The New York Times has a clever feature by Carl Richards, The Sketchpad: Personal Finance on a Napkin, explaining finances with drawings on napkins. The image above may be my favorite. What’s yours?

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Overall, the bag is impressively well made. The matieral is a bit thin but the fit and finish are fairly good (with a few exceptions that I note below). The bag is on the smallish side. It’s perfect for me, but don’t think that you’ll be hauling around your collection of oversize atlases in this bag.

(Click any image to enlarge)

The bag has 4 protuding pockets on what I call the “front” side. The two larger pockets on either side have adjustable velcro on two sides. It’s hard to describe but what it allows you to do is adjust the depth of the pocket to exactly how you need it. Very cool.

Here’s a side view. Not much to see here, except that the hardware connecting the strap to the bag is metal — excellent touch that makes it feel more secure.

The side pockets have an elastic bungee that can make them larger or smaller. It can also be removed via a velcro tab — another nice touch.

This is the back view. There is a long skinny pocket on the bottom, sized for a flashlight, baton, compact umbrella, or something similarly long and thin. When I’m traveling I might throw in an emergency pair of socks and t-shirt here. There is also a rectangular pocket above it, about 4×8″. Both of these pockets close with a slightly flimsy zipper. If any part of the bag breaks, I can see one of these zippers being the culprit.

The size pockets are generously sized. Here I have a 1 liter water bottle in one side, with room to spare. Here you can see I’ve removed the elastic bungee.

The inside is roomy. I got some old college textbooks and it easily swallowed these up with some room to spare. I’d estimate these books were at least 8″ think, maybe more. There is a removable stiffener down the center that helps to organize the contents of the bag.

Here you can see the front of the bag with a couple of the pockets opened. Note that the center top pocket is divided into two, very small pockets. The smallest will probably hold a contact lens case, while the larger might hold an iPod Shuffle. They are really quite small. The lower center pocket will easily hold a cell phone or iPhone.

There is also an outside full length pocket that is useful for holding papers, passport, boarding documents, newspaper (folded), or other items of that sort. It closes very securely via velcro (Thinkgeek says a zipper). You can also see the main zippered compartment closed in this picture — the zipper here is a large, heavy duty kind that I’m sure will not jam or break (in contract to the smaller zippers on the side).

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the bag. I’m taking it on a businses trip in a few weeks and I’ll let you know how that goes.

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As a sometimes coder, I can understand and appreciate the amount of time and dedication goes into writing software.

I should note that an excellent resource for finding open source software is the Open Source as Alternative site. You can search for commercial software — say “Photoshop” — then find open source alternatives. With reviews and ratings, the site helps you decide if there are viable open source alternatives for your problem.

So here are the open source software I use.

Can’t Live without Them

These are the open source programs I use without fail, every day or very regularly. To me, these are really the best of the best.

Audacity: Hands down. I use this audio editor every week to edit audio files from my church and at work. Great options and the beta version (as of this writing) adds some great features.In the world of open source software, this program is very well developed with a professional feel to it.

I also recommend downloading Chris’s Compressor, which is a great plugin that allows you to automatically control the dynamic intensity in your recordings. In other words, it will make the soft parts louder so the overall volume is more consistent — great for almost every recording and especially if you want to listen to classical music in a noisy environment like the car (where the soft parts can otherwise get masked).

GIMP: Weird name, but great Photoshop equivalent. For editing photos, graphics, etc. There might be some real artists out there who miss the fancy functions of Adobe’s product, but this non-artist is very content with the high level of sophistication of GIMP. The main interface is pretty good, though some of the options and functions could use some refinement.

FreeMind: I know of no commercial equivalent — perhaps it is similar to the Microsoft Visio. Essentially, the program allows you create free association diagram, then create links between those nodes and anything you want — files, documents, web pages, notes, etc. It’s flexibility is truly amazing. It has revolutionized how I plan large projects. Give it a try.

Firefox: A great browser. The list of plugins is astonishing and I use them all the time. My essential plugins: Firebug (web development), Web Developer Toolbar (ditto), Xmarks (bookmark & password synchronization across multiple computers), NoScript (to prevent javascript and flash from automatically loading — makes web surfing MUCH safer).

Thunderbird: A great email client. Way faster than the Microsoft Outlook I am tied to using at work.

XAMPP: A great little program that installs a local copy of the open source server Apache onto a local computer. It allows you to do things like install WordPress or other PHP programs on your own computer, play and test them, before installing them on a real web server. Indispensable for web development.

WordPress: This blog and several other sites all run on this platform. Originally started as a blogging platform, it really can run fully functional “traditional” websites. I’m going to write more soon about using WordPress as a content management system (CMS).

Tried Them

I’ve used these programs a little but can’t speak a whole lot to their quality.

Inkscape: A vector illustration program similar to Adobe Illustrator. It’s actually a very nice program but I don’t do that much vector illustration any more. If you do, check it out.

Scribus: A page layout program, like InDesign or MS Publisher. Everyone in my office uses Publisher, so I haven’t used this much. I haven’t used InDesign much so I can’t speak to the comparison.

Still on Closed Source

And there are a few commercial systems I still use regularly, for a variety of reasons.

