Ronin Marketeer » Geek Stuff

How to Record a Phone Interview

john — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:52:48 +0000

Even though I said I was taking November off, I’m back again. A friend asked me about recording a phone interview and I wrote so much that I thought it would be a shame not to get a post out of it too.

The Phone Tree Option in Order of Sound Quality:

Best – Skype to Skype
Still good – Skype to regular phone (Skype Out) A lot of people use this if your interview subject can’t handle skype (doesn’t have the bandwidth, or the technical skill).
Last Option – Phone to Phone

For skype to skype or skype to skype out, use one computer for skype and another, or a digital recorder to record, do not skype and record on the same machine (yes, I know, lots of people do skype and record on one machine, remember that you’ve only listened to their successes, you haven’t heard the files that were lost or ruined). Another benefit of this method is that you get full studio sound on your side.

Ways to do phone to phone: like most tech stuff, the trade offs are that cheap and/or easy are at the expense of sound quality.

One thing to test is cell vs. land line. Cell can be clearer, but if reception is an issue go to land line.

Another important factor – headsets are best, handset next, Polycom conference phone is rough, speakerphones are terrible.

Cheapest and easiest: Many conference call services, such as the good folks of TelSpan can record your conference call (I am a customer of theirs). Give your subject the number, tell the service in advance that you want this one recorded, and download an mp3 when you are done. This is as low a quality can go, but it does work.

Next, if you already have recording gear, put the subject on a polycom and record the room. You get studio sound on one side and this method is a good compromise on price / sound quality. The setup we use for Marketing Over Coffee (this link goes to a page with the full gear listing) is great for that, it’s about $600 but is NPR quality sound and durability. You can go cheaper, but the question is: “How screwed would you be if you lost an interview?” for some it’s no big deal, for others it may be once in a lifetime opportunity.

Most expensive – a device that operates as a phone but pulls the caller into your mixer and pushes your mic back down the line. I don’t know many people that go this route since skyping out is cheaper and better sound quality. But, it should be noted that JK Audio has a full assortment of devices that do this (as well as some other devices that are great if you want to do your own webinars – again, I am a customer and vouch for them).

It will also depend on if you are doing it once or if it’s an ongoing project, for one time call in some favors, rent gear, or pay a pro. If it’s a regular thing, get some decent gear.

Another big tip – when you are done, run it through the Levelator, it’s a free software tool that balances out the volume levels.

Have fun, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Garmin 305 vs. Nike+

john — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:31:03 +0000

Seth Godin’s post on dashboards reminded me that I have yet to post on switching from Nike+ to the Garmin 305.

After about a year and a half of using the Nike+ system I’m now using a Garmin 305. The 305 always had a better feature set, but the difference now is that the price has fallen to around $150. I really like using a heart rate monitor (HRM) to train, some days it tells me that just because I feel like I’m giving 100%, I’m not. Other days I have to rein it in even though it feels like I can push harder.

Besides the HRM, the 305 uses global positioning satellites (GPS) to measure distance traveled, speed (and altitude). I was having a problem with the accuracy of the Nike+ foot sensor (measuring by pedometer), that came to a head when I was running a hilly 5k course that I was unfamiliar with and my iPod read that I was finished when I still had more of a tenth of a mile to go. That was the day I went back to see what the 305 price was at.

As far as music I’m using a 2nd Generation Shuffle, the generation with controls still on the player. The 3rd gen is tiny, but you have to use the earbuds that come with it b/c the controls are on the wire, not the unit. This doesn’t work b/c I don’t like to run with earbuds, I prefer neckband so that if they fall out I don’t lose them.

More reports as I put some more miles (and the Falmouth Road Race!) on it.

HD Video

john — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:20:28 +0000

Here’s my first shot with the HD Video Camera, a Canon Vixia HD30. It was a classic software project – I got the camera, but I had to update to iMovie ‘09 so the file format would be recognized, and I had to update to Leopard to be able to upgrade iMovie. Two weeks later… here it is.

I’m surprised the demand HD puts on my machine, I have a Sony VAIO desktop and it has a hard time not dropping frames in full screen HD while watching on YouTube. The original off the camera is dead on, and if you watch in a smaller window no problem. I’d be interested in hearing how well it plays for you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Playing with the Kindle

john — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:29:48 +0000

I was messing around last night trying to see what a Kindle graphic novel might look like:

This really didn’t work, I had the PDF from a DVD that Marvel used to sell, but the two page spread is too much for the small screen to take. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to get a bigger, color screen, but I do worry about what it means for guys like this.

TiVo using Bonjour

john — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:55:51 +0000

This will only be of interest to the most hardcore video geeks (perhaps only half of the readers here). I just upgraded to the latest version of TivoToGo – the program that gets TV shows off my TiVo and on to my PC, and then converts them to a format that I can watch on my PSP (or iPod, but I don’t do that anymore) and it’s all legal. Or at least, I’m using a tool I bought from TiVo not downloaded from some weird server in some Eastern Bloc country.

The interesting thing is that version 2.7 uses Bonjour, some software that is also used in iTunes to detect what media players are out on your network.

Apple and TiVo seems like a really nice fit, don’t you think?

Tennis Valentine

john — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:50:17 +0000

As a teenager I spent many hours on the tennis court, both playing and teaching. I played a bit in college where I finally burned out after a year, but I still play once in a while. Last month Carin was offered tickets to the Champions Cup here in Boston and we went to the tournament yesterday. Thanks to Staples for getting us some great seats, and setting me up for what will probably be my photo of the year:

And what will probably be on my desk by the end of this week:

Hard Drive Turned to 11

john — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:01:40 +0000

Ok, I know I have been MIA for a while, I have a bunch of fun stories to tell and the good news is that they are saved as drafts so they will all get out eventually.

