As I've mentioned several times to anybody who will listen, my favorite podcast is Hey! That's My Hummus! which is a creation of my most excellent blog friends, Mr. Shiny and Faiqa (both of whom are on a blogging sabbatical while they're working on the show, so I linked to their Twitter feeds).
If a Jew and a Muslim walked into a podcast you get, well... "Hey! That's My Hummus!" It's an awesome show filled with respectful discussion of numerous topics with a humorous slant. If you're not listening to it, you should be.
Anyway...
With Faiqa being in San Diego for BlogHer, Shiny asked if I would like to "virtually guest-host" a "Best Of..." clip show. Since I am not Jewish or Muslim, but instead a non-practicing Buddhist, I thought this was an incredible honor.
So I agreed, and you can listen to my episode right now by clicking on this link!"
It's an awesome show because it has both me and Batman in it.
Oh... and Faiqa and Shiny too.
BONUS! BEHIND THE HUMMUS SECRETS! (spoilers! listen to the podcast first!)
- Shiny says he sped up my voice so I sound like a chipmunk. Personally, I think I sound more like a honey badger! A ferocious, crazy-nasty, bad-ass honey badger! Honey badger don't care!
- I used my MacBook's built-in "Podcast Publisher" to record my intros. This was a mistake. I should have recorded directly in Garage Band, since it can output MP3s. As it was, I ended up having to drag the Podcast Producer MOV files into Garage Band so I could convert them there.
- The opening bit was recorded perfectly in one take. But I live a half-mile from the railroad tracks and a train went by in the middle of my recording, blowing it's whistle through my open window. I hoped that it wouldn't be audible, but it was loud and clear so I had to record it all over again. This time it took four takes, and it still has a couple goofs in it.
- In my intro, I say that I love Shiny and Faiqa more than chocolate pudding. This is 100% true. They are two of the most wonderful people I know.
- My MacBook, still suffering from a botched install of Apple's new Mac OS X Lion, kept overheating. This caused the fan to turn on, which made noise throughout the recording, ruining it. Rebooting worked for a minute, but the fan eventually came on again. To solve this, I sat my MacBook on top of a tray of ice cubes that had a paper towel on top. I then set an ice pack over my keyboard.
- In the second intro I mention that I'm a fan of Batman. This is an understatement. Batman is my favorite super-hero by far, and I am borderline obsessed with the character. Shiny couldn't have chosen a better segment for me to introduce.
- The second intro took six takes to record. You try saying "so we're revisiting" in a sentence! It kept coming out as "we'revisiting." Walter Cronkite I am not.
- Faiqa is, in fact, in San Diego for BlogHer. I had no idea what Shiny was doing, so I decided he was making a piñata. In my wrap-up I joked about Shiny having a "piñata emergency"... I have spent a lot of time since then wondering exactly what a "piñata emergency" might entail. It sounds crazy-dangerous.
- With suggestions from Shiny, I wrote up a script I could read from so I wouldn't accidentally cause World War III or something. My final recording doesn't match the script at all, as I tend to wander off script when I do this kind of thing. I have no idea how everything ended up coherent. Maybe it didn't.
- I actually do love hummus. Along with falafel, pizza, and chocolate pudding, it's a staple of my dietary regime.
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This is the first time I have heard your voice. I was quite surprised. Don’t get me wrong, I think you have a nice, pleasant, voice, but it doesn’t sound like I imagined after reading your blog all this time. You sound so reasonable in real life. Hmmm, that doesn’t sound so good either. You just don’t sound like the Dave voice that has been playing along in my head while reading your posts. As always, it’s better not to assume things- you can frequently be wrong.
Well, I have been sped up to sound like a chipmunk honey badger…
Well that’s true, and a ferocious, crazy-nasty, bad-ass honey badger to be exact, but still….
Nice post and great discussion in the podcast! Loved it. However, I was not surprised to hear your voice because I already heard it thanks to the video you uploaded about Hanna Montana Musical Pen. I clicked it, and then it took to youtube where there were two other videos you uploaded and they were really awesome. It is good to hear your voice, my friend.
Dave,
Your continuing problems with Lion surprise me. I run Lion off of an aluminum unibody Macbook, albeit gussied up with 8 Gb of RAM and a 256 Gb SSD, and right now it’s running at the Snow Leopard temperature of 55’C on the CPU. And that’s with Chrome, Mail, MS Word, MS Excel, Adobe Acrobat, iPhoto and Adobe InDesign all running. (I’ve just closed iPhoto).
I did notice that immediately after installing Lion and for a few days following, my MacBook had a tendency to run hot. On a couple of occasions, I discovered that what my MacBook was doing was updating the Spotlight database. Reading over some articles from the Net, I’ve heard that Lion requires this for some reason, and it is CPU intensive and can take up to an hour to complete. Maybe this is the solution: rebuild the Spotlight database overnight so that Lion is good an acquainted with your machine.
I also killed the Flash plugin and a number of other Internet plugins on Safari, and switch between Safari and Chrome. That appears to have helped.
11. Shiny’s wife told him that you should seriously consider doing voice-over work — and he agrees with her! The voice was very soothing and was reminiscent of that of an NPR professional.
Thanks again for guest-hosting the show! I did, actually, speed your narrations up slightly (at about 107% of their original speeds), but I used an effect to retain the current modulation. However, I have listened to you at chimpunk speeds, and it sounds quite awesome. I’m happy to post some audio if you so desire. 🙂
I’ll give this podcast a go. With an average 40 minute commute each way to work, I’m always looking for new stuff to listen to. And a voice that sounds like a ferocious, crazy-nasty, bad-ass honey badger sounds ok to me.
I had the splendid pleasure of meeting Faiqa for about 2 minutes at BlogHer. We joked about the unfairness of combining the fun/brutal BlogHer conference/party schedule with Ramadan. I think in fairness, you should get to be able to pick an alternate month in cases like this.
As I told Shiny, hearing your voice when I listened was better than getting a dozen roses for no good reason. I adore you, Dave, and am so honored to have your support on this. Thank you so much.