the stuff in my head

After many years of service, my old Altec Lansing computer speakers finally gave up the ghost and it was time to find a replacement. I purchased the previous set on a recommendation for an audio engineer friend, but now I was on my own.

I wasn’t just looking for a good deal, because not just any speaker system would do. As I edit audio on a pretty regular basis, I need a good but not phenomenal set of speakers: too good and I’ll be hearing things most people never hear causing me to over compress or over tweak a file; not good enough, and I won’t enjoy listening to my music collection on them.

I may have erred a bit on the side of “too good” but I went with the Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX system. They were on sale at Best Buy and I had a gift card I’d been meaning to use so I went for it.

I did zero online research, read no reviews and didn’t even price check them against online stores. I lucked out — I didn’t pay too much more than I would have online. They are a great sounding set of speakers, are black (like my monitor and computer), and they have a headphone jack (a feature I very much missed).

In response to DJ Chuang’s request, I hacked together a screen scraper/RSS podcast maker script.

Basically it grabs the HTML from a page, finds the MP3 links and creates a RSS feed out of them. Some of the code is borrowed from various sources on the net (thanks Google).

WARNING: You could really piss off the recipient of the traffic this can generate. I take no responsibility for what you do with this, it’s a proof of concept, use it at your own risk.

I’m offering up the source code for someone else to take it and run with it, I don’t have the time of energy to improve it beyond where it is.

Grab the source file (zipped PHP file).

I’m sitting in Dunn Bros editing the latest Creative Church podcast, and I was just struck at how… un-communal a coffee shop can be. It may not always be this way, but right now, we are merely a bunch of cohabitating strangers… united by coffee (although I had a smoothie). We’re sharing space, but not much else.

Hmmm… it was more profound in my head… perhaps more will percolate later (pun intended).

While I was in Charlotte I was part of a podcast at Conversatio Fide (via Skype), on the topic of Technology and the (emerging) Church. The ‘cast also includes Jen Lemen, DJ Chuang, and Aaron Klinefelter (host).

It almost didn’t happen… DJ’s DSL was being fussy, as was Dustin‘s (the house I was at that night). But, in the end, everything was up an running and it happened, just a bit later than planned.

MP3 Link

Aaron Flores‘ Videoblogging session from the Internet Evangelism for the 21st Century Conference is available online FREE. You can watch it over that the conference site. If you like it, you watch the rest of the streams for only $20, including my podcasting session(s) and the Blogging Session starring Will Samson, Steve Knight, Stephen Shields, DJ Chuang and myself.

Tim Bednar over at eChurch shares some podcasting observations and how he uses Skype to record.

Ten Things I’ve Learned Podcasting and how to record using Skype