By Roy Mathur, on 2019-12-16, at 19:30:31 to 20:06:50 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
CRRRaSh! salutes you with an, "arrrgh!", matey.
Oh, and if you are wondering what the ex-pirate was singing in The Expanse S4E10, some serious Reddit rummaging told me it is the entirely character-appropriate sea shanty-like song The Ballad of Captain Kidd; a frequently covered version of the old moral song Captain Kid's Farewel to the Seas, or, the Famous Pirate's Lament from 1701, not celebrating, but warning against a life of piracy.
And, on the subject of Captain Kidd, I owned a glow in the dark Captain Kidd action figure when a child because even back then people new I liked piratey things. Matchbox Fighting Furies: The Ghost of Cap'n Kidd is a now very overpriced collector's item.
It has been a few weeks since the OpenReach technician check my setup and fitted a high speed master socket. There have been a few brief disconnections and interruptions, but both the stability and speed is much better.
The network also seems to recover without human intervention. In the past, I had to manually restart the router---unacceptable if I'm running a server or scripts. Yes, I could write a complicated to script to poll and then restart the router, but I shouldn't have to.
Yes, the new low profile scissor switch keyboard is better than the old butterfly keyboard, but it's still not clicky enough for me, but Vi users rejoice, the ESC key is back. There are other improvements, but I only poked at the keyboard for a few minutes. In any case, I could never afford it, and, with all that space, why isn't there a number pad and separate function keys in addition to the Touch Bar?
In any case, this thing is way too expensive.
Come to think of it, everything in the Apple catalogue is now too expensive. When did they return to these stupid prices? How much is the cheapest Mac Mini Now? The new i3 CPU seems a rather stingy substitute in comparison to my cheaper i5 2012 model. Sure, more cores, but...
I've finished upgrading. Mojave's the last MacOS for my Mac Mini 2012. I could upgrade, but with all the problems people are having, why should I bother?
Soon, or possibly even before Microsoft stop supporting Windows 7 64 bit, I'm changing from Bootcamp to using a MacOS Mojave partition and a Ubuntu partition on my Mac Mini. On my netbook I'll stick with Windows 7 32 bit, which doesn't seem to have the freezing problems which I have experienced lately with it's 64 bit sibling. I might go with Lubuntu, but, virus threat aside, it seems a little pointless as my main use for this machine is writing using MS Office 2003.
I'm not well organised. There are things I need to do:
Are they stepping down from leadership of Alphabet because of looming antitrust? Or are they going to continue pulling the Google's strings from supervillain island hideouts staffed by girly droids?
Oh, who cares?
An article on CNN says that there is black hole that is 40 million times the mass of Sol.
Not so much the equipment (I list that on the podcast page), but the content.
Have a specific subject to talk about. It's easier to talk about one thing well, than many things badly (like I do with a generic geek podcast).
I write down what I want to say, then only glance briefly at my notes. I do not to read them verbatim because this is conversational not narrative. I do, however, currently write show notes that read like a self-contained blog post or article. It's a giant pain and I'm not sure that it's worth it. It feels like a duplication of effort.
I do not to say "um" or "ah", or, mostly unsuccessfully, use conversational prompts like "and" or "so". If I don't know what to say, I say nothing or hit pause.
Because I also have Tourette's, and stress (like that caused by podcasting) makes it worse, I usually have a lot of vocal tics like, "uh, uh, uh, argh!" etc. to remove.
Other things edited out in post include the worst of my lisped "S"s. Did I tell you I also have a lisp? Then there are the mouth clicks. God help me, I'm a clicker. Dry mouth usually causes this, but don't get too paranoid and remove all mouth clicks, breathing, and pauses unless your want to sound like a wind up robot on speed.
I try not to use compression or normalisation FX, but sometimes that's necessary unless you want to subject your listeners to jump scares... BOO! See what I mean? If you don't know what those terms mean, search for them in your browser.
Going full tilt, I can edit one minute of audio in two minutes. Cutting tape's a pain, but nothing like as bad as editing film. The most difficult thing about editing is all the sitting you have to do. It's terrible for your back and your bum, and all the mousing in the editing suite is an excellent way to develop RSI. They didn't tell you that at your internship did they? Wait, why are you doing an internship? This is podcasting, not radio. Just get out there. Unless it's This American Life. Wait, that's radio too. No, it's a podcast. No, it's radio. Make up your mind Ira. (Maybe I'm wrong about internships, as my own podcast is hardly wildly successful, so do what thou wilt padawan).
Record on two separate devices, even if the backup is only your phone, and save changes frequently when editing. You wouldn't believe how unreliable a computer is, and how you can always rely on it to bodge your recording.
Don't podcast solo. A few do, and develop a nice "talking to a friend" patter, but even after this long, I still find it hard. If you are a solo podcaster, do not inundate the listener with constant, repetitive background music. You don't need to do it and it is the fastest way to get listeners like me to unsubscribe. Your voice is enough.
If you listen to my podcast, it is patently obvious that I do not always succeed at following my own advice, but I try.
As nerds, we often talk of digital preservation, but they same respect needs to be shown for physical media. Cultural artefacts and material history, once destroyed is wiped from human memory. If a thing is important to you, save it.
Never throw away stuck or moldy video tapes, cassette tapes, bookworm riddled books, decaying comics, papers, and photographs etc. There is a whole industry dedicated to the restoration of this material.