So, the brand-new microphone has arrived in the mail and I've been playing around with it. The sound is pretty nice; it reduces the background noise a lot. I haven't figured out how to get it to record in joint stereo, which is one of the Podiobooks requirements, but that's another matter. The first problem was that my voice still sounds like I'm inside the Coliseum with all the fans gone.
There's a bit of received wisdom on the Podiobooks community page that "parallel walls are your enemy." Anything you can do to soften the surfaces in your room, like curtains, upholstered furniture, will help get rid of that echoiness. One of those rubber rooms they use in sound laboratories would be ideal, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any in the area. The next best thing: recording under the covers.
Yes, I threw a sheet over myself and tried recording the first chapter of Grizelda. The sound quality was great. I'm just glad I don't have a roommate right now. If she saw me in an old-style blanket fort yelling apparently to myself about goblins and seamstresses, I don't think she'd understand.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Dalek Exercise Video
I didn't know that these little guys could do stairs. I mean, considering that they look like self-propelled vacuum cleaners. Maybe I really should be afraid of Daleks.
"Exterminate the Flab"
"Exterminate the Flab"
Spring!
Okay, this doesn't have to do with anything, but the trees are finally starting to leaf out. And it's, what, two days until May? That's Minnesota for you.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
About Grizelda
I forgot to mention what Grizelda is about. Here's the "pitch" text:
The monarchs of Corvain had long employed local sorcerers and sorceresses to help keep their people down. When the people revolted and set up a republic, they thought their problems were over. But now, eleven years later, the leaders of the Republic of Corvain are proving just as bad as the old monarchs. They’re rounding up anybody who might challenge them – including anybody with a hint of magical power. When Grizelda, a young seamstress, finds herself their target, she fears she is done for.
In prison she meets a group of rat-riding pixies and earns their undying friendship by mending their clothes. In exchange, they help her to escape and seek refuge in the world below the capitol city. Living underground means Grizelda has to adapt to the strange customs of the goblins, a cheerless bunch who storm around muttering about the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Not content to remain in exile, Grizelda becomes involved with a group of human revolutionaries. Their goal is to return the Republic to its original ideals, before it decayed. To that end they hatch a daring plan: to free all the government’s political prisoners. If their plan is going to work, Grizelda will have to get Communist goblins, irresponsible pixies, and revolutionaries still deeply mistrustful of magic to work together.
The monarchs of Corvain had long employed local sorcerers and sorceresses to help keep their people down. When the people revolted and set up a republic, they thought their problems were over. But now, eleven years later, the leaders of the Republic of Corvain are proving just as bad as the old monarchs. They’re rounding up anybody who might challenge them – including anybody with a hint of magical power. When Grizelda, a young seamstress, finds herself their target, she fears she is done for.
In prison she meets a group of rat-riding pixies and earns their undying friendship by mending their clothes. In exchange, they help her to escape and seek refuge in the world below the capitol city. Living underground means Grizelda has to adapt to the strange customs of the goblins, a cheerless bunch who storm around muttering about the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Not content to remain in exile, Grizelda becomes involved with a group of human revolutionaries. Their goal is to return the Republic to its original ideals, before it decayed. To that end they hatch a daring plan: to free all the government’s political prisoners. If their plan is going to work, Grizelda will have to get Communist goblins, irresponsible pixies, and revolutionaries still deeply mistrustful of magic to work together.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Okay, now it's real
It's official now. I have spent money on this podcasting thing. Doing a quick sound test of the first scene of Grizelda with the microphone that was built into my laptop led me to the conclusion that my voice sounded all right, but the background noise sounded like Snap, Crackle, and Pop were having a drunken keg party in the other room. The problem is that my mouth isn't close enough to the mic, at least when I'm sitting up straight.
Thank God for CNET. Between them and the more experienced podcasters on the Podiobooks community, I was able to pick out a Logitech USB microphone. It's supposed to be perfect for beginning podcasters, and the price wasn't enough to give me a heart attack. But it did still cost money. I've made a financial commitment to this venture.
Thank God for CNET. Between them and the more experienced podcasters on the Podiobooks community, I was able to pick out a Logitech USB microphone. It's supposed to be perfect for beginning podcasters, and the price wasn't enough to give me a heart attack. But it did still cost money. I've made a financial commitment to this venture.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Microsoft Office Assistant
ELIZA is a computer program designed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 designed to carry out a conversation with a human being – so realistically, in fact, that people who didn’t know better thought it was really intelligent.
Fast forward about forty years, and computer technology has made great strides. Though computers still aren’t intelligent the way we are, they’re getting closer. Computers now can solve problems without help and anticipate what their users are doing. And Microsoft, in its great wisdom, thought it would put artificial intelligence to use by inventing a little paperclip guy who would help us write our letters.
Recently I decided the time had come to make contact, break through. If ELIZA could carry on a conversation in 1966, surely Paperclip Man could do just as well in 2008. Here is how the conversation started:
ME: Hello.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Welcome to Microsoft Word Help.
