Category Archives: Podcast

Radio Free Burrito Episode Zero

Alive
W
ell, here it is! It’s alive!

As I wrote earlier today, "It will either be really cool, or the stupidest fucking thing in history, and I’ll proceed accordingly."
My initial feeling is that it falls somewhere in the middle: it’s
longer than I wanted, and it’s a little unfocused, but I’m willing to
allow myself the freedom to make as many mistakes as it takes to either
come up with something cool, or accept that I just don’t have what it
takes to make a podcast.

Observations on getting this thing from my brains to your ears: I
thought the recording would be very hard, but it was actually super
easy. I’ve tried in Audacity several times before, and it never wants
to work, so today I just followed the instructions from Apple for creating podcasts in Garageband,
and it was simple and easy. But holy shit the converting and the
uploading was so hard, I felt like I had no thumbs and an IQ of 24. I’m
sorry to report that this episode is only available in the stupid,
proprietary, Apple AAC format, but that’s the only format I could get
to upload (the .aiff file was over 300MB, and TypePad just wouldn’t let
me upload it. That was really annoying.)

So now I need to know what you, the audience, think. What would you
like more of? Less of? Is it too long? Is it too narrowly focused, or
not broad enough? Most importantly: when it was over, did you feel like
I earned your 30 minutes, or did you feel like you wasted your time?

Heh. The last time I felt this nervous about releasing something into the wild, it was the first version of Dancing Barefoot. This is both cool and scary.

Afterthought: I just realized that I stupidly recorded this thing in super-ultra-hyper-mega-stereo, when nifty-old-mono would have been just fine. The result is a ridiculously large file (71.8 MB) which I can only leave up for a few hours before I blow through all my bandwidth. I’ll see if I can convert the file I have to mono, and if not, look for Episode .05 to hit the airwaves in the next 48 hours. Yeah, I am really a moran. iTunes won’t let me convert it to mp3, and Audacity won’t even open it. So this file will stay up until about 8:00 PM Pacific time, when I’ll have to take it down. If someone wants to mirror the file, go nuts. Gods, I am sofa king stupid. I blame my nervousness for this ultrarookie error. When you mock, please mock me gently.

AfterthoughtAfterthought: I owe Shane Nickerson a huge debt of gratitude, because he pointed out to me my stupid mistake. I’ll reveal my shame a bit later on. In the meantime, here is a .mp3 file, which is much smaller: "only" 27.3MB:

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Oh boy! Several Mirrors!

Mirror one, from WWdN:iX reader buford: radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Mirror two, from my friend Kathleen: radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Mirror three, from WWdN:iX reader  UglyRedHonda: Unauthorized low-bandwidth-friendly re-encoding

And the coolest of them all . . . a .torrent. Man, do I feel like I’ve arrived now! Thanks, Brian! 🙂

 

WWdN podcast idea

I am a big fan of the Family Guy Freakin’ Podcast. I love hearing the people who create the show talk about how they do it, and it’s especially awesome to hear how much they obviously like each other, and the work they do.

Near the end of the podcast, they always answer some listener e-mail (I sent one last week; I don’t know if they answered it or not and they totally answered it on the podcast for Fat Guy Strangler, and they didn’t even make fun of me. Freakin’ Sweet!) and it’s always funny and informative.

So I thought, "Hey, I can be funny and informative, and I want to do a podcast . . ."

So let’s give this a try: Send me a question or comment, and I’ll respond in a podcast. It’ll be sort of like Ask Wil Wheaton Anything but you listen to it and it’s not at Slashdot. It will either be really cool, or the stupidest fucking thing in history, and I’ll proceed accordingly.

Questions or comments can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net. When I have enough questions to fill about seven minutes of podcasting, I’ll produce and publish it.

UPDATE: Wow. A bunch of questions have flooded in today, and I already threw away a podcast that was over 40 minutes long where I tried to answer them all. I mean, I think I’m a swell guy and all, but forty minutes of me rambling on is about 32 minutes too much.

So I pulled out a few that I think I can give interesting answers to, and I’m about to start recording them. I should have Radio Free Burrito Episode Zero up in a few hours. Huge thanks to everyone who has sent in questions. 🙂