Despite my aversion to all things Apple, I've recently discovered the phenomenon of podcasts.

For those of you not sure what a podcast is, it's simply an audio recording made available on the internet for anyone to listen to.  Typically these would be regular shows that listeners would put onto an iPod, MP3-player, mobile-phone, whatever.  Think "recorded internet radio" and you won't be far off, but you don't have to worry about missing an episode!

I don't have an iPod, an iMac, or use iTunes, but I thought I'd post a couple of comments about some podcasts I've been listening to recently...

.NET Rocks is a weekly talk-show for anyone interested in .Net development.  It's hosted by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, and they both have the knack of making some rather tricky subjects make sense.

Another is Hanselminutes, is a weekly talk-show with Scott Hanselmann, a noted web developer and technologist.  These short 20-minute podcasts cover many subjects of interest not only to .net developers, but to anyone who considers themselves a "techie".  Subjects range from development-related topics like Continuous Integration and Reflection, to the pitfalls of HDTV, Office 2007, Windows gadgets, Torrents, and much much more.

A third programme out of the Pwap stables is Mondays - What Sundays Threw Up, but this is anything but technical.  Mondays is a weekly show chock full of people dumber than you, tech toys, a girl, and a lot of geeky, funny, and sometimes amazing stories.  Hosted by Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell, Karen Greenwald, Mark Miller and Geoff Maciolek, you can never predict what weird shit they'll be talking about next.  The best indication I can give of the random nature of the topics covered is to show some of the web-goodies they've talked about, including the Villain Chair, the One Click Butter Cutter, Exhaust-pipe Spinners and real Transformer Robots.  Well worth a listen.

I did listen to a few Scientific American bits too, but they use some gnarly non-standard XML for their feeds, so my podcatcher doesn't like it.

Sunday evening, 19th November 2006. Watched two films tonight, both on FilmFour. Patriot Games is always worth a watch if I've not seen it for a while, even if just for a little bit of Indiana Jones beating up IRA thugs.

I hadn't seen Bound before, but it turned out to be a pretty good thriller about two women, Violet and Corky, getting together to cheat Violet's boyfriend Caesar out of a huge chunk of mob cash. In this 1996 Wachowski-Brothers film, Violet is played by the lovely Jennifer Tilly, and Gina Gershon's Corky was interesting too. The fact that they get together for a little bit of action doesn't hurt either...
Joe Pantoliano plays the "unfortunate" victim of their machinations with his usual flair.