Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

Subscribe to the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChristianaTalksAboutStuff

Or if you must, you can download the mp3 directly. (Right click to save to your hard drive.

It's a big file, but it features about a full hour of awesome Survivor chat.

In the meantime, it is now 4:30 in the morning and I'm going to see if two hours of sleep will be better than zero hours of sleep.

More later, when I'm awake again.

...

All right I'm back. Basically, this is the "Podcast Notes" for Podcast #2. I'll be doing a post like this for every podcast I do, and so the comments for the podcast notes post are where you can give feedback for any of the individual podcasts. (Of course, you can always send me email as well. If you send me an audio file, I may even play it on the next one!)

Podcast #2 covers the first half of a two-hour conversation I had with my friend Mike Meitín last night after Survivor. In the first hour, we talk exclusively about last night's episode of Survivor. The second half, where we move on to other shows, like The Apprentice and Lost, will be part of Podcast #3, sometime this weekend.

The sound quality for the phone call still has plenty of room for improvement, but I'm discovering that it's actually pretty difficult to achieve a high-quality recording of both ends of a phone conversation. Hopefully though, by the next time we do this, I'll have figured out a better way. (P.S. Anyone who knows a better way, let me know!)

I'm not going to do a whole lengthy Survivor post of the type that I've been doing the last couple of weeks, mostly because I'd just be recovering all the same ground as in the podcast and I want to encourage everyone to listen to them!

However, I will go ahead and cover the broad strokes.

Brianna's expulsion was telegraphed pretty early on merely by the fact that we hadn't heard hardly anything from her until last night, when she was suddenly front and center. Very suspicious. What might that mean for Brooke, who has been practically invisible so far?

I think that Brianna may have been good at the later, mental, strategic portion of the game, but since the tribes are actually bucking tradition and voting out the weak people instead of the strong ones, she didn't get a chance to play that part of the game. I was a little disappointed about that, but I don't think that anyone can really argue getting rid of her after her inexcusable performance in the immunity challenge.

Brian pulled off a slick move saving Lydia last week, but he needs to watch the cockiness, lest it get him into trouble.

Amy's a trouper! I love it! I'm really happy that she has been able to resist the bossiness that I was worried would come. I like her a lot.

Kudos to Rafe for scoring one of the points in the immunity challenge. It went a long way toward redeeming him from the ladder disaster.

Jamie is clearly a power-player, but I wonder if he's too emotional for the later part of the game. Mike pointed out that he's somewhat like Stephanie in this respect.

Not liking bossy Margaret quite as much as Super-Nurse Margaret, but then, she had a point: Bobby-John and Judd were screwing it up!

Liking Cindy, Danni, and Brandon a lot.

Judd not so much.

Eagerly anticipating the inevitable blow-up that is Gary the pretend landscaper.

.

I don't know if anyone has actually even subscribed yet, but if you have, please delete the subscription to the link I posted over the weekend and subscribe to this one instead. The change will allow me to track how many people have subscribed. I've gone ahead and changed all the links on the site, including the one on the side bar, to the new link.

And if you haven't subscribed yet, what's the hold-up? I'm desperate for feedback here!

Also, I have the upcoming Survivor podcast, so if anyone has questions you'd like Mike and I to answer, or suggestions on something you'd like us to talk about, just email me using the Contact Christiana link on the sidebar. As long as you can get the message to me by 11PM Eastern Time, we'll try to use it in the show!

Further, if anyone has questions or suggestions for any future podcast, Survivor-related or otherwise, just email me and I'll do it!

.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was planning to try my hand at podcasting with a conversation between my friend Mike and I about the upcoming episode 3 of Survivor: Guatemala.

Still, in order to be at all timely, I would really want to be able to put that podcast up by Friday morning, but I suspected that it would take me a little while to figure out the technical details of the thing. As a result, I decided to do a non-Survivor podcast before then, when I would have more time to figure everything out.

So that's what I've done. Even got me an XML RSS feed and everything, with a lot of help from a few tutorials, such as this one. If you know what to do with those, you can find mine right here. I'll also be putting a link to it in the sidebar.

If you don't already know how to use them, what you need is an aggregator, like iPodder. (You can use that even if you don't use an iPod, btw.)

What the aggregator does for you is it allows you to subscribe to a podcast RSS feed like mine. You cut and paste the link I supplied above, or other feeds (generally indicated by an ".xml" suffix) and it "subscribes" you. When you are subscribed, the software reads the xml file and determines what podcasts are available on that file and downloads them (or not) per your settings. It can also automatically check for and download new episodes whenever they are posted. Pretty handy, eh?

iTunes also has podcast functionality where it acts as an aggregator for all podcasts in the iTunes podcast directory. I hope that mine will be listed there soon, but right now, it's in the review phase.

Now, if all of that sounds like too much work but you are still interested in listening, you can download the mp3 file directly right here: Christiana Talks About Stuff Podcast #1
(If you want to be nice to me and save me some bandwidth, please right-click and download the file, rather than playing it directly off of my server.) Fair warning, it's about 32MB. That works out to a total play time of around 23 minutes. Hopefully in the future, as I start figuring some of this stuff out, I'll be able to bring the relative file size down a bit.

Podcast #1 is pretty basic. I begin by introducing myself, (since I may end up with listeners who have not visited the blog,) then I begin what will likely be a series where I discuss and analyze some of my favorite movies. This time around, it's Groundhog Day. Then I finish up by playing a song from PodSafeAudio.com, which specializes in songs released under the Creative Commons license, making them safe for use in podcasts.

I'm not going to be ignoring the blog, and whenever I put up a new podcast, I'll definitely mention it here, but of course, if you subscribe to the feed, it will all go through automatically.

Also, this is my very first attempt at this sort of thing, and I'm sure it needs a lot of work. If you listen, please, please, please leave a comment or send me an email to let me know what you think or give me suggestions on what I could do better. In fact, if you have the capability, you could even send me comments in mp3 form, and you just might get some airtime on the next episode!

This is an ongoing invitation, and applies whether you are offering suggestions about the podcast itself, or whether you have a comment about the content. Thanks, and I hope you like it!

UPDATE!

I have now corrected some of the wonky volume levels in the first podcast. All the same links apply.

UPDATE AGAIN!

My podcast is now officially listed in the iTunes podcast directory. If you use iTunes, you can find and subscribe to it by searching "christiana" in the podcast directory.

.