OnQ

On Amsterdam (part 2)

The big news people have been asking me about has finally been officially announced. On Wednesday, April 5, 2006, the regularly scheduled broadcast of the eOn Call radio show will be presented live while I am in Amsterdam getting ready for the SMB Nation conference. In addition, the show will run for 30 minutes (including commercial breaks) instead of the standard 15.

How is all of this possible? Glad you asked...

Normally, our show is recorded in the audio booth at Tucker Communications in Denton about a week before it airs. Rhankdi Kidwell and I go through the material, and Ed Tucker cleans it up and packages it for broadcast on the station.

On April 5, however, I'll be in Amsterdam and poor Rhandi and Ed will be stuck back in Denton. Here's how it's all supposed to work.

• I'll get an wireless connection at the hotel and will get my Mac Powerbook connected to the internet.
• I'll use the Gizmo Project client (with a USB headset) to make a Voice over IP connection to a laptop (also running Gizmo Project) in the audio booth back in Denton.
• Rhandi will have a microphone connected to the laptop so I can her her over the Gizmo connection back in Amsterdam.
• The audio output from Ed's laptop (my voice) will be fed into the mixer, along with a second microphone for Rhandi.
• Ed will mix the two audio signals through his encoder, which will turn around and pipe the signal back out through the internet radio feed.

We're expecting about a 10-30 second delay from the mixed signal in the booth to the audience speakersbased on previous live remotes done on the station. This will be the first time, however, that the live remote source has come from ouside the US.

Ed and I have spent hours testing and tweaking the connections and audio signals, and from in the US, it works. We even had Marina listen in on a test feed from her connection in Holland (it took her a few seconds to realize that the feed was live and not prerecorded). The only unknown at this point is the connection I'll be able to get at the hotel. If everything goes smoothly,I'll fire up my laptop, connect to the hotel wireless internet, and get a decent connection back to the US. If not, we'll run one of our prerecorded shows instead.

i'm not sure where I'll set up at the hotel for the feed. I'd like to set up in a public area so anyone who has arrived early for the conference (it won't officially start until the next day) can hang out and see the Amsterdam side of the show. Or witness just how frustrated I get if we can't pull this off.

If you can't be in Amsterdam for the conference, you can still participate. Just open your browser to http://www.apostleradio.org at 10am CST (16:00 GMT) and click on one of the Listen Now links in the upper-right corner of the page. The broadcast will be carried live on all three stations in the Tucker Communications family that morning.

If you can't be in Amsterdam and you can't catch the show live, you'll be able to catch it on the archives at http://www.eoncall.com later in the day (or possibly the next day, depending on how tired I am after the flight overseas).

On Amsterdam (part 1)

Three weeks from today, teh SMB Nation Amsterdam conference starts. So what are my first throughts about the conference? It's not meeting the M&M's in person. It's not hobnobbing with SMBers from across the pond. It's not even that I'll be avoiding places where you can get those funny little cigarettes (which, interestingly enough, comprised a full chapter in a travel book on Amsterdam I thumbed through the other night at Barnes & Noble).

Nope, my first thought, even though I'm not a drinker, is "can I get a good margarita in Amsterdam?"

On Backups

Today I remembered once again why I love backups. I opened my QuickBooks file and found, to my horror, that my Accounts Receivable window had eaten all entries after December 12, 2006. Even though my bank balance looked OK, I'd lost all the invoices that have been entered for 2006, and a few for 2005.

Was that the end of my world? Heck no.

I fired up my Mac backup utility, restored the file that had been backed up the night before, opened it, and all my QuickBooks happiness had returned.

How much did this backup utility cost me? Zilch. It is included as part of my .Mac account. Did I get a good return on my investment? Absolutely. How many hours did I save of trying to re-enter my Invoices (I create PDFs of every invoice because I e-mail them to clients)? I can't even begin to think.

It's something simple, but every once in a while you run across a situation like this where having a backup saves your backside. And this wasn't even a 'disaster' in that sense of the word (although me losing my QuickBooks data would have been disastrous for me).

Don't quiver. Just backup. Just do it. Trust me.

On Travel

I got my passport in the mail last Friday. Let's see how the travel checklist looks now:

Passport - check
Airline reservations - check
Hotel reservations - check
Conference registration - check

Yep, looks like everything is in order to make a trip to Amsterdam in the not too distant future!

Why am I going? Sure, I love the idea of going back to Amsterdam 19 years after my first trip through. Sure, I'm excited about getting to promote the SBS 2003 Unleashed book in Europe. But I'm mostly pumped about the 3 Magical M's getting together for the first time in person!

Oh, I'm sure there's other stuff, but that's the big news for the trip. Better start packing now...