I had the pleasure this evening of “interviewing” the two leading lights of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Austin Tichenor and Reed Martin.

I put “interviewing” in quotation marks because we really just shot the breeze for awhile. Neither they nor I really had any particular question points or theme in mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

On March 21, 2005, the first edition of The Word Nerds went onto the Internet. With that my personal journey into the world of podcasting began. It’s been a great two years. Thousands of people know who I am, more or less, because of that podcast. It has succeeded far beyond my wildest expectations.

The first edition (my partners Howard Chang and Howard Shepherd and I decided to call our shows “editions” rather than “episodes,” since we weren’t telling stories) was just a simple five-minute speech-only monolog. I was recording directly into my iBook’s internal microphone, primarily to learn how to use the Audacity recording software. When it was over, I decided the edition was good enough to keep. It is still the first show in our podcast feed. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Curry is a former radio and MTV deejay, an early Internet entrepreneur, and one of the creators of podcasting. He appears to have been so busy doing all those things that he skipped his high-school earth science and biology classes.

In his Daily Source Code edition #560, for March 9,  Curry gushed about a “fantastic” program he saw on channel 4 in the UK, “The Global Warming Swindle.” (Listen to the DSC at about 24:37 from the beginning to hear this segment.)

As Curry presented it, this TV program is about the “other side” of the global warming “debate,” in which the notion of man-made global warming is challenged. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of years ago, Christmas 2004, to be exact, my wonderful wife bought me a 20 Gb audio-only 4th-generation iPod. It was a wonderful treat. I spent January of 2005 loading most of my favorite CDs onto it, and then began to wonder what the fuss was all about.

A Google search or two for “iPod” kept kicking up links to something called “podcasting.” I explored further, and my life was changed. I became a member of the second wave of podcasting, and I podcast to this day.

Last night, my iPod slipped off a table and hit the floor. This had happened a couple times before, but last night did it in. Read the rest of this entry »

I just got back from meeting my podcast buddy Bob Wright, producer of the Baseball History Podcast. He’s in DC for a conference, and we met (for the first time face-to-face) and went down to the new stadium neighborhood, where I took some pictures. Here’s “your game announcer Bob Wright” Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking more about this “Bum Rush the Charts” thing. Just trying to figure out why I should spend my 99¢ on a band whose music doesn’t do much for me.

Who stands to benefit? Well, Podshow, certainly, to the extent there’s any publicity wash from this campaign. Black Lab, no doubt: lots of people who really don’t know or like them buying their track. But “amateur media”? Come on, give me a break!

Black Lab is a band whose music I don’t really love; it’s just not my style. Even Podshow’s number one satellite repairman P.W. Fenton said the same thing on his most recent Digital Flotsam podcast. I’d never listen to them on my own.

So my participating in this campaign is like putting 99¢ into some Salvation Army kettle somewhere, Read the rest of this entry »

A group of (Podshow-affiliated) podcasters have mounted a campaign to “Bum Rush the Charts” on March 22. In the spirit of “bringing the Media Man to his knees,” these podcasters want to show the Big Media how powerful we “little” podcasters are, by pushing an independent-label band, Black Lab, to the top of the iTunes charts for one day, March 22.

Thinking back to the rah-rah spirit with which I undertook podcasting in 2005, I’m inclined to shout “Yeah!” and hold my right fist in the air, thumb and pinky finger extended in a “rock-on” posture. We’ll show them who the powerful people are in the music biz. This is the quaint world-view I held about 9-12 months ago.

Then I reflect on it, and start to wonder: just exactly who is going to be impressed by this? Read the rest of this entry »

In this morning’s Washington Post, Frank Ahrens reviewed a new book by Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. Ahrens points to the conventional wisdom of a year ago, that held that the ownership of the major media (meaning radio, television, and music) was overly consolidated. Ahrens avers that the media world has turned upside-down in the past year. Clear Channel is selling media properties, as are the New York Times, Knight Ridder, Walt Disney and others.

And to anybody who listens to or looks at media on the Internet, it’s obvious that there is no more media hegemony. When I was 10 years old, 73 million people saw the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Read the rest of this entry »

So I haven’t really been all that political in this blog, but I was home yesterday and had President Bush’s press conference on the television for a bit. Wow, what an inarticulate human being.

Geezer that I am, I’ve lived through ten U.S. presidents. Every one of them, plus the two prior to my birth (FDR and Truman) spoke in front of radio and television microphones. They represented a lot of speaking styles, several different areas of the country, and a wide spectrum of political views.

In my entire life, there has never been a president who came across as a bigger babbling idiot than George W. Bush. When he speaks, he just seems to have trouble thinking up things to say. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in the middle of a massive server move this week, and I’m getting more education than I bargained for.

I’m trying to move three domains (thewordnerds.org, davesmidlife.com, and daveshepmagic.com) to one account at BlueHost. The BlueHost folks are very helpful, their servers are apparently robust, the company is the beneficiary of many good online reviews, the service is cheap.

As you can see if you are one of the six people worldwide reading this post (ever), davesmidlife.com came over without a problem. It’s a little old WordPress blog and nothing more.

The big, important one is for The Word Nerds. The blog seems to have moved okay, and the forum has also successfully moved (although I still have to install anti-spambot modifications).

I am quite concerned that my iTunes does not see the Word Nerds podcast feed, but it may be too soon after the repointing of my domain name. Maybe the Internet is still looking in two places for my site. (Man, I hope so. This looks unsettlingly like a problem I was having with GoDaddy before I dumped them.)

Also, my K2 WordPress theme for The Word Nerds doesn’t work, so I’m using plain vanilla, with no graphic header and no sidebar links, for the time being.

Several domains that I own, that I intend to forward to the ones above, are not forwarding properly.

I am learning a lot about MySQL, WordPress, domain name assignments, and the Internet in general. However, I would have been happy with somewhat less education and somewhat more transparent functionality.