I am heading back home on Monday and I’ve decided to take tomorrow off. I think you’ll agree that I deserve a day off! Anyway, I’m going to use this last blog to update on all the topics I’ve discussed in the past week.

Übercaster: We recorded the most recent WTPT episode on it and I was less than impressed. It is a bit glitchy. Even still, I think we will be giving it another shot in the near future.

Gyms: This is getting really interesting. I have starting appointing the first eight founding members for each of two gyms and there is already a pretty strong buzz about it.

When we fill both groups, the founders will decide on a name for their gym, a badge name/design, battle rules and special conditions, methods for initiating new members and methods of deciding upon a gym leader. These discussions should be held some time this coming Friday night (EST). I will try to get the gym rooms up around Wednesday. more…

It was very hard to keep my mouth shut yesterday about the many things discussed in the latest podcast. If you haven’t listened to it yet, you should probably check that out first. Here’s the run down of some of the interesting things we spoke about:

-Announcement of new contest
-First Pokémon Times real-life meet up in March

Firstly, I’d like to talk about the contest we announced. Let me say, if you would like to help us out, but you aren’t much of a writer or photographer, here is the perfect opportunity to! We are asking our listeners to send us voicemails discussing what they like about the show and why they listen. These will be used in future promotional media for the show. I’m not sure that there will be any prize for this one, because I’m not sure how we would judge the entries.

Regarding the meet up: I can’t wait for this! Arcanator has been saying for a while that he is going to be in New York for the Super Smash Bros. Brawl release party at the Nintendo World Store. I got really excited when I came up with the idea to have a real live meet up at this event. Even if it is just me, KC and Arc, it should be fun, but it would be even more cool if some more of our listeners showed up to say hi! We will post more details about this as the event gets closer. more…

I received a couple interesting e-mails in response my inquiry about making multiple chat rooms and calling them “gyms.” Here they are:

Here are a few suggestions for the chat room. You could probably divide it up into three different groups for now.

 - The first group can be a “Social Lounge”. This is where people can chat about nonsense, talk about random stuff, etc.
- The second group can be the “TPT Gym”, where people can arrange battles, talk strategy, etc.
The third group can be the “Gym Leader” section. Every month, we can somehow delegate the “Gym Leader of the Month”, where people can challenge the current leader for non substantial prizes (such as forum medals, or honorable mentions).

-Justin V. more…

I’m trying something pretty different for today. The rest of the blog will be on video! If you don’t have quicktime installed on your computer, you will probably need it to view the video.

Greetings from the Orange Islands!

I have previously stated on the podcast that when I finally get myself some vacation time, I would put a portion of it into working on the website. Luckily, I just picked myself up a laptop which will allow me to update the site even though I am abroad. And so, I’ve decided to kick off my blog with some thoughts from my vacation. So every night this week, I’ll be updating with random thoughts about the website, podcast and more.

On my plane ride here I experimented with a program called Übercaster. It’s some really exciting new podcasting software for the Mac. It has a lot of great features that would totally change the way we produce the podcast if we used it.

The key feature that makes it appealing to me is that it allows you to record input from a microphone while simultaneously playing audio sound effects and jingles. In other words, it allows you to edit as you go, rather than having to go back and edit a bunch later on. This element alone would save me hours of production time.

One other excellent feature lets you record live conversations over programs like Skype, iChat and Gizmo. more…