Looks like Mike and I managed to drop the ball once again.  One week after we said we’d be going weekly, we took a couple of weeks off.  Sorry about that, but life happens.  Between a few things that popped up, a belated Birthday party for me that tanked one of the past couple of weekends, and a rather nasty cold that swept through my family and took me down this past weekend, we have simply not been able to put some time together to do the show.  We’ll try and pick up where we left off and get things back on the road so to speak next week.

Hey Guys,

With Jim’s recent move to NH, show logistics have gotten a hair more complicated.  With that in mind, starting with this week’s Havana Hut #62, we are going to move our release schedule out one day on both of our podcasts.

Going forward, Mind of Men episodes will be released on Tuesdays and From the Havana Hut episodes on Wednesdays.

We know it probably does not make much of a difference to most of you, but as you know, we’re sticklers for keeping our audience updated with any changes or delays, so we figured we’d make a formal announcement of the change rather than just letting things slip.

Thanks for understanding and being such a great audience!

Sorry guys, several bits of bad luck all conspired to delay this week’s episode.

First of all, Mike was on a Cub Scout camping trip all weekend (it rained to whole time to boot) and did not get back until Sunday afternoon.  Unfortunately, we were just not able to get together Sunday night either in person or remotely to record our front end segment.

Secondly, we have a guest providing the back end segment for this week’s episode, but technical difficulties prevented us from being able to use the recording we had.  We’re going to re-record next weekend.  I promise it will be worth the wait.

Third, while I don’t have the flu (thank God), there is something that swept through my family over this past weekend and all of us are pretty much down for the count.  I did record a segment solo that I planned to release as Episode 109, but when I went to edit it, I found that the fog my head was in during the recording yielded an episode with so many screwups that editing would take a couple of hours.

Long story short, we’re going to have to delay the episode a week.  On the plus side, that means that Episode 109 and 110 will be only a week apart as we plan to stay on schedule regardless of the delay.

All of this is of course compounded by the fact that I still don’t have a house yet and am living with my in-laws until the end of the week.

Once again, my apologies.  Mike and I kind of figured that this three week period of me living out of a suitcase would have an impact and unfortunately it did.

Jim

Okay, not sure what the issue exactly was, but we seem to have solved the problem.  Mind of Men Episode 107 is now working via the RSS feeds so iTunes, Zune Marketplace, etc. should be all set.

HH57 is also fixed, but the RSS for that will take a bit longer as it is more of a manual process than MoM.  You can direct download here: http://media.libsyn.com/media/mindofmen/HavanaHut57_1.mp3 right now or wait until later tonight when iTunes should be able to grab it.

We’ll try to figure out what happened over the next couple of days.

Thanks to our listeners Ed and Steven for bringing this to our attention.

Gents,

We’ve had some reports that people are having problems downloading Episode 107 of the Mind of Men and Havana Hut 57.  We have been able to reproduce these problems.  We are not at the moment sure what the problem is.  The direct streaming links on the website point to the same files that are in the RSS feed, so at the moment, I’m kind of stuck.  Clearly the source files are okay or else the website streamer would not work, but we cannot explain why downloads are corrupted.

We are looking into the problem, but for the moment, the stream seems to be the best workaround.

Jim

Okay Guys, got some bad news.  I’ll give you the short version first and then the long one for those who are interested in the details:

Short Version

I screwed up royally with the recording equipment while we were doing the show this week.  Everything seemed to record fine, but when we went to edit, the recordings were useless.  I then followed with the perfect pairing, managing to also screw up the settings on my backup recorder.  Long story short, that version was also no good.  We are going to try to re-record during this coming week and hope to post the show next Monday, October 5.  We’ll remain on schedule, so the following show will go live one week later on October 12.  As for the Havana Hut, we may be able to get it out on schedule, but depending on Mike and I managing to coordinate schedules, it might be a day or so late this week.  My sincerest apologies.

Long Version

So, you are probably saying to yourself – “Hey Jim, you’ve been doing this for how long again?  More than 3 years?  What the heck, are you a complete idiot or what?  Let me answer that question with a resounding Yes!  So what happened?

Well, as you may know from reading our Podcast Equipment page under the List-o-Matic heading on our home page, I have a fairly complex setup that includes a backup recorder.  We have had problems in the past, but usually the backup saved us.  Not so this week.

