Necessity of No Updates

Posted: February 18, 2008 around 5:30 pm | Annotation

This weblog is largely inactive, but I’d like to give a few words why.

It began at a time where I had a lot of time on my hands. I was living at home, having left college, saving up money to go abroad. I had time. I had time to do things like sit in front of a computer monitoring sound output and waiting around for audio to transfer minute-by-minute, real time. Life changes.

There’s no way I have that sort of time now, for simple reasons. I still have all the audio I want to share, and all the equipment. However, age hasn’t done my Minidisc recorder any favors. The battery can’t hold a charge like it used to, and the right channel on the binaural microphones themselves seems to have gone sour. Most modern electronics weren’t built to last I suppose. It’s never long before they’re replaced by something better.

So really, the Manifesto of this blog that included an optimistic “Theory on How This Will Work” was really too optimistic. I’d like to think that someday I may make available an archive of some sort, but I don’t see this format going much of anywhere… even though it’d be really interesting.

So, for simply another event that was before it’s time, and whose time seems to have passed, let this be a monument. This is what might have been.

Daunting Task

Posted: November 10, 2005 around 8:26 pm | Annotation

Recently, the need for a set schedule of recording, encoding, and uploading audio has been on my mind. Much of it has already been transferred and resides on one of my happily chaotic hard drives; it merely needs organization. But a great bulk still resides in a tiny box in my bedroom cupboard :

I did a tally of fifteen remaining discs. The total came to no less than 34 hours of recorded material, containing 150 discrete tracks between November of 2002 up until last August. This certainly seems like a dreadful amount. But I’ve done the math and it’s the equivalent of recording only 1 minute 58 seconds a day—which doesn’t sound like that much. However, this doesn’t even consider the time it takes to prepare, encode, and classify all that information. Which is a lot.

And I haven’t even finalized the layout.
Please commence supplication to a higher power.

The Manifest

Posted: October 16, 2005 around 6:00 pm | Annotation

The Premise: I have accrued literally years worth of audio from various sources, on various media, and I am doing nothing with it. My trusted bionic microphones have recorded a veritable canon — a canon which includes friends sitting around and talking, walking around and people-watching with said friends, friends partying together, etc. I used to do this all the time. On occasion my microphones might record rain or other natural phenoms too; this can be nice, but not half as novel. Some of my hoardings are quite interesting and very worthy of publication.

The Irony: this sort of thing is now de rigeur. It’s called podcasting, and everyone who ever hankered for their own radio show has one. 20,000 of them in some directories. Unfortunately for me I was about two years ahead of the curve. My dreams of internet radio particapa-dom died as soon as I realized I was too cheap to buy my own website. Life’s funny that way. Now I have the place — but I need the time.

The Theory on How This Will Work: every week I unload a batch or so of recordings from ancient times. They’ll reside on my computer since I have only a gigabyte to work with server-side, and let me tell you there’s way more than a gig. BlogTorrent makes them available for download as either .torrent files or easy little executables. You download them. I’ll do my best to describe events I’ve mostly forgotten, and I ask you to fill me in whenever you can.

The Test: here goes something…