Category: General

There are only a few podcasts I consider to be the absolute best; the kind that make me feel grateful that podcasting was invented. Number one on my list is Digital Flotsam. Why P.W Fenton likes my podcast back, I’ll never understand. But I’m truly honored. Others that are really, really up there are WGBH Morning Stories, Earthcore (R.I.P.), and 5 Minutes with Wichita.

That’s it. The rest are just filler, except for Daily Source Code, which I listen to because life feels incomplete without it.

Where does mine fall in there? If I weren’t the host, I wouldn’t listen to it. Then again, Stanley Kubrick hated every one his own movies. I can totally relate.

Today while catching up on old episodes of Morning Stories, I heard about…ooooh, earthquake. Second strong tremor in the last couple of days.

All done, I’m still here. Tony Kahn of Morning Stories gave a plug for a podcast called The Seanachai. It’s the kind of podcast where immediately after listening to the latest show, you download every past episode, listen to all of them back to back, and from then on you check for a new episode first thing every day.

Now that I have a working iPod, I have sampled a veritable shitload of podcasts lately, and honestly, the only one that stands out is The Serenachi. Patrick Mclean is more talented than this new form of media deserves.

Work is very, very busy, and frankly, stressful. On the plus side, I’m producing a Japanese language podcast for the Canadian Education Alliance. I don’t do the talking, but I do everything else. I really enjoy listening to the interviews of Japanese who are studying in Canada. My favorite was the latest episode, #3. If Chie had her own podcast, I’d definitely listen to it. Episode 2’s interview was also interesting. If you want to hear what very heavy Osaka-ben Japanese sounds like when spoken by a teenage girl, give it a listen.

After receiving a very nice E-mail from someone at Apple Japan this morning who suggested we meet and discuss the possibility me doing an in-store presentation at one of their Tokyo boutiques (Weeeee!), I hope this doesn’t ruffle any feathers.

First off, the new video iPod looks beautiful. It won’t be long before we start seeing train commuters zoning out on their iPods instead of their keitai. However, it’s not the only handheld video player out there. I just learned that iRiver has one that’s larger, supports more codecs, has a built-in FM Tuner, can record audio and is in the same price range. I’m looking for something (besides a chloroform-soaked rag or a pair of gag balls) that’ll keep the kids quiet on long trips, and the iRiver, with its larger screen, might be better suited for it.

Second, if you want to sync your ipod to more than one PC, take a look at the freeware iTunes substitute Ephpod. I like to load some podcasts into my iPod in the morning at home, then add/delete some before I leave work. I also like backing up my library up once in a while, and Ephpod will not only dump all your MP3s into a specified directory, but also organize and rename the files based on the ID3 tags. Not only that, it also lets you easily edit the tags of a whole slew of files at once. There are many more very, very useful features it offers, like scanning the iPod for corrupt, orphaned or duplicate files.

I also learned through the Ephpod site that Updater 1.3.1 can be used to reformat a 1st or 2nd generation Mac iPod for Windows, giving my old and busted retro-cool player a new lease on life. Armed with that and an after-market replacement battery, some of you out there might be able to pick up a used model very cheap, since it might not look appealing to eBay’ers, Yahoo’ers and Rakuten’ers who aren’t in on this nifty little hack.

Yet again. Any requests on what you’d like to see? I’ll try to make something more similar to a documentary rather than just a series of clips slapped together. I’ll have to be careful not to annoy my family by being more focused on capturing everything on video than simply enjoying the outing.

Doing the post-production on both a podcast and a videocast is such a nusiace that I don’t think I’ve ever managed to put out both flavors, even though I’ve recorded both audio and video on a number of occasions. So this time I’ll try to do enough narration on the video that I can save a copy of just the audio and release it as a podcast.

Unless…would anyone be interested in editing the raw audio?

Even though I’m buried in the bottom of every podcast directory and I don’t have thousands of subscribers and I haven’t been receiving much feedback lately, I love checking the visitor map every day and seeing that there are listeners even in places I never knew existed. That map is all I need. And some positive feedback every once in a while.

