Now into my 3rd week of podcasting I decided to listen to some of my past podcasts and see what I thought.

And what I think is I need some work on my delivery. I am too stiff. I talk to fast, pardon me I read too fast. That’s right I have been writing then reading my podcasts. Not a good idea if you want a conversational casual podcast feel.

Hopefully todays podcast will be a step in the right direction

To help me along I have chosen mellifluous as today’s word.

Mellifluous is an adjective that means flowing with sweetness or honey.

I would like my podcasts to flow with sweetness and honey.

I will keep repeating this word, mellifluous, over and over again and then I will become it. That reminds me of a good quote for tomorrow’s podcast.

Not reading my podcasts word for word should help to.

First off I would like to welcome any new listeners to TodaysPodcast.com and thank Adam for the plug on the Daily Source Code.

I hope I don’t disappoint.

Today’s wise words come from Colin Powell the, unfortunately former, Secretary of State.

This quote needs a little setup- On the eve of the war in Iraq President Bush declared he was sleeping like a baby. Powell, a little wiser than the president, having served the US as soldier for 35 years, being awarded the purple heart and founding America’s Promise, a charity that helps children and youth from all socioeconomic sectors in the United States remarked “I’m sleeping like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up, screaming.”

I wish the administration had payed more attention to Powell’s nightmares instead of Bush’s consultations with a higher father.

This weekend, as I have for nearly a decade, my friends and I went to Warren Miller’s latest ski and snowboard movie, Impact. My friends I and go every year. It gets us excited for the upcoming ski season. Actually, I am a snow boarder, but I skied for 15 years and it is tough to not call it a ski season.

Anyway, Warren is smart guy with a profound sense of how to live a life of joy and excitement. And how to make a living at it.

So I would like to relay some words from the sage ski bum. “Memory can be your drug of choice. If you let it.”

Thinking back on my life I realized the memories are worth as much, if not more, that the experiences. Mostly because you can relive them over and over again, but the time you went to a 3d porno with Adam Curry. You only get to experience that once, but you can retell it and laugh about it for the rest of your life. Maybe even make a career of it.

Now Warren has a bit of advantage on the average podcaster. He has put out a ski movie every year for 51 years. 51 years of memories.

In an attempt to catch up I set up a personal blog for my girlfriend and I to save a few memories and photos. She loves it. It could very well be a love note that lasts a lifetime.

Building on the positive comments I received regarding my first podcast today’s word is interstitial. Interstitial is one of those, possibly pretentious, specialized jargon words.

The straight literal definition is the space between two states.

In the context of the web it refers to the page between pages. Two great sites that frequently use them are Yahoo! Games and
Salon. They use them to show you an ad before you get to the stuff you want.

In the case of Yahoo! Games you get to see an ad before you get to play a free game of backgammon. Salon uses them the same way- “You want to read this article? Watch this ad.” The Salon interstitials, because of their high-concept multimedia content, are usually entertaining. The articles are great too.

There are many other contexts where the term interstitial is used. Like TV for example. TV usage is pretty similar to the web- a little content before the stuff you want to see like segues between stories on Entertainment Tonight and the brief network plugs after the ads but before the show.

The medical community uses interstitial to describe unimportant parts of the body that are in between the important parts.

Thanks to Gordon Smith for commenting on my Soliloquy podcast. Gordon, I think you are right. A lot of podcasters are using Soliloquy tongue-in-cheek.

Gordon has a cool bog. “A pictorial journal of life in rural Australia.” Some stunning, beautiful pictures of nature and the mundane, also beautiful. He also has an audioBlog that accompanies and comments on the photos. His site is provides all the content you need for one of those new photo iPods.

Watching Around the World with Orson Wells I heard an interesting observation. It is probably dated and not very PC but it got me thinking.

Orson Wells:

Forgive me, I don’t think the Basques are totally civilized in the pure sense of that word because civilization implies city culture by definition.

None of the dictionaries I use listed a definition demanding or even relating to city living. But the wikipedia entry for civilization describes it as a “complex society in which many of the people live in cities.”

Now I grew up in the Republic of Boulder in Colorado. Boulder is definitely a city, but not in the same sense as New York or Tokyo. So I wonder if I am less civilized than people who have grown up in one of those large cities.

I was in Tokyo in August and they might be more civilized then me, but I have been to New York on many occasions and the word civilized isn’t one of the first words that comes to mind.