I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

I would say all the normal things about this show, but I can't. Why? Because, even for something completely non-standard, this thing is... well... completely non-standard. It's the not normal of the non-normal. It's broken personified, to the maximum power of things that are broken. On top of that, it's even more broken than that... OK, so basically, I will shut up about what it is, and give you this link for the show, featuring myself and Melanie Kotch.
'Well, what's so great about it, then?'

I'll just go ahead and tell you that the description for this week's show will suck a lot more than the show itself did, including bad grammar, but here goes anyway.

• The theme for this show, more than ever, is "I broke it!"


• North Carolina got a whole bunch of snow. After the first traditional call from Derek, a song was played to properly commemorate the occasion... which promptly broke.


• One of a couple of calls from "the duck," breaking even more things.


• Venison calls in to tell us about an experiment involving alcohol and eggs, which broke?


• On the same note, a gassy fire... Sure, why not?


• Josh calls in, Mommy shows up, and things get really, really confusing... that is to say, broken. Baby pictures included, free of charge.


• Melanie and I went to a Carolina Hurricanes game on Thursday, wherein the New York Islanders forgot to show up, and lost 4 to 1. A few highlights, including drunk people chanting slower and slower as the game progressed.


• I said something that caused lots of laughs. I won't say what it was, because it was just... bad.


• Annoying people, broken "oh no" loops, and drum kits, oh my!


• Venison's Alter ego finally figures out that Melanie is "the girl who likes hummers.," and breaks more things as a result.


• Let's try, and fail, to put annoying people in boxes. Didn't work so well... Let's make them fall down the stairs instead.


• Mary Ann calls in, and proves that presents are meant to be broken.


• Venison's Alter-ego shows up again to tell us about some amazing products on sale now.


• Fire drills, hacking phone systems, and many more broken things from a call from Chris West round up this week's squash box.


• As per usual, quite a bunch of other things happened. Find out for yourself what those were.

There you have it, the most enjoyable show of 2010 thus far. Have fun, kids!

Oh, crap! Looks like it's time for another one of these things.

On this weeks' particularly strange show:

• Although I should have stopped long ago, I'm still amused by one particular effect preset I created on the Quad IV processor last year, and used it on a few phone calls, including the traditional first call from Derek.


• The now nearly traditional second caller, Josh Owens, shows up to talk about radio stuff (as per usual,) bad weather, washing cd's in the laundry, the fact that North Carolina's record low temperature was recorded on January 23, 1985 (-34º F,) and other stuff.


• A phone call from Mary Ann leads to discussion of the world-famous "bad for you" effect, brought to you by a Dell Dimention 8200 in 2005, accidental mid-western accents, and a demonstration of the random cart categories for interjecting noises and comments into the show.


• This week's Mommy call reveals that I missed some fun things on Friday night involving lots of cop cars, which is, naturally, rather unfortunate.


• Thanks to a couple of strange Australians, we hear the amazing sound of four berocca multi-vitamin tablets being dissolved in two glasses of water, in stereo, of course.


• Did you know that Ronnie Milsap promoted the use of Windows 3.1? Well, maybe not.


• Things expire over time, but does time itself actually expire and time out?


• Patrick Kelly shows up after not existing for a while. Many things are discussed, including fun experiments with dry ice.


• The sound track for nothing at all?


• I finally have news about the Phonic board. TriTech has *finally* been approved by American Music and Sound to fix it under the warranty. Maybe I'll get it back before next year now instead of 2021, as was originally suggested by the length of time it takes people to actually do things around here.


• Would anyone like a Seth Thomas pocket watch?


• Mary Ann finally got called out for something she did 15 or 20 years ago regarding a grandfather clock, thanks to a conversation at dinner. Cute how these things turn out, isn't it?


• Let's have Christmas on an acid trip, brought to you by what had better be a mislabeled cd. If it isn't, someone has issues.


• Time to play the keyboard some more.

And, as they say, that's that.

Melanie is coming down for a week on Wednesday, meaning Borris goes to another hockey game on Thursday, and, depending on what's going on, there may or may not be a show on Saturday, January 30. If there is, it should be an interesting one. Stay tuned, as per usual.

Hello, and welcome to another week... except not, because it's over. As a result, a new episode of Things and Stuff is now available for you to play with.

On this messed up edition:

• After the first standard call from Derek, relaying some amusing things as usual, Josh calls in and discusses more old radio stuff, broken English, and Redneck Tech, among other subjects.


• A new possible segment of the show, things you know but might not understand, starting with Sting and the Police... in Japanese?


• A call from MaryAnn, including a demonstration of the Moshi talking clock, and why it's a bad idea to use as an alarm, discussion of the Korg KO1 I bought last week, expensive remotes with touchscreens, and the Logitech Squeezebox.


• After a few false starts, playing with the talkbox a bit much, and a call from Alexander, we get a groove going on the Korg KO1 that I call the extended dial tone remix. It will be obvious why, I think.

Congratulations, there's this week's show in the recycle bin. More of the same wonderful crap next week.

Here we are again: the end of another week, most of which I spent in bed, feeling like crap. Way to start out 20o10, huh?

As the standard cycle of things go, another Things and Stuff archive is now available.
Here are just a few of the noteworthy things from this week's show:

• Instead of the hacked, duct taped system of using the Alesis Multimix8 through the Yamaha Motif as a master compressor, this week's show was brought to you by my Yamaha MG124C console, XLR out to the analog inputs on the Delta Audiophile 24/96, using the DBX compressor on mic, a two-stage hybrid compression system+side chain on the phone, and Sony WaveHammer and Smooth/Enhanse plugins on the stream for mastering, otherwise known as all that for that. This board doesn't have master inserts, and I did try putting a hardware compression solution directly in place between the board and the sound card, with some pretty nasty results. I think this sounds better than that would have.


• After the standard first phone call from Derek, we heard from Josh Owens again, with another unusually long phone call, reminiscing about the good old days (well, for us, anyway) of ham radio, old local phone systems, and too many random things to mention here, including more unexpected news relating to said person.


• Last week, I bought a Sansa Sandisk 2gb mp3 player for $20, which runs Rockbox, and can be expanded to 16gb with a MicroSD card. We learn why using it's built-in recorder as a drum miking solution is a bad idea, unless you like that "low-fi" effect, or something.


• We finally have solid proof from Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve that the year should be pronounced 20o10.


• This week's Mommy Call breaks in an interesting way when Dad decides to pick up another phone. Zoom ATAs don't like it when multiple phones are off the hook, resulting in me being looped back into myself and trying to compensate for it. Oh, yeah, and my father is weird.


• How's the Randolph County Sheriff communications frequency doing? Find out speratically throughout the rest of the show.


• A call from a Canadian listener prompts discussion of many things.


• Carbon mics and ping pong effects -- a great way to waste your Saturday night.


• I can't find what I'm looking for, but I do have a talkbox, and a lot of time on my hands, apparently.


• Let's have some out-of-tune side-band from a Canadian HF receiver.


• Kelly the Eyes makes an appearance from Phoenix, acting as the last call, and provider of typical bad humor.

As per usual, other things happened that aren't logged here, but where would all the fun go if things were properly detailed? My response to that: Let's not!

Next week may possibly feature random things from the Korg KO1 Kaossilator I ordered yesterday, but don't have yet. This is a portable, battery-powered phrase synthesizer which does several strange things. Not what most would consider a serious instrument, but it looked fun, so why not? Oh, yeah, and it was cheap, so there's another reason... or something like that.

This fun show, being the first from 20o10, deserves a proper description. Really it does! Thing is, I don't feel like writing one. It was fun, and included, among other things, me making an absolute fool out of myself with a talkbox, a short song about 20o10, Rusty in Orchestraville, which was recorded in the late 1940's and features lots of sonovox, and other fun things.
I rather enjoyed doing this one, but I don't enjoy staying awake anymore. I have been told, internally, to shut right on down. And really, who am I to argue with myself? Oh, yeah, me!

By the way, for anyone curious, I WANT MY BOARD BACK! OK, I'll shut up about that for now, but damn!

'Oh no! Is it time for one of those boring, yearly reflective things again?'

Yep, sorry, 'fraid so.

'Aww, man! I hate those!'

Well, you know how to stop reading, then, don't you?

'True, you have a point.'

OK, now that we've gotten rid of him, here we go with the general bad things that are the typical ramblings from this particular person, prompted by the end of time... or, at least, the end of this period of time which calls itself MMIX, or 2009, otherwise known as -3 B.A. (three years before Armageddon, since we already know the world is going to simply shove off and stop existing as we know it in 2012, right?)

According to history, 2009, overall, wasn't such a great year, even to the very last minute. I'll leave it to others far more qualified than myself to express all that stuff, perhaps reverendbigdawg since he is the history major around here, and, to be frank, I'm lazy, and don't feel like conducting proper research, and referencing specific events to back up the case that 2009 was a sucky year in general for quite a large number of individuals, groups, and fashions. It feels too much like going back to school for a few minutes, which I currently have no desire to do. This could change, however, born out of just the right combination of restlessness and boredom, but for now, let's not.

2009 was a good year to die, apparently, with an unusually high number of celebrity casualties. Incidentally, I've always loved the use of that word, casualty, in that context. To me, it always implied that the end of a human life was casual, and didn't matter too much if it happened or not... Anyway, Some of the more visible/noteworthy deaths included the likes of Paul Harvey, Les Paul, Billy Mays, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, David Carradine, Brittany Murphy, Patrick Swayze, Wayne Allwine (the third official voice of Mickey Mouse,) Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary,) Henry Gibson (the voice of Wilbur in the 1973 version of Charlotte's Web,) James Sullivan (drummer for Avenged Sevenfold,) Dewey Martin (drummer for Buffalo Springfield,) Billy Powell (from Lynyrd Skynyrd,) Blair Lent (the guy who wrote Tikki Tikki Tembo,) Kelly Groucutt (bass player for Electric Light Orchestra,) Eric Woolfson (keyboardist and singer for the Alan Parsons Project,) and many, many more. For a much more complete list of this year's noteworthy and not so noteworthy dead people, you can run over here. If you died this year, and you don't find your name on the list, feel free to add yourself, then tell us about it later.

