The Post Where I Use The Words "Unbelievable Spunkerchief"

There has been a convergence of coincidences.

(That sounds ominous, doesn’t it?)

Here’s the deal. The 28th of this month marks the one year anniversary of this blog.

Can you believe that? I’ve been spouting complete and utter crap for nearly a year, I’ve written (at this point) well over 300 posts, which is equal to about four hundred and fifty thousand words…and no one has told me to go away yet.

So, considering I’ll have been blogging for a year come the 28th, I was trying to think of something a little special to do to commemorate it.

This is where the coincidences come in.

The first fortuitous happenstance came when I was looking through some of the CD ROMs I brought with me from England. In there, I found a simple, but powerful, audio recording/editing program that I had completely forgotten I owned, that I bought back when I played guitar.

The next was a miracle in itself. I received a bit of spam email that actually wasn’t complete and total crap! It was an advertisement for a web-hosting site that hosts any type of file up to 100mb for free. (Of course, if you want them to host something over 100mb, that’s when you buy a membership.)

My brain slowly ticked over. I had everything I needed to create a Podcast. Of course, the hosting site had a bandwidth limit, but that wouldn’t be a problem, because…well, I only have about 30 regular readers.

Now, I have to admit that I have absolutely no interest in creating a regular podcast. My microphone is completely crappy, the time and effort it takes to record, edit, clean up and convert an audio file is just too much trouble.

The other reason I’m not really interested in making a regular podcast is that in order to make a podcast worth the download, it has to be at least 10-15 minutes long. 15 minutes of talking, and talking by myself is an awful lot of time to fill. Not to mention the RSS headaches.

I gave up completely on the idea until I listened to the Penny Arcade Podcast, which is simply the writer and the artist trying to come up with a comic idea, with a microphone switched on. It was simple, no sound effects or music, and was interesting enough to listen to. This gave me the slight push I needed.

So, a couple nights ago, when Sunny left for work, and I had the house all to myself, I sat down at the computer and spent a couple of hours ‘at the mic’. Like I said, I have no interest in doing this on a regular basis, but as a one off to celebrate my one year mark? It was worth the effort. I thought I’d at least try it out and see if it was worth posting.

Here’s the bad part, after spending about an hour recording 10 minutes of only slightly terrible material, followed by about 2 hours cleaning up the audio to get rid of the annoying hiss my mic generates, normalizing everything, adding a slight bass boost for that cheesy DJ feel… and generally getting the audio as clean as possible, I started to convert it to an MP3 file.

At this point, my virus checker decided to do an automatic virus check. My computer froze and I lost everything I’d just done.

I cursed. I cursed long and hard. (Now, I wish the mic had been running then. 10 minutes of me screaming at my computer, waxing creative, and calling it an unbelievable spunkerchief, among other things, was actually worth recording.)

Which leads me to this post.

Before I go to the time and trouble of re-doing this, is anyone there actually interested in wasting 10 minutes of their life listening to me blabber on? While I’m willing to do this all again, I don’t see the point if no-one’s going to listen to it! The download would be linked to here, and would be about 10-15mb.

Let me know if you’re interested.