I use an M-Audio firewire mixer that requires the use of a Firewire add-in card for my computer.  It works flawlessly when I remember to follow the precise directions for getting it set up.  Specifically, I need to shut down my computer before I insert the firewire card.  If I just stick it in and start recording, the resulting audio is sped up and full of static – essentially useless.   You can probably see where I’m going with this – we had a guest in the studio this week and I was setting up on autopilot while carrying on a conversation.  Long story short, I forgot to reboot the computer.

So, what about the backup recorder?  Well, I use that both as a backup for the show recording and also as a remote recording tool when I do interviews in the field.  Unfortunately, I last used the recorder for a field interview and left it configured for a microphone input rather than the line in from my mixer.  Basically, I recorded about an hour of silence rather than the podcast.

So, for the first time in our history, a delay in our show is caused not by a scheduling snafu, but from a complete mismanagement of my recording gear.  Now, not one to take the blame entirely myself, Mike and I discussed this and we have decided to blame our in studio guest for distracting me.

So, thanks a bunch Ed – this is entirely your fault.  If anyone wants to send Ed hate mail, I would be happy to provide his email, postal mail, and his home and cell numbers so that you can contact him to express your ire.

We’ll do our best to get the show out ASAP, but it will probably be delayed until next Monday.

Once again, my sincerest apologies.

-Jim

Just a Reminder that with the completion of Episode 103, Season Three of the Mind of Men officially came to an end.

We are in the middle of our summer hiatus but will be back in August to kick off Season 4 with all new episodes.

Stay Tuned and we’ll see you then!

– Mike & Jim

Okay, for those of you keeping score at home, this week would have been the next episode of the mind of men.

For a variety of reasons, we had to push the episode to next week.

Talk to you all then.

Er ah…

Okay guys, as you know, we have episode 100 coming up next.  As such, we really want to do a good job and make it a special episode.

Both Mike and Jim have been crazy busy over the last couple of weeks and while we managed to get together last weekend we only had enough time to smoke our cigar and drink our libation – certainly not enough to do a full episode properly.

We are going to get together again this weekend and will be doing episode 100 then.

Once again our apologies for the somewhat uneven schedule over the last few episodes.  As you all know from the show, Mike recently assumed full control over his company has has been very busy working with it.

Jim lost his job, found another and is in the process of selling one house and buying another, so to say things have been crazy would be an understatement.

Once again, our apologies and we hope you look forward to our 100th episode.

By the way – there is still time to send us a comment or good wish for the episode to feedback@mindofmen.com.  If you want to record and audio file and send it, that would be great – we’ll try and play it on the show.  Otherwise, and email is fine too.

Okay, guys, apologies here.  I had to bail on Mike at the last minute for our Friday recording session and as this past weekend was Easter with all of the family related stuff that entailed, we just did not manage to get together to do an episode.

On top of that, things have suddenly gotten very busy in my life.  I’ll be going into a lot more detail on our next show, but items involved are a job change and a move out of the People’s Communist Republic of Massachusetts.  Both of these changes have been pretty sudden meaning that there is a lot of work to do and not much time to do it, so things may be a bit chaotic podcast-wise for the next couple of months.

Long story short, our goal is to try and stick with our regular schedule, but we do ask everyone’s indulgence for the time being.  Our current plan is to be back next week with another show.  On the agenda is part two of our ripping and playback series with a look at video.

In the meantime, you can always enjoy the archives – go back and listen to our first 10 shows or so – it will be just like hearing them for the first time…

Jim

In case you were looking for it, the Mind of Men Forum has been retired. We talk about the reasons for the retirement in show #88

We want to thank everyone who contributed to the forum.

Urr. Ah.  Okay, serious falling on our swords here guys.  We got hit this week by a major harmonic convergence of bad luck.

First of all, poor Mike came down with the Martian Death Flu and was too sick to make it to the Prohibition Repeal Party Friday night this past weekend which meant there was no chance he was going to be up to doing a show.

Add to this that over the past weekend, I had both a final presentation and a final exam for my Finance class, both of which are due on Tuesday.

So, long story short, we just didn’t get to an episode this week.  Our bad and we are very very sorry.

So, our plan is to do an episode this coming Friday, which means that you can look for a new Mind of Men next week.