I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

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!

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.

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

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

As per usual, we apologize for the inconvenience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, back to your life.

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

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

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

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

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

• It doesn't cost $800


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As my contribution to the Beyond Radio Network's third biannual broadcastathon, (the point of which is to see how long TBRN can broadcast completely live content without falling over), I did something slightly non-standard.
Rather than my usual boring show inside the usual boring studio, I did an equally boring show outside in the back yard, complete with a stereo mic array, phone calls, messengers, etc. for most of the duration of my laptop battery. Given that I was taxing it pretty hard, it only lasted just over two hours and eleven minutes. Normally, without such load, I can get about twice that. It's also going on 2.5 years old, so I could probably get better with a new one.

Anyway, for more of the same (Borris incriminates himself) that you've all come to know and love, including knocking microphones over, doing bad things with Bluejays and Sound Forge, discussing odd pointless things, and generally being quite insubstancial when all is said and done, you can download this bad ol' thing, not that you really want to do that, or anything. What? You do? Man, you must be even more bored than I was at the time! Congratulations!

Every time I do something like this, I look at myself and think "I could be so much more than I am!" then procede to not do anything to achieve... well... anything much, really. I ought to do something about that. Oh well. Some people never learn, I guess.