All my old AudioRANTS.

My misadventure in podcasting.

Every so often someone asks me about the podcast I did back in 2005, which I had titled AudioRANTS.

The reason it comes up is ’cause the podcasts are still out there on the internet. Back then I had no server space to host ’em on, so I stuck them on Internet Archive. Then I got the podcast posted on iTunes. Since every other podcast listing service in the world regularly goes digging through iTunes and steals all their links from them, this put AudioRANTS on every other podcast listing service… and from time to time someone will find the podcast, listen to the episodes, and wonder if I’m making any more.

Nice to be appreciated, but my usual response is that I have no plans to start it up again. I won’t say I never will, but after doing this batch I got the podcasting bug out of my system and don’t feel the urge to start it up again.

I took down the AudioRANTS site years ago, but I figured it might be best to have one blog entry on this site that links to all of them. So here they are.

Listen at your own risk. I make no claims of audio brilliance, profundity, or entertainment value. It’s just something I did, once upon a time.

A whole lot of downloads.

I was poking around Myspace recently because someone had told me they posted something on my page. I never look at it, so first I had to go through about five different emails and passwords before I finally remembered which one I had registered under. And even then, I couldn’t find my bloody page. So I had it search for “kwleslie.” It didn’t just search Myspace; it searched everywhere.

Sometimes it’s a scary thing to find out how many people have been reading or listening.

One of the top responses was to a podcast I had done some months ago. I had never really kept track of how many listeners I had on the thing; I always assumed it was about five or six, because that’s all the emails and comments I got about the show. So out of curiosity I decided to actually find out how many people had downloaded the show. The lowest number of downloads: 9 (from a show I had re-posted once I discovered a sound glitch.) The highest: 24,717.

That’s a lot of losers!

As I’ve said before: I don’t have a lot of respect for the fans of my dumber stuff. I don’t consider my yammerings worth getting all that excited about. They’re mildly entertaining, perhaps, but that’s all. Even so, there have been people who have indicated to me that the stuff I write is the greatest stuff ever, and the only reasonable response to that is they must not read much. Or they read crap. Okay, compared to crap, I’m amazing.

24,717 downloads? That’s gotta be a glitch or something. The next most downloaded show was only 4,045 times; and maybe by that point people realized the show wasn’t really any good and stopped paying attention to it.

Well… there’s no figuring people's tastes. If William Hung can produce a Christmas album, I suppose people may as well listen to a podcast of my rehashed rants. At least they’re free. People have to actually pay for Hung’s tone-deaf, barely intelligible moaning. Thirty seconds on American Idol was amusing; two CDs is like getting a colonoscopy with a toilet brush.

Same with my rants—after a point, I can’t read any more, and I’d hardly expect you to.

Unpodcasting.

Sunday afternoon I was reading Mark and thinking to myself, “Hey, don’t I need to do a podcast this week?”

Nah. I got nothing.

Yes, I can produce three rants an hour, but I don’t really have anything I feel like regurgitating into a podcast. Once I rant about it here on the weblog, it’s out of my system. This kinda shows when you listen to the podcast; I’m not anywhere near as annoyed as when I’m first pounding the entries out. It sounds like I’m reading. (Which, half the time, I am, because I’m just regurgitating stuff off this site.) Well, that’s just boring. I don’t want to make a boring show. The novelty wore off. So I’m gonna stop making ’em.

I may start it up again if I think of a new premise for a show, but right now I got nothing. So, to all three listeners: You’re just gonna have to read this weblog. Deal with it.

Podcasting.

Since I started ranting about iTunes, I may as well rant about podcasting.

I got into it over the summer, when I was in Vacaville and only had access to dial-up. You really can’t subscribe to any podcasts with any kind of frequency over dial-up. Downloading a simple 34MB podcast took two hours. If you listen to four or five shows a day, as I do, you’re going to spend 10 hours a day (or overnight) downloading. That’s just not right.

“Four or five shows a day?” you may be saying. “Where do you find time?” I play ’em in the background, just like radio. Only I wind up listening to the music… rather than groan in exasperation, “They played this song a half hour ago, and it’s not any good anyway…” and tolerate it or ignore it until it passes. Entertainment should not annoy.

When I first started listening, I thought, “Hm, let’s see if there are any good ones out there,” and started poking around. There aren’t many. I find myself now listening to music shows, with the exception of Adam Curry's show, only because as a professional DJ he actually knows how to talk properly on radio. (Now podcasts.) The rest of them babble.

Even I babble, which is why my own show is gravitating more towards music, sound effects, and general silliness. Hey, if I won't listen to it, why should I expect others to? Not that many do…

Theodicy.

