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.

Fiddling with the podcast.

Those of you who have read my blog have noticed that I’ve been listening to a lot of different podcasts lately. I’m currently fiddling with the idea of making my own… not just so I can add to the glut of them already on the internet, but because I’m not yet finding a podcast that I’m really jazzed about.

So I decided to make one. I have the software; just about anyone with a Macintosh does. All you need is GarageBand and iTunes. Making it is the easy part; making it sound good is a little trickier; and finding a webhost who doesn’t mind the bandwidth is even harder. Good thing I’m not planning to do this on a daily basis.

More details on that when I get to it. Then you can all get on my site and tell me how much it sucks.

Summer cleaning and London bombing.

When I moved to Vacaville for summer, I moved to Mom’s house, which means I had to take all my stuff from my dorm room, drag some of my storage bins out of the garage, and take over Chad’s old room. (It actually used to be my old room, back in high school. I haven’t lived in it since ’97.) The process demands, to some degree, that I put some order into my life, so I’ve been going through old clothes, determining what should be donated to the Salvation Army, what should be thrown out, and what should be kept.

Likewise I have to figure out what books are going on the bookshelves; and I’m organizing my MP3 collection, which is in a mess but needs to be backed up onto DVDs (yes, I have that many) and stuffed onto the iPod. The really obnoxious thing about MP3s is that you have to keep the original CDs you ripped them from in order for them to be legal. This equates to two bins in the garage. I could make a nice little bundle selling them; but for all the preaching I do against piracy, I would be a hypocrite. Integrity is expensive.

My process is not fast enough for Mom, who has been organizing the garage, watering the yard, and doing a million other little projects that keep her occupied.

Occasionally she does this while watching what I call “white trash TV”—courtroom shows, talk shows, dating shows, etc. Man, do they do a lot of paternity tests. I keep wondering how on earth they get people to be on these shows. You know nothing good will come of it when your ex-girlfriend tells you, “Honey, would you go with me on the Jerry Springer show?” There’s got to be a large subclass of people who are willing to go through any freakish insanity so long that they get a chance to be on TV. Anyway, I don’t bother to watch it; I catch snippets of it whenever I pass the family room.

Of course, I wanted to see the latest on what was happening in London. I didn’t hear of it until after noon; and since there’s no cable TV and Kerry was hogging the internet, I was just going to have to wait until the BBC News came on at 5 p.m.

Fourth of July fun.

Happy Fourth. Careful how you treat that flag.

We had a family barbecue for Independence Day; Kerry couldn’t be there but the rest of us ate a lot of food, watched the kids splash around in the kiddy pool, watched Coach Carter, then went to see the fireworks. Typical American behavior.

Other typical American behavior: To watch the fireworks (because, in Vacaville, if you sit in the right place, you can see both the fireworks over downtown and the fireworks over the baseball park) we picked an empty lot next to the Valero gas station; a lot filled with dry grass and weeds. Some dumbasses sitting near us decided that this would be the perfect spot to light sparklers and small fireworks; never mind that fireworks are illegal in this county (and to get an exemption, you need to have the fire department at your event). It would have been very cool if their fireworks had started a small grass fire that consumed their car, just for the personal lesson; but I suppose such a fire would have consumed the gas station and three fast food restaurants and wouldn’t have been worth it.

Okay, I think I’ll talk about sex now.

My aunt is getting married, and according to Mom she’s having the darndest time finding a pastor to officiate. Seems she and her fiance are “living in sin,” and the pastors don’t approve, so they won’t officiate because they disapprove of premarital sex.

Every time I bring this up, I get in trouble, but it’s a biblical idea, so here goes… There’s no such thing as premarital sex. All sex is marital. Scripture is quite clear that whenever people have sex, they’re considered married; all the consequences they suffer have to do with formalizing the union. In the case of adultery (which is prohibited for that very reason) the consequences deal with the dissolution of the previous marriage, and the formalization of the new one.

Western culture—heck, all culture—has argued that there should be a distinction between sex and marriage, and have tried to structure their societies that way. Thus the idea, and acceptance of the idea, of premarital sex. But it’s not an idea found in the bible. Pastors and parents, largely unaware of this, rightly say that sex should be confined to marital relationships, but never deal with the fact that scripture says nothing for or against premarital sex because there is no such thing.

The bit I still don’t understand is this: We have these two people “living in sin,” and they want to rectify the situation… and the pastors tell them no, leaving them to continue in “sin”? It’s as if we had two drug addicts, and they can’t enter a treatment program because they failed a urine test. This doesn’t sound logical… nor does it sound like the sort of grace that the church should be offering people.

Continuing towards the abolition of silence…

Finally got myself an iPod. Instant gratification.

I have been looking for an iPod since last Christmas. (I knew my family wasn’t getting me one for Christmas; they tend to be cheap about such things.) I’ve mainly been poking around eBay for one.

Shopping on eBay is an interesting experience. There’s the odd psychological reaction to “winning” (though you’ve won nothing other than the right to buy something); there’s the huge number of companies that are selling new stuff under the guise of “deals” while they’re actually gouging you through shipping (imagine a $10 cable that’s available for $4, but with shipping it totals $12—to ship a 5-ounce cable); there’s the foreign companies posing as domestic ones (but you wouldn’t know it unless you noticed the “Shipped from Hong Kong” in tiny print somewhere on the page); and there’s the fact that no sellers give positive feedback until you’ve sent your own positive feedback.

Typically I’d find iPod minis—the little 5GB versions—for $200, marked down from the usual $250; but after shipping they’d be $260, and for that $60 shipping fee you’d get a box full of air with an iPod in it; shipping actually cost $5, so they’ve sold you an iPod for $5 above retail. Bastards! I wasn’t falling for that scam, so I kept waiting… and waiting and waiting. Christmas came and went.

It wasn’t until last week that I found something… an older model 15GB iPod that, after shipping, was $103. Score! So I got it Saturday, and spent that evening and this morning loading 2,912 songs into it. It’s still not yet half full, but I have virtually every CD I own in it. It’s a beautiful thing.

Mom didn’t get it. “I don’t listen to that much music,” she pointed out.

“Well, you wouldn’t if you’re only listening to one CD at a time,” I explained. “If they were all ripped to your computer, you could call up any song you wanted whenever you wanted. If you put them in an iPod you wouldn’t need to be near your computer. Instant gratification.”

“Well, it’s your toy,” she shrugged.

Damn right it is.

Dial-up sucks.

Back to Vacaville. Back to dial-up.

I spent the morning poking around the internet—slowly—for all the local Wi-Fi spots. Thank God, most of them are coffeehouses, and one of them is within walking distance. Unfortunately, at home, we have dial-up (specifically, Juno) and it just sputters along at modem speed. Kerry upgraded it to an accelerated service, but that service only works on her PC and the rest of us have Macs. Forget that; we need DSL.

More specifically, I need DSL. I have uploads and downloads that take hours without high-speed internet. (I have been so spoiled by my year at Bethany.) When I first started downloading music off iTunes, I had to put up with dial-up’s usual 15 minutes’ download per song. So I’d set it to download and go to bed. If anything disconnected the phone overnight, I had to start over again the next night. That’s just obnoxious.

In the meanwhile, Mom is pestering me about moving my stuff from one room to another, so I’m getting back to that while the temperatures are still tolerable.