I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

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.

All I have to say about this week's show is "what? Huh? Did I really just do that?" Oh, yeah, and that it is available for download. Well, I suppose I should probably expound on that a little, shouldn't I? OK, screw the fact that I'm tired, and I really don't want to. Here goes anyway...

• For once, Derek is not the first caller to the show. Instead, we get kd6cae, a carbon Borris, and a hard left/right configuration for no reason other than because it can be done.


• Derek called in, and related an amusing story after being side-tracked by conversation: "The dog ate my microphone? Well, not quite..."


• A discussion about microphones occurred, including my recent purchase of a vintage Grundig W1 stereo dynamic microphone from the early 70's, which I don't have to play with at this time. Believe me, you'll all know when I get it, as it should be strange.


• Mom shows up at the studio, at which point all hell breaks loose.


• The ask Mommy segment of the show was introduced, garnering lots of phone calls and weird things, including some incriminating Borris anecdotes.


• It's nearly time for Realtime 2009, the tenth ever such show. Discussion of this occurred, including requesting ideas for things to run over with various vehicles. Crunch time, anyone?


• Dad even showed up near the end of the show, for the first time ever.


• Yes, it is possible to have "dripping drums" using a couple of threshold activated phrase samplers. Sorry about the bad drum mixing, the overheads were too loud and the rest of the mics were too quiet. Still, the main point of the idea came across just fine.

You know what? Listen to the show for the rest of it. That's all the discription you're going to get from me. Sorry 'bout that, folks.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that this show is half an hour longer than normal. I hope this isn't a problem.

As always, I hope you enjoyed the show more than I did, although, I have to say, this was one of the most enjoyable shows in a while. Messenger interaction was a bit sparce on my part, since so much was going on with the phone and in the studio... I sort of forgot about them. Honestly, it was refreshing to not babysit messages all the time. Please don't feel offended if you were ignored. It's just one of those things, ya know?

Just a bit of boredom while waiting for a phone call. Nothing special very much.

VoicePost 268K 1:32

(no transcription available)

Good hello... Oh, crap, I can't use that line. It's already been taken by Crozly Bendix of the Universal Media Netweb. Oh well. Just goes to show that I've been listening to Over The Edge/Negativland a bit too much lately.
Anyway, this week's Things and stuff can now be downloaded at your discretion.

On this week's show:

• Arf9, a new show on TBRN? Perhaps, or not.


• Find out exactly why I have grievances against radio buttons, or at least one in particular.


• A very broken demonstration of the FX Radio SHOUT-Box takes place. We discovered rather quickly why I should move the phone bit away from the 384K connection when three callers show up, plus the outgoing FX Radio stream. I'll probably work on that tomorrow, as well as other stuff.


• Someone from a braille jail called in, at which point I go on a semi-tangent about said institutions, and my opinions on them.


• My fake Borg impression using a bunch of Quad IV pitch shifters prompts a call from Steve. All I'm going to say about that is look out for Reverend Borgdawg around Christmas time.


• A "butt" song was played, which was horribly broken on the stream, because my ISP decided to make things annoying, even though I just paid the bill. Not a problem for the archive, however.


• The "Mommy call" segment featuring the "mother" song, brought to you by my Mom, pressing a bunch of buttons and twiddling a bunch of knobs, as well as "the weekly hood report."


• Kelly called in from Nashville, at which point several things were discussed, including Kelly's far too friendly hat, various Startrek movies, and the fact that I want to see the new one showing in theaters now.


• Using a phrase sampler from my Digitech Quad IV, I made it overly clear that "I want to see the movie!"


• A discussion of old Alesis effects processors occurred, and I attempted to emulate the nasty background hiss from one.


• I called back into the SHOUT-Box to end things, and because I wanted to make sure it decided to work again after breaking itself.

I hope you enjoy this show as much as I enjoyed doing it, or, if you heard it live, as I say every week, "hope you enjoyed the show more than I did."

After a couple of weeks of total existence failure, FX Radio is now back, and even more pointless than ever, thanks to a bit of boredom on my part.
You still get the same *great* content you can only expect from FX Radio's random rotation of far too many sound effects stacked on top of each other (somewhere around 43,000 files at last check), but now, you, the listener, can be heard atop all the madness... if you're loud enough, that is.

As per usual, you can tune in to FX Radio. Now, you can also call +1(360)526-6240 for the FX Radio SHOUT-Box, for your free 90 seconds of fame. You can also sip directly if you have a sip capable device or softphone by using the address sip:fxradio@test.pdaudio.net.
If multiple users are on the system at once, a temporary conference will exist. After 90 seconds, you will be unceremoneously dumped from the box. I haven't found a way to kill a session and be nice about it, so for now, it just drops. I hope to change this in future.

Feel free to do or say whatever you like for the 90 seconds of time you get. This is the internet, which is all about freedom... Right? Yeah, thought so.

Yep, welcome to May, and another weekend. Time for another one of these archive things

In this week's show:

• Human error bordering on technical issues gets this show off to a rocky start, which is transparently fixed in the archive.


• Someone mentioned owning a Technics KN-1000 keyboard, upon which I mentioned wanting to find a good deal on a Technics KN-2000, one of the keyboards used by the legendary Wesley Willis, and proceeded to play one of his tracks.


• I demonstrated some of the fun, pointless things that can be done with Tank-FX.com, a website made by a strange German person, which uses a Linux box to record wav files through a stereo mic array and a speaker through a huge room, then allows you to download the processed sample. Some internet explorer users have had issues displaying this page, so here is a direct link to the upload form if you want to play with it yourself.


• Apparently, bad things happen to me when I imitate bad old school 60's-era radio dj style.


• A failed attempt at calling Mommy. Oh boy, Things and Stuff voicemail.


• We play a track that contains the "things and stuff breaky noise," and remind current and new listeners of what that is.


• We hear from an old CasioTone MT400V keyboard from 1984, which was found in the basement. Naturally, we had to use it in conjunction with the Electrix Warp Factory vocoder, just because it was something to do.


• Going through the downloads folder on my laptop yields some nick6489 incrimination, and some odd sounds.

Other non-mentioned things happened as well. It was fun, and I had a good time at it. It did not piss me "awwf!"

Although it doesn't matter, I failed to mention that May second of this year marks the eleventh anniversary of the day I got my first mixing console, which was a crappy GLI PMX-9000 four channel DJ board, for which way too much money was given. I've learned a lot about audio in eleven years, at least I'd like to think so.

