Conveyor Belt Sushi

Rich Pav 2 Comments

I wasn’t going to put this one out because the battery died before I could finish it, but what the heck. It’s not like this is Neilson ratings week or anything.

Tony provides the Japanese Phrase of the Day:

早くしてくれない？
はやくしてくれない？
Hayaku-shite kure nai?
“Would you please hurry the #$%! up?”

The “#$%!” part isn’t actually expressed in a specific word. It’s in the tone. He certainly didn’t learn that attitude from me.

Were you hoping for a podcast instead of a video? Actually, I’ve been practicing, but I haven’t recorded anything I feel like releasing. But if you really want to hear something and you don’t care if it’s not that great, you can download the file “EXMIC057.MP3” from this directory:

https://herroflomjapan.com/podcasts/

I haven’t listened to it. If you don’t like it, trash it and listen to something else. On the plus side, it has lots of subway noises because I didn’t hit the stop button while I was on the subway.

And about the contest: I’m not about to ask anyone to vote for me every day for two weeks. That’s plain absurd. I’m just happy I was nomiated.

VIDEO

20-60-20

Rich Pav 2 Comments

I don’t remember where I first heard this, but I remind myself all the time.

20% of people will love whatever you do. Another 20% will hate whatever you do. The remaining 60% can go either way.

There’s no actor, musician, artist, poet, author, politician or any other well-known person who is universially loved by everyone. The only way to avoid criticism is to never attempt to do anything meaningful with your life.

I’m sure there are lots of people who want to start their own podcast but a little voice in their head says, “But what if people think I suck and they hate me?” There is no “if.” Once your audience outgrows your circle of friends and family, someone out there is going to tell you just how bloody awful they think you are. And the bigger you get, the louder they get. That’s the way it goes. You just have to get used to it.

Adam Duritz, the lead singer of the Counting Crows, once had a kid walk up to him on the street and tell him, “Man, you suck.” Adam was so affected by it that he couldn’t write or perform for over a year.

In my life, I’ve been that kid and I’ve been Adam. This here podcast is my way of learning to be someone else. It’s good practice. I recommend it highly.

PodCastAward.com Nominees

Rich Pav 1 Comment

The shows nominated for awards at PodCastAwards.com have been announced. The nominees for soundseeing are:

Audio Collective
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheAudioCollective
http://www.audiocollective.net

Herro Flom Japan
http://feeds.feedburner.com/herroflomjapan
https://herroflomjapan.com

Notes From Spain
http://notesfromspain.libsyn.com/rss
http://www.notesfromspain.com/

Sound Seeing Tours
http://soundseeingtours.podshow.com/
http://soundseeingtours.podshow.com/?feed=rss2

The Richard Vobes Radio Show
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RichardVobesRadioShow
http://www.vobes.com/

I don’t know if I’d classify soundseeingtours.podshow.com as a podcast. It’s a web site that posts links to individual shows featuring soundseeing. And I didn’t realize Richard Vobes did soundseeing. His show is great for kids, BTW. All shiny and happy and stuff.

So anyway, please give them all a listen and decide which one you like best. If I get your vote, I’m flattered. If not, well, that’s OK too. Ya win some, ya lose some. Life goes on. From the beginning, my original plan included making my own award and giving it to myself. Maybe I’ll put that into action.

Please take the time to vote for the shows you like. It means a lot to many of the podcasters out there. Since they produce their shows simply for the love of it and not for money (well, not yet… ) it’s a cheap and painless way to pay them back.

PodCastAwards.com

I just noticed the “Vote EVERY Day.” What kind of BS is that? Seems like asking a bit too much.

A Video Tour of Roppongi

Rich Pav 17 Comments

I can’t believe there are nearly 300 subscribers to this…thing. What’s wrong with you people? I mean, I can understand why my friends and family like this stuff, but the other 295 of you? TV and radio programming must be pretty awful if you’re coming here for entertainment. Whatever. I’m glad ya’ll enjoy it. It’s fun for me too. This is like being famous, but without the burden of having to keep track of my millions.

Tonight I started off at the Hobgoblin pub in Akasaka because I was thirsty for Blackthorn cider. Afterwards I turned the camera on myself while I took a little stroll through the neighborhood but…well, you’ll see. It didn’t go so well, so I walked to Roppongi where I had a bit more fun. Then I went home. The end.

I have to apologize to the blind guy who left a comment here a week or two ago. I’ve been meaning to put a podcast together for you. I hope you don’t feel left out. How about if I just e-mail you the 50 or so hours of unedited audio I have saved?