What the heck is theodicy? Well, it’s one of those theology vocabulary words that nobody but us theologians use. I used it on my podcast this week because I ranted about it. Theodicy is the debate about how a good, almighty God can co-exist with evil in our universe. If God can do something about evil, why doesn’t he? The usual answers are:

1. He doesn't exist; so that’s why.
2. He’s not almighty, so he can’t stop it.
3. He isn’t motivated to stop it. (Often because that particular evil is part of his grand scheme of things).

Except, when God talks to Job about the problem of the evil things that have been happening to Job, he made three things rather clear:

1. He certainly does exist.
2. He certainly is almighty.
3. He’s not too thrilled with anything Job’s so-called friends had to say about him. What did they say? Mainly that this particular evil is part of God’s grand scheme of things.

The next time you decide to try to comfort someone with a well-worn platitude, I think it might be a good idea to leaf through Job and see what God thinks of your words of comfort… when it came out of the mouths of Job’s buddies.

The bric-a-brac of late July.

My current events.

Mom’s trying to figure a trip to Disneyland for the family next week. Logistics are always a tricky thing: fly or drive, which hotel, visit relatives or not, accommodating Tim, the cost, the temperature, etc. I’m not particular. It’s been eleven years since I was last at Disneyland and I want another Goofy hat.

Been pounding out the last of the philosophy papers, but I took some time off between 11 and 4 (that’s p.m. and a.m.) to finally write, produce, upload, and post my current podcast. I was tempted to jabber about postmodernism again, but I decided I’d had enough of the subject (since I’ve had to write so much about it for the philosophy class) so I decided to go through the Things that Annoy Me About Living on Campus. I haven’t added to the list since February, and I don’t plan to; but here you can listen to me in full sarcasm mode. Website here. Podcast here. Or try iTunes; but make sure you have a solid internet connection because if you get cut off for any reason, you can’t fix the broken downloads.

I started subscribing to Blockbuster’s DVDs-by-mail service and have attempted this July to get more than my money’s worth by going through 30 movies in a month. I haven’t been successful; their system is a little too slow for me. It takes two to three days for the distribution center to receive my old movie and send a new one. But I can get 25 movies out of them per month, which puts the cost of the service at 60¢ per movie. So there’s that.

One of my cousins is frantically calling the rest of the family members. Someone claiming to be him has sent an email to everyone, “confessing” that he’s been having internet sex with 13-year-olds. Since he wants to be a P.E. coach, this is not the sort of thing one wants to become known for. Just a reminder: Don’t let evil bastards borrow your computer. But on the up side, if my cousin wants to sue this guy for libel, he’s got a fantastic case.

Another hot day today. I may have to hit the air-conditioned coffee shop. It’s a beautiful thing when the air conditioning is so good, you can order a hot coffee and comfortably drink it. I did that Monday. I may have to do it again today. We’ll see.

My first podcast.

Introducing the AudioRANTS podcast.

Just a tip: When you make an 11MB podcast, do not upload it to the server using dial-up. Trust me.

I had flashbacks to when I was editor of Countryside Post in Grass Valley, and we experimented with uploading our files to the printer. This was back in 1999, when DSL wasn’t anywhere yet, much less in Grass Valley. So this was all done through dial-up. Try to imagine sending between 100MB and 150MB of data (even after it was compressed) over a telephone line. Took hours. And if anything happened to stop the upload, we had to start over. In the end, we decided it was less time-consuming to drive to the print shop in Sacramento (about 65 minutes away) and back.

Anyway, enough ranting about uploading the podcast; let me tell you about the podcast itself.

Podcasting, for those of you who don’t know, is making a “show” and converting it to MP3 so that you can easily listen to it on your iPod—or for those of you who don’t have an iPod, your computer. There are lots of podcasts on the internet already; if you have Apple’s iTunes (which is free) it includes a directory of podcasts for your listening pleasure. Podcasts, by the way, are also free to download, though some take a while, especially if you have dial-up.

Out of the pure novelty of it all, I decided to rant into my computer for about 20 minutes, then turn that into a podcast. And then, because for some stupid reason I went all anal about it, I decided to write scripts for the show, edit in some background and bumper music, and create a website to host the stuff on.

Why? Because it’s summer and I have too much free time on my hands. Of course, this is stupid; if I’m going to make a weekly show it had better become easy to do or I’ll frustrate myself with the obligation. But I figure the first one is the hardest, so here it is.

And the first one is probably the most boring. I realized this after listening to it later. I sound a little canned. Likely it’s because of the scripts. So, in future podcasts, I’ll rant off the top of my head; I’ll probably get into more trouble because of it, but it’ll sound more natural.

Anyway, give it a listen; enjoy it; feel free to tell me how much you think it sucks and that you’ve farted more interesting things than that.

Update, 11/20/2024. Of course, I stopped making this podcast as soon as the novelty wore off. The website doesn’t exist anymore either. But the shows are still on Internet Archive, and I linked to all of them here.