Unpaid Geek Time
Ryan on Mar 16, 2005 9:07pm
In my life there is geek time and non-geek time. (Yes I try to have a \"normal\" life as well, doesn\'t always turn out that way, but...). Inside of that geek time, its divided up into two simple parts: Paid Geek Time(PGT) & Unpaid Geek Time(UGT). PGT is what I do for income. Mostly, that is my job, but its also some moonlighting on the side. However, its the UGT that I truly treasure.
It\'s those rare times where I find myself with a bit of free time to do some geek stuff for me. Not for my bosses, not for my moonlight clients, but for me. Blogging, personal programming, playin\' video games, or just plain surfing the web.
Lately, any UGT that I get to enjoy is spent on this site...which as you can tell from the looks of it...isn\'t that much time. My latest interest however, is something I\'ve been thinking about adding to this site for a long time, \"Audioblogging.\" For the unitiated, if my text-based blogs don\'t bore you enough already, you\'d get to actually hear my random thoughts and bad jokes by clicking on a link.
For many audio-bloggers/podcasters this is as simple as pluggin a microphone into their computer and recording away. I however, would like to be able to use my cellphone for this purpose. There are a number of pay services out there that will let you call a number, leave the message and then recieve it in your inbox, but as stated above, I\'m lookin\' for free. These same services offer a \"free\" account, but the file shows up in a propietary format that I\'d have to convert. This has left me with two options:
It\'s those rare times where I find myself with a bit of free time to do some geek stuff for me. Not for my bosses, not for my moonlight clients, but for me. Blogging, personal programming, playin\' video games, or just plain surfing the web.
Lately, any UGT that I get to enjoy is spent on this site...which as you can tell from the looks of it...isn\'t that much time. My latest interest however, is something I\'ve been thinking about adding to this site for a long time, \"Audioblogging.\" For the unitiated, if my text-based blogs don\'t bore you enough already, you\'d get to actually hear my random thoughts and bad jokes by clicking on a link.
For many audio-bloggers/podcasters this is as simple as pluggin a microphone into their computer and recording away. I however, would like to be able to use my cellphone for this purpose. There are a number of pay services out there that will let you call a number, leave the message and then recieve it in your inbox, but as stated above, I\'m lookin\' for free. These same services offer a \"free\" account, but the file shows up in a propietary format that I\'d have to convert. This has left me with two options:
- Find a way to convert the file from the attachment to mp3 or at the very least wav, (I can do ogg, but not many people use it). However, I am not sure I can get the conversion process to take place on the server as I don\'t have system level access to install the appropriate utlities...I am looking at this though, we\'ll see.
- Use Audiobloggers.com and setup a Blogger account, and refer people, (maybe just provide links to the audio).
While the latter sounds the most simple, here\'s the rub. I want to do this without have to be near a computer with a net connection. Basically I\'d have to create some scripts on my web server, go check to see if I have new files at the audioblogger account, add the links to my database, and then see what happens.
Needless to say, I\'ve got some research to do, and I\'ve already spent 15 minuts of my UGT entering this blog. Woulda been easier via voice mail... However, this is proving to be harder for me to do since I am looking for an extremely cheap, (read free), method of performing this function. Right now, what I am probably going to end-up doing
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