Intuition & Elbow Grease

(This entry has been cross-posted from CrazyAces.com)

We have just completed one full month over at CrazyAces , and I am amazed at how much progress we’ve made with microcasting! Our recordings have improved noticeably, with more ‘upgrades’ to come. Our hitcount is showing a very nice upwards trend! For the month of April, the CrazyAces website (pre-relaunch) received 274 hits. For the month of May we reached over 1600 hits, an average of 50+ per day! (CrazyAces was re-launched to “Witness the Birth of MicroCasting” on May 1, 2005)

A search for “microcasting” on various search engines turns up the following results:

Search.Aol.Com lists CrazyAces as the tenth result.
[Update: we are now the seventh result!]

Search.Netscape.Com lists CrazyAces. as the 8th result.
[Update: we are now the seventh result here, too!]

Google lists CrazyAces as the 7th result.

www.MSN.com shows CrazyAces as the 2nd result.

And these last three?

www.yahoo.com lists us as the number one result.

www.alltheweb.com, number one.

www.altavista.com lists us as the number one result.

I think we just might be on to something!

And, we are expanding! Currently, we have two 5-minute microcasts per week, one on Monday night, and one on Thursday. (Although a couple of these have turned into multi-sessions!) Starting this Thursday night (Friday morning) we are going to change to a 30-45 minute format, but only for the Thursday microcast. Monday nights will remain (at least for now) as a five minute exercise in self-control!

Kudos to both Kevin and Christopher for a job well done!

Living in the midwest you just take for granted that springtime brings not only May flowers, but also hayfever. This week it has hit our house like the plague! Tuesday I woke up with the most horrible hayfever, my nose had turned into a snot faucet and I was miserable. I tried all of the over-the-counter remedies from Claritin to Benedryl and a couple of others.

Late Tuesday evening I was trading emails with Kevin and mentioned my plight to him. He came back with what sounded like totally absurd advice at the time:

>Tomorrow when you get up, drink two (count them, TWO) 8 oz. glasses of
>water.
>
>Your hayfever will be gone within the hour. (Two at the most)
>
>Water will heal you from the inside out, if you let it. Just get more inside
>of you and your body will know what to do.

Water? Please, there’s nothing in it except… well, except water! But, I was quite desperate for relief, so yesterday morning I followed his advice, and drank two 12oz glasses of water right after I woke up. Before hand, I still had all of the symptoms that I had from the previous day with the addition of a headache. I really felt lousy and was preparing myself to start eating some aspirin, but I figured I needed to give this “water treatment” a try.

You may not believe this, but after an hour… Yep, it worked! I continued to drink another glass every hour or so until about 2:00pm and I have no signs of hayfever whatsoever!

Today Faith is trying the same experiment. Yesterday the hayfever hit her, so this morning, she drank two 10oz glasses of water and now we wait to see if this was just a fluke, or if Kevin’s really on to something here!

Kevin sent this link to help back up his advice:
Your Body’s Many Cries For Water - F. Batmanghelidj, M.D.

Tonight I bring you a brief round-up of my personal blogosphere:

Item #1: Fun with Telemarketers by Jackardiac
Kevin has really struck a nerve by audio blogging conversations he’s been having with telemarketers! I really think he’s hit upon something here! Quite funny and I just can’t wait to hear the next one!

Item #2: Zap goes 400 hours over at Talking Out of Turn
Charlie once again redefines the meaning of being true to one’s beliefs. It’s one thing to talk the talk, but here’s a man that’s willing to walk the walk, regardless of the consequences! Bravo!

Item #3 The Passion of the Aces from CrazyAces
One of our better microcasts, if I do say so myself! Tonight we discussed (briefly) some of our hidden passions. Those things in life that each of us harbors a hidden passion for that the folks around us most likely do not know about us. Kind of cool.

So much has been going on around here that I was left with little choice but to put this blog on the back-burner for a while. I am proceeding with the consolodation of my business sites: CrazyAces, HoverCat and Xionic Technologies. Instead of having three separate entities to represent my core business services, there will be a single point of access for all of the services. Xionic.com now hosts nearly all of the content that was on crazyaces.com and hovercat.com.

Now that crazyaces.com is no longer being utilized for media production endeavors, I, along with two of my friends, have turned CrazyAces into a “Microcasting” experiment. Microcasting, as I have previously mentioned is akin to broadcasting, but utilizing the technologies of the internet, blogging and audioblogging to present a unique entertainment vehicle. It is our intent to record a new microcast each week with a different topic and/or format each time. Perhaps its a bit too bohemian for the mainstream, but there are interesting challenges that face each of us when confronted with only one or two minutes during which to we attempt to coherently relay whatever message we might design for that particular microcast.

Our first microcast was quite fun! We ran into all sorts of minor issues from not being able to access the audioblogger software from my cell phone to running out of time at the end of the microcast! We had a brief script for an outline, but the rest was totally ad-lib. We haven’t even begun to discuss the format or concept for next week, but rest assured that it certainly ain’t yo’ mamma’s radio!

At last! At last! Microcast #1 is finally out! check it out over at CrazyAces!

(no longer active)

Finally. Not much to this first audio post. I created it two days ago and it just now showed up. Hmm… I hope that’s not the norm. But it’s still very cool and an intriguing way of updating the blog.

So I dialed the AudioBlogger.Com number, entered my info and created a test audio-entry. That was about forty-five minutes ago. I thought it would just pop up as a new entry here, but perhaps I’m wrong. Or perhaps I just haven’t waited long enough. I thought that perhaps I needed to create an entry (such as this one) that would link to the audio-entry, but alas, I see no such option as I type this.

Hrmph.

I’ve read all the FAQ’s, I’ve googled to see how other people are doing this. It appears that my setup is correct, and that it should just show up here. Maybe I just need to be a little more patient.