For me, 2009 wasn't so bad, despite what happened in the rest of the world. I can think of quite a large number of people who would disagree, and with good reason, but honestly, this has been one of my better years in recent history.
Of course, the big highlights included going to London for Andre and Kirsten's wedding in April with Brandon, Realtime 2009 and 2009.5, hanging out in Florida for almost a week in July for the ACB's annual national convention with Derek, Kelly, Stephen, Nick, Monty, some Justins, Brandon, and others, spending time with Melanie in mid November, and crashing Randy Gilkey's place in West Virginia just this month, with Derek and... Brandon? Wow, he just keeps popping up, doesn't he? Considering he's probably a good 2500 miles or more away from me, I've sure seen a lot of him this year. Talk about impulse!
Of course, Christmas with the family was fun and interesting as always, nicely rounding things out, even if Tommy kept losing his duck. If you know Tommy, you might know why this was such a big deal, and caused some issues throughout Christmas day, but that's neither here nor there.

Also, this year marks the fifth anniversary of the Beyond Radio Network's existence. We've been through some great times, and some rough times, and we're still alive to talk about it, something which I honestly didn't think would happen, even a year after it started.
TBRN has brought a lot of people together in ways that wouldn't have happened otherwise, introduced a bunch of interesting technical innovations in all the wrong places, and caused several cats to have problems over the past five years. I would say 'here's to another five', but let's be realistic, and not have any expectations for the future, shall we? After all, that's the proper pessimistic thing to do.
Many people have come and gone over the years, but the bulk of the core that started this project is still around, with some recent additions, which are always welcome. Yep, we're still passively looking for those.

Incidentally, if you want to hang out and text chat with several TBRN people, as well as other random folks who thought it was a good idea at the time, we have an IRC server at irc.tbrn.net:6667. Join #TheLobby, and fun things will happen to you... assuming people are awake, though it's pretty active for a small group of people.
Alternatively, a TeamTalk v4.0 server is available at onj1.andrelouis.com:10333/10333. You can get TeamTalk from Bearware.DK. For blind people, install the classic client for improved accessibility, and some missing features... erps!

Back to 2009:
Unfortunately, a new annual tradition seems to be showing up lately, that being the death of my mixing console at least once a year. Last year, I was without my Phonic board for roughly two months, followed by a nice little flood in the basement soon after getting it back, which set things back another couple of weeks. Now, the board is dead again, has been since November, and I have no idea when I'll get it back, thanks to a subcontractor in flux, lots of paperwork, and other bad things. It turns out that nick6489, who has the same board I have, also now has the same problem with his board! Isn't that cute? I got a Yamaha MG124C for Christmas from Melanie and Derek, which is the new, very cool upstairs board. I could take it downstairs and use it in the studio for a while, but it doesn't fit on a rack, and I don't have a lot of table space. So, for now, I'm using the little Alesis Multimix8 USB rigged through the inputs of the Yamaha Motif XS, coming out of that through SP/Dif to my Delta, and generally making a mess of things. It's a stupid setup, but it works for basic broadcasting needs, including non-software compression, or, at least compression not rendered by a PC, until I can get the Phonic back. As for real production: not quite, although I did manage to record the carbon song, a tribute to carbon phones to the tune of jingle bells, without the use of a board at all, only using the sp/dif output from my TC Helicon Voice Prism and the Yamaha Motif XS for sequencing, so I guess I can do stuff in a pinch. It's just a lot less convenient to do so at the moment.
Speaking of Phonic, I'm really rather tired of dealing with their crap, nice though it sounds when it all works, but I can't find anything analog with all the same flexibility and nice audio for under roughly 2 grand, not counting discounts from fun places like Full Compass, and I *refuse* to buy anything from Behringer again (at least the big stuff that matters,) or a digital board, even if I did have the money for it. Sorry, won't do it! Digital's great, but I want to know where everything is just by looking, not going into menus to do even the most basic of mixing tasks, like panning channels around, etc. Derek's board has made me want one even less than I already didn't, despite the conveniences, like flying automated faders, decent internal dynamics processing on each channel, the ability to copy parameters between channels, buses and sends, as well as other related things... Oh, hang on, that was an unrelated tangent, wasn't it? We're supposed to be talking about this year, aren't we? Well, let's get back to that, then.

One of the most pointless arguments in the world, in my opinion, comes up around this time every ten years. Does the end of 2009 really signify the end of a decade? For that matter, did 2000 officially start off the 21st century and the new millennium, or did that happen in 2001?
As far as most of society is concerned, base-ten, from zero to nine, a ten year period, is just as good a place to start and end a decade as any. Technically, as there is no representation for zero in the roman numeral system, and thus, no year zero between 1 B.C and 1 A.D, the arguement can very easily be stated, with backup, that things should go from one to ten, meaning that the 21st century, the current decade, and the new millennium did, in fact, not start until 2001. My Sharp EL-640 talking clock/calculator/calendar would agree with this philosophy, since it goes no further back than 1901. One observation would have the new decade starting on March 3, 2014. Yet another one has it starting sometime in September, 2017, I think. Ask an Ethiopian for more details on that one.
Of course, the media says that 2009 ends the decade, 2010 starts the next one, and everyone else needs to go home and try again. This seems to infuriate a small group of technically and politically correct minded people, which amuses me to no end. Folks, it's the end of a ten year period. A new decade ends every year from ten years ago. Does it *really* matter so much? I mean, really? 2010/2011, Nothing is going to be any different either way, you know! SHUT UP! I honestly don't care, as if I haven't made that clear at this point.

On an unrelated note, 2010, represented in roman numerals, is mmx. Does that mean 2010 is the year of the old Intel instruction set? MMX was introduced to Intel's Pentium processor in 1996, and now, 14 years later, we will have a year long celebration of the wonderful things you could do with all that added functionality and larger cache. So, we thank you, Vinod Dhan, John H. Crawford, and many others, for developing the original Intel Pentium, which would eventually have that celebrated MMX technology, which we can now dedicate an entire year to worshiping... or something, if you're into that kind of thing. even if you're not, it's still fun to say that 2010 is the year of the old Intel instruction set. If nothing else, it will get funny looks thrown in your general direction, and may even get you ostracized from certain social gatherings, just for good measure.

I've also heard 2009 having been referred to as "the year of much fail." Speaking of failure, here's a list of the fifty worst gadgets of the decade. There are some really fun ones here, definitely worth a read.

As I write this, it's 8:25 PM on December 31, 2009, although this entry won't be posted until after the start of the next one, due to this very boring, pointless, and generally dumb tradition I've had for the past three years of standing outside at the end of the driveway with a recorder and some microphones, archiving the result of New Year's celebrations in 'da hood'. If you're really bored while virtually waiting for this year's deal to be recorded and uploaded, which, of course, you won't be, since this entry won't actually be posted to the interwebs until after that occurs, you can download the following three files:

• 2007 featuring some rain, and the no longer updating Bec, recorded with an Edirol R1 and the Wizzzoe mics


• 2008 recorded with the Zoom H4 and Cad M179's on a Jecklin disk


• 2009 recorded with the same setup as 2008, featuring the usual fireworks, some guns, and a Kwanzaa celebration at the church across the street.

It's always fun to see what stupid things people will do around here. Will this one be any fun? Who knows... As they say, stay tuned and find out.

I've been writing 2010 all this time, but it's my personal belief that 2010 sounds wrong, and leaves you looking for more that just isn't there. Even two thousand and ten sounds better, because that 'and' hangs around to bridge the gap. 20 and 10 wouldn't work too well either. Not enough stress on the 'and', in my opinion.
Thus, dgl1984 and I came up with 20o10 quite a number of years ago to fill the void, just like we now refer to the year 2000 as 20o0, because it's more interesting that way. Interestingly enough, we both did this not having met each other yet, which I personally find rather amusing. Thus, from this point on, especially in speech, I will refer to the year 2010 as 20o10, and there's really not much you can do about it. Sure, it's technically incorrect, and my mother doesn't agree with it, but I don't really care very much. So there!

It's now 10:23 PM EST, and I should probably be a little paranoid, and make sure my h4's batteries are charged.
Oh, good. They are. We're setup to record at 24/96 with lots of headroom.

10:40 PM EST: Time to synchronize the trusty reliable Sharp Talking Time I.
Right, now that's done...

11:30 PM EST: It's raining. I get to stand in the rain, which is fine, since I wanted to do that anyway.
12:34 AM
Well, that was pretty boring, but now, I can throw the intro to 20o10, complete with an interrupting phone call, me being bored and tooting horns at people, and not much else. I think I used a little too much dynamic compression. Yeah, not as fun as some previous years, but, after all, you'll have that. It's all part of the experience.

Enjoy your new year, new decade, whatever you do. We'll do this again, or something like it, in 2011. By the way, 20O11 doesn't work. Thank you.

Well, what do you know? We've almost *finally* made it to the end of 2009, which, for me, didn't suck as badly as it did for other people, and for history in general... but more about that at a later time. For now, I modestly present the last Things and Stuff archive for 2009.
Here are some of the highlights:

• After the standard first call from dgl1984, we have a rare appearance from freakyfwoof, who, as it turns out, also did something rare for him these days... a show!


• Among other fun things, I received a Rocktron Banshee talkbox for Christmas. I explain what that is, how it works, and naturally, do many bad things with it throughout the course of the show.


• I was apparently bored enough to make a Christmas tribute to carbon phones, including lots of obvious autotune... then share it with the world.


• The Phonic mixing console still isn't back in the studio. Find out why... Oo, isn't this exciting?


• Ode to... stupid?


• A tribute to my Yamaha PSS-560 keyboard, or at least it's drums, which turned 23 years old on Christmas Eve.


• Due to a relatively low listener count, especially at the end, lots more tracks were played than usual. Oh well, I should do that more often anyway.


• Sure, let's talk about TBRN's early days, as we tend to do around this time every year...


• There is always hope, but supplies are limited.


• The radio is broken.


• Hello.


• As always, other things.

As a random note, I did this entire show with no effects processing, other than compression and the talkbox, which isn't really an effects processor since it's actually a physical/mechanical thingy. Also, no one told me the show was so quiet as I was streaming. I had to squish it a lot later to get it to a decent level. Thanks, guys... or something?

In other not quite news, I will hopefully write in these virtual pages more often with something other than links to shows, although that requires an upgrade to life first, as I haven't had much to say lately. For those who really want to keep up with the insubstancial details of my life, you can either friend me on Facebook or follow @BorrisInABox on Twitter. Twitter is updated more than Facebook, but I try to cross-post the really interesting stuff.

