Due to some unforseen circumstances (the whole Lavender Brown casting has really thrown us for a loop!), episode 58 will not be out at its regular time this week.  Please stay tuned to hpprogs.com and we’ll let you know when we plan on releasing it.  We are hoping to get it up sometime early next week since Thanksgiving is on  Thursday. 

In the meantime, Enjoy this off the cuff Top 5 I have come up with and feel free to vote for your favorite!!

Top 5 awkward moments in the Harry Potter series:

5. When Neville loses the password to the Gryffindor common room.

4. After Harry uses Sectum Sempra- “err, sorry Malfoy?”

3. Dobby and the pudding.

2. Almost any time Luna speaks. 

1. Ron and Lavender’s Snogfest (Ewww!).

What is the most awkward moment in the Harry Potter series?

Survey by Quibblo

You can now Pre Order Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix! Just in time for the holidays, and it goes great with an HPProgs original Always T-shirt!!)

Today, Microsoft released the new Zune 2.0 devices, along with a new Zune Marketplace (similar to iTunes). The new Zune Marketplace has a directory of podcasts, so of course it’s important for podcasters to know how to get their podcast listed. Here’s how:

1. Download the new Zune software. This requires a Windows Live login.
2. Install the new Zune software.
3. Go to marketplace, then podcasts and scroll down to where it says “suggest a podcast.”
4. Enter the URL of the feed for the podcast, and hit Submit.

It looks as if submissions are monitored, so it may take a while for your podcast to show up in the directory. The Zune Marketplace has many of the top podcasts already in the directory, so make sure to do a search before submitting your podcast to see if you’re already included.

A quick review of Zune’s podcast support: the auto-import feature worked well; all my podcast subscriptions from iTunes were carried over to Zune, without me having to mess with any import/export. Even episodes that I had downloaded via iTunes were available in Zune. Zune allows you to customize settings for how many episodes and how to sync at the podcast level. Album art takes a while to load, but works. I did get some duplicates, when I subscribed via the marketplace for a podcast that I’d already subscribed to via iTunes. It’s not clear to me how to tell when a podcast has new episodes that are ready for me to listen to. Overall, the software looks nice and is rather intuitive in how to use.

Harry Potter Prognostications has been selected as a finalist for Best Podcast in the 2007 Weblog Awards!  If you have a moment, head on over and vote for your favorite podcast (hopefully, that’s us ).  You can vote once every 24 hours and voting ends next thursday.  Thanks, we really do appreciate it!

UPDATE (11/7): One of our competitors wrote this One of our competitors wrote this as a single blog post: “My goal is to beat the Harry Potter Podcast.”

He then wrote in another post, “This message has been brought to you by ‘the (name of his podcast) is Cooler than Harry Potter Brigade.’”

I’ll give you a hint, we are already ahead of this guy, but for the sake of all that is good about Harry Potter (love, tolerance, Aberforth’s goat obsession)- please vote for us.

Hey Everyone. I wanted to give an update on episode 53. Very unfortunately, we are going to have to postpone the episode until next week. There is a heck of a lot going on around hpprogs headquarters this week and if we would sit down to record, it wouldn’t do justice to the topic (which we have already picked and are quite excited about, incidentally).

Please stay tuned for Episode 53 and in the meantime, feel free to go back and listen to some of the “best of” episodes and feel free to laugh at how incorrect some of our prognostications were.

Penny

Hi all. I just wanted to give y’all the heads up that episode #50 is going to be delayed. Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) is this week and unfortunately Greg and I will not have time to edit the episode and get it up in its normal timely fashion. You can expect it on Saturday night or Sunday.

In the meantime though I have a mini-activity/contest for you all to do. Answer these 5 simple questions to show that you have been a fantastic hpprogs listener and send them to us at harrypotterprogs at yahoo dot com (regular e-mail format) and we’ll send 10 of you (we will pick the names randomly) a really cool color HPPROGS bookmark. Trust me, it is cool! Here are the questions:

• What is Greg’s favorite book of the Harry Potter series (episode #8 “Rating the Books”)?
• What date is our 1 year podcastversary (that is an anniversary in the podcast world and YES, I made it up)?
• What house does Penny want to be sorted into? (episode #44 “Prophecy Recap”)?
• What was one thing that Voldemort ignored that lead to his ultimate downfall? (episode #49 “Voldemort’s Downfall”)
• Come up with your own version of the hpprogs tag line, “If you thought Harry Potter was just for _______, think again!” (no wrong answers but points will be awarded if you make us laugh out loud!!)

We look forward to hearing from all of you and getting some of you some great bookmarks.  Please get the answers in by our podcastversary (you’ll have to look that one up) so we can get the winners the prizes ASAP.  Also, This Saturday, Sept. 15 is the deadline for the thank-you book entries.  Make sure to get them in!!

In the meantime, if we have any fellow Rosh Hashana celebrators in our little community, we wanted to wish you all a happy and healthy New Year.

-Penny:)

OK, so we spoke to Michal and she has graciously offered to extend the Thank You book Entry deadline to Saturday, September 15.

But here is the good news. Everyone who sends in an entry will be entered into a drawing to win a free limited edition HPPROGS t-shirt!

So, here is your chance to let JK Rowling know how much you appreciate what she has done for you and have a chance to get a new article of clothing (that happens to broadcast your favorite podcast on it)!!

Remember how you felt exactly a month ago (!) when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out? You were overwhelmed, overjoyed, and probably overtired as well.

