Daniel Leussler:

…that he likes to reinvent himself as often as possible. I don’t. I find the idea that my previous efforts were pointless disturbs me, and gives me the sense that I haven’t made any progress, whatever I’m progressing towards. However, every year around the holiday season, it seems like I make some sort of change, some specific course readjustment. It’s usually fairly minor; I started this blog in January of 2007 (which I’ve kept posting to, albeit without frequency, reliability, or direction), I finally put up some sort of web site for Seabed Recording near the beginning of 2008, and now I’ve got my new project this year.

Seabed Recording Studio is now an official sponsor of Minneapoliscast, a local music podcast that’s been broadcasting interviews and live performances of local musicians for going on 3 years now. Sponsorship could mean a lot of things, but in this case I’ll be providing free studio time to produce the podcast as well as my engineering services, in exchange for the obvious promotional benefits which would come from having local bands and musicians get to visit and try out my studio. Minneapoliscast, formerly a one-man operation, gets an experienced engineer and a studio large enough to accommodate any size band comfortably. We both feel that it’s win-win.

This is a little scary for me, because I’m guessing that recording a podcast is much closer to producing a radio show (or even running sound for a live show) than it is to recording an album. I’ve been a live engineer, and I’ve recorded albums,  but now I’ll be trying to find a happy medium between the two, something that retains the sonic purity (and aesthetic) that you can achieve from being thorough and precise while giving up so many of the useful cheats that are inappropriate in something that needs to happen closer to real-time. No overdubs, more everybody in the same room tracking, minimal edits, less mic options; it will be hard, but also probably somewhat of a relief.

Anyway, I’m still excited about getting a chance to get in the studio and get my hands dirty with all sorts of music, and I’d like to invite anybody reading this who has even a passing interest in local music to check out Minneapoliscast and listen to some of the podcasts there. The site is very accessible even if you haven’t listened to podcasts before, and hopefully in the next few weeks we’ll have some new episodes up which have been recorded by yours truly.

I’ve been using NewsGator, and the related clients NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and NewsGatorGo! for a while now to sync my RSS feeds throughout the multiple computers I’m on. It’s generally been a fantastic experience, and I’m constantly amazed that this service is free. Which is why I’m surprised at how vitriolic some other users are regarding FeedDemon’s choice to incorporate ads into their app.

I’d be right there with the torch and pitchfork if they had done it the wrong way, and allowed giant Flash ads that roll across the screen and blast sound when you mouse over them, or added Intellitxt linking to every other word. I’d be even more mad if they just went ahead and added it without telling anybody. Instead, they decided to:

1. Limit the ads to a specific company with good standards, including no Flash.
2. Tell people about it before it happened.
3. Gave people the choice of sticking with the older free version, without disabling NewsGator syncing.

That last one is the biggest thing for me; not that I plan on sticking with the old version, I don’t. I just think that it invalidates anybody’s claim that FeedDemon “owes” them, because they bought the application years ago when it was $30. If you thought it was worth $30 years ago, and it’s only improved since, then you got your money’s worth. I didn’t, and I want it to keep improving, so I’m happy to have an ad-supported model. Don’t be a jerk, and yell at the developer for instituting the change in possibly the nicest way imaginable.

..To see how useful this new Firefox extension is. It allows me to edit my blog from a pane in Firefox instead of having to navigate to the admin page; seems like a good idea. Maybe I’ll actually start posting more than once every couple of months.