It’s almost the Holiday time!
Hello everybody.
It’s the holiday season, and you know what that means. The true meaning of the holidays is one thing…. Presents. And we’ve got lots of them.
So far we’ve gotten the presents from the following:
Faithgirl1, Kerochan and Joseph. And Batou got something from Oompa. Rangi mailed us a package, but it’s not here yet. Probably because the post office was closed for two days.
The AP Xmas tree is looking good. No lights yet because when I setup the tree I discovered that my lights were bad, and because everything was closed I haven’t gotten new ones yet.
It’s great having two to three feet of snow on the ground. I had to dig a couple of paths around the yard for Max because, well, he’s a small dog. But he likes running around in the yard, and loves snow.
Rukia wasn’t able to get out to Kansas because the interstates were closed, and as her sister (read ride) had her car impounded and was supposed to get it out Thursday, that didn’t happen. So no car until Wednesday probably. So maybe they’ll go out next week sometime. And since the rest of her family is in Michigan for the holidays, Rukia and her sister will be joining us for xmas. Not that Rukia celebrates it, being a good witch, but I gave her a Yule present yesterday. She got the Dune Miniseries DVD set.
I’ll try to remember to take some pictures of the snow and the tree tomorrow and post them up so you can see how much snow we got.
Until then. be safe and keep the Anime love strong!
Let it Snow!
So it’s snowing here. Hard. Very hard. As in almost a foot between 8am and 12pm. They sent everyone home at noon from the office. After taking 45 minutes to make the normally 10 minute drive to Boulder. I stop by the Post Office to check out the AP mail, and they close the Post Office at 1pm, while I’m still there. Glad I got there when I did. Then I had to head over to pick up a UPS that came (since they don’t deliver to PO Boxes). Then head home to the two feet of snow in the driveway. Literally. So I clean out the garage and pull the car in, shovel the driveway, and I’m home for the rest of the day! Woohoo! I think I may have to go out and make snow angels later. Or maybe a snowman. I love the snow. I love driving in the snow, I love walking in the snow, I love laying in the snow. I just love everything about snow. So I’m happy. I just hope it stops enough for the airport to open so that my people can fly in tomorrow and Friday. That would suck if they couldn’t get in. But then it could start snowing again. Friday at 7pm it can start dumping again.
Woohoo! Woohoo! *goes off to play in snow.
Rukia has entered the building
Rukia just landed. So she is officially back in the state. Right now her plans are somewhat nebulous for the holidays, as she was supposed to go out to Kansas to visit her grandfolks. Unfortunately her ride is looking a bit shaky. So if she’s still in town Friday night, I’ll see if I can’t get her to join the show.
Give me my four and a half hours back!
So I just finished watching Love Love. It wasn’t a bad show, just kind of pointless. It had an excessive amount of fanservice, which normally wouldn’t be that bad, but this was in a too young, make you feel dirty sort of way. I was left at the end of the show thinking, why did I watch this? I want my morning back.
So now I’m just exporting the show. I’m going to get it uploaded and posted, and then back to studying for my Japanese final. It normally wouldn’t be that bad, except for one small detail. I’ve been so excessively busy with work and AP this semester, that not only did I have to miss two weeks of class in October, but I’m waaaaay behind on homework. So I’m trying to do a semesters worth of homework to email my sensei and hope I get partial credit for it. Then I actually have to study for the test. I did fine on the oral portion, which I had on Friday, I just need to study the kanji that will be in the paragraphs we have to read for the written.
*Sigh*. I can’t wait until next weekend. I’m taking xmas week off of work, and one of my good friends is coming into town for xmas through new years. My mom is coming flying in for four days over xmas which will be nice, since she hasn’t been out to visit my new place in Boulder that I moved to in 2005. And Rukia comes back from HI tomorrow. So it’ll be busy, but nice to have work done for the year.
It’s weekends like this, where I have to clean the house (because mom’s coming into town), do homework, study for finals, do laundry, and do the show, where I wish for a trained monkey to edit the show for me. Hey could bang on the keyboard like this message from Entropy:
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/80731.aspx
Speaking of, if you like computers, the Pop-Up Potpourri’s over at the Daily WTF had me laughing so hard at work that I literally was breaking skin on my hand biting it to keep from making noise. I’ll provide links to all of them to date.