Microsoft Windows: Yes, this is the biggie. I use it at work and I use it at home. I suppose I could make the switch to Linux or another open source OS, but I have just been too lazy. I grew up on Windows, so switching would be a really big investment that I don’t feel I have the time to make right now. And I don’t think it would fly at work to switch my OS there.

Adobe Dreamweaver: I use Dreamweaver, in combination with some free tools, depending on what I am doing. But Dreamweaver’s integrated environment makes web development fast and fairly painless.

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We discussed a number of different options. We could use a cell-phone conferencing feature, but we judged them to have inadequate sound quality to pick up the conversation in a large conference room. We could purchase a new phone and run a long telephone line to our fax line, the one direct outside line that was working (because it was bypassing our internal PBX system). But that was still judged to have too many risks (using a new phone during an event).

So we resorted to Skype. I plugged a laptop into our sound system:

• line-out on the laptop plugged into an input on the mixer
• microphone input on the laptop plugged into the auxiliary output of the mixer

It worked surprisingly well. The teleconference participants got the direct sound connection from our sound system, resulting in very high sound quality to them. And their speech was routed through our sound system and broadcast over the loudspeaker system, so that all the conference participants — whether they were in-room or on the telephone line — could hear each other.

The one improvement I think I will try to make next time it to get a mixer that has two separate, individually controllable output channels. Our existing mixer had two outputs — main and control room — but when the volume on main was turned down, it also turned down the control room. So there was no effective way to eliminate line chatter from the remote end. This was a problem at one point: one telephone participate started chatting with what was presumably someone in here office, for all the conferenece to hear. This problem could be avoided with two individual outputs: the sound technician could monitor it the mix on headphones, for example. The technician could then instantly mute the telephone output whenever needed.

It’s amazing what one can do with a little ingenuity and a few audio cables.

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Happy New Year everyone! Blessings to you this year.

(Photo is originally from 2009 Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.)

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NYTimes Year in Review

The above is just a sample — click through to see the entire chart.

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Early Recordings

So here’s what we did. At first, we purchased an Olympus DS-30 digital voice recorder (~$100). The Olympus has a great microphone in it with a bunch of different recording settings. We chose the high quality (HQ) mono — we didn’t need stereo for what were going to be voice recordings. (I just learned that the Olympus can be programmed to turn on and start recording at preset times. Very handy, and I’ll show you why in a subsequent post.)

Eliminating Distractions with Directional Microphones

We used the recorder as-is very successfully for about a year. But the Olympus has an omnidirectional microphone, meaning it would pick up sound from anywhere in the room. That means lot’s of distracting noises were picked up — coughing, paper rustling, doors shutting, etc. So we upgraded to some directional microphones, which accept sound only from one direction. When they are pointed at a presenter, they pick up his or her voice well but they reject sound that comes from “off axis” (meaning sound from the side or behind a microphone).

We chose Shure 81A microphones, for about $100 each. They were connected to a Behringer xxx mixer, about $80, which provides the phantom power to the microphones and let’s us record more than one guest at a time. The Behringer mixer can handle up to 2 mics at a time, though the company also offers models that handle more. The microphones were plugged into the mixer, with the output from teh mixer then plugged into the microphone input on the Olympus recorder (notice we are still using the Olympus to record, but we are using an external microphone rather than teh Olympus’s built-in mic).

The difference in the sound recording was immediately apparent. Not only were distracting coughs significantly reduced, but the sound quality of the presenters’ voices was richer and deeper. The sound felt much more human, while the previous sound felt tinny and far away.

The Setup

The setup for the whole system is surprisingly simple. The mics are placed on the table, and they are connected to the mixer inputs with XLR cable. We purchased a cheap cable floor cover to run the cable over the carpet. The outputs on the mixer go to

1. The amplifier for our ceiling speakers
2. The Olympus recorder

The mixer has a separate volume knob for the speakers (labeled “main mix”) and the recorder (“control room”). This works to get the output level right for both the loudspeakers and the recorder.

After Recording — Post Processing

Recording is only the first part; the second part of voice production is post-procesing, where we make the audio sound as good as possible.

For post-processing the sound, I used the free, open-source program Audacity to edit my sound files. Audacity is very capable and can export to MP3 (with the addition of the LAME library). The Olympus recorder only records in Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, but with the beta version of Audacity 1.3.x, you can open WMA files with the optional FFMpeg decoder.

Once the audio is imported into Audacity, I cut out some from the beginning and end, and added a prerecorded track (about 30 seconds long) at the beginning with a little music and a voice saying “This is a recording of the East-West Center in Washington. Copyright 2009.” This track is the same on every file. By having the same intro to each file, brand consistency is established, similar to the opening track of a TV program or radio show.

So the post-processing process from beginning to end is:

1. Record audio using Olympus recorder
2. Plug Olympus into computer and download audio file to computer
3. Open the file in Audacity
4. Make adjustments to audio, including raising the volume if needed
5. Add title audio track
6. Export from Audacity to MP3 format (using 32kps mono)
7. Upload MP3 file to web server

Conclusion

If you’re just recording from your computer desktop, I would suggest a nice large-diaphragm microphone with a USB connection. That will allow you to get great sound quality without the hassle of needing a mixer. One model is:

• Blue Microphones Snowball USB Condenser Microphone — about $100

Hopefully this helps someone put together some really professional sound recordings of live events for relatively little money.

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