I am currently in the process of packing up my stuff for my flight to Liverpool tomorrow. This is quite exciting, not only because I don’t particularly like flying (I am constantly fighting the urge to shout “I ain’t getting on no plane, fool!”), but also because I will meet Dan in person for the first time after over a year of only communicating via email, IM and VoIP. Dan and I will attend LugRadio Live UK 2008 together and hopefully record a “live” show there. We will also try to pick up as many interviews as we can over the weekend.

If you are planning to visit Lug Radio Live, please feel free to meet up with us and attend the recording of show #48 if we can pull it off. We are looking forward to meeting all of you there!

We have decided to scrap the Pligg site in favour for some forums. There was not much going on over there lately and I also recently discovered some slightly disturbing security problems with the system that I didn’t really wanted to live with in the long run. Since a few people requested forums anyway and they can basically fulfill the same purpose as the other site but are much more versatile, we decided to switch. I sincerely hope this doesn’t cause too much of an inconvenience to people.

Registration is optional of course, but we hope that many of you will join us at the forums and provide us with feedback and valuable ideas for future episodes. If you prefer to just hang out and talk about other stuff, that is fine as well. I am looking forward to many fruitful and entertaining discussions over there!

Please note that the theme for the forums isn’t finalised yet — in the moment we’re running the default prosilver template. I am looking at customising the looks of the place soon, but I’ll probably won’t get to it until the new year. In the meantime, the functionality is all there, however, so head over there and enjoy yourselves!

I have just set up a Pligg powered voting site for the podcast called Ante Up! The system works exactly like you are probably used to from digg.com: Once you have signed up, you can submit links to stories and vote on other people’s submissions. Dan and I will also submit our stories for the podcast and each week we’ll try and pick a few stories from the highest ranked ones to include into the show.

Even if you do not submit anything, I would appreciate it very much if you’d sign up to vote on the stories other people submit. If we can get enough active users together, we can hopefully put some more variety into the shows and it will be a bit easier for Dan and me to come up with interesting stuff every week. I hope this will make it easier for you, the listener, to tell us what you want us to talk about. Please have a go and tell us via the feedback form if you like this system or if you have an idea how we could improve it. I am really looking forward to seeing a lot of interesting story submissions from you!

Since we recently got our first listener submitted wallpaper photo, I have created a Listener Gallery section on the wallpaper page. Of course, so far the only pictures in there are Jackie’s, Dan’s and mine. If you have downloaded the wallpaper or think about doing so, it would be great if you take a picture of your screen and send it to us. I am looking forward to your shots. You know the address!

I have just finished editing our first introductory episode and it’ll hit the feeds as soon as possible. We are definitely looking at a release date some time this week. If you come across any stories you’d like us to cover on the podcast while you’re waiting, please tag them with for:linuxoutlaws on del.icio.us and we’ll get them. We definitely appreciate any story ideas you send us since we are hoping for an active dialogue with our fellow Linux users. Once the podcast has started for good, you can also check out all the stories we talked about at del.icio.us/linuxoutlaws.