Amazing Race 8 – Episode 11

Dear Amazing Race,
Thanks for visiting our airport. We have a lovely city as well.
Love, Minneapolis, MN

Detour: Slide it or Roll it
You’re in Canada and you don’t go curling? That’s like, well, going to Canada and not curling.

This is why I like the Lintz’s – they have such enthusiasm. Makes armchair travel all worth it.

They have to find a door on the back of a non-descript warehouse? Why didn’t they just stick around Minneapolis for the final? We’ve got curling and non-descript warehouses with ‘J’s painted on the doors.

I’ve been hoping for a catch-up this entire episode. Looks like I got it – the search the stadium for 5 minute-apart departure times for the next morning, should bring everyone neck and neck.

(Oh yeah, and I vote for Jen to do the trapeze catch.)

Jen says when she flew back from visiting me in Germany (almost a decade ago, wow) the pilot pointed out the CN Tower.

Detour: Ship or Shoe
Jen just gave me a #10 “are they serious?” look after Phil described the ‘Shoe’ task. So, um, I’ll be hiking up a ship.

On a related note, we checked out the Cinderalla holiday exhibit at Fields downtown earlier tonight. Lots of fun – the exhibition designers did some very cool mirror work to show the magical transformations. The little man slept through it.

Roadblock: Geography Puzzle
I’m taking this one. I remember a puzzle from my youth very similar to this one – though that one didn’t have the Canadian provinces – and it was much smaller.

Final Standing of Garrick’s Favorites:

  • Lintz – #1

This is the second time I was on the end of my seat hoping for my favorite to win. Sure, it wasn’t like last season where I stopped watching.

Jen’s closing thoughts, “They’re such good kids.”

Special thanks go to Tivo for making this 2-hr finale much easier to get through. I now consider pausing live-TV a necessity for new parents. Coincedently, with all our stopping and restarting – we ended at 10pm.

Looks like we’ll meet all back here in Feb for another 2-person trek. Until then – it’s all non-elimination rounds.

Tuesday Triple Play – The ER Being Like an After Bar

This triple play was tough, two of these songs were sitting in the queue for a while now awaiting a third. This morning inspiration struck – like that scene from Pulp Fiction. Conventional wisdom says there’s a fine line separating pleasure and pain. These three songs aren’t sure which side they’re on.

Aggregation Not Adding Value?

Splogs or spam-blogs are a problem I’ve touched on before. I find them annoying and whenever Technorati points me to something smelling sploggy, I hit my SplogReporter bookmarklet.

My criteria for splog:

  • whole-cloth copying of another weblog’s post
  • minimal or nonexistent attribution to the original authors and weblogs
  • no explicit “we’re aggregating these sites” messaging

RSS makes it real easy to communicate with readers frequently and automatically – and real easy for robots to make splogs. Simply subscribing to an RSS feed isn’t “content theft” – doing so and not explicitly crediting the original site/author is. Absolutely. No Question.

I can appreciate Mark Cuban’s position that “a search on any blog engine should uncover the unique content on their original source” – not any of the derivatives. The lack of this strictness is why slogs exist anyway. I don’t agree with his position that aggregation doesn’t add value. Aggregation is a very simple way to provide value – Bloglines, Yahoo, and Google have based a number of products on that belief. To me, aggregation and search are two ways of answering the same problem. The trick is to know who’s the aggregator and who’s the source when the aggregator is being dishonest.

When I’m pulling together some feeds for an aggregator, say PodcastMN or MNRep I use the link – or preferably the guid – element in RSS to point back to the original author. Upon reviewing the spec while writing this post, looks like source exists “to propagate credit for links, to publicize the sources of news items.”

Makes sense – and I’ve just added that tag into the aggregators. Seems to me being strict about RSS tags first and checking sources second is a useful to fight splogs and un-attributed content aggregation.

12-Step Podcast Production Process

Recently, I realized how convoluted and complex the production process is for the First Crack Podcast. Now, the process doesn’t need to be this complex. Nor did it start out this way for me. This process was an evolution, developed as I discovered the weaknesses of the applications I’m using and how I’m using them.

