A lousy start to the day today, I had a major computer problem. I could not download my pod casts to my Palm TX for my workday listening. Now to those of us addicted to pod casts you would understand just how dramatic this is, to be forced to listen to hours of inane jocks on t he local radio stations filled me with dread. So here I was at 4.30am in the morning doing a system restore on the computer, reloading the pod casts and still trying to get ready for work. I did manage it though and have now almost recovered from the morning trauma.

Now, what this made me aware of is just how things have changed. The model of yesterday was that your media was delivered to you in allocated slots at allocated times via a non-interactive medium. That annoying boy on the bicycle, who always throws the paper into the deepest mud he can find.. On the way to work you listen the over juiced jocks on the local radio station. And at work you listen to the inane ramblings and dated music of the office radio. Fast-forward to my life now, I listen to my digest of the NYT on the way to work via a podcast subscription. I catch up on the international headlines via my RSS reader on the Palm, then settle into my chosen listening fare for the day with selected pod casts covering a wide range of opinion, talk and music. Things have come a long way; I just wish that the traditional media outlets would get it. They should make their media more amenable to time shifting make it easy for me to get their offerings in whatever format I want and play it whenever I want to.

I am no peacenik, sitting on my butt decrying all war as morally wrong; I have served my country in the past and would take up my body armor and guns and go to war in a heartbeat for a just cause. But, listening this morning to the current death toll in Iraq has given me pause; we have been led into another unjust war by leadership hell bent on serving the interests of those other than the nations they are elected to lead. We have been lied to, kept in the dark about all manner of things that we have a right to know about and have been deceived at every step. Now had these things had been perpetrated by a cynical self serving leader I might take up arms against such a leader, however they have been done by a man who, I think absolutely believes himself to be right. In fact I think he is sure God is speaking directly to him to carry out this course of action, now this is scary, as we are now in a situation of effectively being in a modern crusade, with on the one hand the Islamism idiots on the one side and the right wings Christian idiots on the other, with us caught in the middle. Enough already, please let this slaughter of our children stop, this is just not right.