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/33195.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/37010.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/42777.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/46902.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/51170.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/52996.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/55885.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/59031.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/63686.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/67541.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/72607.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/75718.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/80731.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/85750.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/88145.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/90530.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/97325.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/100851.aspx
Ok. Show is exported. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
Work is boring….NOT!
So I’m at work, studying for my MCSD certification, and decided to blog some more.
After reading my post again and the comments on it, I realized that it came off as slightly negative. So let me clear that up. I love working on the show. I love doing the show and I love the community we have. I prefer not to delegate things unless I know that others can do it better, hence Chigo runs IRC, and Rangi runs the calendar, Weltall runs our store, etc..
So let me discuss the other people who help us out but maybe haven’t been around the whole time.
Rukia. The awesome girlfriend-san. She made her appearance after we had been doing the show for a while, mainly because she didn’t like me spending an evening a week ignoring her in favor of the show :-). She did some shows on and off for a few months. The last three months she’s been in Manoa, Hawaii, and is returning next week. That will be nice. We’ll see after she gets settled back in Colorado if she wants to come back on the show.
Rangiku. She started out as a moderator on the forum, and then when we addressed her directly on the show telling her she needed to go to Bostonian things like the Brattle Anime Fest, seminars at Harvard and MIT, etc., she surprised us with actually doing it! So she left some audio reviews of things, and started to get more involved with the show. Before we knew it, we couldn’t imagine it without her. She is usually on IRC and forums, and helps us out by representing the AP love on the east coast. She records things for us, and has been asked to help plan MIT’s Cool Japan this coming year. Because of her, the Brattle Anime Fest has asked AP to help plan their programming. She’s an invaluable member of the team.
Treize. Chigo and I met Treize at Kunicon in 2005. She won the best of show in the cosplay for her amazing Treize costume. Batou met her at NDK where she had a kickass Miliardo Peacecraft costume. So we invited her on the show to discuss some cosplay stuff. That worked out well, so we invited her around more often. Since then she has become part of the crew, and we love having her on the show, even though she doesn’t talk much unless she actually has a review.
Kaitar. I got an email from a local fan over the summer, and we arranged to do a sushi dinner with Batou, Chigo and I, and her and a friend. We all met up, and because of her depth of knowledge of Anime and outgoing personality, we invited her to be a guest on the show. She worked out well, so we gave her a standing invitation. After about a month or so, all of a sudden Chitar was born, and the rest is history.
Kerochan. Moderating the forums is a thankless job. Mods very rarely get any recognition for their work, so we try to appreciate those individuals who accept our offers. We were starting to get overworked, because of my job, Batou’s job and Chigo’s schoolwork. So we looked around, and found Kero. He acted mature and intelligent in the forums, and well, his handle is Kero, who’s voice actress is my absolute favorite Seiyuu, Aya Hisakawa. Aya has done a million roles, over the past 10-15 years. My favorite is Shitow Haruka from RahXephon. Her voice work is one of the big reasons RahXephon is my favorite show. Anyways, back to Kero. He accepted our offer, and thus far has proven a valuable asset to the forums.
Faithgirl1. Faithgirl1 was an exception to our standard mode of moderator recruiting. In her case we were actually doing well for moderation, but she stepped up and was already almost acting in that capacity, so I just made it official. She is very eager and willing to help, and is a genuinely kind person. Funny story. Faith has been around for a while now, and in the Subscribers forum last week, she made a reference to her real life involving her church. When she did that the lightbulb FINALLY went off. Faithgirl1 = Faith + girl = girl who has faith. The whole christian thing completely went over my head forever. How funny is that? Not that I care, I take Mal’s approach to god. (Book “do you mind if I say grace?”. Mal “Only if you do it aloud”) 
I have no problem with whatever religion/faith people have, I just don’t really subscribe to any of them.
