Home alone

I’m home alone this weekend (and most of the coming week), as Tuxa is in the Açores on business.

So what does this mean?
Well, first off it means that I have already posted twice on the blog.
Then it means that I’m preparing to spend the whole weekend programming (working and hacking).

It’s a terrible day outside, rainy and foggy (and remember this isn’t the UK or anything like that so this actually counts as bad weather) and it feels like just the perfect kind of day to fill up a huge mug with a good tea blend and code the day away.

Boy, what I geek I am…

It Always Comes As A Surprise

It really is true that we are our own worst critics.

This past week when I set up to produce the latest episode of my podcast I had a couple of ideas about possible line-ups for the show but when I finally set down to record it none of them felt quite right.
The line-ups are OK, but I find that I need to be on the right mood for each show’s selection or it just doesn’t come out right.

Anyway, after digging around a bit on my covers collection and fiddling around on my notebook for episode concepts I hadn’t worked on yet, I decided it was high time I did the “They Do It To Themselves” episode. On this show I featured only artists covering their own songs. An obvious criterium if you think about it, but one I felt could produce something interesting.

Well, I recorded the show, got it into my iPod for the “routine inspection” the next day and I left with mixed feelings about it.
On one side I felt like it was a fun and entertaining show but on the other I felt like it wasn’t really quite up to par with the other episodes and I wasn’t quite sure if people would actually like it (and by people I mean “a fair number of people”, there are always those who don’t like a given episode, it’s just the way it works).

On the next day I listened to the show on the car, while driving to work and I felt like it wasn’t really all that great, I felt like I hadn’t done quite what I expected to do with it when I first thought up the concept a while back and I was almost sure most people wouldn’t like it.
But then I didn’t have the time to go over and record a whole new show, so I decided to just put it out and roll with it (I had already missed the previous week’s show —for the first time— so I didn’t want to delay it again).

And then the comments started coming in (mostly private comments, people still don’t use the blog comments much on this podcast) and I found out that mostly they loved it!
I received more enthusiastic comments about this show than I had received in a month or so. And even if the last few weeks have been slow due to people being away on vacation, the intensity of the comments was really an indicator that they really really liked it!

I almost didn’t release it and now people are loving it. Go figure!
I must listen to it again in a few weeks and judge it with a fresh ear myself and see what it is about it that tickles so many people’s fancies.

Heh…