Good ol' fashioned blog post

I haven't posted here for a while, so I figured I better do so. No podcast, just text. If I get time, I'll make an audio podcast this week. I think I have some quality material to constitute making a podcast. I'll probably have a segment called "Stupid things in Oklahoma", because there sure have been a lot of stupid things I've heard about especially as it relates to the good ol' university.

Some bad news on the job search. I got rejection letters from William Carey College in Mississippi, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Heidelberg College in Ohio. It's not exactly boosting my confidence to get passed up by these schools. I'm still holding out that I might get a call from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, but I know that their committee met about a week or so ago. So that doesn't bode well.

I'm heading to Chicago in about a week for the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy. Although this probably won't be the party trip that MTNA in Seattle was, I think it might be good to just recharge the batteries and gain some confidence. I'm supposed to help George with his multimedia recital. He's been really good to me since I met him in Seattle. Thanks to George, I'll have an article published in Keyboard Companion for its Winter 2005 edition, and he set me up to be a reviewer for American Music Teacher. I'm supposed to review some virtual piano software. No money for these gigs, but hopefully it will get my name around and someone will notice.

Lot of people getting more into blogging. The Dude, Slab, or whatever you want to call him just started his blog. My brother, Mike, just got his blog up at michaelajero.blogspot.com. Looks like he's going to start podcasting too, as I tried to talk him through some of the steps on ourmedia.org and Feedburner. It's amazing that podcasting seemed so difficult about a month ago, but once you understand the whole RSS concept, it's not so bad. I cleaned up my Safari RSS feeds in my bookmarks bar, so that it only includes NHL, Flyers, and Eagles news. It makes getting those news articles a lot easier, especially since there's been a flurry of news from the NHL since they got back in business. Thanks for the memories, John LeClair. He provided lots of great moments when he was in orange in black.

Mom's B-day Video Podcast

Here's a Quicktime Video Podcast of Mom's birthday on July 12. This was compressed using the old H.263 codec to see if it will play in the iTunes music store. If it works, then we'll see if we can bump it up to the new H.264 codec. This clip is only about a minute long and 4 MB. Gina and Nio sing Happy Birthday to Mom while I play the piano.

Published on the iTunes Music Store!

Woo hoo! Those lovable geniuses at Apple came through. They actually published my podcast on their music store! Now I HAVE to come up with some decent content. I'll also have to find a different picture than the one they use for artwork there. The one on there now is getting old, but probably the only half decent one I have.

Here are screen caps to prove I got on, just in case one day they decide not to allow us to do this for free anymore. If you do search in Podcasts for "mario", then it will come up (along with some German dude apparently also named mario). It's also listed under the category of Audio Blogs if you don't mind swimming through that scene of chaos.

Also the direct URL to my iTunes music store is: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=74837876

Stay tuned to figure out what I do next.

Nio Video Podcast test

Here's an MPEG4 video of Nio bouncing a ball. It uses the new H.264 codec that is in Quicktime 7, so if you don't have it, get it by clicking here!

You can now subscribe to the MarioCast podcast through the iTunes music store. Make sure you have iTunes 4.9 installed. You can get it by clicking here.

I'm still not listed in the Podcast directory, but if you go to the "Advanced" menu in iTunes select "Subscribe to Podcast..." and plug in this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/marioajero then you should be subscribed through iTunes and get new Podcasts whenever they're posted!

A reason for this blog post is to test to see if this video will play through iTunes (should show up in the artwork box from what I hear). I'll let you know if it works. Or better yet, you guys let me know if it works!

Mario's Podcast About Nothing

I talk about music, life, sports, and whatever else I feel like. I might even play something.

This Podcasting thing is tougher than I thought. I don't know if it will go through. It really is a jumbled mess how this works. Anyway, at least this link will point you to where the feed for the podcast is. However, it still seems more complicated than it should be. I'll keep on tweaking this. Enjoy if you can.

How 'bout them Phillies?

So when I was out visiting the folks, Dad set me up with 6 primo Phillies tickets against those lovable NY Mets. Baseball really isn't my sport, but it was nice to finally see the new Citizens Bank Park. Quite an improvement over the Vet (R.I.P). It was nice getting together with The Dude, Spoonman, and Lisa. Gina's mom got her first taste of baseball and noticed how much slower the game is compared to the other sports I watch.

The Phillies got spanked hard, and there were way too many Mets fans there. Urbina stinks. He sent us home after giving up 2 HRs in one inning.

My first Blog

Okay, so I'm finally jumping on the Blog bandwagon. I've been doing the website thing for over 10 years, so I figured I'd give this a try. Actually, the only reason I'm trying this is that I'm interested in getting into Podcasting (not that anyone would want to listen to me anyway!). But from what I've read, you gotta have a blog before you get into it. I have to figure out how to get this RSS feed to publish an mp3 or AAC file. If anyone knows the steps to link those, let me know.
So we'll see how that goes. Don't expect me to get too political here though. I've already read the story of the Google employee getting canned for his blog, so I'll probably just keep comments limited to just music, tech stuff, and maybe wrestling if I feel so inclined.

I might as well test to see if this can upload pics from my computer. Let's start with a pic from our trip on the east coast.