One item with a Geek Factor 11 for today. I’ve been working on the same laptop at work for over 3 years, you’d think I’d be the type begging the IS guy to upgrade every 6 months but the truth is that I have so much software, all tweaked for my work that it takes a good 2 to 3 days to build a PC with all the stuff I need (unlike a Mac where you string two machines together with Firewire and in 30 minutes you are done, but that’s another story).

For over a year Kevin, basically my Q, has been asking when will I upgrade and my answer has been consistent – as soon as there is a good tablet or when I can get a 64GB SSD. For those under Yoda level geekdom, an SSD is a solid state disk drive. Instead of the normal spinning platters in a hard drive (or laptop hard drive), the SSD has memory chips not unlike what you’d find in a USB flash drive.

Because there are no moving parts there’s a significant boost in speed, and a decrease in power consumption because you don’t have to keep this mini record player spinning at 7200 RPM.

About 3 weeks ago Q told me that there were some machines open and when I saw how brown and burned out my old monitor screen was compared to the new ones I wanted to change right then.

I went to ebay for price comparison and ended up looking at 3 drives. Once I had a fresh image I found that my windows install lost about 4GB of flabby middle and that I could get by with 32GB at around $180. There was a 64GB that I thought I could get for under $400 and then a wild card I didn’t expect, 80GB (or some other weird number) from Intel for $500. The CEO of WallCorp would serve up a huge helping of whupass if I spent 5 bills on my hot rod project and I knew the 32 would eventually fall short so I took a shot at the 64GB. In what I thought was an incredible win I got it for only $320.

I later learned that I was sort of screwed, this drive was a Samsung and was a microSATA, not a “regular” SATA drive so it would not fit in the standard socket (the drive is even smaller than a standard one). This really sucked because it was now December 23rd and Q wanted to leave at a decent hour on the 24th.

Here I give a shout out to Diane and the folks at Advance Computer Services in Ohio who had the Lenovo adapter and were able to overnight it. So the $70 I “saved” on the drive price was eaten up in the adapter.

Of course the fun didn’t stop there. The parts made it in but know the drive enclosure wouldn’t recognize the SSD Drive, which was probably a power issue since SSDs have some different requirements (for the non-geek: I installed all the programs I use on a regular drive and then wanted to copy that image over to the new SSD drive, this happens by putting the new drive into a box that it can plug into and then attach to the laptop via USB so the info can get copied over. Only there the box didn’t like the SSD.

Thanks to Mahalo Answers, the coolest damn site on the web (and part of another future story), a guy gave me a brilliant solution. The good news is that the PC did recognize the SSD Drive with no problem so I inserted it and booted to CD instead of the new hard drive and ran Acronis to copy the image across. It worked perfectly.

So here are the speed test results:

The test was to boot up, start word, close the doc and shut down.

My old Dell 600M – 2:37

The New Dell D630 with a Western Digital 100GB HD – 2:10

(17% faster, and it is running anti-virus, which was mostly shut off on the 600M)

D630 with Samsung 64GB SSD – 1:14, 1.76x faster than the 7200rpm drive, 2.1x faster than the 600M

Now that I’ve had it running for a couple of weeks a few things that I’ve noticed and that others have asked about:

The drive light still flashes as it normally does, but just not as often
It’s totally silent, if it weren’t for the fan kicking in on the processor now and then there’d be no noise at all. Living without the constant hum and clanking of the drive is very cool.
Battery seems to be only about 10-20% better, I’ve read that there’s no huge gains there and my results appear to track that.
Speed opening apps is the biggest thing – Outlook, Photoshop and Dreamweaver start a good 4x faster or more.

Thus endeth the geek prayer, may the force be with you.

Blackberry Tempest

john — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:26:40 +0000

Today I found out that two of our sales guys who both bought Blackberry Storms have both returned them because they hated them. After digging for about 5 seconds I found David Pogue’s latest review also giving it a thumbs down.

I feel sorry for RIM, this will probably hurt…

Here’s Why We Need This

john — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:05:04 +0000

So afterÂ a few hours of using ChromeÂ the only bad thing I have to say is that I’m missing my Delicious tags. Aside from that there are some very interesting things:

Â History Homepage – When you open it up you get screenshots of your past pages, it’s dynamic, it’s very cool.
I also really like the fact that the window itself has no border, between that and the modest toolbars, and use of the title bar to compress the tabs, you get more overall screen real estate. If you’re someone like me who sets the start bar to auto-hide for a few more pixels, you’ll really like it.
It’s a lot more solid than I thought it would be, most pages look “right”

But it’s not perfect

For some reason the graphing plugin that AWstats uses does not show up (for 1 of 3 sites only)
I couldn’t get the Flickr uploader to work

Aside from that, I’m very impressed and it’s already taken the top spot.Â

Why do we need this?

john — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:19:34 +0000

Another browser? Google announces their browser: Chrome

This comic tells the story and here’s what I’m thinking so far.

“Wouldn’t it be great to start from scratch”

Uh. No. Web designers and marketers have taken years to get things to work on 2 platforms, nobody wants a third. You could consider Vista an attempt at starting from scratch, that’s gone well.

P5 and 6 – Multi-threaded browser that’s less of a memory hog – Ok, so I’m a little interested.

P11 – They talk about QA, yeah that’s not a revolution.

P12 – Uses Webkit just like Android. Give me your best Spock… “Fascinating”

P22 – Porn mode, you can open a tab that saves no history. Great, the politician’s dream.

“It’s good for developers because it’s open source” That’s debatable. My ultimate question is: can you get more standardization by further segmenting the market? I doubt it, they have to be counting on wiping out the competition.