. There is still a long, long way to go, but this is progress and progress is good.

It’s going to be a blast to see where this goes and how my whole project will turn out. Stay tuned - there’s lots more to come! Website updates, blogging, podcasts!  I hope this will be a place you’ll want to hang out at once in a while, so suggestions will always be welcome.

Welcome to Chowder Radio. A website about…stuff. Life in California, travel, food, and podcasts. Come on in and sit for a bit, look around, and enjoy yourself - maybe even leave a comment or two.