This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

After LugRadio ended and Jono moved to America I got to put my feet up and not think about doing a show every two weeks about open source software. A nice, relaxing time. But the worm of creativity never stops biting. Despite myself, I started constructing ideas in my head; I liked talking about this stuff, I didn't stop talking about it in the pub, I just stopped talking about it on air. Then I got into a conversation with Dave Neary and Ilan Rabinovitch at OSCON, over a rather suspect beer in a rather dreary hotel room at a rather uninteresting speakers' soiree, about LugRadio and podcasting and timings and so on, and it crystallised a couple of thoughts for me. It'd be good to do something like that again, thought I. And then when I got back, I got a nudge from Jono: we should talk about a show, he said. So I poured out the collection of random thoughts I had kicking around in my head and in my Tomboy notebook, and he said: that's what I was thinking, too.

syn·chro·nic·i·ty (sĭng'krə-nĭs'ĭ-tē, sĭn'-) n. pl. syn·chro·nic·i·ties: the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner

And so was born

As Jono's already said, this is emphatically not "LugRadio 2.0". We've still got the same desire to talk — this past weekend my daughter kissed the Blarney Stone, but I did that years ago, and Bacon needs no artificial Irish mythological augmentation to talk the hind legs off a donkey — but this is, we hope, a new and different thing. Each show — each shot, they're called — is ten minutes long, meaning that you can grab it and listen on the bus, or in your tea break, or while you're eating that horrid Subway sandwich at work, or while jogging; each is on a separate subject; and each is designed to start the conversation, not to finish it. One of the things we're really trying to do with Shot of Jaq is to get decent discussion going around each of the topics. The website is (not that you can see this, at the point when I'm posting this) designed to let you easily listen to a shot, right there on the page, and then get talking about it. And we're buying your participation by making Shots more discursive and well researched. This isn't LugRadio; we promise to do the legwork, and you promise to get involved. Deal? Deal. It's not doom and gloom and Radio 4, though. I mean, this is still us, right, still me and Jono. There may be the odd flash of humour to brighten your lives in these days of credit crunches and Damoclean swords. So, come join the grand experiment. The first shot will be released on Tuesday November 3rd 2009, and there'll be two shots a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. You'll never lose us. To stay up to date with the latest, follow @shotofjaq on Twitter or on Identica. Welcome to the new world order.