Your Story : How We Play the Game of Life

Last night I got on my less than 24 hour old twitter account that I only have two friends on and I find out that Cameron Reily is about to do a skype conference with his Sunday night chat version of G’Day World so I thought I listen to him a lot and why not get on or at least listen.

I got pulled in to the call after just setting up my mic and interface again. I haven’t used it during a skype call before and I wasn’t sure how well or how to set it all up when all of a sudden I’m on and in the chat. After a bit of fiddling in the background with levels and pulling my headphones out of the mixer and plugging into the speakers I got it running ok but I want to improve things as I couldn’t monitor myself very well.

I haven’t been involved in that sort of opinionated conference with people I don’t know before so I felt a bit overwhelmed and a little nervous as I know it will go out as a podcast in the next couple of days and remain in the either for ever.

What it was though is a good exercise in doing this whole interaction/broadcasting thing and I feel that I should take the opportunity to do these whenever possible to hone my skills. I have so much to learn it’s overwhelming at times.

I’m excited and just a lot nervous as I’m using the information from Jason Van Orden on his Podcasting University site to help me set this up correctly and as mentioned previously I’m no geek so I’m going slowly, slowly!

So here I am still trying to get the knack of how all this works and today I decided to clean a few things up.

1. Get a feedburner account.
2. Get a libsyn account

To do that I need to tidy up this blog as I’m not too happy with the url as it is yourstorypod which I haven’t really liked so it’s only subtle but it is now going to be yourstorypodcast. Both of these I have here at wordpress.

So I need to move yourstorypod over to yourstorypodcast which is easy enough so just as I start the process the wordpress server goes down… Bugger!!

Now this delay is preventing me getting a feedburner account which is preventing me setting up my libsyn account… Bugger!!

So I’ll just have to wait until they get their act together and I can do the work and get it done. Then I’ll cut, paste and post this.

Bit by Bit I’m getting there…

In the last four days i’ve managed to spend a lot more time on the mac working out how to do this podcast thing. I now have three conversations recorded and I’ve done a rough edit on my conversation with Shannon who I was fortunate enough to work with earlier in the year. So far I’ve just chopped all the crud out of the chat so it’s more sensible to listen to mainly regarding her quick career path into the film industry. Hopefully you will see that in a short while.

What I’ve realised today is that I’m starting from an incredibly low knowledge base. Everyone that I’m listening to in podcasting seem to be involved in at least one and often many of the skills required to pull this off. Sure I know that if I wanted to I could have just used my iMacs’ built in mic, done a rough and ready recording and posted it to .Mac but I would have to at least know a bit about garageband. However I want this to be good so I’ve had to get this blog, get a decent field recorder, learn interviewing skills, microphone & interface, understand Garageband to get a good mix then post it and organise all the necessary links so people can find me. Wow! And for me typing is a skill I’m quickly getting better at let alone all the geeky stuff.

Don’t get me wrong I’m thriving on the challenge and I’m excited to pull this off it’s just a very steep learning curve and I’d like to be moving a bit faster.

As a mentoring exercise I’m using Mysterious Universe as an example of the quality I’d hope to achieve in time but even so I found out today that Ben is a sound engineer, so that explains why he sounds so good.

Hang in there Ian I say, I’m getting there one lesson at a time

Today I had an interesting conversation with Eve Kauffenstein about the state of how it is for a intelligent young person living in Germany and visiting Australia. Eve is passionate about sociology and gender studies offering a fresh insight into how a modern feminist looks at the world of the 21st century. This is my first conversation for my upcoming podcast of individuals stories about their lives.

I’ve still to do a few more interviews and edit them down into a format before I post them but I’m now on the way.