But many of you did express an interest in doing something to thank JK Rowling for what she has done for you (us) over the past 10 years. Here is a not so subtle reminder to get in your entries for the HPPROGS Thank You Book to JK Rowling. Once again, here is the info from Michal, our wonderful listener who has graciously offered to put this together:

As you may have heard, HPProgs is putting together a “Thank You” book for Jo Rowling. Everyone is invited to submit their letters of thanks, praise and reminiscence to the wonderful woman who has given us all so much. Artwork and poetry can also be included if you wish. All entries will be organized in a binder and sent to Jo- hopefully, we may get a response!

Guidelines are as follows:

1)Please email your letters to me (Michal) at inkasrain@yahoo.com
2)Please submit your letters by SEPTEMBER 1st 2007.
3)Please send letters in file attachments- I will try to keep the format you put together. The greater stylistic variety, the better!
4)TRY not to have your letters exceed two printed pages- although I do understand if you go over, it’s Jo after all.
5)Please spell-check and edit your letters carefully. Unless circumstances dictate otherwise, I will print them out as I receive them.
6)Artwork/handwritten letters must be scanned and sent in file attachments. Please make sure that it will be legible and clear after it has been scanned and re-printed. (I am not sure about color printing yet.)

If you have any ideas or suggestion, feel free to email me!

You have a little less than 2 weeks to get your entries in. Please be part of this wonderful endeavor.

Penny:)

Announcement: We have (FINALLY) set up a flickr account for hpprogs (the address is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hpprogs/). So far, we have uploaded some t-shirt gallery pics as well as the Knight Bus pics. There is an hpprogs flickr group as well, so feel free to add and comment on pics as you desire.

The t-shirt gallery is up on our facebook page as well.

If you have ordered ANY of the hpprogs t-shirts- whether the spreadshirt ones or the special edition ones, first of all thank you for your support. But also, please take a picture of yourself and send it to us (or post it on the flickr group page) and we’d love to add you to the gallery.

Enjoy!!

UPDATE: I just added many of the hpprogs logo design contest entries to the flickr page. If you don’t see your entry, I apologize, the logos were organized pretty badly and I wasn’t able to tell which ones I was adding at the time. If you want your logo added to the pictures, please let me know and I’ll find it and add it. Conversely, if you want your logo removed from the pictures, let me know and I’ll remove it ASAP.

-Penny

We hope to get episode 45 up sometime tonight or early tommorow morning. Sorry for the delay- we’ve recorded about 1/2 of the episode but we have some extra people in our home (my sister is doing construction, has no a/c and she, her husband and 2/4 kids are staying here) and people keep coming in and out- with noise, so we haven’t been able to finish recording. Thanks for your patience…

Penny:)

We decided in the comment thread of the last post that we wanted to put together a thank you book for JK Rowling from the HPPROGS community. Our listener, Michal (who is a “she” by the way), has graciously offered to organize the effort. Please take some time to participate in this endeavor. It has the potential to be an amazing collaboration on all of our parts.

The following is a message from Michal:

As you may have heard, HPProgs is putting together a “Thank You” book for Jo Rowling. Everyone is invited to submit their letters of thanks, praise and reminiscence to the wonderful woman who has given us all so much. Artwork and poetry can also be included if you wish. All entries will be organized in a binder and sent to Jo- hopefully, we may get a response!

Guidelines are as follows:

1)Please email your letters to me (Michal) at inkasrain@yahoo.com
2)Please submit your letters by SEPTEMBER 1st 2007.
3)Please send letters in file attachments- I will try to keep the format you put together. The greater stylistic variety, the better!
4)TRY not to have your letters exceed two printed pages- although I do understand if you go over, it’s Jo after all.
5)Please spell-check and edit your letters carefully. Unless circumstances dictate otherwise, I will print them out as I receive them.
6)Artwork/handwritten letters must be scanned and sent in file attachments. Please make sure that it will be legible and clear after it has been scanned and re-printed. (I am not sure about color printing yet.)

If you have any ideas or suggestion, feel free to email me!

Due to a few unforseen circumstances, unfortunately we are not going to be able to make it to NYC for the Wizard Rock 2007 show. We apologize to those of you who we were going to meet, but we hope (and know) you will all have an AMAZING time! If you do go to this show, please send reviews.

For those of you interested in HPProgs T-Shirts, we’ve got a store set up. Head on over to http://hpprogs.spreadshirt.com and check out the designs. We’ve got shirts with our logo on them, along with a few HPProgs originals (and we’ll be adding more over time). Hope you like them, and thanks for supporting HPProgs.

If you’re going to the 12:01 screening of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at Baltimore’s historic Senator Theatre, keep an eye out for the HPProgs crew.  Penny and I will be sporting our brand new HPProgs t-shirts, passing out HPProgs bookmarks and interviewing folks standing in the line; we’ll post the video here just as soon as we can figure out how to get it off our camera.  If you’re an HPProgs listener, please say hello!
We’ll be seeing the movie sometime over the next day, and will have a podcast up with our review tomorrow night.

What can I say, I got used to seeing our names high on the list last month. My ego (and my inner pre-teen girl) needs the rush.

But seriously, the higher we are on Podcast Alley, the more exposure our podcast gets. That is a good thing, by the way.

Do me a favor please and head on over to Podcast Alley to vote for us (I am making this easy for you with a one click link). Remember, you vote once a month. I really do appreciate it. You all are awesome (and did I mention intelligent as well?!?).

Penny:)

p.s. Did you all see JKR’s new wizard of the month? So we were wrong in our prediction- but what do you think about the item he is holding?