Well, here we are, the last Saturday, and thus, the last actual Things and Stuff before Christmas 2009, although I will probably do something dumb on Christmas eve.
'What did it do?

• The phonic board is still being fixed (maybe). The show starts out with a very bad side-effect of using a keyboard as a master processor, but it was left in for the amusement factor.


• It snowed in North Carolina yesterday, which naturally made the state fold up and shut down, however, it was worse in West Virginia. This among other things was discussed with the first three callers to the show, Derek Lane, Josh Owens, and Randy Gilkey.


• Randy Gilkey... good ol' boy from West Virginia... does the Electric Slide? That's right! Here what Randy doesn't want you to know about him... that he actually enjoys it.


• We find out what Christmas Clunkies are, what they have to do with my mother, and why they are a bad idea in general.


• William the printed circuitboard made himself known today, existing in my Zoom h4 recorder, which broke, and was later fixed.


• Toys that play/sing Christmas songs in Arabic: do they exist?


• Cad fart?


• Let's revisit creating songs using only a calculator, Sound Forge's tone generator, and manually quantizing everything, and demo a partially finished project using this method of fake music creation.


• The mix bus, a new show on tbrn... or not?


• Of course, Other things.

Congratulations, you've almost reached the end of the year. Just one of these boring things left, and 20o10 will exist to do possible fun things to you! Note that 20o10 is not a typo. As I have told my friends and family, I will be calling the next year 20o10, not 2010, because it just sounds more interesting that way. I don't particularly care about correctness, so too bad! Enjoy!

My Phonic board is broken. Did that stop me from doing what I do best, I.E. wasting time, energy, and resources for not very much other than my own enjoyment, and hopefully that of at least two other people? Of course not! As a result, this week's show is now downloadable. In this show:

• We learn the day's true date, November 35, 1990-19.


• The current issues with Phonic, TriTech Electronics (who are, according to Phonic, supposedly authorized to fix my board under the manufacturer's warranty, although they claim otherwise), is discussed, as well as a description of this show's very convoluted broadcasting setup. Just for the info, this is probably the weirdest one I've used to date, and includes a keyboard being used as a master compressor.


• Wo, where'd that come from? A totally unexpected phone call from a long-time family friend, Josh Owens, which lead to an interesting discussion about radio, greyhound buses, West Virginia, Christmas, and many other things. This is a longer phone call than usual, as it was so unexpected, given that Josh had no regular computer access the last time we spoke, and, in fact, didn't really know how to use one that well.


• A standard fallback, going through production libraries at random, leads to a few interesting things, including showcasing some very nasty scratchy pots on the current broadcast board.


• Let's have a Sennheiser MKE2002+dummy head demo from 1973.


• Why wasn't the popular Beatles song 'Let It Be' called 'Let It Generally Exist' instead?


• What Things and Stuff episode would be complete without playing with an effects processor or two, even on a scaled-down streaming setup?


• If you don't have a phone booth, you can put a phone call in a box... Well, I can, so I did.

And there you have it, another show thingy has passed us by. As a reminder, Things and Stuff won't be on next week, since I'll be at Randy's place, for which I am leaving in about 10 hours. Maybe I should start packing? Yeah... Maybe. If possible, I will try to stream at least one of Randy's live gigs, but there isn't a lot of 3g coverage in West Virginia, unless you're in Charleston, Huntington, Parkersburg, or Wheeling. Maybe we'll get lucky, and have some available wifi somewhere. Who knows? Stay tuned and find out, because, after all, it's something to do.

Today, we have several stream archives available for you, the strange, bored person who likes that sort of thing.

PDAudio Realtime 2009.5

On Friday, November 27, 2009, P&D Audio Productions Realtime 2009.5 took place in the beautiful bedroom studio of one Derek Lane. Quite a number of bad, abnormal, and generally dumb things happened during the course of the stream, which, of course, is only to be expected at this point.
Here are just a few such examples:

• Autotune the blues, a prime example of why Derek and myself should never be given access to studio equipment


• slide whistles through autotune are fun.


• So are 1-a-cans with guitar slides.


• TBRN.AM, a good idea or not?


• Uncle Hanson's redneck poetry... enough said?


• Swedish disney songs... Sure, why not?


• How about a wire tape machine playing back a recording of an atomic bomb test?

All this and more can be found in this clickable link. I Think this may have been the shortest realtime stream to date, although this made it no less enjoyable for me.

PDAudio Cartime 2009.5

Adding to the shortest ever series, we bring you CarTime 2009.5, which only lasted 26 minutes due to being late, thanks to a few technical issues.
For those who don't know, CarTime is so named because the streams are done live from the car on the way back from Derek's place. Every one we've tried to do while taking Derek back from mine has completely and totally failed, and this one came close to not existing at all. Fortunately, it did manage to work, and was apparently more stable than any other stream we've done from the car, although it started later than we would have liked. Unfortunately, we couldn't take phone calls (again), but the messengers worked. Although the original stream was done at 24 kbps mono to improve the bandwidth to sound ratio, the archive is in stereo. So, even if you heard it live, you may have missed something interesting. Congratulations to you! Now you can hear just what you missed, and then say "Wow, was that really worth it?"

Things and Stuff for November 28, 2009?

Well... um... I haven't sent my board off to be fixed yet, though I plan on doing so this week. It's gotten even worse than the last time you all heard it in action. TO prove it, instead of a real show, have this fake one as I demonstrate why I didn't actually do a show this week. I think you'll understand, and I hope you'll forgive me. Hey, you can't say I didn't actually do a show, now can you?

What now?

Derek and myself are going to visit Randy Gilkey up there in West Virginia where it's all relative, so our respective shows won't be on for a couple of weeks. Naturally, we'll make up for it by doing strange, possibly random things while there. Of course, I encourage you to stay tuned to the website and TBRN's Twitter for all the latest news, and stuff. No, before you ask, I will not start a news show, and call it News and Stuff, amusing though the concept is to me, for a few seconds, anyway.

Proving that I'm still dedicated to the fine art of completely wasting time, this week's show is now consumable. It's probably not very tasty, but feel free to ingest it at your leisure... or something.

On this weeks highly enjoyable show:

• Although it's not terribly obvious unless pointed out specifically, my Phonic Helix Board fw24 MKII, the console I use to produce Things and Stuff, and many other fine? things, is having some power supply problems, and will most likely be shipped off to Florida for repair in a few days. Not happy about this, you know. It's the kind of problem I only know will get worse, so I'd better do something about it now.


• A fake section called "why I shouldn't own a studio" was introduced, including bad drumming, and a cover of a Beatles track I did while under the influence of a headache on Friday. Sorry about the nasty sound from the floor tom.


• We hear from the 1956 RCA MK II synthesizer, and explain very briefly how it worked, on the fundamental level.


• Mommy reports nothing at all, which is becoming more and more standard in these parts, now that all the loud fighting neighbors have moved away.


• We briefly discuss and demonstrate the G722 codec on a Snom 320 IP phone, and wish all phones could sound like that.


• Let's have fun with recordings made from my Icom tuner over the week, as well as an incredibly inefficient but amusing way to communicate with the show.


• Thanks to Kyle, a discussion of the Large Hadron Collider occured, including several possible theories as to why it didn't work originally, which leads to the world having never been destroyed, of course.


• Bored enough to count from 11:48 PM to 11:49 PM? I was, apparently.


• Random crap was added to the end of the archive to make it exactly two hours long.


• As per usual, other stuff happened that never quite made it to these pages when it actually came to writing these fake show notes.

And there you have it, people. Another week over, another show gone. Next week should, theoretically, play host to PDAudio Realtime 2009.5 from Derek's place on Friday, assuming it all works out. What it will do, I've no idea, but then again, things work best that way.

Have fun, and don't die.

And now, on the forth anniversary of a very memorable show from Portland with myself and maryannn, one of the more unusual shows in a long while comes to you a lot later than normal, and is available for download.

This show is a great example of how to recover from technical issues that make things impractical to deal with, and end up doing something interesting anyway. In this case, Melanie and myself streaming from the netbook on the hotel's internet connection wasn't working out so well due to saturated bandwidth, most likely caused by someone running torrents on the network. After nearly an hour of broadcasting this way, being highly fragmented and only just existing, I decided to try streaming via my phone on AT&T's 3g internet, which worked surprisingly well given that we were streaming in ogg quality 3 and taking phone calls through a sip softphone at the same time. Latency on phone calls was a bit long in some cases, and, over all, the sound isn't as polished as I've like, but given the circumstances, things could have been a lot worse.

This was a rather crazy show, which I would be hard pressed to describe and get right, so I don't think I'll say much, leaving you all to figure it out for yourselves. I will, however, mention that drunk people in a hotel on a Saturday night are fun, hockey in the south is apparently wrong, and... oh, look at the time!

Hello people, both good and bad.

This entry comes to you today from my new Samsung N130 netbook, which I received on Wednesday. I'm writing from a desk in a room on the first floor of the Hyatt hotel, which is only about a five minute car trip from my house. 'Why are you there?' Well, I'm here because lostgirl33 is staying in Greensboro for a few days, and it's the thing to do. On top of that, thanks to all the water from Hurricane Ida, my basement has once again flooded, including part of the studio. It's not quite as bad as the swimming in the studio clip from August 2008, but it isn't so good, either.
Therefore, I'm not sure if there will be a show tomorrow. The part of the studio that really matters is dry, but with a quarter of it covered in about a half inch of water, it may not be such a good idea to try doing anything useful. The grounding down there already sucks, and standing water sure doesn't help that sort of thing. I may go home on Saturday afternoon, grab some mics and one of my small boards, and attempt a show from the hotel, although the internet here is reasonably fast, yet not very reliable, with sucky AT&T routes. We'll see how things go, I guess.

In the meantime, because it's the thing I usually do, have this placeholder, otherwise known as a Hyatt Hotel toilet. It's nothing special, but it's something I have to do, as you probably know by now.

The next few days should be interesting. Later today, we're doing somethingI never honestly thought I would do... going to a hockey game between the New York Islanders and the Carolina Hurricanes at the RBC Center in Raleigh, otherwise known as watching the Hurricanes properly representing the state by losing, most likely. After all, this is North Carolina, and losing is what we do best. Well, hey, we have to do something, right?
We're also planning a trip to Derek's place on Sunday.
As for all the time in between, who knows?

