Boiled or Roasted

It seems that I don’t know what direction this little blog is going. Look for new and exciting—to me at least—changes. Lately reevaluating everything about the Peanut Whistle, I have decided to continue by reviewing the old posts I most enjoyed as a reader myself and the ones with the most mass appeal.

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A first for my 9 year old son and I ; over the Labor Day weekend we attended the Advocare 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Great fun! That’s Luke beside a Plymouth Superbird On display during the race. YeeHaw!

Stay tuned!

Roughing It

Oh how spoiled we have become in this modern age! For a few days I have been borrowing high speed internet from the public library and other municipal services that provide free Wi-Fi. God forbid I have to leave the house to get my Internet fix. Right now we’re stuck with dial-up Web. That was ok 10 years ago when no one had high-speed—but, come on.

Fitting nicely in my intent to become more active—or maybe yet another hinderance—mobile Internet allows me to see the outside world while not missing my electrronic “friends.” A few months back, in the Spring, I coined a new term for myself—eBreak—which is a vacation from all electronic devices: cell phones, computers, the Internet. My eBreak was an amazing success. For an entire week I abstained from all eMails, Facebook and other electronic distractions that had begun to overwhelm me. I highly recommend an eBreak to everyone. It’s just about time for another. Incidently, for my car guy friends: I know that an e-brake is shorthand for emergency brake, but my new word is spelled b-r-e-a-k; just so you’ll know.

Stay tuned

©2010 Neal Rhoden, the Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved. 

Freebies

If you are as cheap as I am then you are probably looking for good deals all the time.

To be even more similar to me you like to find free software on the Internet. Two very useful programs that I have found are 100% free to use forever, no strings attached. They are free of ads as well. I give my personal recommendation.

If you need an awesome free word processor nearly equal to Microsoft Word ® try Open Office. Download at  http://www.openoffice.org

If you like to tinker with digital audio then get the beta version of Audacity for multi-track recording and editing. I find it very reliable and easy to use, weather you're a beginner or an experienced pro. I have been using Audacity for about five years. There was a slight learning curve in the beginning. With the on-line users manual, all features are comprehensively explained. I am not a beginner; audio has been a serious hobby of mine for 30 years: in radio production for a dozen years and church sound since I was 14. Devices and fads have come and gone, but I can truly say that Audacity is the most useful tool ever. It does things impossible for even state-of-the-art analog production studios when I began in radio. The only criticism: there is no real time preview of plug-in effects. Hey, it is free after all. You may download at http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Stay tuned

©2010 The Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved.

800 Views

I feel silly calling it a milestone, but my Peanut Whistle videos on YouTube have had over 800 views. Woohoo! I don't know how the site calculates the number. I do suspect that the tally may be considerably more since demographics data is included in the "insight" profiles. How would YouTube know such info without each counted viewer signed in? Yeah, the number is small compared to all the silly cat videos that get a million plus hits; let me have my moment. With that in mind I figure that more people have seen the video tour of my fourth radio home than we had total listeners at the time the station was on the air. Click on the link above to see my YouTube channel. Make sure you subscribe while you're there.

Stay tuned

©2010 The Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved.