It is here my friends. My favorite month of the year. It is the month of pumpkins (specifically pumpkin lattes, pumpkin mochas, pumpkin pie, and Pumpkin Pie Blizzards at Dairy Queen) and crop harvests and haunted houses and, of course, Halloween. It is that spooky time that transitions us from Summer to Winter. It is really my favorite time of the year. In honor of it being my favorite time of the year I am doing some extra podcasts and stuff to celebrate. Here is an update on that stuff:

First off, I am releasing 37 podcasts this October. 31 of them are branded under “Snark Infested Water’s 30 Days of Halloween”. (I know there are 31 days in October, but I screwed up when I recorded the intro and didn’t realize until I had completed production on the first few show.) The other six shows are interviews with authors and audio producers. My guest list includes authors Michael A Arnzen, Chet Williamson, and Steven Savile; audio producers Jeffery Kafer and Steve Cox; and author and publisher Scott Roche. (The interview with Michael A Arnzen was released on October 5th.) The other shows are mostly spooky and thrilling OTR (Old Time Radio) from great series like Beyond Midnight, Escape, Lux Radio Theater, Mercury Theater, and Light’s Out. So if your looking for some spooky listening to haunt your October listen head over to http://thesnarkyavenger.com and check out the shows .

Second, I have an article up about some cool and unusual haunted house movies over at Abattoir Webzine. Check it out at: http://flyingislandpress.com/abattoir/2010/10/06/five-haunts/

Third, I have a few audio book reviews to post including three books by Chet Williamson (Soul Storm, Ash Wednesday, and Lowland Rider) and one by Steven Salive (The Forgetting Wood). And I have finally finished all the films from Afterdark Horrorfest 4 (2010), so I should get a review of those up this month as well.

So enjoy the extra content for October, and happy Halloween!

As most of you don’t know, I currently pay the bills by working as a software developer. (Who I do that for is irrelevant to this post.) And as a software developer, I am subscribed to a variety of Tech blogs and email newsletters. One of those is InsideTech (well, I think I got subscribed to it when I signed up for Monster.com anyway), and few weeks back they published an article titled “50 Books Every Geek Should Read”. I found the list of books interesting and decided to see how many of them I had read and pick five to read in the next year. I’m not going to give you the whole list from the original article here as I think it is worth a read, but I will list the ones I have read and those I plan to read in the next year.

The books I have read listed in 50 Books Every Geek Should Read are:

Neuromancer by William Gibson
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
1984 by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve McConnell
Getting Things Done by David Allen

The five books I plan to read in the next year or so, that are listed in 50 Books Every Geek Should Read are:

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
iCon by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon
Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

So, how many books have you read from the list in 50 Books Every Geek Should Read are there any you think you might like to read?

I have decided that I am closed, at least to social networking and social media, on Mondays. This means on Mondays I will be ignoring Twitter, Facebook (which is true most of the time anyway), the various forums I am a member on, and the email lists on am a part of. I might even ignore instant messenger but that is unlikely. I will also not be posting to this blog or posting new podcasts on Mondays with rare exception and during the month of October (see details below about Snark Infested Waters’ 30 days of Halloween.) So if you are looking for me at any of these online venues on Mondays with rare exceptions (like this post), you will not find me.

In other news…

Snark Tank Radio is on indefinite hiatus. I decided to put the show on hiatus after the finish of the Summer Serial so I can focus on other things.

For Halloween this year, I have decided to release at least 31 shows (one for each day of the month). Some of them will be interview with horror authors and audio producers, most of them will be some of my favorite Halloween or horror themed OTR episodes. I hope you enjoy all the shows. I am calling it Snark Infested Waters’ 30 days of Halloween. (It would be the 31 days of Halloween, but I wasn’t thinking when I recorded the intro.) And related to this I will not be putting out any new podcasts in the November and December of 2010.

And finally, I will being trying a bit harder to get a post up here at least once at week. I have lot of reviews to write and a few ideas for regular features. And considering the popularity of my article title “Freedom of Religion?“, you might get more opinion pieces as well.