I'll leave you with this for now, with possibly more in the future. Oh, and I apologize for not having anything more interesting to show for myself other than a very standard American toilet (which I think is actually an American Standard), but as we all know, no two flushes are ever the same. So, have another one of your very own, or something.

I know you're tired of hearing this phrase, but I seem to be saying it a lot lately. I apologize for this show in advance, and promise to nevewr not do something like this again.

This week's show can be downloaded here, and offers the following:

• Co-host Chris is introduced, and what is left of a heavily medicated dgl1984 explains the state he's found himself in.


• The technical problems begin with failing messengers, and a dying APC UPS that really wants my attention.


• A Canadian listener calls in, at which point several things, including broken Messengers, an appropriate sound scheme for Windows Vista, and old, bad Things and Stuff references from 2007 are discussed.


• Chris plays with my effects processor for what is arguably a bit too long for anyone's own good.


• Haven't you always wanted to play with a model airplane? Well, now you can, on model airplanes and stuff!


• More unfinished ideas, brought to you by the Yamaha Motif XS and it's pattern sequencer.


• No Mommy Call this week, truly breaking that after almost a year of doing it.


• Thanks to a Canadian node on GlobalTuners, we have a comparison of the United States NOAA weather radio, and Weather Radio Canada. Both are bad, but which is worse?


• Have you ever wondered how WWV sounds on narrow band FM, instead of it's proper AM?


• Shins for Windows takes the streaming client and a couple of other things down after a nice, hard crash, prompting a remote session from another computer to kill it, resulting in issues with the stream for several moments. Gotta love those external archiving solutions... I suppose I could have edited this more, but if Don Joyce can spend half an hour trying to fix a buzz on real FM radio, then I don't feel so bad.


• A ringing endorsement of Time Warner Cable business class? Well, maybe it doesn't actually ring...


• TBRN's live stream is dead... or is it?


• A call from a slightly intoxicated Kyle and Jody at a camp fire ends this poor excuse for a show.

Well, there you have it. Enjoy it more than I did, for what it's worth. Next week's show should be interesting, since Melanie, A.K.A. lostgirl33 will be spending a few days here, starting on Thursday... the twelth... OH NO!

Another month gone, another show in the can.
This show features a failed not quite demonstration of my Icom PCR-100 on Global Tuners, talk about radio for nearly an hour, the introduction of Berny the Fuse (yet to be developed into anything useful), proof that the Greensboro social security office is bad for you, cheap toys from Mommy (again), banging on drums for about 20 seconds, a tribute to 100.3, the not buzzard anymore, and a grand total of five incoming phone calls (all from kd6cae. Enjoy.

Yes, that's right, folks. It's October 25, and, instead of posting yesterday's archive, which is 12 minutes long, by the way, since it broke in all kinds of fun and interesting ways, I'm giving you a show archive that was previously not uploaded, because I didn't like it at the time. Have I changed my mind? Well, not really, but it's something to have.

According to the notes I wrote for this show in June:
At the time of the show, I was being plagued by a migraine from hell. I did manage to do a few fun things, such as putting a well-known and quite horrible song through a midi controlled Granulab, which was rather amusing (at least to me), showed the last couple of minutes of WCWG's analog TV feed as it went off the air forever, and complained about various things.
For some inexplicable reason, I extended the show for almost an entire hour just to talk to Alexander Nelson about keyboards and pointless things, and to play around a bit with the Ensoniq TS-12.
I think I left out a few things, such as Venison's problems with big words, I.E. anything longer than two syllables.

As there was no archive for this week's show, though I still may do another one soon to make up for over-sleeping, then breaking things yesterday, have this thing from last summer instead. I'm not really sure that this is any better. You can judge that for yourself if you like.

Well, ya know, time for another stupid show? ... or something like that.

This week's two hour masterpiece includes:

• How many knobs does Borris's board have?


• Derek's girlfriend, a Roland Juno G, is leaving his life after just a few days?


• The fake plastic stalker gets two seconds of fame.


• A listener's comment about being temporarily broke leads to the constipation blues.


• Let's play with a barebones Motif pattern and acoustic drums.


• Autotune the news? Sure, why not?


• to the listeners in Antarctica, We've got your weather conditions!


• "Ha Ha," said the clown, including a bunch of Mary Anns for good measure.


• This week's Mommy call reveals the fact that my father lost his sell phone at a local WalMart.


• A discussion of belching with Mommy results in some bad time with burping delays and drums.


• The Borris Sorry Mix?


• A fake Fideliphone promo (except not) provided by Over the Edge.


• A bit of info about my new Icom PCR-100 all-mode pc controllable receiver, which will be available to the public to play with soon.


• A waste of time, jerks, and going all keyboard crazy.


• Buzzy times with a Marshall condenser, a bad cable, and a sink.


• Kyle calls in to tell us about a retarded cat, which apparently has vocal quality of a dying baby, as well as introducing his new, up-coming show on TBRN (sort of).


• Someone in LA really didn't want me to leave. Too bad for them!

As usual, other things happened, which weren't mentioned in text.

Enjoy, have fun, and good night? Well, maybe it's not night where you are. For that matter, it isn't here, either. Oh well.

First of all, let me apologize for the lack of an archive last week. A show did exist, but it was a bad experience (tm) and I didn't like it much, so it never was uploaded or written about. I didn't even want to think about it, and thus, haven't actually reviewed it, and don't remember if there was anything fun from it. If this turns out to be the case, I might post it later on.
Now, I would like to also apologize for this week's show being available from here.

Due to the fact that I am sleepy, lazy, slightly preoccupied and lazy, I will summarize this week's show with the following few words:

• Mommy and toys that make bad noises


• a fake stocker who won't die, even with a burned and broken face


• self-made Jerks, and a call from Venison


• Kyle Mckenzie, music and more noises


• random samples from a vast, unorganized collection of crap


• a review of audiorabbit03's difficult phrases from Augost 2007


• a fake ride in a 1965 Ford Pick-up truck


• other unmentioned things.

Enjoy. I did.

Well, it's that time of the week again... Time to go off and download this week's show if you dare.
Here's what it did this time:

• Playing guitars in the rain, bad mic checks, the lonely conductor, and a phrase sampler? How do these all fit together?


• Monty's phone line is really, really noisy, and gets progressively worse throughout the course of the show. Since he called five times, this becomes apparent.


• I was bored enough to make my listener count a part of the metadata using a PHP script, so you can simply look at your player's title bar to see how many people are bored enough to listen to me being bored. Yep, innovations in all the wrong places, that's us...


• Don't stand on my monitor, a comparison between a badly miked and compressed recording of a track played first through my Alesis monitor 1's six years ago, then the same track miked up and played through the new/old JBL 4311's. Why? Why not?


• An abrupbt change from the standard archiving method to the Behringer Squishalizer at thirty minutes and seven seconds into the file, because I apparently was stupid and closed the archiving solution. Sorry about the Squishalizer. I really don't like it's sound anymore, and I'm to the point of maybe trying a software multiband solution that isn't Stereo Tool to replace it... if I can find a decent one.


• More accidental fun with a phrase sampler? Sure, why not?


• Cloning MaryAnn's, and a possible returning show on Sunday mornings?


• Kyle Mckenzie, a friend I met during my days as an active ham radio operator in 1994, showed up for the rest of the show to make life interesting by playing random sound effects, and some of his tracks via Fideliphone, after a technical issue on my part.


• How much are people willing to pay to have their caps lock indicator lights repaired?


• Some callers are apparently much more amusing in boxes.


• Talk of spring tank CB radio reception, fun with old cordless phones, baby monitors, FRS and drive through windows... Alwys a good fallback.


• Where did the weather go?


• How about the weather at the south pole?

This edition of Things and Stuff has been brought to you by an increasingly leaky set of headphones that I should really replace with something better.

People do the strangest things, then go off and tell other people to do even stranger ones. Why? No idea! Welcome to human nature, I suppose.

Due to the events of last week, causing a temporary scale-back of TBRN services until the start of the month, which has resulted in adding preventive measures to ensure stupid things like that don't happen again, I decided to move FX Radio completely in-house, since I have enough bandwidth to support the couple of users that exist at a time, without wasting TBRN's resources.
So, that's exactly what I did, using two internal icecast servers in a master/slave relay configuration, homing on both the residential and business class gateways, and a round robbin DNS for fake load balancing (as if I'm really going to saturate anything locally with FX Radio).
The end result: you probably won't notice much of a difference. FX Radio can still be found at http://fx.pdaudio.net:8888/fx.m3u as always, with the same great content and SHOUT-Box, just that you may get one of two internal basement servers instead of a real one in New Jersey. Oh well, New Jersey is a bad idea, anyway, even if it does have some fast Linode boxes.

Speaking of bad ideas, a few people suggested, for some unknown reason, that I should stream my Omnicron TCC-14 talking clock, which just sits in the studio and announces the time all day. It's available on TBRN's PBX, and you can theoretically sip to time@pbx.tbrn.net from the outside to reach it as well.
Now, as if looking at your watch or clock wasn't standard and efficient enough for you, you can inefficiently get the time via an Icecast stream, too, all be it a slightly delayed one. Yep, that's right, I was sad enough to set it up, because everything I needed was already available without much extra effort on my part. So now, as a result, radio time, all time, all the time exists for your enjoyment. Note: this streams at AAC+ 24kbps, which is probably a bit much, but with all the natural aliasing provided by the clock, I figured I'd give myself some headroom to play with. Please feel free to say "Oh, wow, that's totally useless, pointless, dumb, etc." and I will agree, but remember, I wouldn't have bothered had I not been asked to do so by not just one, but several people. I only do what I'm told, you know? Sorry if it's abnormal or otherwise socially unacceptable, but that's just the way it is.

