Dawn and Drew accepting their Podcast Award!

Leo Laporte accepting his Podcast Award from Andrew.

Can I first of all say it has been a hell of a year. First the book deal “Podcasting The Do it Yourself Guide” happily it has sold a boat load of copies and still selling well five months later. A huge year at Techpodcasts.com with meeting my motto Podcasters do the Work Podcasters get paid being managed by Podcast Connect.

To top it off 5 months of hard work and the team at RawVoice launch Podcaster News Network. Pretty busy year and the year is not finished yet.

I did the announcing while our Platinum Sponsor StreeetIQ.com handed out the prizes. Adam was great said a few words and he loves the microphone that he was given.

The Podcast Awards which I dreamed up, and ran this year came down to handing out about $4500.00 in cash and prizes. This picture does not show everything that was on the table. But I think between checks, trophies, visa gift cards, microphones we handed about $4000.00 worth of stuff out in about 20 minutes. Lots of fun and the fund raising for next year starts shortly

This year has been beyond unbelivable with the explosion of Podcasting and everything that I have been involved with this is one of my newest projects that myself and a great team have put together. In fact we started a new company to support the project the company is called Raw Voice which can be found at www.rawvoice.com but you will want to check out the Podcaster News Network their is nothing else like it in exsistence today.

This is not the entire article, the rest is posted here.

Ben Stein’s Last Column…
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How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?

As I begin to write this, I “slug” it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is “eonlineFINAL,” and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton’s, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton’s is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a “star” we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament…the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin…or Martin Mull or Fred Willard–or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister’s help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Continued Here

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein

Make sure you visit Geek News Central this is were you will find techology information. It is also the home of Todd’s show and the Geek News Central Podcast.

A Year ago I was laying in a hospital bed overseas having just come out of surgery that resulted in some stainless steel in my back with 4 wicked screws, and a severely damaged vertebrae. This would be the start of 13 days in the hospital, being fit with a full body cast, then graduating to a clam shell device that cost my insurance company 7k, and a heavily medicated patient for 8 weeks following the surgery.

The day I quit my pain meds I went cold turkey on a Friday, told my Doctor on Tuesday after having a very agonizing 3 days, and nights. I obviously needed the pain meds early on, and having remembered laying on a hospital emergency room bed screaming for about the first 9 hours because the morphin they gave me didn’t really help I was reluctant to go down that road again.

I returned to work after 8 weeks off and within a week, was back in a Airplane on a 6 week business trip. My Doctor lost his mind but hey when it was time to get back to work you have to dive back in. The hardest part for the 3 months was the clam shell was not being able to pick my kid up.

Finally in Feb of this year, I was given the green light to start light exercising. I podcasted my hospital experience and you can find the audio clip on this post you can take a look at the hardware I carry around here.

I am not complaining, as I am very blessed to be walking, and even though I live in a constant state of low level pain life is good. The wife had expected me to be rolled off the airplane as the initial prognosis was really bad and instead I walked off.

One thing though because I flew back from the middle east only 15 days after being injured, I had to lay flat as much as possible so I enjoyed 1st class on 3 consecutive flights and enjoyed the food but had to decline the liquor, as the Roxicet and the Oxycodone I was prescribed was enough bad stuff in my blood stream.

Thus having spent my 40th birthday in that hospital bed contemplating life, and having really looked forward to 2004 being in my rear view mirror the road ahead is a bright one and I am happy to be have faired as well as I have. So their may be times when I get excited about stuff and jump in with both feet but the reason for that is simple I was given a second chance to make profound changes in my families and people I come in contact withs life.

My Wife, and Kids were champions and my extended family and friends prayed and took care of my wife when I was half a world away. Thank you for being here during the past year also it has been and amazing ride.

Todd..