Almost safe for human consumption...

Yes, it has been a stupid long time since I have posted to this blog. Two things have contributed to this- my survival job and Facebook. By way of explanation-

My stint at school bus driving is coming to an end. June 26 is my last day. This gig served the purpose of getting me out of the doldrums when the economy tanked and enabled me to re-structure my debts so it is much cheaper for me to continue sleeping indoors.

Now I will be able to resume full-time auditioning for voice-over work and grasp other opportunities that are presenting themselves. I am heartened that several of the small business people that I am friendly with are seeing the tides turning. In a little over two weeks, it will be my turn to go back into the water.

I have also acquired some new work habits and skills that will enable me to get more out of each new day (not the least of which is the ability to get up much earlier than I ever have).

As for Facebook- while I still enjoy the GrayBloke's YouTube explanation (scroll further down my blog entries) I find myself being able to wrap my brain around this thing. Even more important- so do a number of my contemporaries. That makes the whole thing a lot more fun!

My RandoRadio program is flowing fairly well of late and it too is great fun every Saturday afternoon. The traffic on the way to the studio is getting more evil as the weeks go along and I will have to compensate- when all is said and done, it's all good.

I will leave you with a YouTube video that was responsible for jump-starting my inspiration. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Click here to see it- they disabled the embedding.

Don't forget to visit the RandoRadio website by clicking on the Rando logo at the top left of my blog page. I'll be back sooner, I promise.

Peace be with you,
Glenn

When pigs fly... or when Swine Flu...

I think it was Obama's consigliere Rahm Emanuel who alluded to never wanting to waste a perfectly good crisis. The monetizing of this one particularly sticks in my craw. While the best way of preventing the spread of this illness is proper and frequent hand washing, a company called Purell bought a full page ad in today's New York Times pulling a quote out of a document from the Center for Disease Control and using it to pimp their product. Who knows how many other papers this has run in- and a full page NYT ad is around $140,000. You still pick up the bottle. The germs are still there to get to someone else. The germs that survive the Purell are STILL on your hands.

WASH. WITH. SOAP. AND. WATER.

I spent ten years around folks whose livings were made in American hospital operating rooms. Trust me, they all WASHED.

While we are on the topic, in the same issue of the Times (the paper whose mission it is to keep me crazy) had this article about the inability to contain this illness. Here is a link to the article.
The one line that made my head spin was a quote from a Dr. Michael Osterholm that showed how vulnerable we really are in an economic sense when the concept of closing the borders is invoked. Not only would we have no source for sterile hospital masks, gloves, gowns and other related stuff but even important drugs and/or the raw materials needed to make them. Then he said "Our global just-in-time economy means we are dependant on others... A Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bar has ingredients from nine countries in it"

So let me see if I get this straight. If the borders were to close tomorrow one of the largest cereal companies in this great land of ours couldn't manufacture a freakin' cereal bar? How are we supposed to successfully build the next generation of automobiles when we can't make a cereal bar under our own power? Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?

If this was no more than a marketing opportunity for some well placed pharmaceutical companies, the governments would do what they did a few years back for the SARS epidemic. Lock down cities and whole parts of countries and ground flights to MAKE SURE that travel is restricted. The company I used to work for was sweating bullets during that episode because it had moved most all of its production to Singapore, and NOTHING was going in or out for a while.

Luckily, there seem to be no major issues in the suburban area that includes Garnerville, NY. There will be a facility wide Arts Festival and here is a link to their website. RandoRadio will be celebrating its first full year of streaming- webcasting- digital hurling- whatever. Go click on the RandoRadio picture at the upper left and go to OUR website to see more of what we will be doing. We will also be asking for some kind of economic stimulus because RandoRadio Is Too Big To Fail!!!

Of course, the main idea is you will hear the effects of your stimulus with us immediately, not months or years down the road.

Time to figure out what will really work for the live show this Saturday. Check out our website and give a listen.

Peace be with you,
Glenn

"You Can't Get There From Here"

And if you are a Firesign Theatre aficianado you know the next line is "...but I'm looking for the same old place!" I'm on the cusp of another show and running through some of the stuff I will be playing tomorrow. Sometimes there is a method to this process and other times it depends on what snakes have been stirred up in my head during the past week. It can fall into place nicely or it can get really ugly.

While I am pulling stuff that ties in with my own sensibilities I have to remember that I am doing programming for a listener base that is used to what "RandoRadio" is. One of my bugaboos is trying to find a way to reasonably incorporate that which is known as "classical music" into a free-form format and I have not been successful quite yet. There are fewer and fewer venues for this kind of music save some NPR stations and even that is becoming more of a piecemeal thing.

I was royally pissed when the local NPR station WNYC-FM pulled its daytime classical music programs after 9/11. They believed it was more important to simulcast their AM talk show stuff and keep New York City gazing into its own navel. Good bye Steve Post and Margaret Juntwaite. They relegated Mr. Post to the junkheap and you may hear Margaret every now and them if you're lucky. As our friends across the pond say, "oh, sod it".

I'm listening to the Sufjan Stevens CD "Michigan". If he only had a clue that 5 years later the tumbling automobile business would give this release even more significance. The track playing now is "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider). I should tie that in with the new John Rich song "Shuttin' Down Detroit".