Showbiz Dog. While Max has been around the entire life of the show, he doesn’t get too much notice. So I’ll tell you about Max. He is an 11 year old mini Schnauzer. He is about 20 lbs. and his coloring is Salt and Pepper. I adopted him from a no-kill rescue service. His previous owner was an old woman who had to move into a home, but couldn’t keep her dog. He was her “precious” as it was, and so part of the adoption was that in exchange for them paying vet and adoption fees, I would allow visitation once every week or two. I asked where to sign. Apparently they had issues finding someone to agree to that. The womans kids (who are 30-40 years older than me) described people saying things like “if it’s my dog that it’ll be my dog, I don’t want to share”. I just don’t understand that sort of reasoning. Dogs have so much love to give, who would be that jealous? So they paid the adoption fees and pay all the vet bills, and a couple times a month, the kids bring their mom down and they take Max to the dog park for an hour or so. Everybody’s happy. I’ve only had Max about 14 months, but I love him dearly. He’s and old man, but he acts like a puppy. He has an amazing amount of energy, and he lives for treats and walks. He bounces all over the house, and provides much amusement as he runs across the hardwood floor and leaps onto a pillow, which then slides out from underneath him, and he eats shit. But he gets some love from the show. Three fans so far have sent him gifts, which are much appreciated.
So I guess that’s about it. It’s going to get busy for me in the next couple weeks, as Rukia comes home, my mom comes into town for xmas, and one of my best friends comes in for xmas from Washington State. But you can look to a xmas day show, maybe some Crispin for Christmas? Of course, the subscribers have already had the interview for a week. So go and subscribe!
I am concerned about money, mainly because it’s been an expensive 6 months. Hotels for NDK, trip to HI, Wii, plus the money I put into AP, so if AP were to start pulling its weight it would be great for us. But whatever, it’s not like we’re going to stop doing this anytime soon, but we can definitely provide incentives for support
State of the show 2006
Howdy folks.
If you’re reading this, then you’re probably a listener of my show. If not, go check it out by clicking on the huge icon in the upper left of the page.
On to the meat.
I figured that since other members have blogs, and they seem to be popular, I should have one. What better way to start off than do a retrospective and where are we now post.
I’ll start off by giving a bit of where did we come from. It was NDK 2005, mid-September or so. Batou and Weltall and Tim and I were bitching about the lack of good Anime podcasts. I had seen a live recording of ASO radio at either Kunicon or NDK (I don’t remember) and wasn’t terribly impressed with them. Batou and I joked about doing our own, since we like to hear ourselves talk, and I’m a programmer and could handle the technical side of it.
Over the next month Batou and I met a few times, tossed around name ideas, and figured out what domains we could actually get. We had a number of ideas, but Anime Pulse was my first idea, and we could actually get that domain, so we ended up going with that.
I purchased the domain, and found a decent cheap hosting provider. I setup a basic blog, and Batou and I started discussing format. We setup a basic outline of how we wanted the shows to go (which is the same format as today). We determined our rating scale, and then sat down to record our first episode.
We had no equipment, so we used my USB mic from Karaoke Revolution and propped it up between two textbooks on the table, and huddled around it. I did the recording on my laptop with Audacity, and then we spent the next five hours or so trying the get it so the levels weren’t terrible.
The next episode was a catastrophe. Batou and I had the brilliant idea of each recording on our own laptops using headsets to try to get better levels. It would have been great except for the fact that Batou’s laptop recorded slightly slower, so when we put the streams together, he started lagged by about minute 10. This would have been manageable, except for the fact that my headset had picked him up lightly, which created the “devil echo” as it were. I banged my head against it for about two hours, and then Chigo came over and loaded it into Premiere and played with it for about three more hours, and we finally said “screw it” and posted it. At that point we said “this is ridiculous” and I ordered a mic and a compressor. Batou picked up a mixer and a pre-amp, and two weeks later, we were back. I was still spending about four to five hours editing, but the sound quality was much better.
During this time, I submitted our show to iTunes, and all of a sudden we started taking off. So we called up Michael “Piano Squall” Gluck and asked him for an interview. Chigo and I had been blessed with his music at Kunicon, and were in love. We had all his songs on our computers and cars. Michael agreed, and we had our first interview.
The setup was ugly, I was still working out the best way to record Skype, so we had two laptops, one recording to Audacity, and then one that we actually used to talk to Michael on. We conferenced in the other computer so it got both sides of the convo to record. It was a cludge, but it worked.
