#aulog

[justhere4coffee]

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Playing with the mic stand and some new plugins in Audacity. I appear to have approximated a certain heavily trademarked robot/cyborg (depending on timeline)...

[justhere4coffee]

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Stream of consciousness time. Actually forming thoughts in order to vocalise them is vaguely therapeutic, so I decided to talk through my issue du jour. No edits, although I did make a couple of false starts which I deleted & started over. Transcription down there. VVV

Key: mispronunciations, non-english words emphasised words (noises off) [editorial comment]

Hello again! I’m making a new recording today, for 2 reasons: 1, I have my new pink fuzzy thing on top of my microphone, and I want to see if it makes any difference; 2, I have some stuff I really want to get out of my head. Because this is going to be a stream-of-consciousness thing, I’ve not made a script, and I’m also not going to edit this afterwards.

Right.

Please excuse pauses, ums, ahs, slurps, lip smacks, et cetera, et cetera.

So, anyway...

I had the weirdest dream last night - in fact, I had two weird dreams. The first weird dream, I can’t really remember much about. The second weird dream, involved me telling people about the first weird dream! That’s rather meta; I haven’t had that happen before. There were some things in the dream that were essential to how that universe worked, for example I wasn’t telling somebody who was there, I was telling someone over the phone. It was a cordless phone; in fact, it looked like an old flip-phone, but it only worked if I was standing on the bed, holding it up to a small metal cage on the wall.

I know. Weird.

Anyway. I think it’s dreams like that which are causing my current “dream issues,” because... I don’t want to go to bed. I really feel quite intimidated by the idea of going to bed. I feel like I’ve not accomplished anything during the day, I get about 6 hours (spread across 3 or 4 different sessions) then I wake up and I think “I’ve got nothing else to do today.” I accomplish this nothing, and feel like I have accomplished nothing! It’s very circular.

But then time wears on; I get tired in the evening and... I don’t want. to go. to bed. It’s not that I’m not accepting that I’m tired, it’s that I know i’m not going to enjoy what happens next, so I put it off.

(big sigh)

Past couple of weeks have been like that. It’s kind of the same as last time I was having issues? It’s not quite as severe, so I’m not worried yet - I am still able to get to sleep, I am still feeling rested, but... The whole process is just abhorrent. It’s weird. (Today’s Word of the Day is “weird,” if you haven’t noticed.)

(pause, sigh)

See? I make all these wonderful noises. Aren’t you lucky to hear them?

I’m buying... “I’m buying”? I have bought! I have bought a stand for my microphone, because at the moment I have to hey-owld... I have to hold it here in my hand, pointing at my face. It’s a bit uncomfortable, and it means if I twitch around, or change hands (tapping noises) you can here (more tapping noises) that kind-of tapping. So, what I’ve bought is one of these um, angle-neck things [I meant “anglepoise”] that clips onto my desk next to my chair, then will lean across over my chair in front of my face. This will make my life a little bit easier because I like to be animated with my hands, even though you can’t see them; it’s just part of who I am.

(small sigh)

Right. What else can I talk about? I don’t know... I think that’s enough for now.

Sleep: It really fucks me off.

[justhere4coffee]

I breathe. I can’t help it, it’s a bad habit I picked up very soon after birth and I just can’t seem to shake it. Normally it’s not a problem, but when it comes time to make an aulog or other recording then it can be a downright liability. Luckily, Science has come up with a solution, or at least a way of minimising respiratory disruptions to the recording process. Behold, the wind shield.

Those little clingfilm-wrapped sausages are how they arrived in the post, and the larger item on the left is how it appears just before you jam it over the top of your microphone. I’ve actually stored the 4 sausages inside the open one until such time as I next use my mic, the size difference is that great. It’s a brilliant, ingenious method of packaging and distribution, and it means that I don’t have to find another special hideyhole to keep them in; instead, they’ll happily slip into the protective wallet my mic came with, and I’ll hardly even notice they’re there until I need one. And yes, they did them in the more usual black, but considering my headphones I thought these were far more appropriate! (Also makes them much harder to lose, and less prone to theft.)

[justhere4coffee]

World 1.0 problems

As I get more confident with my audio recordings, I’m happier to try experimenting with different things. Listeners of the latest aulog will have noticed the inclusion of a couple of prerecorded sound effects and post-processing modulations. And so I had a quick poke about in the dim reaches of the interwebs for sound effect collections and compilations...