In other news, my vintage JBL 4311 reference monitors arrived from Fort Worth yesterday, all 107 lbs of them, and I just got them into the studio this morning. I think this particular set was made in 1974, given what I know about the serial numbers. These things are very, very different from the monitor 1's, obviously, as they are three way, and contain 12-inch drivers. Power? Yeah! Efficiency? Lots of it! Loud? Oh yeah, definitely! I'll have to get used to them, but so far, I love them! They have a very tite and beautiful stereo image, and sound so punchy you'd think you're being knocked over by accident. They do need some cosmetic work, some new fome rings around both tweeters, and a couple of other superficial touch-ups, but they sound and work great. I'm not sure if all the drivers are original, or if any of them have ever been replaced, but unlike dgl1984's pair of jbl 4311's, my set actually has two sets of fully working drivers. His right mid and tweeter drivers are dead, or maybe the crossover is bad. I don't know, but they've been that way for as long as he's had them in late 1997. There are many, many parts on Ebay, and Derek is a bad person for not having them fixed, in my opinion. I've heard Derek's set many times, and even with no highs on one side, I thought they were great. Having them on monitor stands rather than the floor, the way Derek's are positioned, I've come to realize very quickly that those presence controls for the mid (1.5k) and tweeters (6k and up) are really quite a good thing to have, because full on, when you're sitting between them and the mids and tweeters, which are on the bottom, are facing you, it can get pretty intense. So, rolling the output back on those is a really good idea.
Now, to figure out what to do with my Alesis Monitor 1's. At the moment, I'll keep them in the closet, and probably find something interesting to do with them at some point, as I still like them.

Oh, and on a side-note, freakyfwoof and his wife, Kirsten, had a big ol' baby boy on Monday morning at 6:58 AM BST. His name is Jacob Peter Louis (although I think J. P. Louis sounds very important, kind of like J. P. Morgan, but not), and tipped the scales at 10.6 lbs. Pretty big for starters, ya think?
Things should be pretty interesting after this point, and I, personally, am looking forward to the likely madness that will occur as a result.

Now, I will internally debate with myself as to the merits of staying awake, or not. I will most likely lose that battle with myself, as winning would just be too boring, now wouldn't it?

TBRN's archives are currently offline due to a situation beyond our control. Thanks, China, plus some other things. They should be back up by the first of the month.
In the meantime, you can download this week's show from my personal server.
I'm lazy, so I'll just say this about this week's show.
Did you know there is an official sound for Summer going away for a year? Yep, there is.
Basically, as for the rest of it, the show features a lot of fideliphone, including alcohol issues (except not), loud things that go toot, dogs, and a friend who found me after losing contact for about thirteen years. Fun times.

Due to levels being all over the place this week, I decided to try using the c4 multi-band compressor in post-production. Doubt I'll use it every week, but it worked for this.
If loads of people complain about the sound, I still have the unprocessed file, and can edit it all over again... Of course you'll all want me to do that, right? Yeah, definitely a fun time!

Sleep is also a fun time, followed by existing. Yes, it's a great way to live your life, I think.

Edit: October 10, 2009
This archive is no longer on my personal server, nor is the one from September 26. However, I have left the references for the sake of history.

click here to download this week's show thing.
What does it do?

• Thanks to MaryAnn, a new rule has been enforced. If you don't have a valid ID in your possession, you can't listen to the show.


• Last Saturday, I went to Piedmont Dragway with my father to see some nytro-burning Harleys in action. I talked about that, played a small preview of what I recorded there, and complained about the horrible band I saw at a bar afterward.


• Last Tuesday, I blew up my Hafler 50-watt per channel amp, which I replaced with a much cleaner AB International precedent Series 600A on Thursday. Twice the power, and three rack spaces instead of two. I had to move things around in the rack to make it fit.


• Let's play with keyboards and vocoders again.


• Mommy visited the studio, at which point, such strange things as bad bands, bar violence, wireless microphones in toilets, marshmallows, cadavers, condoms, and beeping baby Borrises brought to you by slow scan TV are discussed. We also discover that Mommy's mic technique sucks, but not as bad as some.


• The recording I made with an open transducer in the toilet was played again.


• Slow scan TV will die? Apparently, Borris through a pitch shifter thinks so.


• Beds and vocoders are fun.


• FX Radio is also fun.


• 9-minute drum solos from Deep Purple are also fun.


• Plastic melodica keys and fake wurlitzers are fun as well.

Enjoy.

Yes, that's right, get a Things and Stuff archive a day early this week! Aren't you special?
Click here to grab a copy of your very own!

In this week's edition:

• It's the Ensoniq TS-12's 15th birthday.


• Derek got yet another broken turntable, but refuses to trade his three broken ones for all the working ones I have. Oh well, I tried.


• Time is apparently not consistant, prompting what turned out to be a running discussion about time in various forms throughout the show.


• kd6cae pointed out that the last four letters of PDAudio's phone number also happen to spell another relevant word.


• Roland SC88's, filters, an pitch bends? Um, ok, if someone says so...


• Apparently, the US naval observatory master clock is brought to you by a guy who sits in a room all day and says the time... Well, according to Ken Nordine, anyway.


• I mentioned in passing that, after over a month of absence, FX Radio is now back online, including it's SHOUT-Box.


• As this was the Ensoniq TS-12's 15th birthday, I relayed the story of how I found and eventually obtained the keyboard, and played a couple of celebratory sequences made for the occasion.


• I found, and played, some sounds from the old Fairlight CMI IIX workstation, including the sounds of it's actual operation (floppy drives, keyboards, fans, etc.) as well as some of the effects, some of which were presumably digitally sampled in the late 70's. Someone even included "the standard door."


• Thanks to byron27 and PhoneSpell.org, we are made aware of some incredibly amusing alternative spellings of PDAudio's phone number.


• The reason Things and stuff was a day early this week was discussed. To make it short, I'm going to a drag strip later today, and may stream it live on location, just for something to do.


• I called WWV, discovered just how drifty my TCC-14 has become over the last couple of months, and attempted to synchronize a Things and Stuff intro at roughly 120 bpm to WWV's ticking.


• Let's play part of the Ensoniq TS instructional video, shall we?


• Byron called in, broke the law, and went to jail, without passing go, or collecting $200.


• I can now break it again on demand, thanks to a submission from audiorabbit03.

On a side note, I want some headphones that don't leak as much as my Audio Technica ATHM40's do, though I don't remember them being quite this bad before. I'm hearing my speech come through the archive more than I remember, and this angers me. Maybe I'll buy some that isolate better when funds are more easy to come by. OH well. At least it's an acoustic problem, not an electronic one.

Time to get my stuff ready for the morning, and crash. Hey, this is like Saturday night, except an hour earlier, and stuff to do the next day. How weird.

For those of you who heard the show live, you'll know why I'm not going to bother uploading. In short, everything broke, except the computer I was streaming from, and the server hosting the stream. Oh, yeah, it was pretty bad, and included the final moments of one of my Cad M179 multi-pattern condenser mics (time to buy a new pair of those with money I don't currently have). Some, however, may find it entertaining to watch thing after thing completely break on the air. Believe me, if it weren't me, I would have. So, for those of you who want the archive bad enough, I offer the following proposal.
Give me something nice that I can really use, and you can have this week's archive. Now I think I understand how Don Joyce of Negativland's Over The Edge must feel some weeks.

Want to hear things fizzing, hissing and buzzing at random? How about pops and clicks that show up out of nowhere, and completely break my train of thought? How about a partially high quality FideliMommy call?
Just give me something worth having (and it must be something I don't already have, and find valuable enough as trade for something this incriminating, and generally bad), and a password protected temporary link for this week's show will be created just for you. If only I had access to DRM licensing stuff, I'd have fun enforcing things, like only one play time per user, and all kinds of fun stuff, just because I could.

All I have to say is thank (insert deity of choice here) that August, and thus Summer, is nearly over!

This is another one of those apology shows. Sorry, both for the show's actual content, and for the late post. IN the words of Lord Belchly, "Oh deer, I broke it again."

In this week's episode:

• We celibrate the fact that this is archive number 200 in my local Things and Stuff folder by... well... not doing anything special.


• A new "oh no" has been found. Whether or not this is a good thing is left up to you.


• Some callers apparently preempt themselves, but don't die when told... even by themselves.


• Apparently, 1(800)JustDie is the national A1 advertising hotline.


• Remember the big red knob from Realtime 2009? It makes a comeback on a few phone calls during the course of the show, and makes ending calls a lot more interesting.


• arfy8820 called. I became bored while doing post-production, and slammed it all together in the style of someone who won't be named to protect the not so innocent.


• Let's all hang out in the fake rain, and talk about lightning strikes.


• Apparently, Remote Studio No. 0 was experiencing intermittant buzzing problems. Well, you know how we are about making things even worse than they already are, also known as post-production and boredom...


• Frustration about said buzzing causes us to go on an incredibly bad keyboarding tangent with the Motif XS and Ion, drumming, and timing issues.


• byron27 calls from a CTA bus, just in time for the show to end. Convenient, given who provides the intro and outro music to the show at the moment (Chicago Transet Authority, before they were forced to change their name to Chicago by the real CTA).


• Just because it could be done, this, as well as every show this month, has been exactly two hours long to the second. Remember that thing I said earlier about post production and boredom?

If the above description doesn't turn you off too much, and you still wish to download this week's episode of Things and Stuff, you can click here to do so.

Share and enjoy!

Though it's a bit late, thanks to a bit of stupidity on my part, it's now available to download.
This was the first show done with the new Kel Audio HM2D microphone. I think I like it. Yes, it's dark like a cold Russian night, but that's why I like it for this sort of thing.

On this week's show:

• After a quick ride on Beeping Becky's rather empty Beyond Bus, the show starts off with some chaos provided by Mommy and a drum kit.


• A discussion with nick6489 about microphones, and the possible bands to which Mommy's awesome drum skills can be contributed.


• P&DAudio Productions now has an official phone number (951-PDAudio). Eventually, it will do something more interesting than simply ringing my phone. Eventually, PDAudio.net will have a website, too. Right...


• This week wasn't so great for Les Paul, as he died on Thursday, incidentally, the same day I got the new microphone, though it's probably not related.


• Hear how to not properly modify a set of MXL 604 omni-directional capsules, the result of an unfortunate accident I had with mine when trying to do so.


• We mentioned that Playback Magazine, a production done by Edd Potter on cassette every two months from 1979 to 2007, has been digitized, and is now available for download. Lots of historical stuff here in regards to radio, audio, electronics, and blind toys. The server's a bit slow, though.


• What happens when two songs with nothing in common are played back to back?


• Let's have fun manipulating the sound of an incredibly loud wall-mounted brass ship's bell that belongs to my brother.


• The weekly Mommy call is followed by a call from audiorabbit03, which leads to lots of intelligent belching, naturally reminding us of a particular bit from last year's reverendbigdawg Christmas cd.


