Reading Radar

I’ll work up some thoughts in my downtime.

“Don’t worry about hurting my feelings or being all polite.”
How about the feelings of others?

I’m way less technically savy than you when it comes to computers and whatnot but it does sound like you might be expecting too much out of technology. If your expectations aren’t too high, you’ll find they’re more often exceeded. I know things are supposed to work and all but lots of things fall short of their ideal and we don’t take it nearly so personally.

As for the show, I’d say monkey with it a bit. It’s not like if you try some things and decide “Oh no! I had it right the first time!” we’ll all run out in the streets crying and tearing our eyes out at a format change. I have a format but I don’t feel obliged to adhere too it too closely if some other direction takes my fancy. People don’t seem to mind too much.

Honestly, I rarely listen to the show all in one go anyway. I don’t mean to be rude but I just don’t care that much about Second Life to be held enthralled for that long. I like the show overall. I like the interviews and the sketches best even though often they are only very loosely Second Life related… or maybe that’s why I like them best… maybe I’m not your target demographic here.

Still, I think a lot more people are trying out the Footnote format of breaking a longer show up into smaller increments as they get them done. Which makes sense really. The biggest reason a person is going to want to be interviewed (besides the ego boost) is to pimp something, right? But they can’t really pimp an event with you now can they? If you interviewed me today about my upcoming concert on the 7th, odds are by the time anybody heard the interview, the 7th would have passed. Which is going to be a disincentive for guests.

The important thing is to have fun with it, if that means monkeying with it a ton and making a really inconsistent product till you and the audience sort of work out what’s best, that’s cool. I mean it’s just a podcast. It’s incredibly unlikely you’ll retire on your SLUTR income so for as much work as you put into it, enjoy!

I think a once or twice a week little sketch or interview or tip or rant as a lone cast would be better than one lump sum once a month or so. Also, your stats go way up because you have more episodes and if you just say how many downloads you have a month, they go through the roof.

@viceroy mariner: hehe. umm. you weren’t supposed to listen? it’s not my fault robots harm everyone in the future.
@caleb: great thoughts re: the podcast, thanks! and, it’s not so much taking it personally as… when you are time limited and you want to get stuff done, it’s crazy how much effort it does sometimes take. and that’s because of a lot of little things popping up - roadblocks. sure, most of the time, stuff works and it’s great - but i’m amazed at how many little and sometimes not so little time sinks there are when dealing with this stuff sometimes. i do have high expectations because if this stuff is going to become truly ubiquitous and really become “mom and dad” stuff, it needs fixed. people shouldn’t have to learn so much to get stuff done.

when my dad’s email quits working, for example, he tries a few things and then he’s hosed until i can look at it, figure it out, and get it going again for him. i guess my own view is, we shouldn’t accept the expectation that an average guy who doesn’t care how it works is going to have to pack it up, get it to the computer store, and get someone to help them fix something so trivial.

I will admit I don’t listen as frequently as I should. When your podcast started out you had the babble-cast concept going and that was enjoyable to me because when you get started on a topic with the right people to talk to it is very interesting and informative. Then my personal schedule got out of whack and I had a backlog of podcasts to listen to. When I got back to listening to yours I noticed a change in the format. I appreciate the feedback to the listeners but sometimes it goes on too long. The adventures with Chug are fun but now that there is the videocast too… I dunno if elminating those would help with the length… that’s a tough call I like them, I have visited places because of them, but you are worried about length of the podcast. I completely understand about editing, I have a 40 minutes interview I need to edit and I’m not looking forward to it, I want to go to open mic night, so something tells me I will be AWOL from SL tomorrow night to get it done. I know with Going Broke we want to do a lot, interview designers, review stores, talk about fashion events/fairs, etc. We have decided to develop several formats for the show. We could have a show just be a 40 minutes interview or we could do a short interview and review a few stores or no interview and just talk about stores and such. If we got everything in that we wanted to do in one show the show would be 90 minutes long and that’s just too much, what do you think this is TWiT or DSC?

Maybe look into having an interview only show and then a week later a show with feedback and Chug’s segment and whatever else and maybe just a Radar Babbles show where you just randomly call up people on Skype and see if they will talk.

I know in the thoughts for my new podcast, which if I can ever get the domain name/hosting stuff fixed I will launch. I decided that when I have someone else on, or just me babbling about a topic, there will be a 20 minute timer, if the other person and I have more to talk about it will be another 20 minutes segment for the next show, and so forth.

As for length, from what I can remember, most people like around 40 mins, it’s the length of the average commute. I know Going Broke averages around 50 minutes no matter what we try.

As for the technology rant… I only scanned it but I put 4GB of memory in my MacBook Pro, it supposedly only accesses 3GB but it says it sees 4GB, but I did find it helped my performance some, but yesterday 3 times while I was just hanging out on Edloe not really doing anything just IMing Sougent I beachballed. I didn’t crash out I just lagged, and I didn’t have much else running. TWhirl, Adium, Firefox and maybe Skype, I wasn’t even on a call just logged in if anyone wanted to chat. Before the RAM upgrade I was beachballing all the time so I’m not bitching as much, but I’m still bitching.

Good thoughts. Thanks, everyone. Even if I’m not responding to each point, I’m listening and thinking about them all.