I’ve just finished downloading one such collection: thousands of sounds in dozens of genres, all handily brought together on a multi-CD release. All sounds great so far, so what’s the catch?

Each disc has been individually compressed.

Meaning each disc now has to be reconstituted.

For the sake of my ageing processors, I’m doing them in serial, so it’s only taking a couple of minutes per file, but still - it’s going to take my batch file 2 more hours to complete! And the absolute worst bit is, the “compressed” files hardly even saved any space - and even if they had, I need to now waste twice as much disc space to recover the contents!

Gah!

[justhere4coffee]

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New AuLog! This is the story all about how my life got switched, turned upside down. I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I became JustHere4Coffee.

(Shooting script sans a couple of adlibs & trims under the cut.)

Good morning, ladles and jellyspoons. Or good afternoon, good evening, or even good night - it all depends where you are when you’re listening.

Something I’ve mentioned in earlier posts is that I’ve used a different name on most other websites to the one I use here, so I thought I’d talk a bit about that.

When I first started using the internet, I’d visit a friend in IT at his place of work and surf using the company’s computers, which were connected to an ISDN line. This was blisteringly fast in those days, with a full-screen 1024*768 bitmapped wallpaper image downloading in just a couple of minutes! Of course, then you’d have to split-archive it to make it fit onto your floppies so you could take it home, but that’s another story.

Yahoo! (yodelling sound effect) was the latest up-and-coming search engine slash portal slash content provider, kind of like AOL but without the ringfencing. The first account I made there consisted of a username formed entirely from an old phone number, because I was young and dumb and couldn’t think of a “handle,” but knew that using my real name or any variation thereof was Right Out. Besides, initially it was just so I could have somewhere to store my favourite bookmarks, which was a groundbreaking feature; the fact a *free* email address was included was nice, but not important.

As I got more comfortable with this new toy, I started branching out into other areas and the biggest time sink back then was chatrooms. Thing is, due to a bug in Yahoo’s code, you couldn’t chat using a name that started with a number, so I had to come up with something different. Something vaguely original. Most importantly, something that didn’t have to have half a dozen numbers trailing on the end because that many other people had already thought of the same original thing.

I sat, and pondered. My friend sat & chatted online, tabbing out now and then to do the work he was being paid for. I pondered some more. I reached for my coffee, because I was thirsty and I could stomach it back then (and there weren’t many alternatives available in the office.) And that’s when inspiration struck. (tada.wav) It was a running joke that if any of his bosses came around, my visits would be excused that I’d just come in for a coffee. Just here for coffee. Change the “for” for the number “4”, because that’s what the cool kids did back then, et voilà! This became my chat alias, and in time I migrated it to an account of its own, the inception date of which I now use as the anniversary of my renaming.

The story behind OneCarefulOwner is even less exciting, so I won’t bother boring you with that one. Suffice to say that I was keeping some activities separated (don’t cross the streams!) but I’m no longer bothered with such nonsense. In fact, I plan to rename this blog soon and retire OneCarefulOwner from public life; it’s not a bad name but it’s also not who I really am, it’s just one facet.

Anyway, I hope that was interesting or at least amusing. Recording this has been another lesson in the art of performance; I tried to do it off-the-cuff and ended up with lots of ums and ahs and fluffs and pauses, so in the end I wrote myself a script which I’ll be pasting under the cut as a transcription.

Thanks for listening, and talk to you again soon!

(Oh, the new album art is the exact brand and shade of my headphones. Snazzy eh?)

[justhere4coffee]

Typical. I felt like making an aulog earlier but the screaming hordes were out in force. Now they’ve finally gone home to annoy their parents, I can’t think of anything to say! :( Shall try again tomorrow, but for now I’m calling it a day.

[justhere4coffee]

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Right. Here we go, this is how my new mic sounds - and I like it. Best fuck-up ever. I’m definitely keeping it, at least for a few months. Album art featuring my gorgeous pink headphones; while I filtered it, the colours were left untouched!

I’m going to call this kind of post AuLogs, for Audio Blog - like Vlogs are Video Blogs? Alogs didn’t feel right though, so this is what I settled on. Suggestions for future recordings gratefully received!