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On the latest Bitterest Pill (latest I’ve heard, anyway) Dan Klass talks about the desperation he hears in radio these days. Guess there’s more desperation out there than he might realize, as Infinity Broadcasting—you know, the folks who own all the radio stations not owned by Clear Channel—has decided that they’re going to convert one of their Bay Area AM stations to an all podcast format. This doesn’t mean that Infinity is going to start podcasting (”They’ve been doing that for months,” sez Granpa Ken scornfully, forcing me to dish out yet another verbal smackdown to the old guy), no, regular people will submit podcast type content for radio airtime and I guess Infinity is even offering to cover licensing fees for music.

I don’t know, I’m kind of ambivalent to this. I mean, it’s cool that Giant Corporate Radio© has decided to open up a little bit and that somebody out there is going to get some exposure to all the non-geeks of the world who barely know what an iPod is, much less that there are tons of original and free (in all senses of the word) content out there for the downloading. But… any submissions have to be FCC safe, which, I’m just guessing, excludes me, Freak and Freak’s johnson. And then there’s the whole TiVo-esque element of podcasting lost. It’ll be just like Podcasting, but on the program director’s schedule not yours. I just don’t know. It’s interesting, for sure, but I think it’ll be about as exciting as warm milk.

In other, kinda related news, some of you might have noticed no podcast from us this week. Sorry, but this is one of those weeks when life has gotten in the way. I had to go in super early two days this week and, on top of being sick, I’ve been massively sleep deprived. We would catch up on the weekend, but Freak has a funeral to attend. My condolences to Kelly and her family for their loss. We’ll be back up to speed for our customary podcasting time on Tuesday, thanks for understanding.

Okay, so there’s a bit of a hullaballoo about the idea of putting cameras and potentially microphones in taxis in Las Vegas. Seems the two sides are a) driving a cab is a dangerous job and cabbies need surveillance to protect them and b) people have the right to privacy in a cab and, while unspoken, the fear is that people will use fewer cabs if they are afraid that they may be on camera.

Well, I’m not going to argue the first point. Driving a cab is dangerous. I find it pretty weird though, that we would have privacy concerns in what may be the most heavily surveilled city in the free world. Next time you’re in Vegas, pay attention folks, there are cameras everywhere. The real headscratcher for me, though, is the fact that, of all the big cities I’ve ever been in (and that’s not too many, I’ll grant) Vegas is the only city where cab driver related crime is a problem where I have never seen a partition in a cab. Surveillance video is an expensive add-on kids. How expensive can it be to put a thick frickin’ sheet of lexan behind the cabbie? Not to mention the fact that while cameras may help to catch criminals, a simple fact is that some people just don’t care if there’s a camera present when they want to do bad things. If cameras were truly a deterrent we wouldn’t have “Caught on Tape” videos and television specials.

And ask yourself: if you were faced by a man pointing a gun at you would you rather have a camera or a bullet resistant window in front of you? Hm?

Originally posted to my other blog, Oceanside, Nevada

All I gots ta say is this: If ya’ll knew my dick like I know my dick, ya’ll bitches wouldn’t say shit. You love tales of the foreskin. Admit it. It’s ok. Everybody knows.

PS

Hey RJ, what’s the J stand for?

The show is uploading as I write this and I’m tired so don’t get your knickers all in a twist with anticipation, aight? Tonight Freak and I basically bitch about work with excursions into Mormonism and sex with dogs. To download directly, click on the attachment link below but do yourself a favor and grab the feed with an aggregator, eh? Just click the RSS link on the right or use the iTunes link to subscribe with that fine application.

Listening to the show during the post production phase with my lovely and incredible wife, TJ (who is, as I type, snoring in a rather unlovely but still incredible way) she shared with me that she thinks our listenership might be getting tired of hearing about Freak’s dick and that we need to branch out a bit. Well, listenership? What have you got to say? Drop us a line, use the comment line, leave a comment on the blog, whatever. Let us know what you want to know about life and living in Vegas and we’ll bend over backwards to tell you about it. Certainly ain’t bending over forwards for any of you sickos.

Enjoy folks, and good night.