So far this was pretty exciting. I was on the verge of a new era in machine-human interactions! I pressed on.
ME: What’s your name?
OFFICE ASSISTANT: About paragraph alignment, position, and spacing.
What? The conversation went downhill from there.
ME: You can’t really understand what I’m saying, can you?
OFFICE ASSISTANT: I opened a subdocument, but I can’t make changes to it.
ME: Look, an alien!
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Look words up in the thesaurus.
ME: Your mother was an 8-bit.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Design and build an index.
ME: Bugger off.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Word keeps asking me to enter something. How do I turn this off?
Sigh.
Fast forward about forty years, and computer technology has made great strides. Though computers still aren’t intelligent the way we are, they’re getting closer. Computers now can solve problems without help and anticipate what their users are doing. And Microsoft, in its great wisdom, thought it would put artificial intelligence to use by inventing a little paperclip guy who would help us write our letters.
Recently I decided the time had come to make contact, break through. If ELIZA could carry on a conversation in 1966, surely Paperclip Man could do just as well in 2008. Here is how the conversation started:
ME: Hello.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Welcome to Microsoft Word Help.
So far this was pretty exciting. I was on the verge of a new era in machine-human interactions! I pressed on.
ME: What’s your name?
OFFICE ASSISTANT: About paragraph alignment, position, and spacing.
What? The conversation went downhill from there.
ME: You can’t really understand what I’m saying, can you?
OFFICE ASSISTANT: I opened a subdocument, but I can’t make changes to it.
ME: Look, an alien!
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Look words up in the thesaurus.
ME: Your mother was an 8-bit.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Design and build an index.
ME: Bugger off.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Word keeps asking me to enter something. How do I turn this off?
Sigh.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Victory!
Let me tell you about the time I had installing LameLib on my computer last night! It all started when I did a sound test of the first chapter of Grizelda on Audacity and I wanted to export it to an mp3 so I could share it with the folks at the Podiobooks community. The computer tells me I need LameLib to do this. So after extensive poking around on the Audacity website, I find the LameLib download page.
There are two different versions of LameLib for Macintoshes, depending on whether yours has an Intel or a Power PC chip inside it. Even after the dust has settled, I'm still not sure what kind of a chip is inside my computer. I downloaded both versions, just to be safe, and proceeded to try to open the Power PC version with Stuffit Expander.
No dice.
The little progress bar gets to about 2/3 of the way to finish and stops there in cryogenic stasis. The same thing happens with the Intel chip version, except that it gets to about 3/4 of the way. Cancelling the Stuffit doesn't work either, and eventually I had to turn my computer off with the emergency shutoff.
Finally I figured out that it wasn't working because I had version 11 of Stuffit Expander, not version 12. Off I went to the Stuffit Expander people website, where I had to sign up on their mailing list to get the new version. I happily opened the .dmg and dragged it onto my hard drive. Only then did I read the "Before you install Stuffit..." notice that went with it. "Quit all running Stuffit programs and delete the old version of Stuffit before installing," it said. True to form, when I tried to open my LameLib files, the computer tells me that unexpected error -12000 has occurred. Oh, my God, I killed the computer!
After a few moments of panic, I deleted Lamelib and both versions of Stuffit, restarted the computer, and redownloaded everything. I installed Stuffit, opened LameLib, and to my relief, it opened. LameLib works, too: I did finally manage to export that file as an mp3.
There are two different versions of LameLib for Macintoshes, depending on whether yours has an Intel or a Power PC chip inside it. Even after the dust has settled, I'm still not sure what kind of a chip is inside my computer. I downloaded both versions, just to be safe, and proceeded to try to open the Power PC version with Stuffit Expander.
No dice.
The little progress bar gets to about 2/3 of the way to finish and stops there in cryogenic stasis. The same thing happens with the Intel chip version, except that it gets to about 3/4 of the way. Cancelling the Stuffit doesn't work either, and eventually I had to turn my computer off with the emergency shutoff.
Finally I figured out that it wasn't working because I had version 11 of Stuffit Expander, not version 12. Off I went to the Stuffit Expander people website, where I had to sign up on their mailing list to get the new version. I happily opened the .dmg and dragged it onto my hard drive. Only then did I read the "Before you install Stuffit..." notice that went with it. "Quit all running Stuffit programs and delete the old version of Stuffit before installing," it said. True to form, when I tried to open my LameLib files, the computer tells me that unexpected error -12000 has occurred. Oh, my God, I killed the computer!
After a few moments of panic, I deleted Lamelib and both versions of Stuffit, restarted the computer, and redownloaded everything. I installed Stuffit, opened LameLib, and to my relief, it opened. LameLib works, too: I did finally manage to export that file as an mp3.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Nick Adams Contest
Today I was notified that my short story, The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife, did not make it on to the next round of the Nick Adams Short Story contest. Ah, well. C'est la vie.
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