We decided we wanted a forum, so off I went and setup a forum. It started slow at first, and Batou and I together were more than enough to handle it. Then it got busier, so first I pulled in Chigo to help. Then it got busier still, so we tapped a member who had shown great maturity in dealing with people in the forums. Yep, you guessed it. It was Rangiku. A better addition to the team I could not have dreamed of. With Rangi and Chigo around, Batou and I could focus more on administrative stuff. Batou, well, worked a lot. I spent a month or so tracking down every possible podcast listing/directory and submitting our show to it. I also setup Feedburner and routed our feed there so I could track stats, with which I was obsessed.
By this time 2006 had rolled around, and Chigo had become a permanent part of the show. We were rolling along well, and growing every week. Onepixel from the forums, who works for a design studio, offered his services with designing a logo for us, and developed the logo we use now (I just finally got the trademark approval 10 months later). Then we discussed shirts. We looked around, but couldn’t find anything online that had reasonable prices and the design capabilities I was looking for. So we talked to Weltall. By this time he had his SpiderRock store up on Cafepress, but wasn’t happy with it. So we worked out a deal with him to sell our shirts, and in exchange, I setup his current store. (See a trend here with the programming bit?)
So now we had a blog, a forum, a store with t-shirts and a logo. Now all we needed was profit. We had Google Adsense for the first 4 months or so. And just when it started doing well, like $5-$8 a day in ad revenue, they kicked us out. Something about click fraud, which none of us committed. I spent the next 6 months both appealing the decision (with no luck) and trying to find a decent replacement. I tried a couple different companies, but nothing compared to Google. After a couple tries I finally got AP accepted for Yahoo’s adsense beta, which is what we currently use. It’s still nowhere near the revenue of Google (it takes 6 months to make what we made in 25 days at the end of Google), but it’s something. We also started asking for donations.
In March-ish we got contacted by this guy Adam who said he ran this site called theOtaku.com and that he loved the show, and wanted a podcast for his site, but didn’t have the time to do it himself. Would we be willing to do a short weekly show for him for no pay and some banner ad impressions? We discussed it and decided, why not? It sounded like fun, and could only improve our visibility. We settled on the weekly show, but we got to pimp AP at the end of each show. That’s almost reached 30 episodes, and seems to be quite popular, although I need to ask Adam what the stats look like.
In July we started to reach the concurrency limit of our host. We had reached the bandwidth capacity including shows back in January, and had to quickly shift all our media over to Libsyn, which was a great move. Downloads were slightly slower, but we didn’t have to pay for bandwidth, and they’ve got good stats and a decent interface. So in July I moved from standard shared hosting to a Virtual Private Server through StartLogic. It was quite a bit more expensive, but for getting our own linux box essentially, it was worth it. I could setup ftp, subdomains, email, etc.. myself. So I got everything ready for the change. When I actually changed over the DNS, we spent a few days sorting everything out, and then there was a major outage at the hosting center. So the site went down for like three days. I was, to say the least, outraged. So much for the 99.9% uptime guarantee. I went ballistic on their account people, and demanded my money back. They went all apologetic, and I ended up getting an additional month free tacked onto the end of the account as compensation for the downtime.
After that it went a good bit smoother. We got some actual advertising, Anime-wiki.org, DirectTV, etc.. but nothing for very long. That’s been the biggest fight. If Batou and I didn’t make decent money, we wouldn’t be able to have such a robust community. Although we do get donations, advertising, and most recently subscriptions, it’s still not enough to cover costs. It’s getting very close to covering monthly expenses, but we haven’t even touched the startup costs, or the convention costs.
All in all, I’m pleased with how the show has gone. We’ve grown pretty steadily, and people still like listening to us. That makes me happy. It hasn’t been all flowers and sunrises though. Things have happened, and as the front man, I have to deal with all of it. Like the Google thing, forum issues, IRC issues, spam issues, advertising issues. Plus I do all the recording, editing, posting of the episodes. But a lot of that is my choice too. I am a perfectionist, and I have a hard time trusting other people to do things that I think I can do “right”. So I can’t complain much.
So where are we? I think we’re close to getting a handle on costs, and are poised to grow the show to the next level. Look for great things in the next two years. I know this has been a long post, but if you read it all, thanks.