scan man speaks.
Published by Vijay January 28th, 2008 in Blogging, Medical blogs, Medicine, Other Bloggers, Podcast, Random Noise, TechnologyThis ladies and gentlemen is my inaugural (hopefully) podcast.
I am extremely grateful to Dr. Anonymous and Arunn for inspiring this idea.
I had a boss who used to often say, “At least be an imitator if you can’t be an innovator.”
So here I am imitating, rather than innovating.
Click on the link below to listen to the podcast in a different page or click the small blue play button to listen to it here (the WP mp3 player takes too long to load sometimes).
[9 min 52 sec]
Here are the links to the sites that I talked about:
Doctor Anonymous Live at Blog Talk Radio.
Arunn’s science wiki Thermals and his non-science bilingual (mostly Thamizh with a bit of English) blog Ommachi.
GruntDoc. Ramblings of an Emergency Physician in Texas. You can listen to his guest appearance on the Dr. Anonymous Live show here.
Dr. Wes. Musings in the life of an internist, cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist. You can listen to his guest appearance on the Dr. Anonymous Live show here.
Audacity - the free cross-platform sound editor that I used to record the podcast.
There is one thing that I should clarify. I said in the beginning of the podcast that this was easier to do than writing. Now that I have done it I do not think so and my respect for people who do this on a regular basis has grown. The actual talking part, which I thought would be easy, was laborious and I was not at all comfortable talking to my laptop at around midnight in an otherwise quiet house.
The technical part was not without some effort. It took me more than an hour to record the podcast, clean it up - delete the pauses, add some music at the beginning (the opening chords for Carlos Santana’s Smooth), etc,. Audacity created a 205 MB file for a 10 minute recording and took about 15 minutes to export the file as an mp3. I guess the slowness of my iBook is partly to blame for that. The next time I am going to try out Apple’s own Garageband with the hope that the post-processing will be easier and faster.
Like I said at the end, I would like to hear from the few of you who bothered to listen. Did you like it? Is this something worth doing?
I would like some suggestions for future topics from those who think this is a good idea.
Vijay - I love this! I think you should continue it.
Some topics off the top of my head are around your corner of the world; what is it like in India? In your town? What are some of the concerns there? What’s the history like? Etc.
How did you decide to become a doctor? What inspired you to go to medical school? What were some of your experiences there?
I can’t think of any more right now, but I really think you should keep this up! I love hearing people’s voices (it is my job, after all) and hey - if you ever want someone to type up a transcript I’m your gal! (shameless plug for me, I know LOL)
Best wishes,
Superstenogirl.
Thanks a lot for the comments and the suggestions Laura. I really could use a good steno. But I don’t think our hospital could afford to pay Canadian rates!
I do most of my typing myself. Nowhere near your speeds but I do about 45 to 50 words per minute, which is good enough for most radiology reports and the odd blog post.
Vijay! That podcast was great! I could listen to you talk for hours! This is a great idea - keep it coming!
I wonder … is this the direction blogging is taking?
I loved the podcast Vijay! You have a wonderful voice. I laughed out loud when you mentioned how strange it felt to talk to your computer in the middle of the night!
If you are looking for ideas for future topics… I would love to hear your thoughts on head CAT scans possibly increasing the risk of brain tumor development.
Oh, I would sure love to hear your daughter sing too!
Stacy
Excellent job Vijay, very clear and you do have a nice voice and charmingly accented English. Not that I am so great with the writing but I am much better than when I speak since I seem to follow the butterfly principle, darting here and there randomly.
regards
jmb
Thanks Moof, Stacy & JMB. I could become a star with a fan club like this!!
I just listened to it. Great job! Well done! I’m going to include a link in my post today. Can’t wait for the second podcast!
Hi again, Vijay. I don’t care what anyone else says, what you did IS a podcast. There is no universal definition of what a podcast is. Technically speaking, you have a subscription mechanism for your blog - and the podcast is on you blog - so there you go.
All this new media stuff (blog, podcast, video, etc) definitely has a grey area of definition. So, don’t worry how the “tech pundits” define things. I think it’s a podcast, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
Vijay! You stole my thunder! I actually recorded two “netcasts” and chickened out, not posting them for fear of even more profound lack of interest. But the reason I had was exactly the same–in times of blogging “block” or crisis, it is far easier to talk than type. Add a perfectionistic tendency to over-edit the written word, and the voice-cast medium becomes more and more attractive.
I actually swung by the site today to see if you wrote anything related to the Asia/Middle East internet outage, and here I see you’ve risen the technology barrier! I shall drink an extra Guinness for you tomorrow.
“In my living room, in the dead of night…talking to my computer…How strange is that?”
That got a huge LOL from me. Just be yourself, and things will write itself.
Good luck!
Thanks Dr. A. I’m not going to nit-pick with the guys who make up definitions. If/when I do post my next audio post, I think I’ll cross post it at my Blogger blog and call it the repository of my podcasts. The RSS feed for the blog will be my podcast subscription mechanism.
Enrico: Great minds think alike! I meant the Guinness!!
yep, your voice sounds great without any drawls…
i should listen to dr.anonymous talk show. sounds interesting from what you describe.
and i should be doing that tamil podcast soon…
just to put one past you, i changed my blog url again.
nonoscience is no more. unruled notebooks should be my only english blog and ommachi should be my tamil blog
cheers,
arunn