msb-0047 Oh Wow!

msb-0047 Oh Wow!

Feed back come first so ...

I got some from a Dr. Code. He's got a book on something I believe in, nutrition and MS.

This is some of the content of his email:

Hi Charles,

I am impressed that you are raising the awareness of Multiple Sclerosis in a new and unique way. Thank you for doing so.

My father was diagnosed with MS 10 years ago, and was forced to leave medical practice.

Since then he has regained his health though nutritional methods, and has written a book called "Who's In Control of Your MS?", ISBN: 0-9737918-0-2

(http://shop.drbillcode.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1).

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More feedback:

Advertising people don't understand podcasting and RSS yet.

I can distribute any kind of content: PDF (Portable Document Format) files, audio and video.

One objection I heard from someone that manufactures a complicated powered wheel chair is that they don't want to use podcasting because their advertising is basically visual and needs to be to show off the features of their wheel chairs and that my podcast is audio.

I produce an audio podcast because its cheap, easy and fast.

Also, this way I can do it in my office regardless of how dimly lit it is (or not, depending on whether I close the drapes, or not.)

Also that means I can wear whatever I feel like and be my usual schlubby unkempt self.

On the internet, no one can tell you're a dawg.

But video places certain demands on production values (and expenses,) that I don't feel are necessary or germaine to building up a community of MSers.

But that doesn't mean I can't 'cast quality video (to a pod or to a PC.) (Actually I was stunned at the tools available to let me do it.)

Which sort of explains msb-0045 Video Podcasting and msb-0046 XXXXX Trial Balloon.

I can take video content and put it out there.

msb-0045 was a video podcast of something put together by or for "SubPop" for "The Postal Service" promoting the song "Such Great Heights." They are a great band and deserve all the success they get.

msb-0046 was a video podcast lifted from a promotional video, sent to me for around four bucks in mail each, that could have gone out for about USD$50.00 per thousand or a nickel (USD$0.05) each.

That's five cents versus four bucks. 1/80 the cost.

The stuff looks great and I have the appropriate software to run conversions across almost any format the companies care to supply to the .M4V format which, while not native to the iPod, plays well in iTunes or on an iPod, as well as any web based player.

However the current approach that XXXX used with regards to text should be tightened and the colors should trend more towards using primary colors.

It didn't look that hot on the DVD either.

I don't feel that bad for them.

Its all stuff that can be redone in post-production from the original footage.

Apart from the one download that some got, its available by direct contact to potential advertisers.

However. because it is an advert, or a five minute snippet of one, unpaid for and, as my wife rightly pointed out, until and unless we get a contract authorizing us to play it, could be considered copyright violation, its not for general consumption. (And I can play anything as long as I don't 'cast it.)

Sorry, but there will forever be a hole in the episode numbering.

(Mostly because its on the server wating for potential advertisers to get their own "private screening" and see what this mother can do what you take the training wheels off.)

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Some other feedback was somewhat less positive:

Okay, you're right. You're absolutely right. I appologize.

But you really put it rather harshly. (You know who you are.)

Lets start at the beginning.

Let me introduce myself.

My name is Charles-A. Rovira and I have MS. (Just listen to me. I have no breath control and very little voice control left. Do I sound normal to you?)

I have had MS since I was sixteen when, in 1969, MS took all the neat handwriting technique the nuns had taught me, under pain of eternal damnation, and threw it into a cocked hat.

Still I managed to recover enough of my coordination to become a guitarist, and a damn good one if I say so myself.

But being a musician and eating regular don't exactly go together. Besides I accomplished what I'd set out to do, I got respect, and the rest was impositions, all guys telling me about "getting that sound".

I went into computers in Montreal, back when there were only mainframe and mini computers. Micros were in their infancy. This was in 1976.

I was fine until 1985 when I had a bad attack that put me into the Ottawa General hospital, for five weeks. That's when I was officially diagnosed with MS.

I used the time in Neuro-ICU to think about objects and object-oriented programming. Its easy when you don't have any distractions, like a body, or an appetite, or much of anything else.

I recovered, I wrote for a bunch of magazines that don't exist anymore and was making a nice life for myself when MS came a knocking again; with a vengence.

I spent one miserable month in 1997 trying to get my ass out of a Brooklyn bed and discovered that, this time, I was left having to use a cane to get around.

Like the last time, the previous attack, I thought about objects and data relationships.

Rather than sitting on my duff, feeling sorry for myself, I went to school and finally got a degree, in business.

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I discovered digital audio recording, RSS and Podcasting about 9 months ago.

Now I'm trying to make a go of MSBPodcast.com because I see the possibilities that its extremely focused 'casting capabilities have for giving news and tunes to an extremely small percentage of the population.

MSers make up 0.0833% or 1 in 1,200 of the population.

No advertising firm in the world will touch that.

But the internet can weave every one of those twelve hunded into over 300,000 people.

That's a lot of people.

I am trying to bring these people, us MSers, together with music, podsafe music.

What I hope is that I can bring quality to audio and video while creating a channel for information that we need.

This podcast is what I have planned to do it with and through.

And that's who I am, dearie.

Those are my bona fides.

Any more questions?

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More feedback:

I recently got in touch with Pat Metheny or at least with the webmeiser who's taking care of his website (I'll put it in the show notes.)

He may be providing some tunes to the Podsafe Music Network, the PMN.

You might be hearing some jazz on this show real soon now.

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Even more feedback:

Things are moving along for ChefsForMS. Twelve bottles of wines have been selected and they'll be going into some "gift baskets" four at a time. It should be a fun evening. Dry for me but fun regardless.