Douglas E. Welch: A while ago, I came across this site, http://www.wishbookweb.com/, which hosts scanned copies of historical Christmas Catalogs from the 1940s-1980s. As I was flipping through the site, it brought back some great memories of my childhood. As a child, on the cold Winter nights in Ohio, I would often sit for hours flipping through the Christmas catalogs, dreaming of the neat things I might receive (but probably wouldn’t) for Christmas. For example, this is one toy I have remembered since my 2nd or 3rd Christmas in 66/67. Bizzy Buzz Buzz. The fact that I can remember the feeling of it in my hand after so many years proves the impact that childhood toys have upon us. So, starting today, Friends in Tech is announcing

“The Wish Book - A Friends in Tech Special”

Starting December1, 2007

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Here is how you can participate…

• Visit The Wish Book site
• Find a toy or other object that you remember from your childhood
• Tell us a story about the toy or object
• In the end, the stories don’t have to be based on the catalogs. Tell us your favorite personal holiday story is fine, too

Try to include the following information in your recording:

• Your Name and Home Town Location i.e. Douglas E. Welch from New London, Ohio
• The catalog and page where you found you item (So that others can see a picture of it)
• Your story

Your story can be whatever you wish — a real-time discussion with siblings, “hey do you remember that? Didn’t you leave that out in the rain?” to amore structured “I remember this…” type of story. Let yourself go! Tell us what made this item so special to you.

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How to send in your audio or video? You can send in your audio or video in a number of ways:

• Call the WelchWrite Listener Line at 818-804-5049 and leave up to a 3 minute story
• Record your audio or video and email it to douglas.welch@gmail.com
• Email a URL where I can download your audio or video

Please join us in this celebration of the Holiday Season by sharing your memories!

PDF Flyer: http://welchwrite.com/blog/pdf/wish-book-project.pdf

We are proud to announce the newest member to the group — Steve Riekeberg of the Geek Cred Podcast.  Steve has been a supporter of the group for quite a while and seemed like just a good fit for membership — no pun intended.

Steve’s podcast covers everything geek from tech to sci-fi including a regular quiz to test your geek cred.

On behalf of all FiT members, welcome to the group.

You can find the Geek Cred Podcast over at http://www.geekcred.net.

In a surprise announcement Friday night, September 28, 2007 at the Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario, California, Chuck Tomasi, co-host Technorama and Gmail Podcast, was tapped by author, Tee Morris as the newest co-writer for the upcoming 2nd Edition of “Podcasting for Dummies”, co-written by him and author, Evo Terra.

Tomasi said. “It’s an honor to be asked to co-author and update a book I have read, respected and used repeatedly. I look forward to including all the new advances in podcasting that have taken place over the last 3 years. I think it is a great way to give back to the podcasting community that has given me so much.”

Tee Morris offers up this reason for choosing Tomasi: “Chuck was the first person to contact me identifying the need for an update to the book. His experience with the technical side of podcasting and writing for Podcast User Magazine make him the perfect fit.”

Tomasi co-hosts Technorama with Kreg Steppe, a weekly light-hearted look at tech, science, sci-fi and all things geek. Tomasi also hosts the Gmail podcast, a series of hints, tips and tricks to help you get more from your Gmail account. Both shows can be found at http://www.chuckchat.com.

Tomasi is an IT Manager for Plexus Corp. (http://www.plexus.com), a contract electronics company headquartered in Neenah, Wisconsin.

Technorama and Gmail Podcast are also members of Friends in Tech (http://friendsintech.com) and Farpoint Media (http://farpointmendia.net), a podcasting network of over 70 shows.

The expected release date for “Podcasting for Dummies” 2nd Edition is June 2008.

Our Friendsintech members Paul Asadoorian and Larry Pesce from Pauldotcom Security Weekly have their new book and the companion web site out. If you have a linksys WRT54G and wanted to know all the cool tricks you can do with it then check out their book and website. Better yet, get two or three routers cause you want to be hacking them up after you see all the things you can do.

Links Mentioned:

• Ultimate WRT54G Hacking Book
  
• http://wrt54ghacks.com/

December 18th… mark your calendars. Better yet, if you haven’t already done so, subscribe to the feed. Lucky and his friend Herbert will be striking out to find the Island of Misfit Geeks.

Don’t miss it.

Be sure to mark you calendars and either subscribe or be ready to download. The 2006 FiT Christmas Special, “Lucky the Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Geeks,” will be released.

You remember Lucky don’t you? If not, then don’t wait — subscribe today.

FiT member Victor Cajiao, from the Typical Mac User and Typical PC User podcasts, was recenlty a guest at Harvard University’s Extension School, Computer Science E-1 Course. During his guest presentation he provided good information on how to start your own podcast.

Way to go Victor!

Members of FriendsInTech.com are on the look out for promotions and deals to be able to share with our audiences. These will be posted in our Forums - Promotions and Deals.

So far we have gotten two, one for Musicast and another for SCOTTEVEST. More are in the works so please stay tuned to the Forums.

You might have noticed two postings yesterday here on the FiT site from a couple of new names. New within the FiT realm anyway.

We’ve decided that it’s time that we broadened our horizons a little bit and begin including various approaches to tech beyond just podcasts. As our name implies, we are all Friends in Tech.

With that, I’d like to welcome the two newest friends to FiT — Mike McBride and Andy Helsby. If you haven’t followed either of their blogs, I highly encourage you to do so. Both have been blogging for quite some time on tech-related issues and I am pleased that they accepted our invitation to the group to help expand our content offerings here on the FiT site.

So please join me in welcoming Mike and Andy. Be sure not to miss their postings here on FiT by subscribing to the RSS feed. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Mike and Andy’s personal blogs as well to get even more of their great comments, tips, and tricks on tech-related topics.

Welcome to the group guys!

To all the SysAdmins out there, our hats are off to you. For all you do to keep things running for all users, on behalf of Friends in Tech… Thanks!

If you know of a SysAdmin who is worthy of accolades, submit him or her for SysAdmin of the Year

Don’t forget to visit the SAAD site itself — a nice facelift was recently performed.

We are proud to announce that the Pauldotcom.com Security Weekly podcast has joined Friends in Tech. Paul, Larry, Twitchy and friends bring a great skill set and colorful character to podcasting.

They will greatly enhance the knowledge and creativity of Friends in Tech and we look forward to a great 2006 with them.

Pauldotcom.com Security weekly has a weekly audio podcast on all sorts of information security topics, how tos, alerts. They also produce a fun brief videocast. You can find both casts in itunes or the feeds at www.pauldotcom.com

[audio:http://libsyn.com/media/fit/FiT-Pauldotcom.mp3]

What an excellent opportunity and pleasure. Chuck Tomasi sat in the hot seat and represented each of our shows nicely on the latest episode of TWiT.

Many thanks to Leo for the invitation.

Friends in Tech