• My domain, BadForYou.net, is due to expire tomorrow. I invite all domain squatters listening to take advantage of this fact.


• More trouble with patch bays, sliders, buttons and knobs that ultimately winds up going nowhere, as per usual.


• A listener wrote in asking for the old "You're Screwed!" series done in 2000 by myself and dgl1984. Some things never quite die, do they? Nope, not played, not published. Sorry.


• Let's hang out on the front porch of the past... well, a few hours before the show, with nothing much interesting going on.


• Part of a recording of myself hanging out at Randy Gilkey's studio was played by accident. Randy Gilkey and a pedal steel guitar... oh boy!


• More pointless drumming.

As per usual, enjoy. I certainly did, even if I lost all the edits I made to the archive while editing it, and had to do it all over again. Oh well.

To say "that took long enough" would be kind of an understatement.
First of all, I'd like to actually congratulate Canada Post on being pretty fast about getting the microphone from Winnipeg to my local post office (shipped last Thursday, arrived at the PO on Monday). This is not typical for stuff coming from Canada.
I, however, would like to not congratulate my local post office on good service.

As this package came from Canada, it required a signature for proof of delivery. I, being the boring person I am, was home all day on Monday when they attempted to deliver the microphone. The doorbell is broken at the moment, and they didn't bother knocking. The dog made no indication that someone was at the door, worthless Dexter that he is. Thus, I had no idea they were there until someone notified me that there was a sticky note on the door, indicating that the next delivery attempt would occur on Tuesday the 11th.
That was never even attempted, apparently.

"No problem," said my deer ol' Dad. "We can just pick it up from the post office. They're open until 5:00 PM, according to this here card, so I can just swing by and pick it up after work."
There's this problem, however... Closing time was changed last month to 4:00 PM, and dad leaves work at around 4:00 PM. Oh, yeah, the cards were supposed to have been updated, but weren't. Thanks for the misinformation, people!

Anyway, I now finally have the mic in my possession, and have yet to really do anything with it other than plugging it in, making a short test recording, and going "hmm, this sounds pretty good."
It's a very strange looking microphone. It reminds me a bit of the Cad M179, except it's longer and even more rounded, and has no controls. Also, instead of having a ring that goes around the bottomm which sits in the shockmount to keep it secure, the Kel actually threads directly into it, with no additional pieces required. It's a large shockmount, very much like that of the M179, and seems to work quite well. We'll see how that actually goes with real usage.
It's a very dark microphone, which is the intent, as it's supposed to sound like a large diaphragm dynamic. It's certainly much darker than the Cad M179, which, in turn, is more so than the Cad GXL-2200's I used for much of 2005 and 2006. It would probably not be my prefered vocal mic for projects where the voice really needs to cut through the mix, but that's hnot what I bought it for, really.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was to throw this short, non-scientific mic comparison at you, using the Kel Audio HM2D, the Cad M179, and the Heil PR20, the other primary mics that see the most use in my studio. What do you think?

As I'll mostly be using the HM2D for broadcasting and perhaps voiceover work (should I ever do that stuff again), with the Cad condensers for special applications like singing (not me hopefully), guitar miking, or on the Jecklin disk, with the PR20 on the snare drum in place of the Behringer XM-8500 that's there now, I recorded this very short thing to provide a general idea of how these mics sound at the same distance and at the same volume, with my particular voice. Of course, if other voices should show up in the studio, they will react differently to different microphones. I personally think Rainee, my sister-in-law, would be very well suited to the Kel Audio mic, given how her voice shoots through rooms.

I'll be using the HM2D as the mic for this Saturday's Things and Stuff in place of the normal PR20. Let's see if I like it enough to keep it around past the 21-day return period.

This week's show warrants an apology in advance. "I'm really sorry about that." OK, now that's been taken care of...

Here's what happened this week:

• The show starts off with a dying microphone, in this case one of my Cad M179's. The normal Heil PR20 was still on the snare drum, and I didn't get it off the kit in time to start the show, though I switched to it a few minutes in.


• No phone calls could be taken due to a situation beyond my control, except for Derek, who called from inside the PBX.


• On Friday, I finally got around to creating a track template for recording my drums discretely. Here an incredibly bad mix of something I threw together with the kit, a bunch of melodicas, and some issues. This is not an example of what will eventually be the final result, I promise, I just wanted to make sure it worked, andI want something better for miking my toms.


• Speaking of microphones, we talk about them for a while, including the premise behind my purchase of the Kel Audio HM2d, and demonstrate the mystery, maybe electrovoice mic, which people seem to think was made in the mid fifties.


• After playing a couple of tracks and calling Mommy, a discussion of grounding, balancing and 60 hz hums resulted in... you guessed it... playing around with my keyboards in some pretty stupid ways.


• There's nothing like having an arguement with a recorded version of yourself, is there?

Oh, yeah, and as per usual, all that other stuff in the middle that didn't get explained, because I'm just boring like that.
You can, of course, go over here to grab your very own copy of this week's fine program to see just what you missed for yourself. Naturally, you don't trust my poor excuse of a description, do you? Oh well, I don't either.

You all surely know by now that if I have a single vice in the world, it's studio equipment. I particularly enjoy playing with different types of microphones, though I haven't really figured out why: it's just a hobby of mine, I guess, although I don't do much of use with any of the stuff I have. Maybe one day...

Over the last few years, I've acquired several different mics ranging from the $17 Behringer XM-8500 (which sounds much nicer than it should for the price), to the Cad M179 multi-pattern condenser, with lots of oddities in the middle of the spectrum, such as the old, strange Grundig W1 stereo dynamic set which I haven't used much due to one of the mics having a slight issue that I haven't yet fixed, a mystery mic from probably the 1950's that everyone seems to think is from Electrovoice and has a talk-back quality to it, the 48-volt phantom power carbon mic I built using components from a broken Cad GXL-2200 condenser, a cheap project box, and an element from a Western Electric telephone, and others.
Of course, we have the obligatory standards, like the MXL-603 pencil mics for acoustic guitar, drum overheads or whatever, including a stereo bar, the Audix drum mics (although I want something better for toms), and more stuff not worth mentioning. Oh yeah, can't forget the Heil PR20, which I originally bought for vocals, although I really like the sound of it on the snare drum. All this stuff, and I don't have a single Shure SM57 or 58 beta, although I do have an SM85 from the early 80's. Oh no, what's a studio to do without a 58 beta, or even a 57? Yeah, whatever...

Now, I've gone and purchased yet another microphone, this being the Kel Audio HM2D, brought to my attention by nick6489. This is an interesting approach on a large diaphragm condenser. It's built to sound like a large diaphragm moving coil dynamic, like the Shure SM7B. I've liked the sound and off-axis rejection of the SM7B as long as I've known about it, but, like most mics in it's class, such as the Heil PR40 (which I don't really like all that much, personally), the EV RE20 (which the PR40 wants to be), etc. it costs about $350, and requires a pretty nice preamp, as these mics aren't very hot. That having been said, I'd bet the PR40 would make a good kick drum mic. The RE20 has been used as such for a while, although I don't really like either on vocals, though their side-rejection is great.
Anyway, back to the HM2D: I've heard samples of the mic provided by the people who make it, as well as other users not directly offiliated with the company, and I'm pretty impressed with the sound this mic puts out. It's not your typical bright, sharp like a knife sound, which is very apparent with cheap Chinese condensers such as the Cad GXL2200/2400, MXL 990, or the Behringer B-2 Pro I used to have. It seems to be warm and fat, which is what I like in a good dynamic microphone, and why I like the Cad M177 and M179 so much. They're not cold and clinical like some of the cheaper, standard-issue condensers. There are even some recordings available where the HM2D is used as a kick drum mic, and, surprisingly, it didn't do bad things like you'd expect with a condenser at such close proximity to that kind of source.
Kel Audio even links to other competing microphones, with the idea being "if our mics don't work for you, here's something that might." You don't see that every day. Welcome to small companies?

Although I haven't received mine yet, it having just shipped from Canada yesterday (Yeah, they're conceived and tested in Canada and made in China), given what I've heard of it, I'm thinking the axis on this mic will be pretty defined. It's a supercardioid mic, which would be perfect for stuff like broadcasting, voiceover, etc. without picking up extraneous reflections off to the sides and behind the microphone. I currently don't have a supercardioid mic, although the Shure SM85 pretends to be one, though it calls itself a cardioid. I bought the Heil PR20 for the same reason, but even it's pick-up pattern is a lot wider than I thought it would be, though I do like the sound of it, especially when the bass is rolled off just a little to compensate for proximity effect, and, as I said earlier, it's great on the snare. At the moment, I'm using a Behringer XM-8500 on the snare, which, to me, sounds better than the Audix snare mic from the fusion drum pack. If this Kel Audio mic doesn't suck, I want to put it in place of the PR20, and move that mic to snare permanently, keeping both Behringers around as throw-around mics for guests, or whatever application requires something that doesn't suck too much or require a lot of effort to set up. Kel Audio has a 21-day return policy on all their microphones, so that's a good thing, especially considering the HM2d is $199, which is actually more than I've ever paid for a mic. Even the Cad M179's were a bit cheaper at $169 a piece, and the Heil PR20 was around $130. Yeah, I know, I'm just not a true high-end person, since I don't have at least one Nueman, not even a Sennheiser MD421, or even a Rode NT1A, and certainly nothing with tubes in it, but, for a little person such as myself, dropping $200 on a mic is a pretty big deal. To those who already have such better stuff, not so much. That return policy may come in handy. Who knows?

So far, the only thing I'm not sure about regarding the Kel Audio is the fact that the self-noise (14dBa) is a bit higher than my Cad M179's (11dBa). Both the Cad M179 and HM2D are considerably noisier than the Rode NT1A, just for the reference, although in the case of the Cad, it matches the noise of my preamp pretty well, so it's not very noticeable, though both mics are great for the price-to-noise ratio, especially the NT1A.
If the output is hot enough, this won't be a big deal, but it might become a problem otherwise. That's my biggest gripe with the old Shure SM85. It's output is almost that of your typical dynamic, but it comes with noise that you wouldn't get from a dynamic as well. So, to compensate for output, you introduce more noise into the system.
Of course, you get no self-noise with a moving coil dynamic, just preamp noise. If you have an ultra-nice preamp, you can get away with having less noise with a dynamic mic than with all but the quietest condensers around. However, on most mixers (unless you've got an Avalon, Neve, Allen & Heath or something nice like that), getting the mic as hot and non-noisy as possible before channel gain is a good thing to do. The Heil PR20 I've been using for broadcast stuff over the last year isn't such a hot mic, but fortunately, the preamp on my board isn't terrible, so I can get away with it. The same mic on my Presonus Bluetube or Rob Sizemore's old Peavey board, though... well, let's just say "ffffffffffffffff" and be done with it. I'd hate to see what things would have sounded like with my old Alesis 1622, the first "professional" console I had. Quite nasty in all respects, except for the fact that it had six aux sends.

