Several people have been experiencing bugs while using my .xml to .pod converter. I just wanted to voice back to you guys that while I don't personally use it, I still want to ensure that it's up-to-snuff! I've sent you all emails in response and would love to get your .xml files so that I can investigate these issues further and get them resolved for you. At this time I don't have plans to release the source code for the converter, but fully support open source software. I just want to be the one fully responsible for it right now. So continue to send me feedback about this or any other of my scripts, and thank you so much for the positive comments!

I've been flipping through quite a few tutorials written by Lee Brimelow and thanks to him I've now added an mp3 player in to the site. Admittedly I've had Flash on the backburner for a while, but have finally picked it back up and am very happy with the possibilities. The beauty of the whole thing is that it's totally dynamic. I just drop an audio file in the music folder and it's automatically added to the list of songs for the mp3 player. Flash, driven by XML created by PHP. It's a beautiful thing!

Lately I've become more interested in my family tree, so I'm writing some software which will allow me to enter in family tree details. In the long term, I think this may be a very cool piece of software, but for now I'm going to keep it very basic. Enter in a name, add a father, mother, sibling or child. The end...

Well.... THAT was short lived. As it turns out, I've decided that "upgrading" to Vista is a bad idea. I had nothing but problems with it. If you buy a new boxed system pre-installed with Vista you'll probably be fine, but upgrading from an older version is a bad idea. Come to think of it, I don't remember ever successfully upgrading a version of Windows. I've always resorted to formats and fresh installs. Anyway, just a word of caution to all of you.

I've been searching for quite a while for a windows equivalent to GarageBand (Mac), and for the life of me I couldn't find it! (for anyone who knows my powers of 'the search', this is quite a statement) But at long last, I've found it -- and it was right under my nose the whole time! Acid Pro, 6.0 uses the same bar-style midi tools that makes GarageBand so powerful, with the ability to snap to specific chord structures or syncopation. The beautiful thing about all of this is that I finally discovered that while my sound card has no Vista drivers, Vista actually recognizes it as a valid ASIO card. So I can finally upgrade my OS! This makes making music a billion times funner. So here's to making sweet, sweet music!