This week's show is available over here

In this show box:

• I made it back from London just fine, but my luggage didn't. As a result, I've lost a bunch of clothes and my home-made Jecklin disk, two years to the day after premiering the concept on TBRN. Investigation on lost luggage pending.


• I speak my mind using a stupid, short production about my thoughts on British AM radio (which they call medium wave), and show some very un-edited recordings of myself scanning the FM band from Andre's place. Radio is a bit different over there... sort of.


• Mommy calls to alert us to the fact that she was scared by a cart I played, and to update us on the status of "the hood." Was anything *really missed by being out of the country for a week?


• Proving once again that time is not of the essence around here, we pay tribute to buttons and knobs, with special guests dgl1984 (and his Mommy), nick6489, kd6cae, Lino Morales, Randy Gilkey, and others, who were mostly not tuned in at the time.


• Despite the fact that I now finally have sampling ram for my Yamaha Motif XS, I haven't yet installed it. After using the ram in it's packaging as fake percussion, I got a bit carried away at the keys, being boring, stupid, and anti-creative as usual.


• We then find out, purely by accident, what happens when you blend the ambients of the Gatwick Express train to Victoria Station with the fake wild west... kind of.


• More effects processing fun with buttons and knobs. Does that ever get old?


• Speaking of audio, let's talk about microphones. Might as well, since no one really cares, right?

I'm really starting to think that a format change for the show is in order, though I currently have no ideas on what I'd do with it in the future. Suggestions, of course, are welcome. Yep, burn-out time again. It happens to all of us, and it's been a few months for me. Regardless of my current outlook on things, I enjoyed this show for the most part. Now you can as well. Yay, or something.

Sorry for the late post. Due to some technical issues, and a certain well-known adaptive product which was mentioned on audiorabbit03's show a few weeks ago, I had issues bending the archive to my will. As some know by now, I've decided to no longer like the sound of my Behringer Ultramizer compressor/exciter/limiter, though it's handy for streaming, so I use a separate archiving and mastering process. This means more work for me, but I like the over-all sound better.
Due to multiple issues with the studio PC after the show, I ended up editing it all from the laptop and a very cute little 250GB Freecom ToughDrive, which I got from freakyfwoof. Good times... Maybe not? They don't seem to sell Freecom hard drives here, but man, they're cute and quiet.

In any case, enjoy this box of a thing, while I shove off for some much-needed maintenance on a few things around here.

Hi, and welcome to a hotel in Shepherd's Bush, where seather12 and myself will be staying until early Tuesday morning, at which point we will shove off to Canada and the United States, respectively.
Yeah, great way to start off a post, informing the reader that we will soon be leaving, isn't it? Right, I thought so!

The last few days have been an absolute blast. Naturally, I have audio to show for it, though not as much as I would have liked. As events go, some of the most interesting things never get recorded. As dgl1984 pointed out, to insure a really boring vacation, be sure to record everything at all times, and nothing fun will happen to you. Don't record anything, and you'll have a great time.
I've managed a bit of a compromise, and, for the most part, except for a few stupid things, it's worked out rather well.
So, let's get to the audio then, shall we?

Before anything happens, we must first get to the United Kingdom. So, get on that plane and shove off! This file was recorded between Monday and Tuesday afternoon, and takes you from the trip to Greensboro, to Philadelphia (where I meet up with brandon), to Gatwick, to the Gatwick Express train to Victoria station, to a taxy that takes us to Andre's flat, all in about 80 minutes. It's amazing how fast things go when they're edited, don't ya know?
This file includes heavily abridged versions of both of my flights, including take-off, landing, announcements, etc. and announcements from the Gatwick Express and Victoria station itself. Unfortunately, I broke something, and you don't get to hear the first interactions between myself, Brandon, and Andre. Sorry 'bout that, but there are things to make up for it.

On Wednesday, we met up with Pam and David, two of Andre's long-time friends from Charlotte, originally from Chicago. In this recording, Andre is the odd one out, being surrounded by people from two other countries, with no fellow brits to back him up, all in his own home.
Apparently, Pam used to work with Andre when he was a very small person.
Later the same day, Brandon, Andre and myself were just hanging around and being stupid with microphones on. This file includes a very dumb Fender Rhodes duet with Andre and myself near the end, as well as other dumb and random things.

Thursday was a really lazy day, and thus, I didn't record anything.

On Friday, Brandon got his Nokia n82, which was ordered from a UK Ebay seller. Just for the fun of it, Andre and Brandon recorded with both of their phones on opposite sides of the room, and I patched it together in Sound Forge, with Andre's phone on the left, and Brandon's on the right. For whatever reason, the mics on these phones sound quite different, and the audio on Andre's end had some drop-outs, which I fixed (sort of). Now, for your enjoyment, have a fake stereo recording done with two Nokia n82 video cameras. It's rather short and to the point, as well as being rather pointless. Hmm, is that a contradiction? Maybe!

On Friday night, Brandon and I checked in to this here hotel. That was recorded, but relatively boring, so it won't be posted. For a while, we didn't think there was wireless access, as they seem to be using a residential BT home hub with WPA encryption. Yeah, residential stuff in a hotel, how cheap! Anyway, Brandon got the nice hotel staff to give us a password, as it is a free connection, and from that point, we were good.
This room is pretty small, but not bad otherwise.

Now, for the big event -- the Louis wedding itself, which occured yesterday. This was streamed live on TBRN with some issues, since the network we were using wasn't exactly optimal. In fact, it broke up and died just before Andre and Kirsten were to give their vows (yeah, only the most critical point of the whole thing). However, there is an unbroken archive of the entire ceremony, including lots of ambients, a late start, the incredibly quiet PA system, babies, and loud cameras, all brought to you by my Cad M179's and a Jecklin disk on a table. Enjoy the end of TBRN... except not.
Now, let's all watch things change... or something.

After the wedding, everyone, except the couple, walked to Kirsten's parents house for the reception. Brandon and I went with Duane, Andre's incredibly cool half-brother. That place is massive! I met lots of people, including several drunk brits, and James Bowden, who is even more subtly scary in person than on the phone. "Yeah, I wanted some samples from my Roland Phantom X, so I just de-compiled the samples from rom, shoved it all onto a compact flash card, and wrote a program to convert them to something useful. Easy!" Yeah... Sure, whatever, man.
I don't have much audio from the reception itself, unfortunately. I would have particularly liked to have had the speeches several of us made. Brandon has them on his phone in a decent quality mono, but I think that's it.
I did, however, manage to get a few minutes of the mini-concert held outside by Andre's father on steal pan, a drummer who's name I can't remember, and Danny, a bass guitar player, until my h4 batteries died. This also includes conversation between myself an Andre's grandparents from Barbados. It's all quite interesting, really, and is available here.