OK, that's all for my geeky rambling for now. I'd write about my life and be standard, but that's terribly uninteresting. Actually, so was the stuff you just read, so maybe I will. Let's see... I slept some, I woke up, I did things, and I'll do more stuff later. Yeah, that didn't take long. Back to your life.

And now, friends and foes, this week's Things and Stuff, starting the chronically depressing month of August out good and... proper? Well, maybe not.
Description=off. download=on. Just know that it had several issues, including a live Wesley Willis impersonation by yours truly, a back-up Borris via radio link, Dexter talking to himself (again), and several other bad things.
Enjoy. Yeah, maybe I'll actually write a description for the next one.

What do "we are the Borris," "we are the flock," an old Omnichron TCC-14 talking clock, a couple of clippy drum solos, some stupid Digitech Quad presets, Buckethead, Deep Purple, Ozric Tentacles, and Herbie Hancock all have in common? Well, this week's show, of course!

This non-description has been brought to you free of charge by a very lazy person. Enjoy.

OK, I did a terribly, horribly stupid thing, or would that be a very good stupid thing, given that it was dumb, and we're possibly rating the level of stupidity.

Since dgl1984 wasn't around to do his show this week, I decided to do his three hour slot rather than my standard two hour one. Never again, I tell you! Here's why:

• The show received one phone call throughout it's duration: a combined call from Andre and Alexander, which totally broke my fake professional start, and all that.


• "How was your week?" Mine sucked, with the possibility of maybe, finally moving out of this place sometime in the not-so-distant future. Information pending.


• I finally got the Alesis Ion fixed after about 3.5 years, and bounced around with that for a while, though nothing ever really came of it.


• Accidental patchbay configurations lead to some interesting effects that shouldn't happen, spawning radio free Borris, another idea that will probably never go anywhere, but was fun at the time, at least to me.


• Let's talk about guitars and stuff for a while. Sure, why not? Not much else to do.


• I decided to open Fideliphone, which meant several bad people dropped in, including freakyfwoof, matt02392, Alexander Nelson, and, very briefly and without the ability to hear anything, Danny Mac on the fretless bass. Fun times with melodicas, pitch shifters and keyboards, with much chaos to go with it.


• I tried closing one fideliphone window, after which point about 300 of them popped up in my face, causing me to have to kill the process from another computer, breaking the normal archiving process along the way. Thus, the last few minutes of the archive sound completely different from the rest, since it came from the stream archive which was compressed with the Behringer Squishalizer, while the rest was mastered in Sound Forge, as has been the norm for archiving lately.


• We learn what happens when broadband audio is piped through a narrowband FM 2 meter transceiver, in this case the Icom ICT2H, purchased from kellytheeyes a few weeks ago, using the old Behringer MX2642A board, the Samson C-Com compressor, and the Heil PR20. Again, nothing better to do.

I don't even want to talk about the badness that occurred while editing the archive. In fact, I don't want to say much about much these days, prefering bed.

Yes, for those who missed it, I also did a show from Derek's place last week using his Mackie 1202, Samson S-Com, and the Heil PR20 in his basement. It was either that or try to use the big scary digital board, which I refuse to do. I like buttons and knobs and everything, but I prefer to know what they're doing.
More info about that and lots of other stuff to come in a future entry.

By the way, please don't blame me for this week's archive intro, it's all Andre's fault. He made me do it, you must understand.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to put an actual link to the file in here, stupid! Well, here it is. Enjoy.

No, the date you just read was not a typo. This is, in fact, a link to Things and Stuff for July 5, 2008, since there was no Things and Stuff last Saturday. There will, however, if things work out, be a stream tonight (this being July 6) at some point to make up for it, live from Florida, featuring myself, Derek, Kelly and Brandon, live from the KLA campground in Polk County, Florida.

I didn't originally post the archive for this show last year, because I didn't like it at the time. It was done on a vastly scaled back studio setup, due to the main Phonic board being broken. I used a $39 Behringer UB802 as the board for the show, the VoicePrism for a mic preamp, compression, gate and effects, and the Ultramizer compressor/exciter, all rigged together with some virtual duct tape, and managed to make it sound pretty good for what it was. I listened back to it a couple of weeks ago, and decided it wasn't as bad as I originally thought, so now it's available for those who like that sort of thing.
It features a few loud, clippy wizzing fireworks sent in by Everett, which were edited to be slightly less painful than the original broadcast, and lots of other random things that I honestly can't remember, since I don't have the file locally, and don't feel like downloading it from here to make fake show notes. So, have fun being surprised.

Now, for a short and rather dumb voice post from Florida, recorded on Saturday night while at the Everglades Restaurant/bar at the hotel, which is hosting the ACB national convention this year.
Seems there was a slightly out-of-tune baby grand piano at the place. Derek started playing it, so I got my recording stuff out (in this case, the Zoom h4 and Audio Technica AT822) and was immediately told to play as well. I honestly just wanted to record the piano from the inside with the X-Y while he was playing, but ended up playing and recording. Unfortunately, the batteries in my recorder died a few minutes after starting, but the best bit was captured, that being the fact that we were a bit loud and were told to turn it down slightly, in a nice way. Have the PDAudio Everglade Piano Experience and enjoy yourself choaking on it.

As a random bit of information, I'm thinking when I eventually finish writing the webpage for PDAudio.net, I will probably convert all my audio content, including some stuff that was never posted, to mp3, using the rather nice mp3 encoder on the Zoom H4 (which is probably the best one I've ever used) rather than Ogg, since it is compatible with more players, though I like the ogg format.

Now, I will go to bed, for tomorrow/today is the last full day of convention fun, since we'll be checking out of the KLA campground at 11:00 AM Tuesday, probably hang out at daytona Beach for a while, then start the long, lonely 13 hour road trip back to North Carolina on Tuesday afternoon/evening. I've yet to purchase a train ticket from Charlotte to Greensboro, since I don't know exactly when we'll be in the area, but I will most likely be back home by Friday night at the latest, so the pointlessness that is Things and Stuff should continue as normal. Isn't that lovely?

This week's show is now available
In this episode:

• I fully intended to have a properly working Fideliphone setup, using the netbook to host. Unfortunately, that flopped over and failed. Oh well, I'll try again next time.


• DJ Fumble-fingers broke levels to start off the show. Yeah, typical.


• Derek has a small, metal friend, which indirectly made him money today. He introduces this unnamed friend to the show via phone.


• Andre demonstrates a way to generate GSM noise by shouting.


• Alexander and I discuss several things, including why I wasn't on the air last week, and the fact that I was very sick on Wednesday, when I wanted to do a make-up show.


• A clip was played from around this time last year, when I was similarly sick, and playing with a carbon mic to exentuate the issues I had at the time.


• All tracks played on the show but one originally came from vinyl.


• Thanks to Andre, after a bunch of technical issues, we are introduced to an old, but still active British time service from god only knows when (1960's or 70's?)


• A comparison is made with three different mixes of Frank Zappa's Peaches en regalia from Hot Rats -- the track from the official Hot Rats CD release, the version from 1995's Strictly Commercial, and finally, the far superior mix from a vinyl rip from an LP originally pressed in 1969.


• Alex and I discuss the old Apple 2 and Macintoshes from days of the dead.


• A clip from Negativland's Over the Edge is played, just to prove that I'm not the only person around who likes playing with buttons and knobs.


• This week's Mommy call is interrupted by a dead cordless phone battery, and subsequent white noise, but it comes back anyway.


• The houses on both sides of us are enpty and up for rent, and I discover that, unfortunately, they are not available for the price of $0/month. Shame, that would have been very convenient.


• For the first time ever, Derek calls from his very own cell phone, and gugs a couple of times, just to make the experience a proper one.


• Flip phone magic, a part of this complete breakfast?


• Someone calls from a sip phone under Gnome with some issues, that, of course, must be exaggerated.

Things and Stuff will not be on next week, as I'll be in Orlando with dgl1984, brandon_h, kellytheeyes and Steven. Depending on what's going on, what kind of internet access we have, and if we're really that bored, Heavy Stuff FM may exist in it's place, live from a cabin. Between Derek and myself, we have enough portable equipment to pull off a high quality audio, low quality content stream from wherever we may be, provided the net access is good enough. If all else fails, we could always broadcast at a reduced bitrate on my AT&T 3g connection, which is actually pretty reliable if you're not moving. I've managed 384 kbps upstream with it, which is easily enough to handle streaming and phone calls, but I don't know how reliable that is at sustained upload. Of course, results will vary depending on the connected tower as well. Who knows?
Stay tuned for more info as it is available.

I was just reading the Greensboro News and Record, as I do sometimes, and this is the title of one of today's articles. It continues:

"What does your country mean to you? It may be hard to put into words, but we would like for you to try — to put it into four words, that is.
Tell us in a four-word phrase what makes you most proud of the United States. We’ll use some of your phrases in the July 4 edition of the News & Record
and on news-record.com."

And here are my four words for the nation:
I HATE THIS PLACE!

Here are some alternate suggestions:

1. Please go die now


2. not this thing again


3. are we done yet


4. No, don't do that


5. mind your own business


6. you're one to talk


7. stand in the corner


8. go play in trafic


9. you should be ashamed


10. shove off an die

What are they talking about? IT's easy to express my views on this country, or at least it's current state, or maybe just the state of North Carolina in just four words!
Yep, that's me, Mr. Patriotic. After all, Patriotic is almost, but not quite my middle name, in the truest sense of the word.
Just rip out everything after the i. Oh, look, even more irony, how cute!

After almost a month since it's initial airing (still a lot better than last year), the archive for P&D Audio Productions Realtime 2009 is now available to the public, all 5 hours and 36 minutes of it.

