Too Much Technology Going On

Damn. I'm always frustrated by how quickly technology changes, how much new stuff comes along that I'm intrigued by and get excited about but that ultimately overloads my brain and leaves me feeling frustrated and scrambling to catch up.

In the last 48 hours, I've come across these technological advancements/prisons that I'm trying to absorb:

* The new Mac OS-X Tiger: It has a new feature called Automator which will allow me to create scripts to automatically run repetitive tasks. Sounds great. When will I have time to learn it? Who knows.

* RSS Feeds: I found out about this as an outgrowth of getting the new Mac OS as well. RSS will allow me to have news and postings from various websites fed directly into my webbrowser in one place (or in as many categorized places as I want). I've been able to get hip to this pretty quickly, but it leads to other questions, like GENERATING RSS Feeds of my own to people who would "subscribe" to receive the information. Could this be a new way to do gig announcements and the like? I'm not sure. What I do know is that finding out about RSS led me to . . .

* Podcasting: A special type of RSS feed that contains mp3 files that people can subscribe to. You get a podcast "media aggregator" (oh yeah, my brain exploded right there) and subscribe to podcasts, your computer gets them for you when they're released and you listen on your mp3 player (like iTunes - sorry PC kids, I'm totally Mac, so these are the references you get) and then they can be loaded into your iPod. Well, obviously this is the greatest thing since RSS (which was only a second ago) and something I could definitely put to good use. I've gotten myself pretty comfortable with being on the retrieving and listening end of the whole podcast deal, but now I've got a whole college course of stuff to learn to figure out how to create podcasts that people like you can get your ears on.

* Blogger: Yes, kids this program itself is providing me with a bunch of new ideas to overthink. First off, up til now, I've always done my Journal entries from inside my website. Pretty easy and straightforward. Now I've got a new website and a new way of doing things. The web designers signed me up here to Blogger, then created a way to have the blogs I post to Blogger show up within my website. Lightbulb moment: It seems like the way they do this is by using RSS to feed the new entries into my site. Okay, that's pretty cool. Now, the downside. While you as a reader of my blog CAN subscribe to it using RSS when you're reading it at http://jimboggia.blogspot.com/, you CAN'T subscribe to it directly from my website. I want to change that. More stuff to learn.

Other cool things that having Blogger will allow me to do are being able to get posts up just by sending email (though if I have access to email, I don't know why I couldn't just go to the site and post stuff), and Audioblogging, which is basically me being able to leave all of you a voice mail message you can play from the website. I'm sure that will come in handy.


I guess the point of all this is that I'd really like to incorporate the use of these things to make the website cooler, communicate with you guys in better and more creative ways, but each thing that comes along seems to require taking a month off to learn. Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhh.

I think I'll go watch a DVD.

Oh, did I mention my desire to turn the 150 plus hours of video from the making of the album into a DVD or at least videos that can be posted to the website.

I'm still reading the manuals on that one, too.

Anyone who would like to apply for the position of Boggiamusic Technology Guru - send me an email.

Or maybe write a letter.