MWGblog

Disneyland has posted the newest podcast my company, Willnick Productions, Inc. has produced for them. I must admit, I am particularly proud of this podcast. I think we captured a bit of the exciting and new as well as the interesting and old. We cover a new attraction based on Monsters, Inc. including an interview with the director of the film, Pete Docter and the Imagineers who created the attraction. However, for me, the home run was a trip up inside and to the very top of the Matterhorn. I owe this adventure to podcasting.

Back in November, at the Portable Media Expo, I was invited to go to a dinner with a good number of podcasters at Benihana. I was seated with my friend August Trometer (iPodderX) as well as Ken Ray and Laura Burstein, both formerly of Inside Mac Radio. During dinner, my work for Disneyland came up. Laura started telling us all kinds of “outlandish” theories about Disneyland, including one that there was basketball court in the Matterhorn. This sounded a little too out there to me. I, after a cocktail or two , was also quite confident that no one was going to suit up and traipse across the park to go play basketball. So I challenged her on the validity of her statement and said I would get to the bottom of it. Well, as you can see from the picture above, there most certainly is a basketball hoop on the 5th floor of the Matterhorn. I was wrong and Laura was right. (There I said it - painful as it is.) As a result of my investigation, I had a great time touring the inside of the Matterhorn as well as going all the way to the top. Fellow podcaster, Dan Klass, came along and has a funny take on the whole episode at the Bitterest Pill. I must admit, this was a once in a lifetime event, if you have any interest in Disneyland or what it is like inside the Matterhorn - give it a listen. Best of all, the folks at Disneyland and I to have even more exciting things planned for the months to come. I can’t wait for some of the things we have on deck for the Official Disneyland Resort Podcast.

Continuing my posts from 2005, here is my upcoming schedule for 2006. I am still filling speaking engagements in. Feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss having me speak.

April 27-28th The Podcast Academy at Boston University, Boston, MA

• Topic TBA

June 7th Society of American Travel Writers, Mackinac Island, MI

• Podcasting for the Travel Journalist and Writer

September 29-30th: Portable Media Expo, Ontario, CA

• Topic TBA

I have made a few more changes to the podcasting setup I am using. I have completely removed the Symetrix 528e. It has been replaced by all Aphex gear. I highlighted some of the upgrades in this post.

Since then I have added the Aphex 622 Logic Assisted / Gate with downward expander pictured above. The amount of control the Aphex gear gives you is astounding. I actually have had this piece of gear in place since mid December. Today I found a screaming deal on a B-Stock Aphex 720 Dominator II Precision Multiband Peak Limiter. This was the last piece I was on the look out for. It is rather expensive ($1350) so I was happy to see that my friends at BSW had a single B-Stock unit with full factory warranty for only $499.

Once I get everything settled in, I’ll put something up about what all this stuff does. Much of it comes into play for the podcast production I do for clients like Disneyland, however it certainly helps for Reel Reviews as well.

For a movie fan - this is cool. Interviewing Jon Voight at Disneyland.

I spent the last few days at Disneyland again working on their podcast. We covered the unveiling of the newest attraction: Monsters, Inc., Mike & Sully To The Rescue! This included a celebrity event and exclusive media coverage. We also got to take a behind the scenes tour of the Matterhorn. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say it was an elevating experience. We captured lots of great audio and I am excited about the upcoming January edition of The Official Disneyland Resort Podcast. Stay tuned if you are a Disneyland fan.

I discovered the hard way, that if you have built an audience subscribed to a custom rss extension, you might need to think twice before upgrading your Wordpress install. Wordpress has changed the way it handles the feeds from the site. The old /wp-rss2.php file is still there, but frankly that is an ugly extension. On this and my other sites I have always used a rewrite so that people could pull the RSS feed at mwgblog.com/rss.xml. Turns out Wordpress 2.0 breaks this. Buried somewhere in the permalink building code it causes a 404 error to be posted to the header breaking aggregators. Interestingly it will display in the browser and only seems to effect rewrites to the feeds. All the other rewrites work just fine. A few other people have posted in detail about this problem. Of course, you find this out once you have already done the upgrade. I don’t know that it is a high priority fix; 2.0 is new and they have bigger fish to fry. If you are a php expert, feel free to dig into the classes.php file, my guess is that is where the problem lies.

So how did I fix it? It’s complicated. I have a script that scrapes the wp-rss2.php file and posts it to a static xml file. I then changed the rewrite to point /rss.xml to the static xml file. That is a pain the ass way of doing it, but it works.

I am still hopeful someone with PHP prowess will care enough to find the real fix.

Marantz PMD660, Marantz PMD670 and Marantz PMD671

Ok, I am a sucker for podcasting audio gear. I have used the PMD670 for well over a year. It is a great unit, which I have recommended to countless people. Over the summer I picked up a PMD660 as a second unit, I also use it as a playback unit when processing audio through my Aphex hardware audio processors. Since I am doing more and more podcasting projects such as the work I do for Disneyland, I had a need for a second high quality recorder so that we could record in two places at once. I ended up going with the PMD671. It is capable of 24 bit/96kHz, has improved mic pre-amps over the PMD 670 and has a great remote (extra) which allows you to start and stop recording as well as an LED which notifies you when recording and if clipping occurs in one of the channels. If you have done any field interviews you’ll appreciate how nice it is to have a clipping indicator on the mic rather than having to stare down at your recorder. Over the coming weeks I’ll let you know how the new unit works.

Sorry for the mess - upgrade in progress.

Michael Geoghegan, Stephen Page and Brian Ibbott at KYOU

While out at Macworld, Brian Ibbott from Coverville and myself got an invitation to visit the studios for KYOU. Stephen Page, who is in-charge of the Infinity podcast experiment with KYOU, was kind enough to show us all around. KYOU actually comes out of traditional radio studios housed in San Francisco. The same building holds 7 different Radio stations including KFRC, Alice, Live 105, and KCBS. I have never been in a traditional radio station, but was interested to see much of the same gear I use for my podcasts, stacked in their equipment racks. I have always said I have a radio studio in my basement. Now I know for sure.

I am heading up to San Francisco to Macworld for a few days. If you’ll be there and want to meet up - shoot me an email at michael at mwgblog dot com.