So, that's all I have for proper audio at the moment... No, we're not done yet. I still have toilets!
In fact, there are three varients of Andre's toilet. First, a half flush, obtained by holding the handle down for too long.
Now, a long flush, where the handle was held down for a bit less time. This, for some reason, makes things go really slowly.
Last, but not least, we have the full flush as it was meant to be.
The first two recordings were made with the Cad M179's, the last with the Audio Technica AT822, after I realized I did it wrong, and couldn't be bothered to drag the Cads back in there again.

Of course, I had to record the toilet from the Abbey Hotel as well, because it's just something to do.
First, I recorded from the bowl as normal. However, after listening to that, I decided it might be interesting to pop the tank lid off, and record from the tank perspective as well, since it sounds incredibly different from your standard American toilet. I am amused by stuff like this for some unknown reason.
Looking at the pipelines behind these things, I am convinced you could shove a small child through the plumming system pretty easily, until it comes to a turn. They use lots more water at a time than ours do (I think it's something like 5 gallons to a flush).
Just to be different, I also recorded the full fill-up and drain of the sink in our room, since it's incredibly fast both ways. Where'd all the water go, anyway? I wish the Perdue family sink would do that!

OK, that's it for now. Time to enjoy the rest of my stay here, as there are now less than 48 hours of it left. Tomorrow, we'll be headed back to Andre's to say goodbye and hang out for a bit, then we're off to Gatwick again at some stupidly early time on Tuesday morning. The flight leaves at 9:20 (or is it 9_50) local time, but due to check-in things, we probabl should be there by 6:00 AM or so at the latest. That should be fun.
Enjoy all the randomness that is the universe at large.

This week's show exists here. Honestly, I probably could have compressed the most fun bits of the show into a single 10 minute segment, but oh well.
Things learned during the show:

• Time Warner Cable is starting to deploy data caps in select residential markets, including mine. Naturally, lots of people aren't happy about it.


• Derek wants my splash cymbal.

Yeah, I think that's the extent of it.
It was semi-fun, and something to do, like packing... which I really must do. I'm going on an international trip tomorrow, and I haven't started packing yet. I am a bad person!

Hello from a restless person, currently residing on a bed, typing on a laptop rather than doing anything useful.

It's nearly time for my second ever international trip, as I'll be headed to London Monday afternoon, arriving Tuesday morning at 6:55 BST.
To put it mildly, the anticipation is killing me... or would that be the tension, or perhaps my mother? In either case, I'm ready to get out of here for a while... At least, I'm pretty sure I am.

I've found my passport, which was in a really stupid place, acquired some handy UK pounds for cab, bus, train fare, etc. found presentable clothes for the occasion, and have mostly gotten all the portable technology together for the journey.
Naturally, something had to break, and yesterday, not today, this being Thursday, something did.

The battery on my Iriver H320 hasn't been too great for a while, but was still usable to a point. Yesterday, however, I noticed it was flat after an over-night charge. Thinking that perhaps my charger had become unplugged, which has happened several times, I checked to make sure that this was the case. Of course, it wasn't. I then used my handy dandy volt meter, I.E. my tongue, to get a reading from the charger... and, there wasn't one. You should notice something at 4.5 volts with 2 amps behind it, right?
"OK, fine," I said to myself, "I'll charge it over USB instead."
And now, ladies and gentlemen, after 24 hours of charging from USB, I now have about 24 seconds of battery life. Yay!

The cool part, however, is that I have a replacement battery, which I bought for my first Iriver H120 over a year ago, but was never used, since I broke that particular unit... or, at least, I thought I did. Now, after reading some posts on Misticriver, I'm not so sure that either one or both of my H120's are not recoverable. Of course, I can't verify anything until I can find a Torx T5 screwdriver, which I don't have. Furthermore, no one in this area seems to sell Torx screwdrivers quite that small, just 10, 15, 20 and larger.
Boring!
So, I have this lovely new internal battery that I can't use until I can acquire a screwdriver. Had I known this would happen a week ago, I could have ordered one from somewhere and been done with it. Of course, these things always find the worst possible times to happen. Oh well, no portable music playing thingies for me on this trip, I guess. Let's hope I can sleep on the plane. I should, theoretically, be able to do this, since I can sleep just about anywhere, including brick basement floors and kitchen tables, as I found out during the Nashville trip last year.

On the plus side, I have a new set of Sennheiser PX100 collapsible headphones, which should come in handy for various things. I broke my old ones in a bad accident with a crappy old sound card at fake job, which decided it wanted to send a loud DC pulse directly to the poor, defenseless diaphragms of my PX100's.
Last month, I bought two 8GB SD cards for the H4, so recording for long stretches or at 24/96 (should I need to do so for any reason) should not be a problem. Plus, the free 250GB Freecom ToughDrive I'm getting from freakyfwoof should insure plenty of storage for fun recording times.
Yes, folks, the Cad M179's and jecklin disk will make their first international trek across the Atlantic. I'm going all out with this one! More toilets, yeah! Even more reason to rebuild my website... but I'll work on that when I get back.

I have UK phone service, brought to me by Orange, and have setup VoIP routing so I can make calls inside the PBX, and thus, outside it as well, for only the cost of a local London landline call. While in a wifi coverage area, I can both make and take calls from my sell or home numbers while there, and, as soon as I change a few things, will have a forwarding system in place for when I can't get wifi reception. I'm still not sure what hotel we'll be staying in when not at Andre's place, or whether I'll have reliable net connectivity while in said unknown location.
Thus, although this is supposed to be a vacation, I can still be bothered by people from home without incurring lots of scary charges. Ain't technology great?

I've got streaming configurations for both the laptop and netbook for the Louis wedding, and for times where I am incredibly bored, such as, perhaps, waiting for connections. I'll be hanging around in Philadelphia with not much to do for about four hours, so I might just show up on TBRN while there. After all, none of us TBRN folks have streamed from an airport before, although this has been done by nick6489. So, while not a first, assuming there is enough bandwidth available on their network, I'll also take phone calls, making a variant on that.
Apparently, seather12 will be streaming at some point as well, when he makes it to Philly, although I'll be there longer, since he's coming from Las Vegas, and has a shorter connection.
Sure, it's something to do, after all.

