Ceallaigh's Blog
I need to write this entry for my wiki anyway, so I thought I'd make it a blog post as well in the hope it might help other people getting started with Audible ACX narration. That said, this post is technical in nature and only covers that portion of the process. I'll write another post once my sound studio is finished that discusses sound attenuation for audio recording. Suffice to say for now that you need a silent, sound-dampened environment to work in, since it's virtually impossible to scrub sound artifacts from a recording without sacrificing quality.
Responsible Ceallaigh: Well, I've ordered copies of Batman #1 and Batgirl #6 to complete my collection. Now it's time to get to work!
Organizational Ceallaigh: You know, if you finished that unread stack of comic books on your desk, you could put them in the read stack and bag and board them all together this morning.
Geek Ceallaigh: (whispering) That's right! You tell her!
Responsible Ceallaigh: (eyes the stack) Well, I *am* collector as well as a reader, and I *do* want to keep them nice...
Geek Ceallaigh: (with pom poms) Read the comics! Read the comics!
Responsible Ceallaigh: No, I can read them after I finish my edits, and they're not going to suffer any damage where they are.
Geek Ceallaigh: (pouts)
Organizational Ceallaigh: I tried.
Upon learning I was about to undertake a somewhat complex revision process, my GEH (short for Genius Engineer Husband) rises to his feet, points his slide rule in the air and proclaims, "I can make a spreadsheet for that!"
And so he did.
It's a fine creation consisting of a page for each chapter plus one for the template and one for calculating how close I am to completion. I spent the day today gathering my notes, his notes and my beta reader's notes into an outline and then breaking that into overall, section and chapter edits. Afterward, I plugged them into the spreadsheet, and now all I have to do is go from chapter to chapter ticking each item off as I address it.
When there are Casbahs which need rocking, the GEH arrives, and he rocks them.
Bi-la kaifa.
Tech Speak
I've just learned via my Twitter feed that a certificate authority in the Netherlands issued a valid SSL wildcard certificate for Google to a third party in July, leading to concerns that attackers may have been using the certificate to route sensitive traffic through their own servers, capturing it and compromising user data in the process. Microsoft Technet has issued an advisory about the certificate, and a Pastebin post of the SSL certificate alleges it was used by the Iranian government for man-in-the-middle attacks. Google has written about the attack on its blog, and PC World has provided an excellent overview of the problem.
So, if you signed up for the newsletter in the last couple of hours, could you go back and do it again? I've over-written my database without checking for new subscribers.
Sheesh.
I've uploaded my rebooted web site to our server, and it's accessible now at csmaccath.com. Please note that it's not quite finished yet, but I wanted to close my Flickr account today and point folks to my own image galleries, so I jumped the gun a bit and finished all but one or two things this afternoon. Here's what's changed:
Miscellany
For the most part, this reboot takes the long-running, somewhat personal site I had and turns it into a professional web site for my writing career. There's more information about the Petals of the Twenty Thousand Blossom series, the theme has changed, the menus have changed, my social networking links are more prominent and I've provided a site map so folks can find the old content I don't link to anymore.