Zo's Blank Spot

Picture this:

You've just hopped off a train heading home after work at about 9pm, and you're listening to the first episode of "Black Adder Goes Forth" on your mp3 player.
As you walk through the subway underneath the railway bridge you are listening intently after a long pause and a laugh track for Baldricks' reply to something Black Adder said... 
And then you see a very bright flash, and then... BANG! CRASH! 
BOOOOOOM!!!! 
The abrupt start of a flash thunderstorm.
Positively scares the absolute bejesus out of you.

You are now acutely aware that for the next 15 minutes as you walk the same route you stomped on many a cricket all those months ago, you can fully expect to get very wet indeed.

So what do you do next?

Why, you pull out your iRiver H340, plug in your Wizzzolliams and start recording of course!! *grin*

This was recorded on Friday night. There are two files: one of the entire recording, and one of a spectacular thunderclap that was not only so loud it shook the ground around me, but was preceded by such a bright flash of lightning that in the recording just prior to the thunderclap you can hear my sharp intake of breath, and then exhaling again afterwards along with the start of some very hard rain.
For those of you with dialup or slow internet (or aren't audio geeks), I'd probably recommend the latter as it is less than a meg big. 
For those of you however who want to hear the recording in it's entirety which includes me getting totally rained on, hear all the smaller thunderclaps in between and me chattering and saying "fuck!" every now and again to the invisible audience - I've posted the full unedited audio as well.

The record volume is low, but this was just as well as you will hear by the loudness of the thunderclap mentioned before... and the mics did not clip - that was actually how the thunder sounded believe it or not...

Check em out:

Isolated thunderclap (725KB)

Zoe gets caught in a thunderstorm - FULL recording (18MB) - for refs, the isolated thunderclap is located soon after the elapsed time of 9 minutes, 35 seconds.

Sounds awesome on the speakers in Will's lounge room!!! 
Even better on headphones, definitely.

Man, I love thunderstorms...

I went to IMAX a few nights ago and saw OOTP. And I have to say it was definitely worth waiting and paying the extra money to go and see for both the visual and audio experience, including 20 minutes of 3D.
And being according to the blurb below there was approximately 15000 watts of sound to capture on offer.... capture, I did! *grin*
For those that don't know, IMAX is a special cinema chain we have here in Oz outside the typical movie cinema chains that are rare, and the single largest cinema screens in the world. They typically live in or near science museums and only show documentaries filmed with actual special IMAX cameras, so when my die hard HP fan flatmate heard it was screening at IMAX, I decided to trot along with her. The film the projector runs is not your standard 35 mil either - here's the big advertising blah blah from the IMAX Melbourne website if it interests you overseas people:

I'm lacing the one hour intervals together and editing out the big chunks at the start when we're not even in the cinema - then I will *definitely* post it. Somewhere, anyway.

The mics performed well - a bit of the top is missing apparently but I'm waiting for confirmation of that when Will actually finishes something else he is reading so he can listen to it on headphones. And obviously you get my flatmate's popcorn crunching in right channel occasionally, and my somewhat quieter attempts to stealthily extract similar product from my own box in the opposing channel. And of course there's the funny bit when my stomach decides to quietly rumble, and the part where for about 5 seconds a certain person in right channel coughed loudly. And the varying intervals off in the distance where other people in the cinema were coughing with *their* colds... I had to position the mics pointing upwards rather pointing directly left and right as I probably should have in that situation sitting up the back too... but had to to minimalise popcorn grabbing noises. 
But other than that, the movie was so loud (I set the record levels to 20 on the iRiver) that it really didn't matter much at all. Also, being IMAX and the tickets being $20 instead of $7, there were nowhere near as many people as in a normal cinema, and only one kid. So surrounding noises were actually not constant nor bad. I was quite pleasantly surprised by the quality, actually. I don't think I could have got as good a recording at a normal cinema in fact.

Anyway, I'll be posting that in the next few days.

And you right remember from the "Obsessions" post I mentioned a hero of long ago with the initials "CD". Well, not long afterwards he contacted me totally out of the blue, sending me a message via MySpace. I just about fell off my chair in "oh my god" ness...
Apparently he got bored one time over the weekend when he wasn't doing any radio prep for his breakfast show on a commercial radio station elsewhere in Oz, and Googled his own name. And lo and behold on page 2 results was a few lines from the "heroes" section of my profile about how he was a "silly teenage crush, but was the reason I initially got inspired to get into radio anyway" (This, curiously, is no longer Googlable).
He emailed me - and we've been in regular contact ever since (the evidence can be seen in the "comment wars" we've been having on eachother's profile pages *grin*). In fact a few nights ago we stayed up to 2am in the morning yakking on MySpace IM despite his having a radio shift that morning starting at 6am. I asked if I should let him go but he said care factor was 0.01% so yeah. I unfortunately but understandably slept in way past even 9am to tune into the stream so I don't know if he even made it to work on time that morning as a result... heheh - oops *guilty look*

Besides that, a lot of old friends I hadn't heard from since school have popped out of the woodwork, even a couple from before we moved from Tassie. So as much as I despise myself for going so mainstream and joining the MySpace rat race, and as much as I know I will hardly ever blog in it - I'll keep the profile for the time being.

Apart from all that, still ironing out a few wrinkles with the internet plan change at Will's place, but all's well.

*puts down the blob of blu-tak now shaped like a pair of lips with grinning teeth and dawdles off*