My Experience with Podcasting

I told Hubby that I needed to get a pair of headgear with microphone function for the digital literacy course I'm taking. So, on 26th October 2008, Hubby took me to Plaza Low Yatt to look for that item. Plaza Low Yatt is supposedly the hub of IT gadgets in Malaysia. Just a few days ago, I saw an advertisement in 'The Star's' Metro section that a tenant in Plaza Low Yatt was having a Renovation Sale. However, before we headed to Plaza Low Yatt, we headed to Sungai Wang Plaza to just to check out the prices first.


Finally, on 2nd November 2008, I found the time to start tinkering with Audacity programme and do a trial run of my voice recording. Being new to the headgear and microphone and also the Audacity programme itself, I fumbled my way through, making silly (and perhaps unthinkable!) mistakes along the way. This was what happened:

• After identifying the 'start recording' and 'stop' buttons in Audacity, I clicked on the 'start recording' button, only to find nothing happened...like nothing seemed to budge. Then Hubby told me that if voice recording is taking place, the line should become jagged (but my line was straight! Help!). Then only do I realize that actually there's a switch for the microphone. So I on the switch, click 'record' and started yammering , then click 'stop'. To listen back what I recorded, I clicked the 'play' button....and still no sound! Help! So Hubby suggested that I double click the 'Volume Control' icon near the task bar to check whether anything was accidentally muted. Well...none was muted. Then why no sound!? Then I tried increasing the volume button of my laptop's speaker and voila! I can hear my yammering already! Yay!

So, next is for me to see how to save that yammering sound. So I clicked "File" and chose "Save Project as" and to my dismay, the note said that the type of file saved may not be compatible with most programmes. Then, I tried clicking "Export as mp3" and to my dismay also, it prompted me to install some .dll code (I don't know what's that!). So now my last option was to click "Export as WAV" and voila, it's done!

After all the trial and error, now I was ready to do the actual voice recording. I decided to present about a modified way on how to bath the baby because on that day when I woke up in the morning, my left hand hurt so much when I moved my thumb (thanks to carrying my heavy baby for the past 5-and-a-half months already!). For your information, I had the same problem with my right hand too just a few days ago and the pain (tendon pull type of shooting pain sensation) had not really go away yet (up to this time of writing the blog!). So that whole morning I was wondering whether or not I should bath the baby since my mother-in-law was not around to help and my husband (just as other male members of the family!) has no idea how to bath the baby. After much thought, I finally came up with the modified approach of bathing the baby and somehow felt sort of 'proud' of the 'acheivement' and decided to share this tip through podcasting.

The next day is a working day, so the broadband was available for me to find a free podcast hosting website to upload. First, I tried one of the hosting website (can't remember the name) that offers free 100MB but to my dismay it required some validity certification in order to access the website. So, next I tried Podomatic and managed to set an account and upload my podcast. However, when I go back to check my account, the podcast entry is there but there's no download! Hmmm.....must be some system error somewhere. I clearly saw the upload progress when uploading my podcast.

So today, the day I'm writing this blog, I tried to upload the podcast again and this time with success because there is a pop-up prompting me to download the WAV file. So you can go to this link: http://www.alicephua.podomatic.com/