I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

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

On this weeks highly enjoyable show:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

Have fun, and don't die.

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

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

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

Hello people, both good and bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week's two hour masterpiece includes:

• How many knobs does Borris's board have?


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


• The fake plastic stalker gets two seconds of fame.


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


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


• Autotune the news? Sure, why not?


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


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


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


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


• The Borris Sorry Mix?


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

• Mommy and toys that make bad noises


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


• self-made Jerks, and a call from Venison


• Kyle Mckenzie, music and more noises


• random samples from a vast, unorganized collection of crap


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


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


• other unmentioned things.

Enjoy. I did.

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


• Some callers are apparently much more amusing in boxes.


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


• Where did the weather go?


• How about the weather at the south pole?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


• Let's play with keyboards and vocoders again.


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


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


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


• Beds and vocoders are fun.


• FX Radio is also fun.


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


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

Enjoy.

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

In this week's edition:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this week's episode:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

Share and enjoy!

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

On this week's show:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


• More pointless drumming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's what happened this week:

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Here are some alternate suggestions:

1. Please go die now


2. not this thing again


3. are we done yet


4. No, don't do that


5. mind your own business


6. you're one to talk


7. stand in the corner


8. go play in trafic


9. you should be ashamed


10. shove off an die

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

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

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

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

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

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


• Narf


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


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


• Radio Shack sucks (no, really?)


• Burp a bottle, and make your bottle woddle?


• The baby Borat chorus exists, and made itself known


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On this particular episode:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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!