Aspiebloggen

Edit made 2015/02/14

I’m so sorry but just noticed that i apparently forgot to link to the media file for this episode. It is fixed now.

Hello and welcome to Aspiebloggen podcast episode 3. I am your host Tommy Eriksson. In todays episode, things that should have been in earlier episodes and also time for iTunes.

This is the podcast where i bring you my views on things, in an attempt to let my voice be heard and to grow my confidence. For too long my voice has not been heard and my views are mostly unknown, but not anymore.

Most of what i will bring up will be about asperger and autism related stuff, but other stuff will most certainly be discussed. My website is at aspiebloggen.se. There you will find the show notes for each episode as well my other blog posts. The blog itself is in swedish but this podcast and the corresponding show notes will always be in english.

Now let’s get started.

Todays episode is brought to you by the letter A.

This podcast was supposed to come out yesterday but i heard about how iTunes and more specifically the iTunes player from libsyn doesn’t like variable bitrate. This is what my previous episodes was encoded in following the advice from the podcast The audacity to podcast. So for this podcast i had to change it to use iTunes instead. I didn’t notice much difference but at least it didn’t sound worse, and the test recording i did got smaller than the lame version so i’m sticking to this.

I always wondered after hearing the advice about using the lame mp3 encoder with the quality set to 5, why the other episodes has a bitrate at exactly 64 kb when my own episodes has a changing bitrate that never got that low. Well now i know why. Hopefully those of you using the libsyn player could at least listen to my previous episodes. From now on all mp3 encoding will be done in iTunes and not in lame.

This is the second recording of this episode. I did an earlier that didn’t have a script and realized about the one minute mark while editing that it was total and complete crap and that i would not continue editing a episode that at that time reached 22 minutes of mostly rambling. I did make some notes so i used them to make this script instead. Trust me when i say that regardless what you think about this recording, the other one was way worse. I realize now that i can not make unscripted podcasts and will therefor stop. I refuse to have a quality decline when there should be a rise instead.

Now it is time for a big step for me. After this podcast is published i will submit it to iTunes. I know that it is fully possible to do this after only one episode but i also know that unless you know what you are doing, and i for one are only getting started on that, submitting the first episode to iTunes risks getting the podcast denied due to insufficient quality. I don’t know what the quality requirements are but i have a feeling that my first episode was below it so i wanted to learn more. And considering the changes made during last episode that the change in encoding it sure is good i waited.

Now for things that should have been in earlier episodes but that i forgot to include. The first is an explanation regarding the cover art. My first cover art had a green background similar to my old website. I will also include it in the shownotes at aspiebloggen.se/3. For those just listening this is what it looked like. Near the top left was the text asperger syndrome. This was one of 3 topics i considered covering. Below it was the text Lego, below that was the text Gaming and at the bottom was the url for my blog. At the lower right was a picture of me sorta looking up on those words.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/99192724@N06/16418446311/

This is the old cover art.

The main problem with that design was that i learned about how it was good to zoom out to that the picture was about the size of a postage stamp. And when doing that only the words asperger syndrome was readable, and that is not the name of the podcast. Also the name of the podcast was nowhere to be found so i redesigned it, this time using Inkscape instead of Gimp because i really don’t like Gimp and since apple has a tendency to change their rules regarding cover art it seemed best to make it in vector graphic so that it could be scaled up if needed. BTW for those just learning to use Inkscape, just ignore the menus on the right. You don’t really need them to get started.

So regarding the new one. I made sure that it would have the podcast title for once and that it would be readable even you only see it as a thumbnail. Then i wanted to ad some images to it and remembered that the options for Inkscape allows you to login to openclipart.org, so i went there and was pleased that the clipart there was completely free in every way. Just what i needed.

Anyway the boy on the left symbolizes my childhood when i was often confused about why things where the way they where. To an aspie like myself, you people who don’t have aspergers seem almost telepathic when it comes to right away knowing how to deal with many situations. I’m still confused about many things but fewer now than when i was younger.

The man is me right now. An adult ready to let my voice to heard and willing to make it so. Speaking out is hard since i have not even blogged much last year and talking is not something i’m good as but i need to get better at it which is why i made this podcast. There isn’t really any more to say about it.

As you might remember from my comments about the old cover art i also mentioned Lego and gaming. These was topics that i considered having on this podcast. I later learned that if you want your podcast to be easily found and popular it is best to keep the podcast to a single topic and just make another podcast about other topics you might be interested in. Thinking more about it i realized that i can’t really get into talking about Lego right now. I haven’t kept up with Lego news for several months and not built anything either so while i would love to make a podcast about it and probably will. For now i wont.

As for gaming, well i said in the first episode that i will talk about gamergate and i will when i find the time to do so. For the past 3-4 days i haven’t even kept up with my twitter feed. I have been busy reading about other topics of the craftier sort that i wont go into right now. When i wasn’t doing that i either read return of kings or did stuff away from the computer so it has been busy.

But i don’t game enough or know or care enough about gaming to talk about it. I used to play world of warcraft back in the day but stopped and when i play games now it is much more casually. Also like with other things the passion just isn’t there.

And finally in this long episode a word or two about where i will get inspiration for future podcast episodes. My website which was later taken offline was created on the 18th of september 2006 and received its last update on the 19th of october 2008 so it lasted about 2 years. The blog was created on the 1st of january 2007 which means that it has  been going 8 years now. The website stopped getting updated because it was easier to make blogposts instead of webpages. When the site went offline and the blog moved to wordpress.com the pages disappeared with it. But while moving the blog to its current location at aspiebloggen.se i transferred the webpages to the blog so that they would once again be available. This made me realize just how much i had written that i had forgotten about. Well regardless of whether or not i still agree with it i will use those pages as well as older blogposts as source for future podcast episodes. I mean the blog is about asperger ,mostly, and so is this podcast so that seems like an excellent idea.

Well that will be all for now. Wow the episodes keep growing in length. Until next week, take care.

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