Speaking of having something to do, this is the point of writing all this now. That, and it gives me an excuse to stay awake for at least a few more minutes. Lately, I've been going to sleep in the middle of the afternoon and waking up at around 10:00 PM, which really isn't a good idea. If I can just shift this whole thing by four or five hours, I'll be at just the right point to exist in BST, assuming jet lag doesn't do bad things to me like it did last time I went to London in 2004. Going from west to east was bad, but not much happened the other way around. That first day I got to Andre's Mum's flat was the only time I can ever remember sleeping for 18 hours, and I'd rather not do that again if you don't mind very much. Way to make a first impression, eh?

This up-coming week is going to be a mad one. Stay tuned to this blog, as well as my other outlets, for continuing coverage of this once-in-a-lifetime deal. Who knows? I may even set up a podcast, or something.

What I'm going to do now, however, is crash on the floor and temporarily die. I have things that must be done, but attempting them in my current state would be a really bad idea, thus, I won't bother. Good night, and pop off!

OK, here's the deal. I'm rather tired, and, while this was an awesome show, I feel like being lazy and not making show notes for it. So, this week, have a mystery show.
I will, however, mention that it includes a few minutes of content from this very odd radio station which is fast becoming one of my favorites. Venison likes it, too, so that makes it strange by default.

Enjoy this non-textually described episode of Things and Stuff. Sorry to those who rely on closed captioning, but... hey, it's radio!

Thanks to overlooked terms of service of Bluehost, TBRN currently has nowhere to store show archives.
A new system should be in place soon, once logistics and semantics have been worked out, but there is currently no ETA.

The last few Things and Stuff show archives are available here, but, due to space constraints, they must be rotated more frequently than was previously necessary.
Other show archives should return in the near future.

As per usual, we apologize for the inconvenience.

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

• Find out how I lost almost seven years of work in a matter of seconds.


• I introduce a new effects concept, at least for me, using external midi controllers to manipulate effect parameters on my Digitech Studio Quad iv effects processor, rather than it's single clicky data wheel and a bunch of buttons, and do bad things with a delay matrix I made using all 8 possible external modulators, inspired by the effects used by negativland.


• These effects are used on a phone call from Chelsy, just because.


• the snowman calls in, and we discuss several things, including President Obama's supposed non-existent bowling prowess, and the comment he made on the tonight show regarding the special Olympics. he also relates an interesting bowling story among other things.


• More effects processing fun (just gotta play with those knobs).


• Short Wave radio is brought up, and discussed for a while.


• A call to Mom reveals her fascination with the old Henry game from the mid 90's, as well as other random noise-making toys found in her closet. More opportunities to play with effects on the phone patch, of course.


• "Dumb," yet another fake spontaneous single, created using a multi-tap delay with infinite feedback, the music for a show intro from last month, and a drum kit.

Not one of my favorite shows, but it's there nevertheless.

This week, the separate archiving process didn't break, thus, post-stream mastering without the Behringer ultramizer, which was used live. The Ultramizer is really starting to bug me now. I'm thinking of buying another DBX 266XL or 166XL compressor, and a Phonic tube exciter for the master process chain, and making this ultramizer shove off and die, although I will lose my limiter with this configuration. Oh well, no one will notice anyway.

This week's show is now over.
'What did it do?'

• Arme Tsering, the oldest living person in the world, turned 118 last Monday. As a tribute, we played an interesting recording from 1891.


• We learn that emptying the basket in an industrial dishwasher is a good idea, and using wet towels to quell stove fires is a very bad one.


• We throw the audio from a ProMax UK video, simply entitled "Harrr," or "how to produce a radio commercial." Rather amusing, I must say.


• We reflect on the fact that Things and Stuff has been on long enough to have done at least one show on every numbered day of the month, I.E. the First of November, Second of February, Third of May, etc. all the way through 31, and play a bit of a tribute to this incredible milestone in Things and Stuff history.


• A call to Mommy yields the idea of doing a 30-minute Things and Stuff every day for a month, since the show has the distinction of having aired at least once on any numbered day of month. Will this actually happen? Probably not.


• The vocoder got something to do for a few minutes.

Um... I think that's about it, except for all that other stuff I didn't write about, which would take 95% of the fun out of listening to the show yourself, don't you think?

My normal method of archiving the show... um... broke, due to user error. If anyone wants a 2 hour file of just me talking with no context, however, I'm your man.
Thus, you get the sound of my Behringer Ultramizer as it was streamed live. I've fallen out of love with this particular processor. Something about it just grates on my ears even with no exciting or compression active, and I don't even know how to describe it. Oh well, time for more research when more cash is available, I guess. I'd love a TC Electronics Finalizer, but can't justify the $900 for the little baby one, when all I'd use it for is streaming my show, from which no income is produced. Any projects I do (which lately aren't many) all have software mastering applied.

Enjoy.

Oh, and happy birthday to this poor excuse of a blogbox, which has mostly been a Things and Stuff link repository as of late, and not much else. It has existed for four years as of today. Yay, or something.

This week's show, subtitled "the show that must not be named," is brought to you by something slightly different.

Out of boredom, I set the challenge of not saying the name of my show during this week's Things and Stuff, with a few set bad things that would happen on each offense, as determined by listeners. The first time I said "Things and Stuff," I was to use reverb on the mic for the rest of my show. On the second offense, I had to pan the mic hard left or right, and keep it there. On the third offense, I had to switch from my lovely Heil PR20 to... my kick drum microphone. As you can imagine, all this and more occurred, although I did a pretty good job of not screwing up until close to the end of the show. Oh well. All in all, highly fun and incriminating to yours truly.

I show, at least to the extent allowed by microphones and acoustic things, my new Altec Lansing Orbit portable speaker system, which is the cutest thing I've come across in a while for small accessories, such as mp3 players, netbooks, PDAs, etc. It gets way too loud, and has far too much bass for the size.

How many keyboard demos do you know of which feature bad things happening to people? One is featured on the show, that being the Korg X5DR.

We hear some semi-rare stuff from the Beach Boys, as well as revisiting a few small clips from the Sunday Night Serenade in which Borris was live at Randy's place in West Virginia last November.

Oh, don't worry, there are other good things, too, but my brain is freezing, and not allowing me to put forth the proper effort to write it all down.
Instead, you can have a download about it.
I didn't get around to showing some other fun things this week, so stay tuned for more interesting stuff next week.

At this time, I'd like to go away, as staying awake is really becoming quite problematic for me. Enjoy the archive while I enjoy pretending not to exist for a while.

This week's show consisted largely of being slightly annoyed with Canadians, reminiscing about elementary school days, talk of bovines, icesickles, and the audio equivalent of a well-known derogatory statement. There, how's that for an incredibly vague description of the show?
click here to download a complete description.