So? What do y’all think of the banner? Gotta give props to the art-slave/beer-wench-in-training! That grrrrl gots skills! Hope everyone enjoyed the studio B show. If you guys enjoyed that, I got way more stories about my schlong, and most of them are just as bad, if not worse. Perhaps there’s a show segment in the future? Tales from the foreskin, or something like that…. anyhow, BBG has agreed to go on loving me for the time being, so a crisis has been averted, and a town saved. Thanks for the continued support, and also, lick my balls. What? They’re dry! Later kids. Look for me in a clean McDonalds bathroom near you.

Back again, peeps. It had to happen eventually, Freak’s Famous Hairclippers story. Live from our alternate site, Studio B with special guest Dutch, Freak’s heterosexual life-mate. After the Hairclippers story it’s pretty much all Freak talking about his dick again, though Dutch and I get in a bon mot here and there.

Special thanks go out to the BBG for being so understanding. We would never humiliate you without your full and informed consent. Thanks also to Flip, resident Art Slave for our spiffy new banner!

Direct download the show by clicking on the attachment link below. Subscribe with the XML link to your left. Feel free to leave a comment, send us an email or call our Gizmo line. And, as always, please show your support by clicking on the Vote for Us link on the right and putting in a good word for us at Podcast Alley or add us to your favorites on Podcast Pickle

For anyone who recognizes that reference, I commend thee. You are a true Parrot-head. For those who don’t ( and I suspect this may be the majority of you.) these are the words of none other than the Bard of the Beach himself, Mr. Jimmy Buffet. This weekend was by far one of the greatest in recent memory! Here’s how it all shakes out…..

Friday

3:00pm- Got off work, headed to a Lowes near you to try and spend the 100$ gift card that my dear mom got me for my birthday. Walked the store for 45 minutes and found multitudes of things I needed, bought none and left empty-handed.

4:00- Got home and set about waiting for BBG to get there and join me for a weekend of child-free frolic and dirty sex. Seeing as how she wouldn’t be over until 8, I opted to make good use of my time and I went upstairs to practice sex.

4:03- Finished rubbing the rhubarb and removed myself to my favorite chair downstairs to play MVP baseball 05 on my XBOX.

8:00- BBG showed up and I was gonna make fish tacos from scratch with the orange roughy I jacked from Wood’s house.

8:45- While trying to get dinner going, BBG made a point that it might be good if I were to go upstairs and fuck her NOW so we could get through the dinner-making without the incessant urge to hump, thus expiditing the whole process in a more timely manner.( She is so wise. That’s how come for why she’s the boss of me.)

10:30- Flopped out on the couch w the lady and discussed going to see the midnight showing of Sin City. This never happened, for at about 11, she went upstairs and never came back.

11:30- I finally went upstairs to locate my girlfriend, and found her naked in bed. Bummed because I wouldn’t be seeing the movie for a second weekend, I gave up the ghost and joined her. Happy, because in lew of going to my movie, I chose to get mine in the form of more booty for Freak. Let’s see her sleep through this.

11:35- I rolled off and asked her how she liked THAT. She sleepily mumbled something about not having to go to school today and turned over. I scratched my head and started to ponder how Sprite could possibly be better that 7up, and was asleep fifteen seconds later.

Saturday

9:00am- Got up with the lady and ended my 9 hour dry spell with some tastey morning sex, and we cleaned up and headed out to run errands.

3:00pm- Met up with the group we were going to see Jimmy Buffet with and headed down to the MGM Grand hotel and casino to start the binge drinking.

4:00- Got our first round of 5 drinks. 31 dollars. Began bitching about the price of drinks.

4:15- Got our second round of drinks. Tossed the money over without a second thought. ( see, the booze had me now, and all I could do was hold on and hope my wallet could take it.)

5:30- Stumbled over to Wolfgang Puck’s for our reservations for 10. Ate so fat, drank a ton, paid the 300$ tab and headed back out into the casino in search of a bar.

8:00- After about 6 more coronas, a shot of jager, and big-ass margarita, we headed to the arena for curtain.

