Audio workout

Prompted, yesterday, by yet another pointless and ridiculous update, not two days after updating The Girlfriend’s computer to be “current,” I finally decided to rid the site of any dependence on Adobe’s horrendous Flash plugin. Their software has been bloated, near-pointless, and risk-prone for years, and their updates consist of plugging every exploitable leak that someone manages to find – it says a lot that this occurs every couple of weeks on average. I cannot come to the conclusion that anyone knows what the hell they’re doing, and Firefox automatically shuts Flash down the moment that Mozilla hears of any issues (that Firefox is so easily controlled by Mozilla is another issue that bears examination.)

Since only one plugin on the site required Flash in the first place, this was no big deal, right? If you think that way, you haven’t done web development, and it’s this kind of thing that prevented me from further pursuing the field, either semi-professionally or just to make the site slicker. HTML, the ‘language’ of web display, has been a hodgepodge born from text-command computers since its inception a few decades ago, and attempts to make it standardized and more intuitive have been going on for almost the same length of time, hampered by the influences of the companies providing browser software; in short, it changes a lot without getting a lot better. The plugin I needed to eradicate only played audio files, and HTML5 now provides for a simple sound player, so all I needed to do was reformat those posts and pages where sound files appeared. On top of that, WordPress recently adopted this and made it even easier. In theory of course, mostly revolving around new content and not retrofitting existing content.

The end result was 38 sound files, spread across multiple posts and pages, that took hours to reformat, once I finally found a method that worked – most of them had to be renamed after all of them were moved. Is anyone still finding that one-year experiment in podcasting? Probably not, and they might be regretting it whenever they do (not the best of equipment to work with on this end,) but I hate having anything up on the site that’s blocked out or obsolete.

Anyway, they should all be fixed now, so you can check out my music recommendations without issue. Unless, of course, you can’t. But as a bonus, I am including my supercut of podcast outtakes solely for amusement.

In no way safe for work, home, daycare, or really any public consumption at all

If bad language bothers you, well, get over it, but if it bothers those around you, you don’t want to play that file out loud. I don’t want you to get the impression that my recording ‘sessions’ were always like this – these are examples of when things were repeatedly going wrong and I was being more fumbletongued than usual. I have a face for radio, but not the speaking habits…