Please click on the RandoRadio globe picture to visit our website and consider some economic stimulus to keep us going. RandoRadio Is Too Big To Fail!!! Just keep telling yourself that.

Peace be with you,

Glenn

So I took the plunge, see?

Yeah, I know it's been a while. Time seems to fly along much more quickly when you spend much of the week being up before the chickens. Thanks to converging religious holidays I actually got a couple of weekdays off- lost pay but gained some sleep. Whatever...

The previous post nonwithstanding I took the next step into the world of social networking and set up a Facebook presence. While the start was a little shaky I've managed to ease into it and for now, all seems well. I've even participated in a couple of the group time-waster activities and lived to tell about it.

The only collateral damage from this seems to be some increased activity on my old Classmates.com account. The problem is that they wised up and I now would have to pay for content I used to see for "free" (translated as "live with the cookies/spyware the site would throw into my machine). I'll have to consider that over the weekend.

I already pulled the content for tomorrow's show and it will veer off in several different directions during the course of two hours. I have yet to settle into a groove after over a year of doing this, and perhaps that is a good thing. There is so much good musical stuff out there that it would be a crime to confine oneself to a single genre or style. For the most part I try to keep the sets from getting too schizophrenic. Sometimes I don't quite succeed.

But if I got it right all the time it wouldn't be much of a CRISIS now, would it???

Thanks for looking in, and continue to listen to RandoRadio. Remember that we require fiscal stimulus to operate, and RandoRadio IS TOO BIG TO FAIL!!!!! Please go to our website and help bail us out to the best of your ability. The biggest difference between bailing us out and bailing out a bank is that you HEAR THE RESULTS OF YOUR STIMULUS INSTANTLY!!! Heck, all that other bail-out crap will take months or years before any results get to us. We even have T-Shirts, mini "Lava-Lamp" tchotchkes and other goodies. Please Go to our website- YES, YOU CAN!!!

Time for bed- Saturday morning wushu class starts early.

Peace be with you,

Glenn

FaceBook finally explained to me via b3ta and YouTube

February is just about done and I am a very happy camper. The winter utility bills have been killers. That's what I get for wanting to sleep indoors, I guess.

It's probably a generational thing, but so-called "social networking" sites have get to get me excited in any real way. I was never an entirely social critter while growing up, and the superficiality of most high school and college interactions never really made an impact on me. The reality is that at my age, most of the people that I was friendly with either moved far away or died. Having used the service called classmates dot com to no avail I can't imagine what good stalking people on other websites would do.

But thanks to YouTube and a regular contributor to b3ta.com, I have been enlightened as to how the whole thing REALLY works. Check this out...



I feel so much better now...

As a public service, have a new mantra-
Just keep your media player on Rando Radio 24/7/365. You need no other internet radio station. Just keep your media player on Rando Radio 24/7/365. You need no other internet radio station. Just keep your media player on Rando Radio 24/7/365. You need no other internet radio station. Just keep your media player on Rando Radio 24/7/365. You need no other internet radio station. Just keep your media player on Rando Radio 24/7/365. You need no other internet radio station.

Peace be with you,

Glenn Carella

And the Cold War was bad because...

When I grow up....

Belated Happy New Year to all! I have no bus work today so I can get caught up on some other things. Like this blog. Or sleeping past 6 AM. Whatever.

One of my ham radio friends who has moved to a warmer place passed along a YouTube video that is now public domain. I share it here to give folks some context as to how we got here, and the only thing to add to this is the conversion of the wave energy (analog) to those little ones and zeroes (digital) for spewing over the web.



Many thanks to John Samuels for this one. By the way, the "OH2FFY" you see at the video's end is the call sign of the ham whose efforts moved this work to YT. John's call is K2CIB, and mine is N2GOP. I spoke of ham radio in an earlier blog post, and we use infrastructure called the atmosphere to get our signals from point to point. Click here to learn something about it... I dare you!!

The infrastructure of the web is still fragile enough and porous enough that it is subject to disruption in a number of ways from your own machine to lord knows where else in the food chain. There are many waypoints between our RandoRadio studio and what finally arrives in your computer.

Radio's expenses are more front-loaded (higher up-front cost) but once you are going it costs the same whether 10,000 or 100,000 listen to you. On the internet the startup cost is lower, but since you are charged by bandwidth usage, the more popular you are your costs skyrocket. We need your support to keep going, both in listening and in finance. This stuff doesn't just happen.

I would love nothing more that to be able to take our programming and move it to shortwave radio. With the current sunspot cycle slowly rising we could have a global audience for sizable chunks of the day, and they wouldn't even need a computer to hear us.

FYI, there is still a bunch of domestic shortwave bradcasting going on here in the US. Since major media companies have no way of tracking individual listeners in radio in the same manner as the web, they have no inclination to push that form of media. But when your power fails (as well as the power for all the surrounding infrastructure) what will you do with your computer? About the same as you will do with your cell phone. Not a lot. See also Katrina, 2003 Northeast blackout, communications failures after 9/11, the list goes on and on.

That said, I'm settling into a decent pattern with my show until the next bizarro event in my life. Stay with us. It only gets better. Trust me.

Peace be with you,
Glenn