Categories
Home Base

Wait! Don’t blow the hatch!

It’s been one hell of a week, to put it mildly. First off, flying solo again at work, and we had a hellacious round of storms and tornadoes on Sunday night, for which the station’s coverage kicked copious quantities of butt. (See the work blog for examples of how we’re “POPping” that coverage – I’ve added quite a few brand new spots.) But that has meant epic-length work days. And last night when I got home, something was wrong – I think it was the fact that every receptacle that’s supposed to drain water had backed up. Toilets overflowing, bathtubs and sinks filling themselves, mass hysteria. So the inevitable call to the plumber went out this morning; I stayed home longer today to meet him when he finally appeared in the afternoon with his robo-rooter. Just snaking that thing through the pipes blasted some clogs out of the system, but there was still something amiss. So there was no choice but to dig up the yard – it was time to blow the hatch. … Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

Joining the pod people.

I’ve been sidelined by a bit of mild food poisoning for a couple of days, so when I wasn’t stuck in the bathroom for hours, I’ve tried my hand at podcasting for the first time. (Don’t worry, none of this was done in the bathroom itself – that would be a poocast. Not that I might not do one of those in the future…) My first podcasting experiments will be revealed on Friday the 17th, as I launch a series – or maybe I should say a tentative series – of Doctor Who podcasts to accompany Sci-Fi Channel’s broadcasts of the new series in the U.S.; the idea here is to help draw continuity connections between the old series and the new for casual fans or new fans. (If you’re a longtime dedicated fan, well, probably nothing new for you here.)
I wound up talking almost non-stop through Rose, though there were a couple of significant pauses for The End Of The World. I quickly discovered the value of keeping an ample supply of beverages on hand for this activity, and lived in fear of the weather alert radio behind me going off during yet another stormy day. (Not long after I finished End Of The World, I was getting things set up to record The Unquiet Dead when the first alarm sounded, followed about ten minutes later by the second one, and I figured “well, that’s about it for today.”)
I also discovered that I’m really not too well equipped for this whole endeavour of casting from my particular pod. I still don’t have a microphone (which certainly would’ve helped when I was trying to record the Voice of Odyssey a few weeks ago), so it’s currently a convoluted process of recording my voice with my camcorder (with the lens cover closed) for 45-odd minutes, and then spending another 45-odd minutes dumping that audio to CD, and then more time to finalize that disc, rip it to my hard drive, and edit the top and tails (I’m assuming you don’t want to hear me do a TV-style 3-2-1 count-in here.) A microphone would let me just do my damage straight to the CD-RW and cut something like an hour out of the process.
Ah well. It’s really strange how multimedia this whole thing is becoming. Oh, to quit my day job and do this all day. Assuming anyone likes these, I’ll be looking for other podcasting opportunities in the future…I just have no idea what they’d be. If anyone’s got any ideas, I’m all ears.… Read more

Categories
Should We Talk About The Weather?

All clear

Looks like the tornado sirens may have been somewhere between a close call and a false alarm (and in any case, the Weather Service never issued a warning – not that this necessarily means anything to anyone who’s lived in this area for the past ten years); a Crawford County deputy called in a funnel cloud, and radar indicated rotation. A little while after the hailstorm I poked my head out the window and found some mammatus clouds.
Mammatus clouds - March 9, 2006
It’s interesting what strange memories pop up sometimes, when you least expect them, and these clouds got me started on a very weird trip down memory lane. … Read more