Day: May 11, 2007

5 Borough Bike Ride

So, I headed into Manhattan last weekend with a few guys from church to do the Bike New York 5 Borough Bike Ride. Good times were had by all.

Statue at St. John the DivineWe got into the city on Saturday afternoon. We stayed at the New York Youth Hostel, upper west side. Walked around for a long while after we got there, and managed to put back both a plate of pasta at the hostel’s carbo-loading supper, as well as half a small wood-oven pizza (with whole wheat crust!) at a great restaurant down the street Saturday night. We also walked up to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine Absolutely amazing, but an odd vibe. Even though it’s an active church, it felt like I was walking through the Cloisters more than the church. Then, there was this bizarre statue outside. It had something to do with peace, but I just kind of liked that everyone was standing on a scary looking crab. And the avenging angel’s pretty darn sweet – ought to be a comic about him.

Continue reading 5 Borough Bike Ride

Podcast Workflow

Chris Brogan asked for podcast workflows today. Mine follows:

We use an Roland Eridol MP3 recorder patched into the PA to capture the audio feed. One of the chior members turns on the recorder as they go out at the beginning of the service, and turns it off at the end of the service. We capture audio at CD quality (44100 sample rate, 24 bit).

After coffee, I go grab the SD card out of the recorder, and take it home. I use Audacity and my MacBook to trim the file – start just before the Gospel reading, and end at the end of the post-sermon prayer.

Once the file is trimmed, I do a high-pass filter with a cutoff at 70 Hz to get rid of any 60Hz that we picked up from the electrical system, and a low-pass filter at about 3.5 KHz to get rid of any higher frequency noise. I’ve experimented with the “Noise Removal” effect, but it either
1) Doesn’t do much; or
2) Adds digital artifacts.

I then export the file as a 44.1KHz/24 bit WAV, and run it through the Levelator.

Re-import the output into Audacity, and use the Lame MP3 encoder to export as 11.5KHz/8 bit MP3.

Our platform is WordPress with the PodPress plugin. I use the FireFTP plugin in Firefox (Flock, actually) to upload the file.

Then, it’s a matter of New Post -> Include audio file -> Post; and we’re done.

The only trouble we ran into was trying to figure out why our initial posts sounded like chipmunks in the flash player included with PodPress, but that turned out to a non-standard MP3 bitrate on our part.

Dialogue

Setting: A three-year old’s bedroom, morning, before work. We’ve been watching Zabomofoo, and Nate is putting on pants (YES!)

Characters:

Daddy

Nate (the three-year old)

D: (Sings) While walking with the Nate one day, Daddy and Jacob saw something strange, a bouncing little creature who loved to jump and play… (Spoken) Nate, what do you think we saw in our yard?

N: A monkey.

D: (Laughs) That would be cool, but I was thinking a squirrel. You know there’s no monkeys in our yard.

N: (seriously) There ought to be. (Smiles)

Exunt

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