msb-0136 Scared by a stats check

msb-0136 Scared by a stats check

intro

I've been checking my stats for my old episodes and people have been picking them up on the way to the latest episode or maybe they have picked after listening to the latest episode (which means that the podsafe, and by definition the indie-, music that I picked is more popular than I originally thought [I seriously doubt that they are going back to pick up the old shows because of my voice.])

As of this writing, I now have 8,556 podcasts distributed:

• 4,700 through a web browser and
• 3,856 through one podcatcher or another, (by the way, how's Juice [ http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php ] working out for you? You've been catching the episodes since "msb-0133 What's happening". Drop me an email: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com. I want to know if you're able to get the band images and web links.)

---- "Sage Hill - Theme " by: "Intelect" http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=234976

Feedback come first, so...

Herrad should be podcasting every Thursday. She'll have something in English to introduce herself on the next show and then, its back to Dutch.

This isn't feed back as much as it was an observation by my SysAdmin friend that I am basically just being a coward.

After getting us another brewski each, and giving him a hearty "Fuck you... What's that supposed to mean?"

Between sips and gurgles, he read me the riot act in his unassuming, quiet way. (Its a much more devastating and effective delivery; "Once you have they attention, don't go off like a bomb, that's noisy, flashy and short lived, instead, plow into 'em like a glacier and anihilate 'em!" [which got us off track talking about global warming. {The best part is that, even though he does not believe that the statistics are following the right events in recent history, (and it then becomes a question of which came first: warming or pollution,) he agrees with me that it would be better for us all if we stopped belching megatons of shit into the atmosphere.}])

He's right. I am being a coward.

I am scared of success. Scared "shitless".

I've never minded failure.

That's how we learn.

Sometimes I've had to reach for what part of a program or project was a failure, but I always found something.

Its just that now I've got to decide something and I don't know what direction this podcast is going to take.

If the response to the ad is "crickets-chirping" silence, I will have wasted $1,300.

That's a tad too high a price.

---- "Grace of a Princess" by: "Jim Richmond" http://www.audiostreet.net/jimrichmond

Feed Forward comes next, so...

Hey... If you don't tell me anything you want to share, or ask the readership/listenership about, then I'm just sliding into the next song. :-)

But I just caught guitarist "Manuel Barrueco" in a Micheal Lawrence film [ http://www.mlfilms.com/productions/manuel_barrueco ] on PBS and he was great, really great; though it was tinged with melancholy for me.

... sigh ...

There but for the grace of happenstance went I.

---- "Ou va la vie" by: "StudioMig" http://studiomig.com/

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com

---- "Extravagante e Exibido-Norberto Macedo" by: "Ze Sao Paulo" http://zesaopaulo.cals.com.br/

Main Topic: Scared by a stats check

I am scared by a check of my stats.

Unlike my health, which I monitor constantly because I am very aware of my surroundings and my place in them, (we'll get back to that in "part deux",) I am in an uncontrollable situation as regards this podcast.

If its a "cricket-chirping" disaster, I'm out $1,300.

My wife is going to be pissed off at me for wasting what is after all a very finite resource: my money (not to mention my ability to replenish said resource is entirely dependent on my health, [which is a major factor with MSers. One bad episode of "flu" could turn into a bad episode of MS and I don't have enough myelin left to withstand too many of those.])

Worse than that, its based on the client's perception of my health, right or wrong.

Nobody wants a "crip" working for them if they can just tell the supplier to send a replacement. (Yes, people are treated the same way as parts, they are interchangeable as far as the client cares, and they all want to have the shiny new parts, even though this old part may be smarter and have better solutions for them. "sigh!")

Well, enough prevarication and delay.

The worst part of this is that if its "not" a "cricket-chirping" disaster, I have absolutely no guarantees as to the actual direction this will take me in.

----

Some things I'd actually like.

I would like to interject a note of media into the lives of people who are otherwise are ignored and forgotten. (IMDB found "one lousy, stinking 'made for TV' episode", out of all the millions and millions of hours of media references on their database.)

I would like to be able to bring the adverts for therapies, products, goods and services out into the open. No more hiding on the pages of some obscure journal or magazine, or when the availability of things are discussed "sotto voce" and knowledge is spread through the fragile telephone of "oral tradition."

I would like to remind the health delivery sector of our economy that we exist in all our multi-variate forms, as does our disease. I know the effects of this disease as much as than anyone, in a cold clinical, dispassionate sense, and yet I am still astonished at what it has to teach me.

I'd like to give us a voice out there, instead of the silence I endured for over thirty years from the time first my first attack, in high-school, when my handwriting went to hell, until my first listener discovered me.

There is no "magic bullet", no one "final solution", except the same one you're probably thinking of too. (While I am sure "Osama bin Laden" would be delighted with lining us all against a wall, proclaiming that 10% of the world's population is only fit to be shot, [never mind the 0.0833% fraction that we MSers represent,] I would hope that the non-socio-psycho-pathic world would be shrewder while being more compassionate.)

I also have to ask myself: "What would having a thousand and/or maybe more listeners do this podcast?"

I'm not a medical practitioner. If people are newly diagnosed they want to know who's who, what's what, where's where, when's when and why (and I feel bad telling them I don't think there is a "why." [Then again, maybe there "is" a why, a duplicatable series of circumstances which lead to MS. {Research "was" the point of my last show...}])

----

Some things, I'd be kicking and screaming about, and I'd probably not do because, its "not" worth the success, while I "am".

Then MSBPodcast stays a "violon d'Ingres," a hobby, and a means for me, and my multi-national, multi-linguistic collaborators, to rant and vent.

It just means that I wasted my dough and that's just too bad.

---- "Variation On Bolero theStark" http://thestark.com/

Main Topic, part deux:

We're back; talking about MS are the relationship with the physical environs.

Specifically, how my "driving" has changed over the years and why.

My first wife thought I drove like an ass-hole and my second wife thinks that too; so some things just never change. :-)

Because my MS has left me with a spotty, erratic and inconsistent "somatic sense", a sense of where everything about me and mine actually is, I tend to rely a lot on what my vision tells me about the actual position of both my self and my environs. (I had shiny racing pedals installed not because I drive that fast anymore, but because, every now and then, I need to look down at where my feet actually are in relation to the pedals to rejigger the sometic sense of where my legs actually are in relation to the pedals, [which you must admit could lead to a potentially deadly accident {I don't take lightly the act of guiding a ton of metal, plastic and glass, powered by the equivalent of 17 sticks of dynamite in the gas tank.}])

Now extend that to a car.

When driving, we tend to know instinctually where our boundaries are as if we "were" the vehicle.

Our somatic sense adapts to a new "body image" which includes the vehicle, its capabilities and its limitations.

I used to be great at backing up and parallel parking... "Not no mo' "

And I suck at just straight pulling in from the front.

If you want to spend some time watching a fool try to pull into a parking spot, just follow me to the mall and watch me try to park into a spot that's at ninety degrees from the traffic path.

I tell myself, out loud, that its because of the car's small size, but I know that's bull-shit.

I'll be happy, if not exactly relieved, when my wife learns to drive again.

---- "The Men Who Were Slaughtered By Henry Ford" by: "Hugh Flynn" http://www.hugh-flynn-composer.com/

Outro