Ok, with the caveat that I don’t do a podcast and never have, here’s my take.

One, you gotta like what you’re doing or you’ll never be satisfied so just do your thing and don’t worry so much.

Figure out how long you want it to be, then figure you’re going to spend X minutes on feedback, X minutes on ranting and babbling, X minutes on Chug’s segment (or as Daphne suggests, move her segment to In Your Face as it’s own show and make it video) and X minutes on interviews. Give yourself the time for what you want to do so that you don’t feel rushed, some episodes you may adjust so you spend more on one thing than another but don’t let the interview length force you to not do what you want, if the interview goes long and the material is good then split it between multiple episodes.

I’ve listened to all the SLuR episodes, the best ones were the babblecasts with multiple people where you can play off of the different personalities. You definitely are more amusing when you have 3 or more people on with you.

I can honestly say that I’ve found something enjoyable about each of the episodes of SLuR and I look forward to new ones, the only, only thing I can beef about is that you take too long between them.

Regarding your MacBook issue - I was having similar issues with my iMac24…. beachballs, lockups, 1.1FPS, etc. Then i ran into this thread: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=251866 and gave it a go - and it works!

I have to say that this solution is brilliant, and obvious when you think about it. Evidently the mac client is set by default to use ALL of the graphics card memory. This works fine until the client fills the card up with textures and then OSX wants some, perhaps if you are running another app, etc. Anyhow, your machine will do texture-thrashing because of this default.

The forum post suggests lowering your texture memory down to half of the default to prevent thrashing. And it does - at least on my iMac. My frame rates are WAY up (30+ frequently now) and very few beachballs. Give it a try, Radar, and maybe the rest of your technical day will be a bit better!

One suggestion for shortening it: never mention any comments I make to you. The novelty of SL has finally worn off for me, so I’m not consuming very much SL-related media these days. So far I’ve only had time to listen to the first 10 minutes of your latest podcast. In general, though, my biggest complaint about SL podcasts has been poor sound quality. As far as content goes, I think you should do whatever gives you joy. The ones that seem to work best are the ones that have some kind of theme or focus; the format in which it is presented is less important.

@ArminasX Saiman: This is something that makes sense (not eating all the VRAM for textures only) but, unfortunately, for the problems I’m having with the nvidia 8600M GT opengl drivers, it doesn’t make any difference at all. None. Zero. In fact, I’m currently running at 192 megs of the 512 megs of VRAM my computer has because RC2 keeps setting it to that. But I can set it to 256 and it doesn’t matter.

I see this posted a lot on the JIRA and forums, and I’m glad it helps some people, but it’s not the main issue going on for a lot of us, probably even most of us.

OK, I don’t understand the technology rant. I have a Windows-based HP notebook that does SL just fine. My 5 year old Dell would have sufficed had I been able to upgrade the video and memory. Do I get lag? Sometimes. Am I and others grey/ruthed etc? Sometimes. But no amount of memory or rockin video card capacity is going to fix the problems inherent in the SL platform. It is what it is and I’ll continue to bitch while being able to run almost everything except SL problem free on my computer.

What do you want your podcast to be? You have a lot of elements now that could stand on their own quite nicesly…the interviews, the rants, and Chug’s piece especially. All great segments in and of themselves, the show’s too long as it is now….unless I listen to it when I’m supposed to be working, I can’t get it all in at a go.

I’m not a fan of the babblecasts…too much “on” and not enough of interest to anyone but the participants. Well, except when *I* am in them of course. Seriously…nothing turns me off a podcast faster than hearing a bunch of people speak among themselves with no format or moderator….I’d rather entertain myself with my own friends.

Ok, well, try having a conversation and every couple minutes SL freezes for 30 seconds and you can’t reply. Or see what’s being said. And now tell me you are NOT gonna get frustrated, and I’ll say you’re not being honest.

Or have SL completely lock up your computer so you have to hard boot, consistently, within minutes of logging in. That’s what the current RC does, every single time I run sl, so that means, unless they fix it, that’s what’s going to happen in the next release client. That’s the future of SL for me. Guaranteed system lock ups in 5 minutes. And that means I won’t be in SL anymore. Still don’t understand?

I actually agree about the babblecasts, actually for ME babblecast meant me babbling, but the group casts, well, there’s a million of those all over the internet. People in a group yammering, and blah blah blah for an hour. I get feedback that those are the ones people like, but if I did that most of the time, it would kill my spirit and I’d stop podcasting. Seriously. There’s no creativity in that at all.

I believe I said it was the platform, and what you are describing is platform related. But it’s not the technology, it’s the company behind that technology.

You babbling is fine. Well and with me.

Finished listening to the last episode last night, and it was great as usual. You do have the best sound quality of all the SL podcasts I’ve heard. I really like interviews from which I learn something new about SL. This one with Will got me interested in listening to 118 Migration, which I really wasn’t interested in before.

I agree with Jane2 about babblecasts. I’m not really interested in listening to people chat about what they did on the Grid this week. Group casts are OK if the group actually has something newsy to talk about (and everybody’s sound level is consistent), but doing a group cast just for the sake of doing a group cast does nothing for me.

[...] Radar: http://radarmasukami.com/ - link to his post called “Technology Sucks - It’s not just [...]