I hate Sundays. It's 80 degrees F outside, and probably around 150 degrees in this room, which naturally traps heat, and contains things which output even more of it. The rest of the house isn't so bad, but it's not fun in here. Last week, we got six inches of snow, a good deal of ice, and tons of business and school closings. The window is open. Let the exhaust fumes and loud annoying people exist without delay!

I've saved up for months, despite how it looks on the surface. I made an internal pledge to myself to make things work out. Now, I am the proud owner of a set of plane tickets to and from the United Kingdom, leaving Greensboro on April 13, returning from London on the 21st.
For the first time ever, I purchased a semi-expensive flight without the aid of a lady.

When I went to London to visit freakyfwoof in April 2004, I had financial assistance from both his girlfriend at the time, and my very own Mom.
I went to lightningcount8's high school graduation party in New York in the summer of 2005. That flight was payed for in full by maryannn. I didn't say anything, she just kind of went "Hey, how ya doing? I bought you a ticket! You're going to New York!" Um, OK then...
A few months later, I went to Portland to visit said Mary Ann. Guess who payed for that flight as well? Yep, that's right...
But now, ladies and gentlemen, I am a truly independent Borris. In purchasing 100% of my own ticket, I have achieved... um... spending a bunch of money. Yeah, that's it.

We have coordinated things so that seather12 and I will arrive in London on the same inbound flight from Philadelphia, which should hopefully make traveling to Andre's flat ((which we'll be seeing a bunch), the hotel, and other places upon arrival a bit easier to manage. This in itself is kind of strange, since, in all the times I've flown, I've always been by myself, never with family or friends. In fact, I haven't been on a family vacation since I was ten years old, with only one other when I was four, which I don't remember very well, other than going up and down in an elevator, and enjoying it immensely.
We don't get out much, ya see. I, personally, have done more traveling than the rest of my immediate family in the last eight years than they have in the last ... um, more, and it's not like I go cruising every day or anything.

Some of Andre's friends from a long time ago will be temporarily imported to London from the United States, as will, presumably, many of his English ones. Theoretically, good times should be had by all. Look out for possible strange streams and recordings from London around that time period.
If nothing else, I get the opportunity to record more toilets! Yay!!! I don't have any British public toilets in my collection yet, and it gives me an excuse to rebuild the badly broken toilet archive, as well as the rest of my page, actually. Maybe I'll even be a bad geeky person, and do some AM/FM DXing from the hotel, since I didn't do that last time I was there. I wish I had a scanner again, or something like a Kenwood THf6A... Oh, no, we mustn't revert back to our ham radio days.... That's bad! I guess that part of me will never quite die, even if I do find ham radio mostly boring these days.
If anyone knows of something under $50 that will do general bands in the UK with searching, let me know about it, though.
Yeah, I'm kind of financially stretched.

All in all, this year is starting to look like a very strange one, with Andre and Kirsten's impending marriage, as well as the recently announced baby arrival. Yep, times are definitely changing around the TBRN omnibus... er, unibox... er, something, and I get to be a part of this historic experience (tm). INDEED!

I also just realized that I will be leaving London the day after the sixth anniversary of that faitful meep that brought Andre and I together, and which, rather indirectly, caused the spontaneous existance of TBRN as we know it today. How cute!

In completely unrelated news, today would have been my Grandfather's 91st birthday, if he were still around to experience it. I will forever miss you, PawPaw.

Now, back to your life.

As some may know, I am planning a trip to London, UK from April 13 through the 21st for freakyfwoof's wedding, among other things.
Of course, me being the bad person I am, will most likely do a lot of computing on the road. I'm even considering creating a Borris's time in the UK podcast to highlight events as they happen while there, just because I can. Plus, I never get out, so why not go all public and make lots of noise about it?
However, I am faced with a slight conundrum.

I have both a rather large, but decent for 2006 HP L2005 notebook with a 14.1 inch screen, weighing something around 7 pounds with a 12-cell battery, which gives nearly seven hours of battery life, and a very cute, much smaller Acer Aspire One, with an 8.9 inch screen, weighing almost a forth less, and with only about two hours life tops with it's three-cell battery.
While the Acer and HP are technically pretty close in terms of processing power (2.0 ghz AMD Turion l37 single core, 1MB l2 vs. 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom 270 hyperthreaded, 512KB l2 for the Acer), the HP has a standard 80GB hard drive, while the Acer has a much slower internal 8GB SSD, which hits on performance. This machine was meant to run Linux, not Windows XP, although it can pull it off. It's biggest bottleneck, as I've written earlier in this blog, is it's slow write speed. This can be fixed if you're up for some fooling around, I.E. replacing the SSD with a faster 300x or 350X CF card, or even an Ipod hard drive. The case is very small and thin, so the drive has to be smaller than a 1.8 mobile drive, I think.
Yeah, I admit I probably shouldn't have bought this particular netbook, and, had I known about it at the time, would have probably gotten... yes... get ready for it... a Samson nc10 (*gasp*) but it's too late for that now. I think, at the time, this being last September, they were only just available in the U.S. or not quite here, and no one had heard of them. Oops.

Given the complete plunge in value of this already very cheap Acer Aspire One since the new 10 inch version was released, it has practically no resell value, so I guess I'll hang on to it and take my loss, and deal with things as best I can, especially now that I'm tite on finances and can't splurge on things like NC10's even if I wanted to. Well, technically I could, but then there'd be this issue of not having enough money to buy a plane ticket at the point in time at which I have decided to do that sort of thing...

Anyway, the point of all this is that I can make my Aspire One work for most things, and it basically meets my needs except for the slow SSD and bad battery life (both of which can be fixed, sort of). I don't really need a lot of space on a laptop, though it is convenient. If I need to augment the internal storage, I've got flash drives, SD cards, my Iriver h320 with it's 20GB HD, and could even buy one of those bus powered USB HD's, which I want to do before I leave anyway.
The three-cell battery can be replaced with either 6 or 9 cells, taking the battery life much closer, or maybe even beyond that available with the much more mammoth HP l2005, with the extended battery so large, it raises the back of the laptop off a desk by a bit.

