Greetings all. As a brief intro, my name is Andy, and unlike the other Rusties, I’m from Central New York rather than the upper Midwest. The snowfall is pretty much the same, but the state isn’t in the shape of a mitten. No, Central New York is not anywhere near the city. The city is about four hours down. I’m a sports/video game geek, and I thought that there would be no better way to start my rantings by ranting about… a sports video game.

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The concept can be a good idea for new users to Twitter but then again maybe not. I asked the question when I signed up “Outside of my friends, who should I follow”. I received a huge number of responses from the people I knew out in the real world and all of the suggested people to follow were top notch, plus I picked up a few others that have been suggested by someone I had starting following through a previous suggestion.

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Our take on the Hulu and Boxee, Forced to Divorced. http://tinyurl.com/au9jtb

I am opening a letter I wrote to Jason at Hulu about the Hulu/Boxee throwdown.

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Thursday evening the hopefully final test run and shakedown of the systems will be performed.  With a skeleton crew of hosts we’re going to record something. Will it be a pilot episode? Will it cause the machines to burst into flames sending small children running and screaming? We’ll just have to wait and find out, odds are things will fall somewhere in between.

Keep tuned Batfans for when more information arives on this BatStation…

I’m not sure how the decision was made or that a decision was needing to be made for that matter.   I’m not even sure what events happened that lead us to having the idea that for the core products at Rust Media having the recording be as portable as possible it the route to go.  So with portability in mind we set about to run some audio tests.    We’re still looking at what the final hardware is going to be but using our notebooks we tried our a few different headset mics, two USB and one straight analog.  The clear winner was the Plantronics 645 USB headset it gave the best sound and performance of the headsets we tested and at about $30-$40 is reasonably priced.  The analog only headset we tried gave a good sound but using the onboard audio hardware of the laptops gave us poor response time and would occasionally garble the audio stream.  The last USB only headset while performance response being good the sound quality from the mic just wasn’t there.

The tests were ran by two of us getting on Skype and making a call the calls were recorded using Total Recorder which produces an mp3 and a raw wave file out that we then checked to see how things sounded, not very indepth I know but it did the job we needed.  The sound quality coming through Skype is more than acceptable and we see little post processing needed to output a final show.

We’ve still to settle on what additional hardware we’re going to need as well as the software to post process and package the final product but we now know how to input our content so to speak. There is still a lot of behind the scenes boring tedious work to go but things are progressing and I can declare this weekend’s tests a success.

Currently we’re working on assembling the equipment we need to begin producing audio podcasts.  Why only audio? well video was discussed but it was decided that due to cost and the fact nobody really would want to see our ugly mugs that audio is the best place to begin.   I know that you can read all over the web that all you need to make a podcast is a computer and a microphone, while thats trueusing that setup the quality is less than.. well it pretty crappy.  Over the years there has been too many podcasts that have shown great promise to me that we’re simply unlistenable due to poor production quality.  Since our startup funds are pretty sllim and we still have day jobs I think spending the extra time to research and assemble the right equpment our budget can handle is the smart choice.

I’ve recieved a few recomendations on equipment and am always open to more. That also goes for show ideas, things you want to hear about. Rust Media is going to be a more social media company we want our fans to be invested in content we produce.

Greetings….Welcome to our little feed for the new media site. Http://www.rustmedia.tv

Greetings Interwebs! This is the new home of Rust Media, it may not look like much now but I was getting a bit antsy so expect to see a lot of changes to follow.
Who or what is Rust Media? We are a bunch of guys out of the Midwest with a sack full of opinions and we’re not afraid to use them.
Some important links if your curious as to whats going on.
http://rustmedia.tv
http://twitter.com/rustmedia
http://twitter.com/captangrypants
http://twitter.com/danbjorklund