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Posts tagged as “Weekly Check-in”

What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 17, 2025Weekly chicken.

What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 17, 2025

November 23, 2025 |

Life and Thoughts

I lost a couple days this week to a child home sick with an ear infection, so my output hasn’t been so great. But I still managed to do something!

Posted twice — Now you all know about my desire to have my face in the local diners and the hallowed tradition of Sandwich Day.

Recorded more voice data set scripts — Another 5 or 6 of these this week. The interface I record into isn’t the normal DAW method, but through a web page. It’s a little wonky and the interface isn’t the easiest to use. I wish they’d let me resize the text box the line sits in. I wish I could record pick ups. Some of the lines are two or three hundred words long and have foreign language words. They are very difficult to get through in one pass.

I’ve figured out a clever (to me) way to soften this difficulty, though. We’ll see how well this works out in the future.

Recorded an audition — This one was to be the voice of a service call voice robot.

Added another TBLR episode to Youtube — This time it’s The Damned Thing.

Overall, not too bad for a week that was two days shorter than normal. Next week will also be limited with Thanksgiving and Sandwich Day.

I don’t really share videos as exclusive post topics anymore, so I’ll share this song I found last week and really enjoyed here instead. Have fun.

> Continue reading...What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 17, 2025
What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 10, 2025Weekly chicken.

What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 10, 2025

November 16, 2025 |

Life, Thoughts and Work

What did I do this week?!

Recorded a voice project – There’s quite a bit of low impact work recording a variety of speech to help train virtual assistants’ abilities to recognize speech. They give you a little phrase and a mood and you record it. This project had 256 prompts and took about four hours over as many sittings. Not great money, but not hard work either.

A voice audition — I can’t say for whom. I was NDA’ed. To be perfectly honest, even after recording the audition, I don’t know who it was for.

Started learning Fairlight — I’ve been using Studio One for ages to do my audio work. It’s very good and works for me, but there’s no harm in learning other options. I recently tried Reaper but it’s like trying to learn how to build a house by staring at an ugly concrete wall. Maybe I’ll return to it one day, but for now I bounced right off. So now I’ve set my sights on Blackmagic’s Fairlight which lives inside DaVinci Resolve. That last sentence probably means nothing to most of you. I’ll follow up on this at some point.

Recorded and posted about my kids — What else would I write about?

Wrote and recorded a post for next week — You’ll see it on Monday. Planning! So cool!

> Continue reading...What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 10, 2025
What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 3, 2025Weekly chicken.

What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 3, 2025

November 9, 2025 |

Life and Thoughts

In an effort to stay true to my statement of intent in Tuesday’s blog post, let’s have a weekly check in with what I am making or doing during the week. Doesn’t have to be fancy. Think of it as a way to keep me honest.

Ok let’s go!

Published three blog posts — Feels nice to write here again.

Wrote another post for next week — Loading up the post schedule.

Recorded narration for three blog posts — This adds quite a bit of time to the postings, but it’s also fun and good practice for me for longform narration, especially in a more contemporary style. I was going to skip the Tiny Chef post, but then I thought ehhhhhh just do it.

Posted current TBLRs to The Black Laser Youtube page — Now, if you want to listen to me read you stories on Youtube, you can. You can only see five of them so far, but they’re all queued up. Of course, if you want to listen to all of them or old post narrations, you can get them all at The Black Laser Bandcamp.

Got my video camera all set up — For some special projects! Also putting to use the AT815b I’ve owned since the 1900s. I also spilled a little coffee on the camera.

Finished cleaning up some photos from this summer I’ve been sitting on — The distinct disadvantage of shooting on a camera is that you need to touch everything afterward. I get nicer photos, but it takes more time. You’ll see the photos on Monday.

That’s pretty much it. Not at all a bad effort, especially while the entire house is muddling through colds. See you next Sunday for another round up!

> Continue reading...What I’ve Done for the Week Beginning November 3, 2025