So, to summarize, we have huge, pretty fast and mostly reliable HP 2005 with cracks in the lid, vs. tiny, cute, inconspicuous netbook, which weighs almost nothing, can fit in someone's overly huge pocket if you try hard enough, but isn't as meaty in terms of raw speed and power... Well, netbooks generally aren't, which is kind of the point of them. There are now net tops as well, which, far as I understand, are netbook equivalents in a set-top box configuration, which might be handy for the center-piece of an entertainment system without taking up lots of room...
Anyway, I digress. Back to the topic at hand; I have these two machines, and obviously, one of them is going to the UK with me. I could probably take both, but honestly, I'd rather not.
The question, however, is which? Should I buy a larger battery and some more external storage for this netbook, even with it's slowish SSD for the convenience factor, or use something that looks more like a desk (not desktop, just desk), but with more room and faster response time?
If it were a choice between my HP and the even larger Toshiba Satellite I used to have, it'd be the HP instantly, for both the fact that it is smaller and more powerful. However, the convenience factor of the Acer almost overrides it's performance. Thoughts? Comments? Why bother boxes?

In other news, we have a winter storm warning in effect here in the Triad, with up to 8 inches of snow possible over the next day or two. At the moment, it's right on the edge of freezing, and there is quite a bit of ice on trees and elevated surfaces. Around here, this almost always leads to a lack of power at some point, so if I go offline for a while, that's probably why. Sure, I've got my phone's 3g connection and multiple battery powered pc's and UPSs, but that will only go so far. We have no generators or fun things like that, so no power really means just that.

On this week's fine edition of Things and Stuff, we make sure everyone knows that Borris is a bad, geeky audio person who, after all these years, still likes playing with effects processors. Hear the incredibly dumb effect combinations he came up with for your listening pleasure this week, which involve LFOs, dynamic envelope controllers, and feedback.

We hear a rather strange track from Landy's Mods, submitted by nick6489. Dumpsters, free food, and autotune?

Borris played a clip of a dying electronic clock recorded from Mommy's workplace, which was slightly amusing.

Mommy called in, shared some memories on the late Paul Harvey, and talked a bit about "da hood" and all of it's various issues, including domestic violence, though there was, unfortunately, no live audio from it. Oh well.

An old Fender Rhodes promo record from the early 70's, recorded by Herbie Hancock, was also featured, because Borris seems to like strange things of that nature, even if you don't.

Borris mentioned that February was the first month since May 2008 in which he has been able to successfully stream on every Saturday of the month

Other things happened as well.

Want more info? Why not have a little download. Enjoy this one, though. Borris enjoyed it almost, but not quite as much as he enjoys speaking/writing in the third person.

This week's show is now available for download. This week's show is pretty standard, other than a semi-broken live demonstration of Fideliphone with byron27, some tracks, and some random talk about pointless things, I.E. regular deal, for the most part.
Over all, I enjoyed it, and now you can too. Have fun!

Due to some incredibly crappy performance from TBRN's machine, as well as the ever so helpful staff at midphase... er not... TBRN has moved. The network is now hosted by a few linode servers in different datacenters, each with specific tasks for the sake of redundancy.
This means a huge downsize in terms of locally stored content, and available bandwidth per month.
However, it also means a striking increase in reliability, and more fun things to come in the future.

Most critical services are operational, but currently are accessible through a different address, until DNS hosting is moved and migrated to reflect the new changes.
Until said issues are resolved, you can listen to TBRN's live programming by visiting http://tbrn.andrelouis.com:8888/tbrn.ogg. Sorry, no automation at this time, though this will change as soon as some other issues are addressed.

All archives will be hosted off-site by Bluehost, conveniently provided by seather12, and links to past shows on this blog may or may not work until the entries are manually edited. At this point, I don't know, and, to be honest, I really don't want to manually go through and edit each "Things and Stuff" link to connect to something that works if it can be helped, but... well... whatever.
I have some time on my hands if it comes down to it, as I know some people find my show, and thus, TBRN, through this strange and odd misshapen thing that appears to be a blog of some sort.

Also, due to the server move, FX Radio has a new address. It can now be found at http://fx.pdaudio.net:8888/fx. The link for FX Radio has also been updated on PDAudio's semi-broken website as well.
Same great... um... great? content??? you're all used to. Only the address has been changed to protect the innocent.

Now, before I go to bed, I'd like to bring the following interesting application to your attention: Fideliphone.
This is a high quality p2p, full duplex audio app, similar in concept, at least to some extent, to AudioTX. Differences:

• It doesn't cost $800


• It uses the open-source Celt Codec for it's audio via UDP, rather than mp2, mp3 or pcm wav


• It plays nicer with points that are not connected via VPN

and much, much more... Well, eventually, anyway.
It works sort of like Speak Freely without a reflector, in that you and your remote party must be connected to each other. There is currently no way to send a connect request or anything fun, so that bit must be done very manually.
It just works when both machines have established a connection.

It's still very much in development, but so far, this promises to be a rather cool tool for things like net radio remote co-hosting, or just chatting with very high quality, stereo audio, which I've done quite a lot over the last day, including a three-hour Fidelicall with Jim Snowbarger, with stereo miking on both sides. that was fun!
In fact, there is currently no way to use this program in mono (though this will be implemented soon, I've been told). The idea was to get a stable stereo application working first, then implement other things on top.

Celt, which is a compromise between the quality of Ogg Vorbis and the latency of Speex, allows mono and stereo encoding at either 44,100 or 48,000 hz, and fixed bitrates from 32 to 500 kbps, or quality managed bitrate.
The quality of the Celt codec is adjustable within the program, although the default quality is right on the edge for users who have 256/384 kbps upstream.
In fact, due to a stupid issue with one of Charter's routers, I can't seem to send to Derek at anything higher than about 20 KBPS without errors, while I can send Andre, in london, much further away, a solid 100+ KBPS stream from this program with no break-up at all, with Andre sending a slightly smaller stream, somewhere around 90/93 KBPS to accommodate his upstream... and the quality is amazing at such a bitrate!
If you didn't notice, we're measuring in kilobites, not kilobits, so it can get pretty intensive at the upper end of the quality scale for some users. Still other people were not able to make good connections, despite having available bandwidth... Maybe some bad routing? Well, one of them was in New Zealand, another was onMCHSI which has lots of bad old AT&T routes, so it wouldn't be too surprising, or anything...

I'm very excited about the potential of Fideliphone, as I've been looking for an alternative to the highly expensive AudioTX for some time now, and it looks like this could very well do it.

I, however, have not been looking for bed replacements in a while, although I've decided to make use of the one I've already got. They're convenient, these bed devices. I like'em.

P.S. I bought a Samson C com mono optical compressor for $29, for use with my mic upstairs. It should be here tomorrow. Just thought you'd all like to know.