This was the tenth such show done by Derek and myself, since we started this dumb thing in 2002, and was originally broadcast on the night of May 30, 2009, incidentally freakyfwoof's 26th birthday.
The original plan was to use Fideliphone to patch Andre into the stream at random times, but, unfortunately, due to the lovely folks over at Time Warner Cable, this broke in a pretty bad way, resulting in several edits to cover up the general stupidity. Anyway, it was an excuse to include even more edits than were strictly necessary.

During the course of the stream, we demonstrated Pam, a prototype contact microphone design, which has, or rather, had a bit of a problem, before she experienced a total existence failure. Have you ever wondered how it would sound to use a guitar as a broadcast mic, or, perhaps, how things really sound while drinking water from the perspective of the bottle? Never fear, you'll find out here!
Pam meets Oscar, the carbon mic (I just named him about five seconds ago), and strange things are done as a result.

Some profundities are revealed during the course of the show, including, but not limited to

• Monty's "brother" name, as he directly opposes T-Pain, is OU-Pleasure, with a proper explanation


• Narf


• Water from Greensboro, whether bottled or from the tap, is apparently a bit trippy, resulting in the PDAudio band doing some very strange things with drums, simulated tape delays, and a keyboard


• food boxes apparently play an important role in the lives of some very disturbingly stupid people


• Radio Shack sucks (no, really?)


• Burp a bottle, and make your bottle woddle?


• The baby Borat chorus exists, and made itself known


• What, exactly, is a naff, and why do you not want one?


• one frequent caller is apparently a bit creapier than we initially gave him/her credit for

Naturally, there is the obligatory stuff that never gets mentioned in text, just to make it more interesting for you later.

Of course, now you're bored, curious, or both, and want to listen to this thing, don't you? Congratulations, you're in luck! You can now download a copy to call your very own. Have fun!

Well, what do ya know? I'm actually writing in the blog again, properly this time, rather than in the guise of a delayed, semi-automated RSS feed. How's that for something?
Not impressed? Oh well, it's all good. I'm not either.

As you've probably noticed, no archive was posted for last week's show, which, by the way, did actually exist. While some fun things did happen, I wasn't really happy with the over-all result. At the time, I was being plagued by a migraine from hell. I did manage to do a few fun things, such as putting a well-known and quite horrible song through a midi controlled Granulab, which was rather amusing (at least to me), showed the last couple of minutes of one of the local TV station's analog feed as it went off the air forever, and complained about various things.
For some inexplicable reason, I extended the show for almost an entire hour just to talk to Alexander Nelson about keyboards and pointless things, and to play around a bit with the Ensoniq TS-12.
Yeah, it's all quite boring. Maybe I'll post a highly edited version of that archive at some point, but I really just wasn't in the mood to deal with it after the show, nor did I feel like it this week either, apparently.

Speaking of not feeling like doing things this week, that's the position I found myself in yesterday. Since Derek was busy, Arfy was... er... somewhere, and the Clower brothers were away visiting relatives, I decided that being the only live person on a Saturday was quite boring. Besides, it was really hot down there, as it hit 99 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, and I didn't have fans or air conditioning running in the studio all day. These combined issues yielded the end result of my staying upstairs and being lazy. Pretty sad when you don't even feel like doing a self-appointed task from which enjoyment is usually gleamed, isn't it? But, such is life. Oh well.
Derek and I have both agreed to do our respective missed shows at some point on Wednesday, so stay tuned for that. I don't think I've ever done Things and Stuff on a Wednesday. I'm usually pretty inflexible about my time slot, since I like it just the way it is. I don't want three hours, or different hours, thanks for asking. On this TBRN fake station thingy, the only exceptions have been when I've missed shows completely due either to laziness or special events, or stupid things like the broadcastathons.

Enough of that... I know you're probably about as bored reading all this internal whining as I am of writing it, so no further effort will be exerted on my behalf, at least on that topic.

Now, for some stupid news about my recent life, or lack thereof:

I won third place in the NokiaMailtone contest for my entry made with sign and triangle waves and Sound Forge's tone generator, all without getting out of bed. Apparently, the third place prise is a new Nokia E63, which is a lot like the E71 I have. It's stripped in some ways, I.E. no internal GPS or HSDPA (although it's still 3g), the camera isn't as good (2.0 vs. 3.2 MP I think), and it's plastic instead of metal, which, ironically, makes it less resistant to fingerprints, although it might not look as shiny at first. However, it does have a real 3.5mm headphone jack instead of the 2.5mm of the E71, which is really one of my very few complaints about that particular phone. While I have converters and adapters for everything, I don't like putting extra weight on the jack, which is done a bit even if using a 2.5mm to 3.5mm jumper cable. Now that I'm actually starting to use it for downloading and listening to podcasts, reading books in text format, etc. it would be nice to have a real native jack.
So, I guess they'll send that to me at some point.
I haven't actually gotten a firm confirmation on that, so yeah, in either case, it's something to do.
freakyfwoof also submitted an entry, but sadly was not even put into the top five. Shame, really, because I honestly thought his submission was better than mine.

I also managed to break my Iriver H320's hard drive by dropping the player while it was recording, and the drive was caching from memory. I could easily get a new drive and a new battery, since it needs both, and I probably will still do that at some point, or more likely attempt to revive one of these busted H120's, but for now, I bought a used Iriver H10 on Ebay. No line-in recording, but I really just wanted a good solid player for the trip to Orlando. I rockboxed it, copied things to it, and played around with it a bit. Seems to be all right so far.
In place of the up/down buttons found on all the previous Iriver units I've owned, there is a touch strip, kind of like a really narrow rectangular laptop touchpad with only two contact points, one on either end, corresponding, of course, to up and down. Honestly, I like it better than the buttons, which I realize shouldn't be the case, but I do, so there. The only real issue I have at the moment is that the current Rockbox daily build seems to have issues with the H10's fm radio, mainly being that it doesn't actually turn the thing on. You can fake scan for presets, and go up and down the fake spectrum, but it doesn't really do much. Oh, I think I got it to go "click" a couple of times, but that's about it. Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but the radios in either my 120 or 320 never did these things when controlled by Rockbox. Oh well, it's not really important anyway. It's just terrestrial commercial badness, though it's still good to have around sometimes.

In other news, I bought a mystery microphone on Ebay for $5 the other day. It's a dynamic mic of some kind, and the guy who sold it doesn't know what it is, since the switch plate containing the make and model has gone missing. It's rather vintage looking, and could be something from Electro Voice, which generally doesn't suck, although nobody seems to really know what it is. So, it could be good, or a pile of crap. In either case, it was $5, and I'm always looking for different microphones for different situations. I still wouldn't mind another Heil PR20, so I can use one on the snare drum in place of the Behringer XM8500 I have there now, which is still better than the Audix snare mic I was using originally. On the other hand, perhaps I could acquire a super cardioid dynamic. I currently don't have any of those, just standard cardioids, and the nice, old, slightly noisy Shure SM85 from 1983, which is an electret condenser that takes phantom power. It's probably got the narrowest axis of any of the mics I have, which makes it incredibly useful for stuff like singing while at the drum kit, or, in my case, being stupid while banging badly on drums. I want something with that kind of directionality, but not a condenser, and with maybe a bit more on the bottom end of the spectrum. It probably won't happen though. Even the Heil PR20's pick-up pattern is a bit wider than the SM85. I may have to eventually get something like a Shure SM7b, EV RE20, or god forbid... a pr40? Nah, wait, scrap those last two mics, and probably the first one as well. I've yet to spend $350 on a microphone, though I've come almost close, and I'm not really doing enough to warrant the expense. Oh well, hasn't stopped me before.

Sleep, however, has stopped me from doing many things, like continuing to type in this virtual box of issues. It is, in fact, telling me to do so now, so who am I to refuse? A sleepy person, that's who!

Although things haven't quite been finalized yet, it looks like I will be at the 48th ACB national convention in Orlando, with Kelly, Derek, Brandon and others, for at least the first few days of the convention. It's also a great excuse to go to a beach, which I haven't done in ages. 'How many ages?' Well... um... 1988, I Think. Yeah, it's been a while.
If you're also planning on attending the convention, or if you're in the general area, leave a comment here or contact me online, so we can arrange to hang out and be stupid... or something.

In other news, the PDAudio Realtime 2009 archive is still being edited by Derek. I've done my part for editing, which, honestly, is probably less than his bit, but that's ok. It should be up soon. Let's see if Derek manages to meet the June 11 deadline? Oh, look, that's tomorrow, how cute! Is anyone placing bets?

Despite some flashbacks to some of the bad old days of 2005 and 2006, thanks to some idiots who seem to enjoy using Skype phone to allow synthetic speech, clippy songs and other general badness through the system, this week's show was fun, and is available for download.

On this particular episode:

• Things and Stuff live? No, really, actually live, in front of an audience and everything? Well... it's fun to pretend, anyway.


• One of the "indeed" boxes, better known as a spring reverb tank, is temporarily out of commission. Either Derek or I (not sure which) broke one of them last week at some point. Thus, no analog spring reverb for the phone.


• During a call from Bec, the topic of originality came up, as well as the long-argued fact that there are no longer any original ideas in the world.


• We then decided that "the Original Plagerizers" was a good name for a band. And, no, you can't copy that, since we originally copied it from someone who already copied it from someone else... except we did it first, right?


• Thanks to a dream from maryannn, I now know the name of my prospective soulmate: Lilly Louis (no relation to Andre, I think). Problem is, there are at least 146 of them to choose from...


• The state of North Carolina is proposing the closure of the Governor Morehead school for the blind, which has existed since 1845. I was not a student there, and I'm glad of it.


• Hear my thoughts, a recording from Raleigh in 2002, and an annoying song that always followed me around while there, all related to the topic.


• During the weekly Mommy call, we learn that, apparently, Kyle Bush has no respect for Gibson guitars, or maybe just guitars in general. Stupid people with money!


• School... Can we please stop talking about it? Apparently not...


• Could MaryEloquence or MaryAnn Talkolewski be the next big thing in synthetic speech? Probably not, but it's worth asking anyway.


• After a Frank Zappa track, we hear some very nasty sounding promos for his hot new album, Hot Rats, from 1969. Let's hear it for flexy-disk, or something that sounds like it, anyway.


• A police whistle and some delay effects; what else in the world could possibly be any better?

Gotta sleep, need it very, very badly now. Enjoy this crap, or don't.