  1. Record in AudioHijack Pro ($32)
    AHP is more stable than GarageBand and Audacity – especially for recordings longer than 30 minutes. Before I switched to AHP for my raw AIFF recording – I’d easily lose 10% of my shows. AudioHijack Pro can handle all your mixing, ID3 tags, and uploading to the server (that’s what I do for the FastCast).
  2. Initial Edit in Audacity (Free)
    When you delete a section in GarageBand it leaves a hole, so you need to manually put the two pieces back together. Audacity automatically collapses the hole on delete – making the initial edit process go much faster. I export this initial edit as a WAV. I’ve also found Audacity easier than GarageBand to take a stereo track down to mono.
  3. Write up shownotes in MarsEdit ($25)
    The spellcheck and HTML shortcut keys make shownotes as easy as writing an email – and I don’t need to worry about accidently closing a browser window and losing what I’ve written.
  4. Conversion in QuickTime Pro ($30)
    GarageBand doesn’t like Audacity’s WAV file – misreads the kHz or something. So, I open the WAV in QuickTime Pro and export as an AIFF (QTP can reliably handle the initial record and easily copy/paste multiple files together).     Update 25 Jun 2007 – GarageBand now reads Audacity’s files.
  5. Open First Crack ‘base’ track in GarageBand ($79)
    I’ve got a GarageBand track with the intro and outro music already set, I record my voice-overs and import the AIFF file.
  6. Final Edit and Mixdown in GarageBand
    After giving it one more listen, I mix down and export to iTunes.
  7. MP3 Conversion in iTunes (free)
    Here I set the ID3 tags, artwork, and paste the first sentence or 2 of the shownotes into the comments field. I then convert to mp3 (56 kbps 44 kHz).
  8. Manual File Rename
    After the mp3 conversion, I track down the new file in my iTunes library, and manually rename it to FirstCrack_##-ShowName.mp3 – eliminating all spaces.
  9. Upload to server with Transmit ($30)
    Finally, I FTP the file to the server.
  10. Tell MarsEdit to ‘Send to Weblog’
    After the file is uploaded, I send the shownotes to the website.
  11. Open up post within WordPress‘ Admin Tool
    MarsEdit has two minor faults;
    1. It always sets the post category to ‘uncategorized’.
    2. It doesn’t trigger WordPress to automatically detect the mp3 file and create the ‘enclosure’ tag.

    I uncheck the unwanted category and hit ‘Save and Continue’ to trigger the mp3 enclosure creation.

  12. Celebrate – another podcast is up.

A Quick Reminder on Equivalent Power

Since finally listening to Dave Slusher’s the Human Touch presentation from the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘equivalent power’. The notion that if you want to rebut anything I write on any of my blogs, you can do so on your own blog or podcast. This is different than in traditional media where the publisher (newspaper editor, radio show screener, TV producer) can easily censor comments.

Then this gem shows up from the guy I thank for starting us down this righteous path of togetherness:

“When people get the idea that they’re on some righteous path that’s exclusive of others, that’s when I start shaking my head….Get a clue, we’re all bozos on this bus, and none of us gets out of this alive.” – Dave Winer

The Next Standard in Public Radio

When I started podcasting a year ago I was questioning Public Radio’s role in my life. The news and regular programs were no longer satisfying. Then they started the Current – kept me supporting them for a couple months. Then, it started to sound more like more of the same and hey, look, interesting stuff happening in podcast-land.

In the mail today was letter from Minnesota Public Radio asking me to help them raise an additional $3 Million before the year’s end. That’s $1 million / week for their capital campaign to build the Next Standard in public radio. This letter is on the heals of a very expensive ‘save the date’ flyer for another fund raiser early next year.

I can’t support them.

Raising multiple millions ($43) and asking for more smells too much like a pre-flameout dotcom or an insensitive, out-of-touch media conglomerate. Two things I don’t want associated with my public radio.

When I look around at regular individuals like you publishing blogs, podcasts, and video-blogs regularly and without millions of dollars, I think, “This is the public creating radio. This is public radio.”

No, we don’t need no sticking transmitters.

Related: 85% of 12-24 year olds choose their MP3 player over traditional radio as a preferred option for music…. “54% of the total sample says there is not a radio station in their area that plays their favorite music.”

Amazing Race 8 – Episode 10

Bills Bust

“Let’s just focus – we might have to eat some turtle.”

This is the Big Catch Up we’ve missed the last couple of episodes.

Detour: Pioneer Spirit or Native Tradition?
We’re going for assembling the wagon wheels and horse team. I’m feeling like the horse team might not be _that_ much trouble.

Buffalo Bill is one of my favorite Old West personalities. Great story on how one man can change….unless I’m confusing him with Wil Rogers. Eh, either way. First time we drove through Nebraska, we stopped at some roadside Buffalo Bill Cody attraction. More poop jokes in one spot than anywhere else. So many.

The photo kicking off this post I shot in Deadwood, SD this summer. I’m pretty sure it’s Buffalo Bill (and would appreciate a correction if I’m wrong – thanks).

Roadblock: Finding Colored Golf Balls?
In this challenge (find 4 golf balls of a specific color) the leader has the advantage only if they pick a color that’s easy to spot from a distance. Trailing the pack and being stuck with ‘green’ will guarantee a good walk spoiled.

Current Standing of Garrick’s Favorites:

  • Lintz – #2