This week's Things and Stuff was streamed earlier than usual: 5:00 PM EST. Thanks to a really boring Saturday lineup this week, I decided to stream after Derek's show. However, things broke rather hard for him, and he didn't do his full three hours, so I thought I'd start the show at 4:00 PM. Well, that broke too, since, right before Derek was supposed to go away, the server fell over, and then came back at around 4:30 or so. Rather than starting then, I waited until 5:00, at which point I had a pretty interesting show, consisting of lots of calls from the UK from people who would not normally be able to listen live, as my show isn't the most conveniently scheduled one for that part of the world.

Various things were discussed, including the introduction of a Poultry power plant in central North Carolina and it's associated bad puns, a rather boring demonstration of a new set of hot rod drum sticks, and much more that I can't bother to list here, since I'm lazy like that.

Now that I've said my bit, it's time for you to see what fun things you missed... or not.

At the time of this writing, I would normally be on the air. Instead, I'm uploading the archive for a show that should, theoretically, still be in progress. Fun times.

While on Ebay, looking for a higher capacity battery for my Acer Aspire One, I came across several 7200 MA 9-cell batteries. Officially, the best batteries sold by Acer for the Aspire One series netbooks, as far as I can tell, are 6-cell 4400 MA batteries.
Of course, these long-lasting, most likely fat, bulky and large 9-cell batteries are made in China, and I am naturally scared of them, given the tendency of Chinese batteries to have explosions of the non-romantic variety, especially extended batteries, in which more cells are crammed into very little space. Last week, a Chinese man was killed by an exploding cell phone battery, which was, of course, made in China. Apparently, that was the seventh high profile case of death by phone battery in the People's Republic.

Although I don't have any direct experience, I've heard plenty of bad stuff about Chinese batteries over the years, and, while I'd really like to get the most out of my netbook, I'm a little bit scared of these things.
Ads like this don't do much to ease my mind about them, either:

"Guarantee Quality! Brand New! Factory Package! Fast Shipping!

A high quality battery has stable outcome and good endurance. It does not only provide a stable working environment, but also enhances the mobility of the laptop. “Inferior" batteries, not only short-lived, and even extremely vulnerable to overheating, fire phenomenon, which eventually leads to the explosion of the entire notebook, burning, and even greater disaster and loss. Our batteries are in high grade quality and certified by CE and RoHS. You can reassure of purchasing it!"

Hmm, I can reassure of purchasing it? does that mean I should buy one, and then tell myself over and over again that, yes, I did indeed purchase this product? Actually, come to think of it, it doesn't say who should be reassured. Should I contact the seller and say "Hey, guess what? I just bought this battery! Just thought you should know, just in case you didn't notice the fact that you've received money, and have in fact shipped the product to me. Oh, by the way, I'm using said product now, but I was told to 'reassure of purchasing it', and as the instructions weren't strict enough to direct me to the proper party to be reassured, I thought I'd cover all the bases. So, I've told myself over and over again that I bought your battery, and now I'm making sure you are aware as well. Congratulations, you have now been successfully reassured!"

That bit about "explosion of the entire notebook, burning, and even greater disaster and loss" doesn't sound terribly promising either, and it would seem as if the marketing for this particular battery has already been well acquainted with some issues.

Other than the fact that I streamed this week's show in both Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Flac lossless, which Klango Player can stream, by the way, it wasn't really so different than any other show.
No, there won't be a flac version of the archive, unless you *really* want one, and you have to give me something nice in return to prove it.

I spent quite a long time complaining about Vivian's various problems over the week, demonstrated why it is a bad idea to put an arosol powered air horn under water, which was a suggestion from byron27 a couple of weeks ago, played around a bit with the old Ensoniq TS-12 and Yamaha Motif, and generally made bad things happen. All in all, a very typical show, though a bit light on external support. Oh well, sometimes less distractions make other stuff more interesting.

I accidentally encoded this file at a higher bitrate than normal, and I can't be bothered to re-encode and re-upload, so enjoy this file, which is a little bit shorter than normal, yet almost 40mb larger. For anyone who cares, I again bypassed the Behringer Virtualizer for archiving, though it appeared on the stream. For some reason, I don't like the sound it's putting out anymore, no matter what I do to it. Oh well... I like being dead, so dead I shall be.

On February 8, 2000, I had broadband internet installed in my house for the first time.
Now, nine years later, I'm commemorating this anniversary in a really dumb way.
Not only will I broadcast using the standard Ogg Vorbis stream to TBRN, but I'll also be providing an Ogg Flac lossless version as well, just because I can.

Hear every fine detail that you would not otherwise notice or care about. Cringe at the artifacts of any mp3 or ogg file I use as music or bed material. Experience the true high fidelity of lossless streaming as it was never meant to be heard... well, assuming your player of choice can stream Ogg Flac.
Unfortunately for Winamp users, the libraries are too old to support Ogg Flac streaming playback. However, if you use Foobar 2000 for windows (unsure of programs for Linux and mac, though I'm sure they exist), plug the address http://tbrn.net:8888/tas.flac into your ogg flac streaming player of choice tonight at 10:00 PM EST. Doing so before then will yield a non-working feed.
Otherwise, feel free to listen in any of the normal ways provided by TBRN, as I do plan on an interesting show tonight, geeky bandwidth-using thingy or not.

If you are as geeky as I am, chances are you have some deep, dark, hidden secrets that you'd rather not have published... Actually, that has no relevance here, so forget I said that.

This is a one-off deal. I don't plan on doing this every week, or, in fact, ever again after this particular show.
Mainly, I'm just bored and feel like wasting some resources. Yeah, that's about it.

What is it about Thursdays? Why must they promote issues, problems, and other unfortunate events?

About an hour ago, the OS drive on Vivian, the local server box, which still runs most of PDAudio.net until it's moved, decided to crap out and die. It said "Clicky, clickky, tocky ticky, I won't calibrate no more!" to which I replied "Shove off!" It happily abliged.

This actually isn't a big deal, since it was in need of an overhall anyway, and nothing important was lost. It was an old Western Digital 40GB drive I bought in early 2003, which was replaced for failing the same way this one did a few months later. I guess almost six years is a better life span than four months.
I have another 40GB Seagate drive, which is currently having things installed to it as I write.

However, the point of writing now is that the last couple of times I've had hard drive failures, hard fails, or failed-so-hard drives have been on Thursdays as far as I can remember, except for once on a Tuesday.

Why does this matter? Technically, it doesn't, but it gives me a great excuse to be even less useful than I already am, and complain about pointless things.

Having done so, it's time to drop back down to the basement, and get this *lovely* system up and running again.

Have a great Thursday, everyone! I am!

Welcome to the second show in as many days.

This one was rather interesting, as it features the all new random breaky-noise button, as well as a few other buttons that pull up random things, and can sometimes make phone calls more interesting.

