Since we’re officially waiting until April for new post-Razor Galactica, we decided to “unpack” the re-watch schedule a bit, giving each episode its own week instead of stacking up two-part episodes. We’ve updated the schedule in the official calendar over in the forum.

Immediately — GWC “immediately,” not Sci-Fi “immediately” — this means that next week’s re-watch episode is now 220: Lay Down Your Burdens, Pt. 2. Since we’ve already posted a 219/220 Frak Party (and one on the forum), we’re going to leave it up for this week’s discussion as well. We’ve already posted separate presidential approval polls for each episode, so you can continue to vote there.

The current re-watch schedule ends in the middle of March, which (at this early guess) should just give us time to have a little fun leading up to the season four kick-off, but we’ll change it again if necessary.

As I’ve said in the podcast, creating the forum was a tough decision for us. We’ve seen where forums can sometimes lead — both good and bad. That’s why we were very reluctant to change the formula we accidentally stumbled upon that enabled all of you to find GWC and enjoy yourselves here.

But the kick-ass meetups going on in Philly, NY, and Dallas, and the incredible discussions and friendships that’ve formed in comments finally pounded through our thick skulls the idea that the community has outgrown the blog’s meager interactive tools.  So, we put in a hard few weeks to try and upgrade GWC’s infrastructure to support all the great work you’ve done building such a quality community.

And for those of you who missed it in last week’s podcast, let us reiterate in print: the only thing more important to us than Battlestar Galactica is you. Participating in the GWC community is an important part of our lives, as are all the friends we’ve made via the ‘cast. The GWC podcast, blog, and forum aren’t going away, regardless of the short (or long) future of BSG.

That said, we’d like to offer a few notes about the forum and how it interacts with the blog:

First, we’re going to leave comments open on the blog for all but podcasts and frak parties. With the release of the next podcast and frak party this weekend, we’ll turn off comments for those posts and instead add a link to the appropriate thread in the forum.

Podcast threads will appear in the GWC Podcasts fourm, and frak parties will appear in the GWC Online Events forum. We called it “online events” instead of “frak parties” since we envision adding additional re-watch, group reads, and so on there as they come up. In fact, keep an eye out soon for the Buckaroo Banzai re-watch you heard about last week.

If you have ideas for official events — or for future podcast guests or discussion topics and so on — we’ve created a News/Suggestions forum for that purpose. You can start threads at will in this forum, so we can all participate in sussing out things the community will enjoy. We’ll then create online events, blog posts, and even mention them in the podcast as they take off.

We also created a “Meetups” forum to serve as ground zero for planning your own GWC get togethers. We’ll add your meetups to the official GWC calendar — now contained in the forum! — so everyone can find you and attend, and we’ve even got some neat stuff to help you plan your event. Look for more on that soon.

The forum features a few general discussion areas, including one specifically targeted toward BSG. But don’t worry: we know that discussions here on GWC sometimes head off in other directions, so there are forums for other sci-fi talk and even an “off-topic/other” forum to catch all the rest.

Finally, there’s a Forum, Blog, and Podcast Issues forum for technical discussions of problems you find with the GWC infrastructure. We’ve done our best to get it all working and to make it all available to everyone, but we’ve probably missed something. Let us know in this forum, and we’ll correct it or help you out. Or maybe you’ll help us out. Either way, things’ll be better for it.

The blog will remain available, and we hope you’ll check it from time to time — or maybe grab an RSS feed to stay current — as with the advent of the forum, it’ll take on a more active role in keeping everyone aware of all the cool stuff going on in terms of meetups, BSG news, GWC news, and of course, Audra’s sweet top-ten lists.

One last thing: the store is open as well. As we mention plainly in the store itself, it’s not intended as a big money-maker. If every one of you bought a T-shirt, we probably wouldn’t cover hosting costs because we’ve set the markups extremely low. In most cases, Cafe Press will make 90%+ of whatever you’re paying for the items.

The point of the store is to give you a chance to grab some gear that you (or we) couldn’t otherwise have — gear that hopefully represents some of the fun inside jokes that we in the GWC community share. And if you have suggestions for additional gear that you’d like to see, drop a post in the Suggestions forum. When Sean has time, I’m sure he’ll oblige if possible.

Enjoy!

This morning we added another feature to GWC: a Flickr photo pool. This is an easy way for us — and you! — to share your GWC-related photos. We kicked things off by adding a few of our own. Specifically, I uploaded a shot of me and Audra with someone everyone here’ll recognize (Sean’s behind the camera), and Sean added some killer pictures from our visit to the Star Wars exhibit in Fort Worth a while back.

But the best thing about the Flickr pool is that you can join and add your photos as well. If you’ve never worked with Flickr before, it’s easy — and more importantly, free. Just jaunt over to their website and sign up for a free account. Once you’re set, you can upload your photos using any of their simple methods. Then you can join the “Galactica Watercooler” group and add any of your uploaded photos to the group.

