My resurrected reading habit picked up in April, allowing me to tear through Analog's June issue and make another serious dent in the Hard SF Renaissance anthology, while a trip to New Hampshire to visit my sister for Easter gave me time to listen to the unabridged audio of Stephen King's new horror novel Cell.

And just to round out my geeky knowledge base, I quickly read through O'Reilly's Google Hacks, a book that explains the ins and outs of the world's most popular search engine.

Another podcast, another Sunday spent painting. This time around I discuss Battlestar Galactica's Season 2 cliffhanger and offer a brief review of the film version of V for Vendetta (yes, I'm behind the geek times) before launching into reviews of the turn-based strategy game FreeCiv, the podcasts Misfit Brew and Does My Geek Look Big in This?, talk about the venerable webzine Quantum Muse, and present reader John Mierau's review of the "PodReady" portable podcatching client.

That's followed up by a review of Wizards of the Coast's Spell Compendium, which includes some of my thoughts on D&D 4th Edition and a bit of a rant on the importance of indexes.

I've been a stranger in a strange land the last two weeks as I've spent half my weekend hours in Home Depot, and the other half working hard to transform my old gaming room into my daughter's new bedroom. Fortunately I had plenty of geek podcasts to keep me company through the process.

Radio Active #28 features a bunch of podcasts, some old friends, some new acquaintances. It also features less-than-optimal sound quality as I struggle with a new non-headset microphone that isn't quite up to the job. The podcast is easily listenable, it just sounds like I recorded it in an aircraft hanger.

I'm playing around with some variant home pages for Nuketown, and I've come up with one I really like: it uses a large photo/image/graphic on the home page, and places the content beneath it. It feels more webzine-ish, and less bloggish, while retaining interactivity (or rather adding it, since there isn't much here now).

The Chronicles of Narnia soundtrack has me torn. On the one hand, I've now got another fantasy-themed soundtrack that I can use in my role-playing game sessions. On the other, my geek music collection now includes a song by Alanis Morissette.

I mean no offense to the women geeks out there, for whom this is probably a good thing, it's just that I've never really liked Alanis' music all that much -- its just too depressing, too angsty for my taste (but hey, I still regularly listen to Huey Lewis). Fortunately her track on this album -- "Wunderkin" -- is fits the soundtrack quite well, and has less angst-per-beat than most of her other music.