DS106 Radio Debut

In the wee hours of March 4, I was listening to #DS106 Radio. @DrGarcia goes to Ron’s Liquor store to pick up a bottle of vino and gets into a fascinating discussion with the sales clerk regarding the nature of online education: perceptions, misconceptions, benefits, drawbacks. [NOTE: must do a comic strip of this- it was amazing, hilarious, serendipitous, fascinating]

Then @jimgroom starts playing excerpts of Melleville’s Moby Dick. @noiseprofessor, the fastest photoshopper in the west starts making whale art and takes over the stream playing whale-related music. I start pasting cool excerpts of the text into my twitter stream.

“Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”

@grantpotter @brlamb and @draggin in the midst of a face-to-face meetup, gather at @brlamb’s place and pickup the #DS106 Radio stream. I am still in the whale groove so I request via twitter, some of Raffi’s Baby Beluga. Which, by the way, was my first, one and only vinyl album I’ve ever owned. For those of you who care, that should firmly confirm that I am a child of the 70s and a real taped-glasses-nerd. Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap episode Friday night was to play all audience requests of “Your first vinyl”. These consisted of Beatles, Elvis et al. No Raffi. But DS106 isn’t CBC – these djs complied with my nerdy request and played my song (against their initial, “what? noooo..not Raffi!?”

Then as they signed out, they threw down the gauntlet and counted down for someone to pick up the #ds106radio stream. Having just downloaded Papaya and configured the settings, I figured I’d give it a shot. It was 4am EST- everyone should have been asleep (especially me!). Except there were people from California, BC, Australia, Texas, even Tokyo! DS106Radio does not KNOW timezones. The more I think about it- DS106Radio IS a time zone! What time is it?
As soon as I started streaming it was just quiet. I had to turn off the listening in order to broadcast, so I had no idea if it was working and if I was just sitting the dark talking to my phone. Until…

Getting immediate feedback from my twitter stream was truly magical and a really cool experience. I stayed up even later to listen to @brlamb and @draggin @grantpotter do more live music. Later yet, @DrGarcia and I skyped in (after a few technical glitches) and we managed to have a 5 way skype conversation. It got a bit meta at this point since I think we were the only listeners and we were broadcasting basically just back to ourselves.
So I went into work the next day feeling really charged about the potential of this. My next project is to get Audio Hijack and Nice Cast configured so I can cut in some tunes and other audio and actually do a show. I’m also very interested in described audio as an assignment. I wanted to create a Yahoo Pipes stream that read the M3U file and created a meta stream of images, text, relevant articles, etc. Alas Pipes is stupid (which is the defensive way of saying I’m stupid). That said, I have a ton of work to do for pay, so that project will have to wait a bit.

I did tweet the related describe audio Assignment idea, which @DrGarcia, bless her soul, managed to put into the wiki and expand upon. I suppose in a sense that’s what I’ve done here but there is room for more, I know. More thinking & creativity in store for me.