When it rains...it pours.

Good tidings, love and light to all of you.

Thanks for joining the human race and turning your backs on being sheep and getting your daily, non-conformist dose of AndHow Web Radio. If you are not listening *RIGHT* now...I am shocked. If a man in prison can surf the web from inside his cell, then you really are not left with a lot of excuses are you?

Things are up and running...the test stream is *LIVE* and now currently taking a hammering. My faithful and trusty test server has given me the following results for this stage of AndHow Web Radio,

1. My math is not great, but I figured I could handle 7 or 8 concurrent listeners on my current configuration. This includes me hosting the media server on the back of my ASDL broadband connection. I am now hosting up to 9 listeners on a pretty much regular basis. I cycle through about 100 or so listeners a day. So the test stream has proven that I will quickly outgrow my current bandwidth resources, so looking at streaming hosts to handle the proposed traffic.
2. My little media server is quite capable of handling anything I throw at it so far. The sound card is not so flash, so my inputs from the board haven't been that great. Currently I have to do live broadcasts from the studio PC and then encode them to the server. Fortunately they sound great on that PC, but just not on the server. I somehow think that this may be the fault of the current test instance of the station automation software and not the hardware though. The mic really sounds sweet, in addtion to the new sound board and is a far cry from the Radio Shack dynamic mics and mixer board that we were using back then. Much easier to replace, if you dropped the gear into the Neches River during a show. Now it is all covered under my homeowners insurance!

I think things are coming along swimmingly. Seeing that I am doing *ALL* of the work putting all of this together...it is slow going. I have already been receiving donations from a few gracious listeners, which go a long way as not all of this is free. I have had to upgrade my ADSL plan to PRO via my local ISP. I have outsourced some voice-imaging (mostly because I am too busy to do my own!) for station IDs and sweepers. I haven't even had time to sit down and just do a live show, but only for a few minutes. Hopefully I can get caught up on things and be able to enjoy the fruits of my labour, soon!

All of this as the world is coming to an end! (only if you are a networked device that needs to speak to the internet.) Funny enough...the last time AndHow Web Radio was up and swinging...the Y2K-bug was upon us. We actually were broadcasting live from our New Year's Eve 1999 party...what you heard on the air was on the dance floor! We continued until the wee hours of the morning. Uneventfully, nothing happened...the electricity stayed on...the internet was still running and so were our servers! Another funny thing that just came to mind, if I was just doing dial-up clients, like back in the day...I wouldn't need a streaming host...this server and my ASDL broadband plan would suit all of my needs. How things change in 12 short years.

Nostalgia aside, it is hard work sounding this good...so I will get back to my tasking.

Peace, love & kibble.

The Reverend