.A week ago I made a list of things I’m thinking about doing next with my life. Everything from playing poker to starting a video version of Weblogs, Inc. On the list I added a throw away joke about making a better iPod with Peter Rojas (the famous editor of Engadget).

Peter responded to it (and did a followup), and then Dave Winer (the genius behind RSS and OPML) chimed in. Now Michael Gartenberg from Jupiter has chimed in, and what was a fantasy has now turned into a feasibility study.

Peter is meeting with Dave, and I just had dinner with Peter. Maybe the Rojas player (or the RWC player) could happen. Maybe we can do a short run and pre-sell the first 1,000 signature players–all of them autographed by Peter Rojas himself. I’m will to put the money up for the first run if Dave Winer will match me.

For me the key features are:

1. Open source software.
2. Wifi
3. No DRM
4. Removeable media (i.e. Compact Flash)
5. Preloaded with three shows from the top 200 podcasts

As far as standard batteries I’m not sure about this one since portable flash players use so little power and last so long. Maybe having an add-on to charge with standard batteries would be best. I’m of course open to removable rechargeable batteries.

As Dave points out any hint of DRM and the project is over. We don’t need any VC money to do this Dave. We just produce the best player and make 1,000 of them–all presold. The money comes to us first and we don’t have to put up *ANY* money. After we get 1,000 made we do version 2 six months later and produce 10,000 of them. If that sells out we do 100,000. We are not doing this for the money anyway… if it becomes a 10,000 device a year company and we break even I’m fine with that–I just want a better player!

Gosh I loved this service. Is there an online location for former Google Answers people to hang out now? I’d love to talk to some of these folks and hear what they’re thinking today…

Update: I couldn’t find a group so I started one:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-answers-alumni

Google Answers lives here: http://answers.google.com/answers/

Open invite to all my peoples…. Lock from Gawker is spending Nick Denton’s money on cocktails this Friday night at 6:30PM at a true dive of a bar called The Magician on the LES in NYC.

Details here (note on that image: I’m not looking out into space–there were two photographers taking out photos and I’m looking at the other)…. if your coming blog it!

Note: looks like 1938media.com will be taping a live show (and by show I mean he will take his shirt off, lay down on the bar, and rant about anyone who’s actually accomplished something with their lives for 90-120 seconds).

I turn 36 today.

I have no job and nothing to do but walk the streets of Manhattan, read my books, and drink coffee. I couldn’t be happier.

Having a low key dinner tonight with some old-school friends in New York City, being inducted in my high school’s Alumni hall of fame of Thursday (which for anyone who knew me in high school knows is an absolute miracle and highly ironic), and I’m having drink with some bloggers after work on Friday.

Note: everyone is invited to the drinks on Friday…. if you’re in NYC and want to meet up in a casual location and just chill this is it. Thanks to Andrew and Lock for hosting (and paying for all the drinks–you guys are great!).

In my “what next” blog post last week I put in an inside joke about starting a gadget company with Peter designing the products. Peter picked up on it and now others are pinging me about it–but taking it seriously.

So, that leads me to the question: Could two guys in a garage create an indie gadget company?

If anyone knows what a gadget should be, and where the market is going, it’s Peter. Dave Winer joked with me at dinner this past summer that Peter would make a better iPod than Steve Jobs–I think I agree. So, back to the origional question: What would it take/cost to make a gadget hardware company?

I’ve been to China and seen the knock-off devices (in fact, Engadget’s “keeping it real… fake” covers the knock offs), so it’s clear that you can make devices cheap. So, what if Peter designed a wifi-enabled media player for geeks. Like something with built in podcasting software and the ability to sync podcasts whenever and IP device is detected?

Adam Curry mentioned that someone should make a super cheap podcast MP3 player on a recent DSC.

Is this something we could actually do? What would it cost to design a media player? How many do we need to order? Who would design it? Who would built it? Anyone have insight into how to make an Mp3 player out there?

I can just imagine the “Rojas vs. Zune vs. iPod” shootout on CNET.

Will be back in New York City this week. Some things I’m looking forward to:

1. Seeing my friends
2. Croque-madame at Pastis | Debate
3. Hot cider wih dried apples at the bar at Gramercy Tavern
4. The long down Broadway from Times Square to Chinatown–I try to do this every trip. Note: I take 5th avenue from 23rd street to the Village.
5. Shopping downtown at Century 21 and JR Computer World
6. Shopping uptown at Barney and Saks
7. A Knicks game or two
8. Poker group on Tuesday
9. Tae Kwon Do practice
10. Late night cocktails and conversations at Bungalow 8
11. Catching a film at the Film Forum or Angelika
12. Joe’s Shanghai dumplings

I’m looking for a designer to work on redoing my blog and some work on the CalacanisCast logos. I’m building a list of the best designers I can find….

In no order so far…

• silverorange – digg and firefox

  

• hicksdesign – firefox and thunderbird logos (niiiiiiiice!)

  

• stamen design – cool interface stuff like root markets, digg, flickr

  

• happcog.com – Magnolia is soooo nice

  

• stopdesign — the blogger redesign was niiiiiice

  

• simplebits — odeo’s clean design

  

• You guys have any other thoughts?!?!?

Alexa does not work at all and we should not even recognize it as valid anymore from what I’ve learned.

You can game Alexa with as few as three machines running the Alexa toolbar.

So, let’s see how high we can get Calacanis.com over the next five days shall we?

Step One: Everyone install the Alexa Toolbar and load my blog 100 times over the next couple of days. Please put your name below if you are taking part in the experiment. We’re gonna do this for like 10 days then stop.

Step Two: Get a webpage refresher for Internet Explorer and set it to reload the page every 10 minutes or something random.

http://www.download.com/Refresher/3000-2356_4-10497539.html?tag=lst-0-2
http://www.download.com/Auto-URL-Refresher/3000-2381_4-10399160.html?tag=lst-0-1

Step Three: Load the main page (www.calacanis.com) and the about page ( http://www.calacanis.com/about/ ) so we can track the % impact we have in the details over at Alexa.

Update: Some folks have said I’m trying to do this to get my rating up/page views up. Uhhh…. no. This is a test. I don’t have any ads here and these page views mean nothing to me–they are not real! They represent nothing but a test. Plus we are going to stop this test in 10 days or so–let’s say Dec. 3rd. So, this is just a temporary spike in pages that does NOTHING for me on any level. Zero! If someone wants to run the test on a brand new domain name we can do that too.

Another day, another search term on Technorati I didn’t recognize: Litvinenko. My first thought was this was some Web 2.0 company, or some non-US celebrity sex tape.

Turns out a former spy was killed by radioactive material that was slipped into his food. Crazy.