Jason Scott here, happily writing to you from the textfiles.com offices in
Boston, Massachusetts, where I have flown back from the city of Cleveland
Ohio, home of NOTACON 2 and NOTACON RADIO... neither of them a plan or a
dream, but now a reality and a memory. In the case of Notacon, once again
they pulled off a great convention, filled with fun, parties, talks,
presentations and all that intense hoo-hah one has come to expect from the
FTS team.
But imagine my surprise when I report to you that not only were we able to
pull off NOTACON RADIO, but that we were actually able to do what we set out to do:
set up a radio station on the convention floor, broadcast our voices wirelessly to
whoever had a laptop handy, and ultimately (after some bumps and brilliant moves)
onto the internet, live.
Of course, some things were shifted around to accomodate reality. We didn't broadcast
63 hours straight; other factors like sleep, things to do, keynotes and wrap-ups,
and getting up on Sunday, prevented this goal. But we got almost 24 hours of real,
honest content from a huge team of people both on-site and off. That's a full day
of talking, jokes, humor and weirdness the world didn't have... and that's in ADDITION
to the talks and presentations recorded and taped by Notacon itself.
The radio station was accomplished this way, technically: I brought a nice laptop,
with lots of disk space, speed, and CPU, and a wireless link. I initially had
planned to shove the stream out directly to the internet via a hotel link, then let
both attendees and non-attendees yank out the stream that way. The tests on Thursday
quickly dispelled this notion; even with the initial groups milling around, the
network was occasionally subject to pinch points. So instead, I started working with
Marcus (Pygmy) and Muchomas, who between them provided both network assistance and
the use of the Notacon Wiki machine, a Sony Vaio, that was running Icecast2, to
be the depended-upon link. This worked spectacularly, and we ran tests in the early
morning, running sound through the whole system and then hearing it show up on the
connected laptops. One of the coolest unintended situations was that there was a
30 second delay between when sound would go into the Laptop (live sound, from a mic)
and when it would play on the laptops. We did some weird tests with feedback... and
I don't know how you measure success with that.
The program on the laptop was "Oddcast", a Winamp plugin. It takes a live music
source and turns it into a stream that gets shot out to an icecast server. It actually
works kind of weird. I was more happy it "worked" than really drilling into it, but
it wasn't actually using Winamp for a sound source, really. If you dropped something
into Winamp and started playing it... you wouldn't hear it! I ended up going OUT the
headphone jack of the laptop, INTO a mixer, and then back into the laptop! That's nuts!
So we knew it would work. We didn't have an outgoing-to-the-internet link, but we knew
that anyone who could see the network from the hotel (basically everybody) would be
able to listen if they so chose.
We set up around noon on Friday (hey, I sleep in) in a corner of the network room.
It was a consensus decision from Froggy and myself and a few others that this was
a good place to be, because it was "in the action" (with people using the network
room and providing live ambience) yet not in the hallway, where it might bother
the people attending talks. And not near the registration area, where it could bother
both notacon staff AND the hotel. This turned out to be a great place; many times
people would walk by the table and realize we were broadcasting, and jump in and
sit down.
We got off on the right foot with 'This Con Sucks', a preview and talk about
Notacon with Froggy and Tyger, who talked about how they got to the current point
and what they figured the con was going to be like. A good solid hour.
After them, I continued to solicit folks to just come sit down and talk. The idea
was to be free form, not depend on music/songs/winamp playlists to drive the station;
you could do that anywhere, with an MP3 player and a wi-fi access point. We wanted
people to be driving this. Anyone could sit down and talk.
The master of sitting down and talking was echo. As soon as he saw the
setup, it was on it like paint on a barn, gearing the conversation every which way.
I'm considered to be the Guy Who Talks a Lot in many of my social circles. Well,
guess what, I have a better. Echo centers his discussions around Military issues,
but he's not in the last bit afraid to hit someone up for their thoughts on censorship,
government, and a personal question that set the conversation in another
direction entirely.
On the air, we discussed Citadel and his brilliant idea to fix a broken fuse in his
hauled-in junk computer by bridging it with a wire. I believe the resultant
explosion made it onto the air.
The tenor and tone of the whole show took a new turn when, while echo and I were
talking about all range of issues, Citadel showed up with one of the security guards.
"Talk to her!" he said, and he sat her down. For the next hour, we talked about
her, her 14-year career in security, and amazingly intense stories about her family
and the time she was a hostage during an armed bank robbery.
From there, it only went upwards. We had tons of folks stop by and chat, and at
8pm, my voice hoarse beyond reason, the Dial-A-Dork crew showed. This is a local
show about tech issues and stories that plays on a local Cleveland AM station. They
brought shirts, a banner to hang over the station, and a lot of energy. After some
time together, I was able to leave them with the stuff and go for a nice dinner
with RaD Man, who had arrived from California for the con.
I kept checking back with them, but they were going and going... and going....
They saw Steph the Geek come by, and interviewed her. Then Drew Curtis of FARK.COM
was snagged and HE was interviewed. Drinks kept coming and coming... and by the time
they were done, there were FOUR HOURS of radio added to the pantheon. I packed up
for the night, took everything up to my hotel room, and set the playlist to repeat
the 8 hours of content we'd recorded. I also threw on some pre-recorded stuff, explained
below.
The next day, we set up after the Keynote address, and I started the ball rolling once
again. Now more people were just hanging out, talking, being on the air with me. We
started to build a little "crew" with "regulars" who were talking and enjoying themselves.
Around this time, we got the external Internet connection running, so now the whole net
could enjoy the show! Live! For this, we have to thank Paul Timmins who came through
with both the icecast server and the bandwidth necessary to pull it off. I was linked into
an IRC channel with people at the con and who wished they were... and they were responding
to what we were saying! We'd comment on a person or a piercing, the people in the channel
would respond to it, and we'd talk back! It was fantastic.
At this point, we went for the gusto and did... a remote broadcast of a speech. RaD Man
was to give his talk on Running an Art Collective, and so we decided this would be a
good use of the wireless mic we had. We ran a cable to the room and put the antenna at the
back of the room, and put the wireless on his podium. At this point, I left the station
(and my laptop!) in the hands of Citadel, and went to the room to watch RaD Man's talk.
....and didn't come back for hours.
This is the most surreal part of the whole thing for me. I didn't have to run the station
pretty much again. It ran itself; all the folks working together (Citadel running the
board) and people just took the thing over. I have no idea what's on the recordings. I
would stick my head in and see people talking, and then go back to showing my documentary
in another room. For hours and hours, there were folks around the mic, talking about subjects,
sharing stories... you name it.
Finally, as the night got to the wee hours, I packed up the machine again, and got upstairs.
I broadcast more pre-recorded material until the network finally gasped its last for me late
in the morning.
The result? We have recordings. LOTS of recording. Everything that went across the station is
now available in about 700 megabytes of OGG file, and will be available very soon after it's
all sorted out. All of it generated by a bunch of folks just having a great time.
How much better does it get?
