Noooooo! Or, always back up your files

It's been an incredibly busy week here at lake Wobegon, but Thursday evening I had a couple of hours to myself and I thought I'd record a couple of episodes of Grizelda. Recording Ch. 3 went just fine, until I went to save it and accidentally called it Ch. 4. Lo and behold, when I open the folder of Audacity projects, I discover that instead of asking me, the program went and overwrote the existing Ch. 4, which I had already recorded and put a lot of time into editing! Trying to fix it I ended up breaking the Ch. 3 that I had just recorded. About three hours of effort, vanished into the digital aether.

I went to the Podiobooks author help site to see if there was any way I could salvage the two chapters, and came across a forum post with this title: Always Back Up Your Files.

I've learned my lesson.

Arrgh!

All the sound I recorded for Chapters 3 and 4 have to be thrown out because I keep breathing into the microphone every time I say "p" and "t." I'm making progress up a steep learning curve, but it's going slower than I expected. I might have to postpone Grizelda's air date so I have the summer vacation to work on it.

I can has light?

So the Lolcat Bible will likely induce eye-rolling for most people, but I think it's kind of an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Lolcat is a brand new language, spawned by the Internet. Is it a natural language or an artificial language? Semi-synthetic, maybe?

Progress

After some intensive recording, I've got the first five chapters in the can (which is how much Podiobooks requires you to submit up front). Now, onward to sound editing!

How Not to Sound Like You're in a Tin Can 101

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.

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"

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.