Keep an eye out in GWC’s right sidebar for a Flickr photostream that’ll show ten of the most recent additions to the pool. (Because the group is brand-spankin’-new, right now it just shows my one photo. But that’ll change shortly.)  Clicking on any of the photos links you to the big versions, and clicking the “more photos” link takes you to the pool itself.
Anyway, we hope you enjoy it, and look forward to seeing your photos!

First of all, we’d like to wish all of you who’ve stuck it out with us for the last year Happy Birthday.  Indeed, GWC will be one year old tomorrow.  We were saving the new design for tomorrow, but we ran into some issues that forced us to go ahead with it.  So here ’tis.

You’ll notice a couple of quick advantages.  For example, the new site actually works in Firefox, IE, and even Safari.  (Yes, some of us have Macs, too.  So we felt your pain with the old site.)  And certainly the new site offers Sean a much better opportunity to show off his design capabilities. 

You’ll also notice two tabs up at the top which don’t work yet:

Forum 

For the first year of GWC we studiously avoided adding a forum.  We felt like somehow we’d managed to attract such a great group of friends and participants that we didn’t want to do anything that might shift the balance or otherwise frack things up.  As many readers have commented, this is an amazingly friendly and enjoyable group.

But recently we’ve begun to feel like not adding a forum has sort of become the new adding a forum — like by not adding one we’re hobbling a community that could otherwise grow and become even more enjoyable for everyone involved.  So we relented, and it’s coming very soon.  We’re still tweaking the installation, but expect to see the forum tab live in the next week.

Store

While we’re by no means planning to turn GWC into some kind of sales tool, we’ve also finally succumbed to the many requests for some basic GWC gear to help you share the fun here with others.  Specifically, we’re putting together a little Cafe Press store full of T-shirts and trinkets complete with GWC graphics and listener/reader-only inside jokes.

GalacticaWatercooler.com’s redesign should give you some idea of Sean’s skills — remember, he’s a world-class sandbagger — so we’re excited about his creations for the store.  Hint: start working on him now to do a full-sized poster for the store; they take some time.  I have one over my desk that he created — it’s a “1 of 1″ print — and it’s fraking incredible. 

More To Come

There’s more, but we can talk about it later.  For now, I just wanted to let everyone know that a) the site is back up and should stay up now, and b) we’re really, really happy that you’re here.  You’ve made the last year incredibly enjoyable for us (and your fellow reader/listeners), and we hope that when the forum goes live it’ll give us all an opportunity to interact even further.

Enjoy.

Please note: we’re in the process of adjusting our hosting service and Galactica Watercooler may experience brief outages. But don’t worry — we’re not going anywhere. We’re just working out some kinks to bring you the first of some of the planned GWC site upgrades.

Update #1: We’re deploying some of the changes. We’re poor, so we don’t have a dev server. We have to tweak while live. We very much appreciate your patience.

We got kind of a late start recording tonight, but the podcast is in post-production right now and should be out on the site right around midnight.  By the way, we were a bit tired and, well, beat down from a really long week when we recorded tonight’s podcast, so forgive us if we’re a bit slow.  It happens to everyone, and this week it was us.

In the meantime, a few news items of interest:

• The Space Shuttle Endeavour has undocked from the ISS and is still on schedule for a landing Tuesday.  The first opportunity would bring them down at KSC at 12:32 p.m. ET, so give it a watch if you get a chance.  It’s not as exciting as vipers and raptors, but it’s, well, real.  (If you’re at home, DirecTV offers the NASA channel.  If you’re stuck at work — or without satellite/cable — you can watch a free streaming feed here.)
• As many have discussed in comments, Sci-Fi announced their fall schedule.  We now know that we’ll indeed see a series of two-to-three-minute-long “mini-sodes” broadcast during the new Flash Gordon, which now occupies BSG’s old 9 p.m. Friday night slot.  We also know that Razor will air November 24th.  Woot!
• And finally, we’re in the process of making some changes to the galacticawatercooler.com site, and plan to release them in the next few weeks.  As always, we’re doing this over nights and weekends, so we’re not sure exactly what day we’ll finish.  But it’s exciting stuff that we think will make the time you spend here even more enjoyable.

See you in a few with the ‘cast.

Since I we (sorry, Goose) had a lot to do this weekend, we weren’t able to record tonight. Rest assured, though, that we’re not abandoning you. We’ve all set aside time to record tomorrow night, and you’ll get the podcast late tomorrow night. Or maybe early Tuesday morning depending on whether I’m in the mood for beer or coffee tomorrow. It could go either way.