8:10- Met one of the casino hosts who happened to be a friend of one of the guys in my group, and he upgraded our balcony seats for 15th row center floor seats.(This is one of the many joys of learning how to play the Vegas game. It all about who ya know!)

8-15>>>10:50- Enjoyed the best Buffet performance I had seen to date, rocked my ass off, and elbowed my girlfriend in the head while batting a beach ball. She “accidentally” spilled her rum and coke on my flip-flopped feet, and I drank 20 coronas while she grinded on my pal Andy. ( What, me worry?)

11:15- Got out of the show and headed to the sportsbook bar with gang to get more drinks and check the baseball scores.

12:05- Tried to leave, but as it was now officially BBG’s birthday, we had to get one more round. BBG was handed a Jager-bomb.( Shot of Jager dropped in a half glass of beer.) I tried to tell her no, she glared at me through the bottom of her empty glass.

12:25- Got a hellacious cramp in my foot trying to get comfy squished in the backseat of Andy’s truck while acting as a pillow for BBG, who liberally stretched out her 5′6″ frame and assed out.

12:30- Pulled up in front of my buddy’s house where we were crashing and with the help of my nigga Dutch, pushed/pulled/dragged BBG’s limp form from the back seat of Andy’s truck to the guest bedroom where we both crashed.

Sunday

6:45am- Woke up to BBG rubbin her ass on my crotch. Did the manly thing and gave’er a good rodgering, but instead of going back to sleep, she figured it was a s good a time as any to get up and start the day. I remained in bed. She ventured out into the living room to check on the other survivors from last night.

7:00- She returned to bed and told me that Dutch was sleeping with his mouth wide open, and that he didn’t respond to her poking his lips, and that I should put my dick in his mouth and get a picture. ( Dutch, you owe me one.) I told her this was probably due to the fact that after dropping us at the house, he and Andy had gone back out to drink and had probably just gotten in. ( I was right. They got home at 5:30am.) She reluctantly came back to bed, and we slept for a few more hours.

10:00- We for reals got up this time, and joined the crew out in the living room. Sent the nightowl drunk kids to the store for breakfast provisions and watched some NASCAR/Cubs vs. Brewers on the 60 inch flatscreen.

11:30- The bitches returned and I set about making eggs benedict for everyone. Brunch was excellent. In addition, there was a super frittata, fresh melon and ripe tomato slices.

12:25pm- After we ate, we busted out the suprise B-Day cake for BBG ( Angelfood……what else for my angel?) and did the traditional thing.

The rest of the day was spent with another quite interesting event. She was just having a quiet family bday party at home with family, and our parents met for the first time! What a trip THAT was! All in all, it was without incident, and the night ends w me writing this and BBG asking me to hurry up so we can watch the origional Amityville Horror( so we can be ready to see the new one!).

Any more writing and my fingers will be too cramped to use on her, so, I’m out fuckers. Look for me at Target.

FrEaK

In the interest of organization, I’ve added a new category for all the hot and dirty technical details, since I know you’re all just a bunch of sluts for things like how to edit your .htaccess file so you can redirect an XML request without your subscribers seeing it. Yeah, I don’t really know what that means either.

From now on, once technical stuff expires off the main page you can find it all lumped together in the “Technical Crap” category. You dirty nerds.

I hit a post on Slashdot a little bit ago that mentioned the phenomenon of “skypecasting,” which sort of suggested that this was the natural evolution of podcasting. The implication was that you could use Skype to distribute podcasts for free (Skype, being a voip program with p2p underpinnings, would seem like a natural for this) with no bandwidth concerns. Okay, that sound pretty cool. So I start looking around on the net for more info. The Unbound Spiral link gets a 404. Swell. The Moodle link (if you read the Slashdot post, you know what I’m talking about here) requires a registration. Even better.

So, off to Google. On Google, I find this, supposedly the definitive guide to skypecasting. In a nutshell, it’s a description about how to use Skype, plus Windows Sound Recorder plus something called Virtual Audio Cable (which sounds like a weak tea version of Audio Hijack) to record a Skype interview. There’s also hype about how you could potentially use this to turn an MP3 player into a Skype based radio station. This article has the interesting quote: “the level amount (sic) of required technical know-how makes it not for ‘mere mortals.’”

