Having a great time. Wish you were here.

Pics on Flickr. Continuing to come.

One video on YouTube. A backstage view of an amazing 15 year old acrobat.

More to come...

Poker Road is a relatively new website, set up by Joe Sebok, and I have to say that their content is phenomenal. Great podcasts, both audio and video.

If you follow poker at all, it's definitely worth checking out.

It rained as I was headed over. We canceled. Then the sun came out. But once the grass is wet, it ain't no fun.

And it will rain again.

I'll be gone for the next 2 movies, but they'll still happen, so go and have fun...

It's not raining (yet) so we are still planning on going to the HBO Bryant Park Film Festival.

We'll eat, drink and be merry, until it rains, at which time we'll make like bat's out of hell.

As you probably know, I sing with the New York Choral Society.

We are going to China for a concert tour on Friday.

The best way to reach me while I am gone is e-mail. I should have internet access in the hotel.

I'll have both my work cell phone and my home iPhone with me. If you have the work number that should work fine. It's the number that starts (646) 739... (I am not crazy enough to post my number here.

If the work phone doesn't work, and you really, really need to reach me, then there is the iPhone.

Now, here's the deal with the iPhone. Calls are $1.99/minute, and it turns out that even if I don't answer, I pay that the entire time that it rings and while you leave a message. So, please, keep it short. That's the number that starts (646) 256...

However, it's free to receive text messages. 50 cents to send em, but free to receive. So, feel free to text me, just don't expect a response, unless it's important.

Finally, if I can, I'll but a sim card in China for use in another phone. If that works then I'll have another number to share. We'll see.

Karen will be here in NY, so you can reach her all the normal ways.

One of the cool features of the iPod is it's ability to play audiobooks either speeded up, or slowed down, without affecting the pitch. There are ways to convert podcasts into official audiobooks so they can take advantage of this feature as well.

I listen to a ton of podcasts, so being able to listen a little faster is invaluable to me. There aren't enough hours in the day for me to listen to everything that I want to, so every little bit helps.

When the iPhone came out I noticed that the books played even faster. There is no fine control over the playback speed. Your choices are Normal, Slow or Fast. But on the iPhone the fast setting is significantly faster than on the iPod. I didn't realize it until I went back to the iPod after using the iPhone. Even speeded up audio seemed almost painfully slow. So, I am a junkie for speeded up audio books and podcasts.

Now, I wanted to get an iPod Nano with h2audio.com waterproof case so my morning swim wouldn't be so boring, but I was curious if the Nano would play at the faster iPhone speed, or the slower iPod speed (which is still faster than normal). I looked, but could not find an answer to that question. So finally I decided to just get the Nano. Even if the speed wasn't what I hoped, it would still be less boring than swimming laps with nothing to listen to. And, it helped that my wife gave it to me for my birthday.

So, here are my results.

The iPod and the Nano play at the same speed as each other. Playing the exact same podcast, in 10 minutes of real time, the Nano and the iPod played 12:30 of content (25% speed increase), while the iPhone played 15:00 of content (50% speed increase).

So, in an hour I can listen to 75 minutes of content on an iPod or 90 minutes of content on the iPhone. Kinda cool.

Anyway, since I couldn't find this information anywhere, I decided to post it here, in case it helps someone else.