In the meantime, here are a few things you might enjoy:

• Apparently Belgian archaeologists who were digging around in a Roman bath uncovered a “huge, exquisitely-carved statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian last week. Though Wikipedians will always remember Hadrian as “one of the ‘five good emperors’” and the guy responsible for Hadrian’s wall, Hadrian’s gate, and (you guessed it) Hadrian’s Villa, OGs will always remember, um, her, as the power-hungry woman who went too far/was misunderstood by all.
• Those of us who suck and didn’t make Comicon — that’s right, you know who you we are — missed out on a Futurama 2008 trailer. Thankfully Gizmodo was there to rub it in our faces let us in on the action. One day GWC will have a travel budget, and after we visit the Philly Crue (assume there are dots there — I’m way too lazy to look up the code) we’ll get to see great stuff like this.
• Comicon Part Deux: The debate is officially over. He’s small “e” evil. Now if Flickr could just end the ship debate for us…

And in case you were wondering, the Dallas meetup was a blast. In fact, we’re talking about doing it again sometime next month.  Enjoy, and we’ll see you tomorrow night. Or Tuesday morning.

As a number of you have astutely noticed, our current re-watch schedule runs a tad bit slow in terms of reaching a target of completing the entire canon just shy of season four.  Now that we’ve reached the end of season one, we wanted to take a minute to update you on our plan.

And unlike the Cylons in season three, we do have a plan.

First of all, we’re combining all two-part episodes into a single re-watch week.  These are more fun to watch together anyway.  Next, we’ve succumbed to the (correct) pressure and created an official Google calendar for the re-watch:

As you can see from the calendar, we’re currently finishing up season three in February.  While official sources say we’ll receive season four in “early 2008,” we (sadly) can’t assume that means January 1st.  So this schedule might work fine.  Then again, we’re also going to need to devote some time to Razor in November, so we may need to compress the schedule a bit more.

That’s really why we created the Google calendar.  There’s no way for us to know at this moment how we’re going to need to handle, say, September’s re-watch schedule.  We’ll have to talk it out here on GWC.com and adjust as we go to make sure we’re all caught up and ready for Razor and season four.

So subscribe to the Google calendar and you’ll automatically be privvy to the new sh… tuff.

PS: We’re setting up for the commentary ‘casts now and should be recording in an hour or so.  Look for more of this weekend’s podcasting extravaganza later today.

Update: Sorry about issues with the button.  I’ll troubleshoot them as soon as we’re done recording today’s commentary episodes.  One down, one to go!

Update #2: The button works fine — which shouldn’t surprise me so much as it’s a direct copy of Google’s code — but you must be logged into your google calendar when you click it.  Then it offers you the opportunity to subscribe.

As I mentioned at the end of Podcast #49, we’re going to do something a little special with #50.  But since I was tired — and maybe a bit incoherent — I thought I’d add this post to make things a bit more clear about exactly what we’re doing.

First of all, you’re going to get three GWC podcasts this weekend.  You’re going to get one-each commentaries for each part of Kobol’s Last Gleaming.  (In fact, we’re inagurating our new custom-built audio desk and much-more-organized technical setup with these podcasts.  Woot!)  These will be “Podcasts #51 and #52,” however.

Podcast #50 will be a “bonus” ‘cast targeted specifically at all of you hardcore GWC-ers — the ones who’ve made this so much fun that it’s become a part of our life, the ones who bust our chops (and educate us) when we drop the ball, the ones who’ve helped us through good times and bad.  You know who you are.

We’re cooking up some other fun stuff, but for starters, we’ve got an audio “blooper reel.”  Calling in will be much easier once you hear three full minutes of me frakking up the intro with full-on heckling from the crew.

But the most important part of #50 is you.  You’re what makes this awesome, and we want to feature you.  So if you have a minute, we’d like you to give us a call at +1 214 296 9229 and tell us about how another GWC listener/reader helped you enjoy BSG more.  Try to keep your call to around 30 seconds so we can include a lot of ‘em.

For example, I’m going to spend my 30 seconds on LVogt, who recently inspired me to delve a lot deeper into the whole Hadrian/”Witch Hunt” situation than ever before.  If it wasn’t for reading LVogt’s comment, I’d probably have glossed over it, and I’d have missed out big time.  I’m willing to bet that most of you have had a similar experience — so let us hear about it!

And in case we haven’t said so recently, thanks so much for making GWC a joy.

I just want to let everyone know that we’re working with our hosting service right now to work out whatever the problem is with comments.  Don’t worry — GWC isn’t going away!  We simply have a problem with the blog software.

In the meantime, I apologize for the downtime.  I’ll keep you updated here, and I look forward to hearing all your great thoughts on this week’s episode — and everything else! — very soon.

Update: The problem has been resolved and the comment system is again active!  Thanks for all your patience and all the supportive emails.