Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Podcast Refreshed, Other Updates

So, _thought_ that I wrote a weblog entry Monday describing my mountain bike crash. I have a vivid memory of writing it... but it does not show up in Blogger. Not as a published posting, not as a saved draft -- not at all. This has never happened to me before. Very strange. Did I hallucinate it? It isn't in Google's cache. It's just gone.

Netflix, which has so far delivered movies as regularly as clockwork, has suddenly not sent anything in two weeks. According to their site, they never received the last two movies we returned. Lost in the mail? Stolen? I asked one of our family friends who also uses Netflix and she says that she, also, has suddenly stopped getting any new mailings. Coincidence?

FOLLOWUP A FEW WEEKS LATER: it turns out we had the discs... they had just gotten lost. Not the fault of either Netflix or the P.O. Oops...

Anyway. I crashed my bike on Saturday, while out riding with my son, and my injuries are mostly bruises except for a possible fracture in my wrist, so I'm wearing a splint. I can't bear the idea of rewriting the whole story, so that's the capsule version. I was wearing a helmet. My bike is damaged, and needs some repair work. So is Isaac's, although he was not hurt.

I have put up some new content in the William Hope Hodgson podcast: some explanatory clips, and then the first chapter of The Boats of the Glen Carrig, set to Creative Commons-licensed music and ambient sound. Chapter 1 features music from the dark ambient album The Laurentian Divide, by Samsa, which you can download at darkwinter.com, and canoe sounds from wanderingear.com. Very cool stuff! You could call the result "ambient horror."

If there is interest I will produce all 17 chapters. If there is no interest I will probably produce the next few only. I have recorded the first five but not edited and mastered everything yet.

I have also updated the category tags and removed the old material -- I wasn't happy with the audio quality of my earlier work. I still have the dry recordings, so it is possible I will re-master them in the future, although some of the original files have the snowball crackling problem evident, despite my best attempts to edit it out.

If you are already subscribed, you should be able to just see the new material show up when you update the podcast. If you suscribe fresh, you will only see the new material. The podcast home page in the iTunes store still shows all the old files, and none of the new files, although I sent their server a "ping" request asking it to update the podcast. This might fix itself; if not, I'll see if I can get technical help.

I also submitted my audio review of A Scanner Darkly to the reviews editor at Escape Pod, but so far have gotten no reply. I am disappointed, because my own opinion is that I made an entertaining and weird little review, which I thought would fit Escape Pod quite well. I should just be patient, I guess, and remember that "no answer yet" does not necessarily mean "you suck."

No more for today -- typing is painfully slow with one wrist in a splint! And I'm not so aggressively fixing typos. With luck maybe at my followup appointment they will tell me I can get by without it.

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