Thanks to everyone who filled out the questionnaire. The results are interesting. I like feedback way more than votes. But votes are kind of nice too. If you happen to be at Podcast Alley voting for other shows you like, heck, you might as well vote for me too while you’re there, right?

VIDEO

Video Blogging in iTunes

Rich Pav 2 Comments

A few people have asked me how to get video clips to show up in iTunes just like podcasts do. There’s no real trick to it.

Actually, there is one trick for subscribers. To see the video in iTunes, you need to select “Show Artwork” from the Edit menu. The video plays in a wee little area in the bottom left corner. Click on it to play it in a larger separate window.

For pod/videocasters, create your video in some format that QuickTime can play back. I highly recommend you use 3ivx to encode your videos. This is what Rocketboom is using and their videos are incredibly sharp and smooth yet the file sizes are reasonable. (And Amanda Congdon has such big, beautiful…ah…eyes.) At $20 for the encoding software, it’s a steal. And make sure your sound quality is good. Crappy sound makes the video seem crappy too.

Then, all you need to do is enclose the video file in your RSS file exactly the same way you normally do it with your MP3 file. My blog here runs on WordPress. When I write a post containing a link to a media file, WordPress automatically generates the RSS file with an enclosure tag. If you have a web server that runs Apache, PHP and MySQL, WordPress is a breeze to install.

If you’re looking for a web host to run WordPress, Dreamhost is utterly amazing. I pay less than $8 a month, for a hosting plan chocked full of more stuff than I could list here. What they offer for such a low price is insane. Something new is that for every week you’re with them, they increase your disk quota by 20MB and bandwidth by 1GB. I currently get 141GB bandwidth per month (I use about 50GB) and 2820 MB of disk space. And if you sign up through the link here, a friend of mine in the US who’s out of work and going through some bad times gets the commission.

Geoblogging: Mapping photos

Rich Pav 4 Comments

I live for this stuff. Someone mashed together Google Maps, Flickr, Firefox, and Greasemonkey to make it incredibly easy to show exactly where a photo was taken.

Here’s an example. Click on the photo below to go to the photo’s page on flickr.com. On that page, click on the hyperlink “GeoTagged” below the photo. It’ll take you to the geoblogger.com site and show you on a map the exact location where it was taken.

Shinjuku Station

If you’re willing to click one more time, click on the “satellite” link in the top right corner of the map to see the location on a satellite photo of Tokyo. Zoom all the way in and you’ll see Shinjuku Station.

This is so simple to do that I’ll definitely be tagging the photos that accompany soundseeing tours. If you have flickr account and are somewhat technically savvy, instructions are here.

Being attention deficient is a good personality trait for podcasters, isn’t it? (Except when having to edit hours and hours of audio.)

Apparently there’s also a way to import the data into Google Earth, but I’ll leave that for another day. It’s a great app to play with if you have a powerful enough PC and video card.

Here’s a fun activity: Learn how to zoom in on your house starting from all the way out in space. If you’re ever abducted and you manage to comandeer an alien dingy to make your escape, this skill surely will come in handy.

Meal Ticket

Rich Pav 7 Comments

I know I promised that my next work of art would be a podcast. Hey, I lied. I can’t help it — videos are just so frikkin’ easy to make! Post-production is simply connecting the Clie to my PC via USB and doing a cut & past job in QuickTime Pro. I save it as a self-contained hinted movie with MP4 video and audio encoding.

Well, I was in Shibuya a few nights ago after work to buy a wide angle lens so I can shoot panoramas. I didn’t have my mics, but I did have my Sony Clie PEG-NX70V, which as you can see I’m really starting to enjoy using as a video camera. Even with plenty of other data on the 128MB Memory Stick (text articles off the web, e-books, WAV files from the voice recorder, Atok for handwriting recognition in Japanese, etc.) I still have enough room for about 40 minutes of video. Granted, it’s only 160 X 112 pixels big, but it doesn’t look bad at all when viewed at double size, does it?

So I decided to do a wee little videocast of a Japanese style fast food restaurant. This is really mundane stuff to me, but I know there will be lots of people diggin’ it because it’s different and it’s a glimpse into the daily life here. I like that I can whip out my mics or camera practically anywhere and just start talking. It took a while to build up the guts, but I’m completely over the self-consciousness now!

OK, the next one will be a podcast, I promise.

VIDEO (10.3 MB)