Well gee. To quote a film favorite of mine: “Let’s not start sucking each other dicks just yet gentlemen.”

First of all, unless I am gravely mistaken, we’re talking about recording a Skype call and that’s all. Audio Hijack Pro can do this right now (and, if you’ve read the pdf, you should agree with me that using AHP is orders of magnitude more simple). The pdf file I linked above mentions the seeming impossibility of mixing music into the interview with VAC, which is not a problem with AHP. Not to rain on your parade guys, I’m just saying. And, so far as I can tell, the “turn an MP3 player into a radio station” meme looks like nothing more than routing the output of your MP3 player to Skype so that people can listen to it just like they were listening to a phone call. Again, AHP ought to be able to do that without any trouble, but, really, why would you want to? If you want to stream audio, why not look at an audio streaming app? Unless you’ve got some way to allow someone to remotely trigger a file transfer with Skype (I don’t use Skype much, so I don’t know if this is possible) aren’t they just limited to listening passively to whatever you feed them? Maybe they could record it, but they still have to play it out in real time to do so. Sounds kind of like taping something off the radio to me. Feasible, but a rather significant step backward from the inherent time-shifting of podcasting.

I intend to keep my eye on this skypecasting thing. I think the idea of using Skype for distribution is interesting, but no more or less worthy than using Bittorrent. Both ideas solve the bandwidth issue, but each has some significant technical hurdles. For the time being, I’ll stick with paying for a low cost, zero bandwidth solution like Slapcast. Still, if you don’t have a Mac with OS X and you’re looking for what looks to be a very painful Windows podcasting solution, you might want to check this out. For my money, if you’re using Windows, I would look at iPodcast Producer first.

Disclaimer: I originally posted this on my personal blog: Oceanside, Nevada

Hey there. So, we got the fourth podcast recorded and I’m waiting on TJ to return home after dropping off Flip’s buddy Dee so I can do the (minimal) edit when I get an email that there’s a new comment right here on the blog. Being an absolute attention whore, I have to check it out. We love comments, please make more of them. Hey! It’s RJ, our first commenter (that neither of us is, you know, sleeping with) and all around nice guy. Seriously dude, you have no idea how cool it was to hear that we maybe didn’t suck as bad as we had feared. Then you had to go and ask about our setup.

Ah fuck.

See, I’m still very much learning this stuff, so I’m not exactly what you’d call an expert. Additionally I’m an absolute perfectionist geek so I probably spend way more time on this than I need to. Still, since you asked and I really wish someone had, you know, written this shit down somewhere, here you go.

Let me first say that there are more ways to podcast than I know. I’m constantly hearing about new ways to do it, from the extremely expensive and technical to the dirt cheap.

Our personal setup is based upon a studio design described by Hugo Schottman. You can see his very detailed description here. I record the show on my 12″ PowerBook G4 using two analog headset mics jacked into a Griffin iMic with splitters. I use Soundflower and Audio Hijack Pro per Hugo’s description, only without the noise gate. I play the intro and outro with iTunes, though I’m not happy with it and I’m investigating alternatives. Also contrary to Hugo’s setup, I record straight to AIFF. I had too much latency and too many artifacts when I tried to record to a compressed format.

When all is said and done, I use Garageband for postproduction, fixing levels, that crap. The best tip I can pass on (thanks again to Drew Domkus for this) for Garageband is this: when creating a postproduction session, make sure you set your tempo to 60, otherwise you won’t be able to import more than about 30 minutes worth of audio. When all the editing is done, I export to iTunes where I edit the ID3 info and then compress the file to something that shouldn’t choke anyone’s connection.

That’s kind of the nutshell description of how I do it, which works for me. A really good resource for you would be the forums at Podcast Alley, where you can find out about how a bunch of other smarter and more talented people do it. You also might try emailing other podcasters and asking them about their setups. Just keep in mind, though, that Dawn and Drew use Garageband for everything, Adam Curry has all kinds of cool toys, and the Lascivious Biddies, as far as I can tell, sit around an iSight webcam to do the Biddycast. There is no wrong way to do this, let me stress that. Except maybe to not do it at all.