The one way to be absolutely sure that I’ll actually do something is to watch and see if I publicly announce that I won’t be doing it.

And so, heeding the siren call of Air Canada, I spent the wee hours of this morning, between about 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., in a fuzzy haze of air ticket, hotel and conference booking, all towards getting me to Reboot 7.0 in Copenhagen next week.

Of course I ignored my own “book your hotel first” travel rule, and so about 2:15 a.m. I ended up with a confirmed, non-refundable air ticket, a paid-up conference registration, and no place to stay. Thrashing around various hotel and tourism websites, I put a couple of lines in the water before I finally fell into bed.

When I got up, 5 hours later, there were only “no room” rejection letters in my in-box, so I launched at it again before coming in to work. In the end, I found a room at the CAB Inn Scandinavia through the last-minute discounter RatesToGo. Although this felt a tad too much like buying drugs from a guy in the bus station, I was ready for anything by the time it rolled around.

You can follow along on the reboot website (here’s my profile, which uses the word tiny a lot — it was 3:30 a.m. after all). I’ll be blogging, podcasting, and making tiny ornate sketches throughout the event, so you can sit back and play the home game if you’re interested.

Oliver and I had a regular Wednesday night gig at the CARI swimming pool all winter long. We were planning to get back into the routine tonight, but found, to our dismay, that the leisure pool is closed for swimming lessons until 8:00 p.m. The silver lining is that from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. the leisure pool is open and the rate is reduced to $2.00 a person; a little too late for our purposes, unfortunately, but a good deal if you can make it.

The situation improves in a couple of weeks; until then, the pool is open around supper time on Mondays and Fridays and over the weekend.

The CARI staff person I talked to on the phone was super-nice.

I want to create a portable podcasting rig, something I can carry in my hands or on my bike and travel around with easily.

It looks like the something like an iRiver or a Muvo would be fine for my purposes: both can record, both have enough “disk space” to record lots of audio, and both are quite small.

The Muvo seems to have the edge, especially when used with a Mac, because it just mounts as a drive on the desktop, and files can be copied to and from it, while the iRiver requires using proprietary software to do this.

But both seem to accept audio input only through a “line in” jack rather than a “microphone” jack, which leads me to believe that I would run into troubles if I just plugged a regular old microphone into them.

Can anyone (a) confirm that this is true or not and (b) if it is true, what can I do about it (preferably by some mechanism that doesn’t involve another piece of heavy equipment). Bonus points if you can do this without trying to explain to me how impedance, resistance and balancing work, and without using the abbreviation “dB.”

Some housekeeping items for our Live from the Formosa Tea House podcast:

• We’re going to try and record a new episode this week.
• There’s a new section in the archives for the podcasts.
• There’s a new URL for the RSS feed (the old locations should auto-redirect).
• If you subscribe to the main RSS feed for this site with a podcatcher, you’ll get the podcasts now (they used to be driven by a hand-coded RSS file, now they’ve joined the mothership).

If you every had any doubts about the value of Dave Winer’s “just let it all happen” approach to podcasting, listen to this podcast, a recording of breakfast with Betsy Devine. It just happens, and it’s very interesting.

Air Canada is getting better at highly targeted marketing. On the way in to the office this morning I was thinking “it would be great if there was a way to fly to Europe on a whim.” I picked up my National Post this morning and found the following ad on the bottom of the front page:

Just as I was starting to get over my Eurofetish, there she goes pulling me back in…

Today marks the first in an experimental series of podcasts here on the blog. I’m trying out the medium: taking the gear out for a ride and exploring different ways of talking about things that I’m interested in. Putting this piece together brought back a lot of memories about Nouspeak, a weekly spoken word programme on Trent Radio that I was one of the production team for; I enjoyed that experience, and I had a good time editing this piece together.

Today’s podcast: Cindy Burton, owner of the recently-closed Cool Dog Deli in Charlottetown, talks about the ideas behind the deli, the challenges she ran into running it, and how it came to close.

I have long been a fan of the CITY-TV programme The Originals, especially its “interviewless” format. I’d experimented with the format in radio projects before, and decided to return to it for this piece.

Here’s the tech used to assemble today’s podcast:

• My “in studio” voiceovers were recorded into Sound Studio using the Omnidirectional Tie Clip Microphone from Radio Shack connected to my iMac using a Griffin iMic (see this technical note).
• I recorded the telephone interview with Cindy Burton using the Monitor command in our Asterisk telephone system. The result is two WAV-format files, one for each side of the telephone conversation.
• I broke Cindy’s part of the interview up into individual clips using Audacity; I exported each of the eleven clips as a 16-bit, 44 Khz AIFF file.
• I used Apple’s GarageBand to edit everything together: I imported my intros and Cindy’s clips, added a soundtrack, and exported into iTunes.
• I then exported as a 24kbps mono MP3 file from iTunes (which compressed the file from 108MB down to a more reasonable 2MB!).

Thanks to Cindy for agreeing to talk about her experiences; you can email her at cindy@cooldogs.ca or visit her website at bigdogsolutions.ca.

I’m trying to craft up a little podcasting rig here in the office, something better than using the built-in microphone on my iMac. I’ve had a Griffin iMic hanging around, and I bought a Omnidirectional Tie Clip Microphone from Radio Shack this afternoon.

Doing some testing with the iMic and the new microphone, using both Audacity and Sound Studio, there was a noticeable background hum with everything I recorded.

I tried a different Mac, and a different microphone, but the hum remained. Then I stumbled across the helpful Fixing white noise and 60Hz hum when using an iMic and Final Vinyl, which advises, in part:

• Flip the switch towards speaker. This will amplify the signal coming in.
• Go to Applications—>Utilites and run Audio MIDI Setup. Set the “Properties For:” to iMic USB Audio System and make sure that both input and output are set to 16bit 44100Hz 2 channels. Most likely it is set to 8bit.

I have no idea what this actually does, but it worked, as you can hear clearly if you listen to the attached MP3 file.

Post number one on this blog was six years ago today, May 31, 1999.

A couple in BC buy a smart car and detail their experiences.