We talk about highly expensive Italian cars that apparently buckel just as easily as a Kia, go "moo" several times, show the rather respectible outgoing quality from the Nokia E71's voip client, get a phone call from Mommy, and much more.

Something is slightly broken with my Behringer ultramizer configuration, and it sounds a little too processed on the bottom end for my taste. It decided to obtain a subtle excited digital FM processing quality, without the terribly horrible bad clear channel compression. I don't particularly like that sound, although no one complained about it, other than me and my headphones.
I only discovered this issue last minute, so to avoid playing with it in realtime on the show, which is always a bad thing, I simply recorded the archive without the Ultramizer in the chain (although it was used for streaming), and did mastering post-production in sound forge. This is one of the few times when having the Phonic's main firewire l/r routable to main mix on the board without the inserts in the chain comes in handy.
I actually think it sounds a little better with Wave Hammer than with the Ultramizer, but I have both versions of the stream, if lots of people complain about the quality of this archive... or something. Let's see who actually notices or cares.

Yeah, despite the above description, it's actually not boring. So, go on, have a download of your very own.

I, in the mean time, will enjoy some quality time with my sheets and covers.

P.S. It's 2:10 AM.

It really does sound better than this, trust me.
This is a very hot phone, and the voice post gateway is known to boost audio, thus it sounds a lot worse than it would have otherwise. Oh, and thanks for the additional artifacts that didn't used to exist.

VoicePost 257K 1:26

(no transcription available)

As many who hang around some of these pages will know by now, TBRN is having it's forth semi-annual broadcastathon, where the idea is basically to get as many live shows in a row until we run out of steam. I think the last one made it to 108 hours of consecutive live content.

Not to be boring, I've done something no one on the network, or perhaps any other internet radio station has ever done before, on each broadcastathon in which I have participated.

In August of 2007, I did a show live from a bathtub, including messages and phone calls while under water, which I am linking here yet again, though it is against my better judgment.
In June of 2008, I streamed from outside with a set of Cad M179 microphones on the fake jecklin disk on the back yard swing, until my laptop battery died. This ended up being rather incriminating as well, but for different reasons, obviously.
This year, I did something that tops them all for stupidity, at least in my opinion.

For several weeks now, I've been meaning to move my e-mail over to the new Linode VPS, and cancel my Speakeasy DSL, since I now have RR business class cable.
As of this morning, PDAudio's mail is happily being hosted by the Linode, and this afternoon, while streaming from said DSL connection, it was canceled live on the air.
Yep, that's right... After four years of faithfully providing Things and Stuff to several people around the world, Speakeasy will speak no more.

The idea was to stream from the DSL connection, cancel the account while streaming, and see how long it took for Speakeasy to cut my line off.
However, I was distracted by some interesting phone calls and messages, and by the time the connection was actually cut, it was already time for the next show on the network to air. Fortunately, Icecast is fun, and allows multiple streams on one server, so I just moved over to a different mountpointt at 4:00 PM, in order to finish what I started.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was sad enough to do this, and it was, in the long run, a success. The DSL was disconnected at around 4:13 PM, and it's last action was to stream to TBRN. It died heroically in the line of duty, and all that crap.

Sure, it was a prime example of someone with far too much time and too little to do, but that's my life lately.
You can get your own copy of the DieSL show if you want. The name was suggested by freakyfwoof near the end of the show, and it just sort of worked. There will, however, be no more DieSL shows in future. That's a one-off. I will not be activating more DSL connections just to kill them again on an internet radio station, because that would be a wonderfully bad idea, not to mention a phenomenal waste of resources. We know people that embody those concepts quite well, don't we?

I fell asleep before posting this yesterday, so here, have an early Saturday morning post.

Today, we're going to do something I know you'll think is a great idea once you've all seen it in action. We're going to take the toilets off the ground, and mount small, yet powerful subwoofers under them, replacing the porcelain palace atop the sub in such a way that it can not be seen from the outside. Then we will make the flusher trigger a random, loud, deep sound, so that it scares whomever is unfortunate enough to be using the facilities at the time. Perhaps we will include such features as only allowing the flusher trigger to work intermitantly, or when least appropriate. This could be a big hit in public restrooms with auto-flushing toilets.


Actually, here's a better idea... Why don't I go to bed?

This week's show can best be described in two words: train wreck!
Lino the telemarketer, Decendy, the new month in the gregorian calendar which has even worse representation than February, terribly horrible bad swedish songs, and some other issues... Yep, typical show.
I went on for a few extra minutes, because an Irish guy told me to. It was a bad idea, so I didn't do it for too long.

This wasn't one of my favorite shows, but it could have been a lot worse as well.
Fortunately, it's over, and I can put it behind me. The only cool thing about this particular show is that, since I have my new cable connection, the archive uploaded in 9 minutes. I like that.

Now I can play with my new toy, the Nokia e71-2, which, by the way, is the first Nokia phone I've seen in a very long time that doesn't go "gug" in my coverage area, plus the sip client sounds awesome as well. Too bad it doesn't fully support Talks yet, but it works enough to use most things with a little weirdness. It's incredibly quick to respond about things though. I'll definitely be loving it when the next Talks comes out. Mobile Speak fully supports it, but compared to Talks, it's incredibly sluggish and bad.

Oh well, enough blind talk for the day. I'm going back to bed.

This is just a quick update to say that I'll be deleting all "Things and Stuffs" from TBRN before June 2007 to free up disk space, and help balance TBRN's heavily Borris and John biased automation.
While some of these shows are quite fun, some are incredibly bad, and, in my opinion, should really go away. Thus, they shall.
If you want any of these archives from January 2006 to June 2007, you have from now until Friday to get them. GO on, you latent obsessed Things and Stuff fan, grab them while they're still around... or not. They don't last forever, you know.

In other news, I've ordered TWC business class cable internet, which will be installed tomorrow morning, at 5.5/1.5 mbps. It's apparently the fastest upstream I can get in this market without paying for SpeakEasy business ethernet, which I don't think you can install in a residential context even if you had $350 a month to drop on 3.0x3.0 mbps, or even more for 5x5 or 10x10. Local resources should become a bit more than twice as fast to the outside world, starting tomorrow.
This here service isn't so cheap, either, and I still envy those who can get the same or more upstream for less in other markets without trying very hard, as I have to do.
Ah well, fun times in the stagnant, slow south.

I'll also be moving the domain's e-mail and web content to the Linode box over the next few days, so the address to access things in my basement will be changing to a subdomain, rather than simply the top-level domain itself. You have been warned, for those to whom it applies.