Core Dump

Many years ago, in a previous life, I worked as a part-time radio DJ in small-town radio. It was an interesting experience and I l earned a lot of useful things about recording, editing, and mixing voice and music recordings. The technology has changed a lot since then, gotten a lot simpler and cheaper, but the basics are still the same. Tom Johnson covers a lot of these basics in his post, What's the Best Microphone for Screencasting, in which his quest for better sound on his screencasts leads him to examine several different pieces of equipment and recording techniques. If you are podcasting or screencasting, this is well worth reading.

Labels: hardware, podcasts

Last week I went to the Merril Collection to see Robert Charles Wilson read from his new novel, Julian Comstock. It's been getting a lot of buzz online, and I'm looking forward to reading it while I'm on holidays in a week or so. But first I'm going to listen to this podcast interview with Wilson from the Copper Robot blog.

Wilson discusses his latest novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, which is the most fun novel you'll ever read about the collapse of Western civilization and the end of religious freedom and democracy in America. It's an adventure story about the son of pious snake-handling parents in a small town, who leaves home in the company of the nephew of the President of the United States, and goes off to war and New York. The novel has adventure and romance and comedy and sea voyages and rooftop foot-chases and leaping from building to building. It's great fun.

I also talked to Wilson about his 24-year career, past books including Darwinia and Spin, his writing process and favorite tools, and how working for a Canadian civil rights education was great education for a writer.

Labels: podcasts, SF

Ted Chiang is a science fiction writer living in Bellevue, Washington where he works as a technical writer. He's not terribly prolific - according to Wikipedia he's written only 10 stories up to 2008, but he's very, very good. For those 10 stories, he's won four Nebula awards, two Hugos, and several other awards.

His latest story, "Exhalation" is available as a podcast from StarShip Sofa. I haven't listened to it yet, but I don't think I'll be disappointed.

Labels: podcasts, SF

In this podcast SF author Spider Robinson reads John Varley's Hugo and Nebula winning novella, The Persistence of Vision. This is a rich, powerful, and beautifully told story that is every bit as relevant as when Varley wrote it 30 years ago, and Robinson's reading does it full justice. It's every bit as good as Cory Doctorow says it is.

This is a timely reading -- and not just because the economy is in free-fall. Technology is rupture -- each new wave of technological change displaces and remakes us. Today's technocratic winners are tomorrow's superannuated losers. The future of human history will be about how we answer the bug in/bug out question.

Every time I read this story, it fills me with sorrow and hope and makes me mist over, and Robinson's reading is no exception. If you only listen to one piece of audio this week, make it Spider's reading of "The Persistence of Vision."

Labels: podcasts, SF

Fans of the excellent and sadly cancelled CBC radio program, Search Engine, will be glad to know that it's been resurected as a podcast. (Link to MP3). Older episodes of the show are still available on the CBC site. From BoingBoing:

The first zombie episode of Search Engine is now online! It features an awkward discussion between me, the CBC exec who gave us the axe and a guy who started a Facebook group to protest the cancellation. There's also a story on our embarrassing federal election, titled 'Canada is retarded.

Labels: podcasts, technology

Seems to be an SFnal weekend around here. It's sunny and warm and I spent a large part of the weekend ridding our back yard of weeds. I don't feel like thinking about technical writing stuff, so ...

Spider Robinson is one of Canada's better known SF writers. I like most of his work quite a bit, except for the Callahan's bar series, which has gone on far too long for my taste. The Internet Review of Science Fiction has a long interview with him in their current issue. In reading the interview, I found out that he has a podcast, so I'm pulling in the last few episodes now. Robinson is one of the better readers and panelists out there so his podcast should be entertaining.

Labels: podcasts, SF

The British Science Fiction Award nominees in the short fiction category are now available as podcasts. They include stories by Ken Macleod, Ted Chiang, and Alastair Reynolds.

Labels: podcasts, SF

I listen regularly to several podcasts, most of them technology-related. It's a good way of keeping up to date with what's going on the tech field, and I can listen while doing other things. TechRepublic lists their picks for the 10 best technology podcasts. They pick two that I listen to every week: Security Now and TWIT (This Week in Tech). I was listening to another, CNets' Buzz Out Loud, for a while, but dropped my subscription because I didn't think the content was consistent enough.

Labels: podcasts

Over the last couple of years, SF author Charlie Stross has become one of my favourite authors. I've managed to read everything he's published but for two of his most recent novels, which has sold out so fast that I've been forced to wait for the paperback editions to come out. You can get an idea of what all the fuss is about by listening to Rick Kleffel's podcast of his interview with Stross. It's in two parts: one and two.

Labels: podcasts, SF

Tom Johnson has published an Intercom article in which he selects the top 5 technical writing podcasts (STC registration required). For the benefit of those who aren't STC members, he's expanded the article on his blog, listing quite a few more podcasts. The first in the expanded list is by DMN Communications, produced by my co-worker, Scott Nesbitt.

Labels: podcasts, technical communication

The annual Society for Technical Communication (STC) conference was held last week in Minneapolis. I couldn't go, unfortunately, but fortunately Tom Johnson of Tech Writer Voices did and he's put up some 35 podcasts from the conference on the Tech Writer Voices blog. Included are interviews with Rob Houser, Ann Rockley, Scott Abel, and many others.

Labels: podcasts, technical communication

Escape Pod, a podcast for science fiction short stories, is podcasting this year's Hugo nominated short stories, starting with Tim Pratt's Impossible Dreams.

Labels: podcasts, SF

The Windows Weekly podcast this week features two members of the Office 2007 UI team, Jensen Harris and Jacob Jaffe. Jensen Harris has been blogging at length about the new Office 2007 ribbon interface during it's development. The podcast gives an overview of the new UI's development, the reasons behind it, and some of the challenges the designers faced.

BTW, I am very impressed with the new interface in Office 2007. It makes many tasks both easier and faster.

Labels: Office 2007, podcasts

John Scalzi has released a free audio edition of his novella, The Sagan Diaries, set in the same universe has his excellent novels Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigade. The MP3 files are available in low- and high-bitrate versions. I'm grabbing this one immediately - Old Man's War was one of the best debut SF novels in recent memory.

Labels: books, podcasts, SF