Shout out to whoever-you-are in State College, Pa. I graduated in 1990, back when you were, what, two years old?

That was a real Mexican poncho, I’ll have you know. Not a Sears Mexican poncho. Those things were high fashion back then, along with porn mustaches.

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Originally uploaded by RichPav.

A few months ago I stayed in Tokyo on Friday night and had to take the first train out on Sat. morning to go back home to Koga. I arrived at the station too early and had plenty of time to kill, so I decided to pretend I was a real photographer. Until now I completely forgot about these photos, but I quite like them.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richpav/sets/1075025/

I uploaded a soundscape of Akabane Station to herroflomjapan.com/chum_audio/ A musician who’s recording a CD asked me a long, long time ago to record some train station sounds. I wanted to make it into a podcast but I’m far too busy with work. Last night we recorded the first podcast for one of the five organizations run by the ten or so of us in the this office. It’s in Japanese, I’m not on it, and I wish I had time to redo it to improve the quality of the audio and add some of the outtakes to the end of it.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ceapodcast

Lots of other stuff in the queue too: a bilingual interview with a coworker about racism and discrimination in Japan; a widescreen, hires version of my walk to work, a view of Tokyo from the top of Roppongi Hills, the video I want to make to show off my bitchin’ new keitai…

There’s been quite a ruckus in the podosphere lately caused by a hate speech podcast. They’ve been posting extremely offensive messages in various forums and have been banned from many. Except Podshow-related sites run by Adam Curry.

I like Adam. He’s a good guy. He’s made the decision that hate mongering scum have the right to free speech on Podshow web sites. His company, his decision. I disagree with it. If the four of you who voted for me at Podcast Alley this month want to keep voting for me, please do it at Podcast Pickle.

I’ve been thinking about doing a podcast on what it’s like to be the victim of racism and discrimination, but frankly, I don’t know if I could get through it. Making the transition from being a white Anglo-Saxon male in the US to a minority in a foreign land was rough and painful, but it was a real eye-opener to how disgusting racism and discrimination truly are. In fact, until the tables were turned and racism became an issue that occasionally affects me and my family, maybe I used to be a closet racist myself.

So that’s the way I feel, and very strongly at that. It might not be the way you feel. I’m OK with that. Lots of people have strong feelings one way or the other. That’s why it’s called a controversy.

No flaming on my blog please. Hate and anger just breed more hate and anger, and I’ve never been good with handling either. That’s why I want nothing to do with Podcast Alley anymore. Being in the same community as those racists brings out emotions in me I don’t want to deal with.

Just a head’s up. As soon as I can find the time, I’m going to reinstall WordPress from scratch. I might have to clear out the database too, which means everything might disappear then come back in a way that’ll make your subscription go bonkers. Kinda like those Cambodian zombies, actually.

If I could, I’d simply move the blog to WordPress.org, which sounds like an excellent place to put a blog these days, but changing my URL would cause an even bigger headache than this comment bug from hell.

Are people using the Safari browser the ones who get an error message when trying to post a comment?

Update: Nope, that’s not it. Could someone who can’t post a comment please save this debug page as HTML and e-mail it to me?

I’m getting real tired of this.

In other news, I went to the Apple Shibuya Store last night and bled all over the Genius Bar. I was trying to crack open my junky old retro-cool 1G iPod with a stick of plastic and sliced my knuckle. Did you know that if your iPod refuses to recharge, removing then re-attaching the battery often fixes it? The Genius didn’t. He was quite impressed. Got the drive reformatted, now for the first time in many months I have a working iPod.

While waiting 1 1/2 hrs. for my turn I subscribed a few iBooks to HFJ and saved some videos to their desktops, but they probably clean them out every night. I also did a lot of drooling over Garageband and iMovie. They’re nice, but not worth the overpriced hardware they run on.