a different perspective on numb three ers

The art department at Numb3rs created the best fake comic convention I’ve ever seen for last week’s show. The level of detail was phenomenal, including things like a stack of flyers welcoming participants to the con, booths from Wizkids, and WOTC, and appearances by several different real life comic creators.

One of those comic creators, Tony Fleecs (In My Lifetime, POSTCARDS: True Stories that Never Happened) talked to the comic podcast Word Balloon about his experiences on the set. It’s an enjoyable listen for comic readers, and people who just want to know what it’s like to be on the set of a television show from the perspective of someone who doesn’t work in the TV industry every day. He also said some nice things about me, which made my sugar hangover a little more bearable.

(Thanks to reader Ethan J., for the link!)

radio silence

Some days, you just have to accept that you’re not destined to do the things you want to do. You just have to say, "I did my best, but it’s just not going to happen."

Like this fucking podcast, for example. After spending nearly three hours working on it yesterday, only to have my machine completely eat all of it and leave me with nothing but an empty feeling and a tiny ball of rage to show for it, I sat back down today to give it another go. As a bonus, I even convinced my wife to let me take out the old iRiver and ask her some questions about dating, and then being married to a geek. It was awesome.

However, the gods had other plans, because when I imported my audio from my iRiver to my Powerbook, it was totally useless, just like it was after the Grand Slam convention. Only this time, instead of being totally blown out, it decided that it needed to skip all over the place and drop out about every three seconds. I’ve discovered that the only thing this particular iRiver is good for is hitting with a sledgehammer, then setting on fire, stomping into a ball of goo, and launching at the invading Viking army via a trebuchet. (And it’s not even very good for that, to be honest.)

This really needs to just work. I really need to be able to just sit down, take what’s in my head, and put it into a recording. It’s clear to me that if I want to do this podcast on any regular schedule, it has to be as technologically easy as it is for me to write, and I just don’t have the tools for that right now. I have to get some sort of reliable recording rig that is NOT a USB headset into fucking Garageband that crashes, and the iRiver that decides to just stop working one day. I need stuff that just works.

This is all a roundabout way of saying: I’m really frustrated, and
really upset that I’ve poured five hours of my time into this fucking
thing, and I have nothing to show for it. It’s the end of the week, I’m
hungry and cranky, and instead of trying to start all over again and
force a show out by the end of the day today, I’m going offline for
several hours, to have dinner with my wife. Thank you all for your questions and the time you spent asking them; I’ll do my very best to get the technical side of things worked out quickly, so your time will not have been wasted, as well.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Please drive safely.

the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have

Today is Towel Day, a day when all geeks can carry their towels with them in tribute to the hoopiest frood of them all, Douglas Adams.

I absolutely love that I’m recording an all-geek podcast on this most sacred of days.

Updated: Oh! You know what I love even more? Spending 2.5 hours working on the podcast, then losing the entire thing to some weird confluence of system lockups and crashes.

I’m taking a long, long, long don’t-break-anything walk, and I’ll try again in the morning. Sigh.

radio free burrito: all geek edition

I think it’s time for a new episode of Radio Free Burrito, don’t you?

I had a super good time with episode eight, which was entirely Q&A, so how about this experiment: I’ll do another Q&A show, and focus it on a single topic, guided by whatever is on your mind: The topic is Geek. (Hey, you should go with what you know, right?)

Send your questions to ask at wilwheaton dot net, (with a descriptive subject line, please) and I’ll get a new show out by Friday.

box of rain

I‘m working on WWdN today (about to stop and walk my dogs; the rain has broken, and it’s quite beautiful outside right now) and I thought I’d share a couple of links for any readers who found me in Exile, rather than following me over from WWdN.

The first is something I wrote a long, long time ago, when WWdN first started. I knew people would be coming to my site with lots of preconceptions, and I wanted to take a shot at challenging them. I also had a tragic-but-true story which started this whole blogging thing for me, and is one of the first narrative non-fiction things I ever wrote:

If this is your first time here, you should read this.

The second is a couple of links to a reading I did from Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot at Gnomedex a couple of years ago. It’s not the best performance of all time, and I tossed in a couple of ad-libs that in retrospect don’t work (see if you can spot them!) but

You can now see or hear me read from my books Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot! If you like what you hear, you may want to pick up a copy of Just A Geek: Teh Audiobook. Or not. Whatever. I’m not the boss of you.

Oh! And even though I’m putting my photos into flickr these days, I have an extensive gallery that’s filled with really great stuff, including a HAWESOME series from a road trip Anne and I took a few years ago. Man, I really love WWdN. Working on it brings back a flood of memories, and I can’t wait to get back home.