Good morning everybody. I slept for crap last night. I think it stems mostly from my trimming my beard. Let me explain. My beard was getting pretty shaggy. So shaggy in fact, that I couldn’t run my fingers through it without leaving a trail of what look like, and in actuality are, pubic hairs where ever I go. It was only a matter of time before I pulled one out of mashed potatoes or something. Or worse, someone else found one in whatever dish I had prepared for them. As much as I’d love to wear one of those fancy beard nets like the guy in the bakery at WalMart* has, I think I’ll just trim it. That was my thinking anyway. That trimming would solve all of my problems. It did solve the creepy long stray pube problem, but it created the “my face is really irritated and itchy” problem. So, that said, I spent a good majority of the night with the itches. If it wasn’t my face, it was my ears. If it wasn’t ears, it was my legs. If it wasn’t my legs, it was my butt. I just couldn’t sleep for itching.

But at some point, I did sleep. Like a mofo. And now I am awake and typing up this post and sipping my coffee.

Yesterday was a day of very small victories. I got my paycheck. The headsets arrived. Word to Me’s Grismas presnents showed up. I had chciken and stuffing for dinner. Small things that went well. After dinner, and after my tutoring got cancelled, I started to work on the aggregate audio device thing. If you’ll recall, that was my plan to get two headsets to both input into the computer simultaneously so that both Zaxxon and myself would be mic’d during the podcast recording sessions. What started out as a simple plugin adjustment quickly became 2 hours of frustrating Hell. I got them to sync up as one, but I just couldn’t figure out how to get them to both record at the same time. Finally, I threw my hands up and went back to watching Star Trek.

I really should start cataloging all of the actors who later became well known, but played bit parts in random Star Trek episodes. Like this chick who you might recognize:

It is crazy the amount of people who show up on there.

Anyways, after an episode or three I called Zaxxon to let him know of my failures at getting the mics to work. Later, as I was talking to Dave about various Grismas and podcast related things, a light bulb came on in my head. I rushed him off the phone and went to investigate it. It was a no go. But I did notice something while I was trying it out. I figured out that I could set one headset to one track and the other headset to a different track. But how to get them to record at the same time? It just kept eluding me. Then I noticed a tiny little cute red button on each track. While one was highlighted, the other would gray out. So, I clicked the grayed out red button on the other track and what do you know? It worked. Two tracks enabled. Batman be praised! It was a silly little red button the whole time.

You can guess where this is going. It is on like Donkey Kong with a paper plate and a glass of milk in a snow storm. Podcasting here we come. There are still some volume issues to be resolved, but I think I can deal with that in post production.

So yesterday had its high points. Today is the open house at the letterpress shop. That is one reason why I’m in no rush this morning. I don’t have to be there for a few hours. Once again, the hours of the open house are from 1pm-5pm if you’d like to stop by and see what we do there. The shop is located in the basement of the Gardner building by the campus library.

Well, I’m going to go poop now. Have a wonderful day! More soon. ~SC