Yay. David's in. 

Now David Wilkinson says he will contribute to the song. That's great! Paolo mentioned earlier that he would, too.

Guys, please feel free to make a new bed, start all over, or do whatever you want with it, and just tell me where to come in! Or add on, whichever way you want to do it. Be fancy with tracks, or just record you and the speakers.

I hope Dave will sing something on it. After all, it was his attitude about how everybody should sing if they like to sing, regardless of the "quality," that made me want to join in on a couple of his songs back in May:

- Green Acres, and

- Dixie

I like it! Hey Mikey! 

Wow, I really like the new mic. It sure makes a difference. Listen to the latest recording for my literature game. If you let the little Pupu player keep running it will play the next most recent round of the game, and you'll be able to hear the improvement. I hope. I'm all thumbs with Adobe Audition; I'm sure there is more I could do, but I just haven't been as fussy as maybe I should be about it. I do know I have to do a lot less fooling around in Audition with noise reduction and stuff with the new mic. It'll make it a lot easier to throw together my podcast.

According to the manufacturer, this new mic, a Samson C01U, should be a big hit with podcasters who don't want to invest in a lot of equipment. Because it's USB, apparently it doesn't need a pre-Amp? Something like that. I really don't know much about this stuff.

It's funny; they expect you to already have a mic stand. Yeah right! So I'm using one of those heavy diner-style coffee mugs.

The product is so new they don't have the Windows driver yet on the website. I'll have to see what that does. I did have to do quite a lot of fiddling around with the sound device settings in Control Panel. Without the driver, that's the only way to control the input volume.

You know what's kind of crazy? I think having the nicer mic gives me a little more confidence about the performance aspect of doing the podcast. I was scared to death in the beginning.

New mic 

It's here. Just getting it hooked up. Is it really necessary to make them that shape and size?

How lucky. I'm trying it out, and while recording, I get that click I described earlier. Ever hear that before?  

Well, I have to leave for a while. Shoot. I'll do my podcast with the new mic tonight.

Stop, children what's that sound? 

I'm hearing a little sound coming from my PC that I don't remember hearing before, a soft click, a little like those tin clickers you had as a kid on Halloween if you're an old fart now. I can't associate it with anything that's happening in OPML, but I do hear it when I have OPML open, and I've tried closing other things in my system tray to isolate it. It's kind of cute, but I'd like to know what it means!

If you ever saw "The Longest Day," an old movie about the Normandy invasion, they talked in a pre-attack briefing (I think to paratroupers?) about using those chirpy clickers. It was the definitive semi-fictional film account of the invasion until "Saving Private Ryan," which made the war seem lots less romantic. There was a legion of great stars in "The Longest Day."

I love the internet 

All right! Somebody else like the Blues and wants to play. I hoped there might be somebody. Paolo!

I wonder if Paolo does the harp and guitar at the same time. I don't see a neck strap in that picture. One of the funniest things I ever saw was somebody just starting to learn how to do that. It's a coordination thing, like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.

Which license? 

You can't be surprised to learn I'd never written a song from scratch before last night. ;-) If I want to license it under Creative Commons, would be be a text license? I don't care about the audio version.

When marching band is bigger than football 

I've had this idea for a long time to write a screenplay, one of those what-if stories, about marching bands getting to be so popular they have their own cable TV channels, trading cards, consumer magazines, draft.

Hey, maybe I ought to try to do it as a radio play. I've been talking to some online friends about mounting an amateur podcast play.

Tonight will be the seventh year in a row I'll have participated in the ritual to close one of my kids' week-long high school marching band camps. The directors work the kids for a week, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., with lunch and dinner breaks, but still. Then on Friday night the parents are made fools of by taking the field armed with horns and impossibly cryptic formation charts.

You never know, but I don't think I'm going to have a bit of trouble with my upcoming empty nest, so long as my boys continue to like me, and it seems likely they will.

Waiting like a kid at Christmas 

I'm supposed to get a new mic today. I've been using one that came with a computer, you know the kind you can replace for $3.99, and probably costs 10 cents to make in China?

The FedX tracker page says "On FedEx vehicle for delivery." But it said that yesterday, too. That's why I'm so anxious.