BurnsFamily Blog

L.A. had a 5.4 (moderate) earthquake around Noon today. To folks who aren’t familiar with earthquakes, you can certainly feel one of those but modern-built structures typically are unaffected. The Richter scale is logarithmic, so a 4.0 is 1/10th the energy of a 5.0, for example. The USGS says that the Bay Area is overdue […]

What I did to ensure the cleanest possible upgrade experience:

I use Keynote ‘08 for my professional presentations, I also use it for client work such as training and technical presentations. I am super-excited about the new features in Apple’s Keynote ‘08 update. Unfortunately, if you have decent audio recording equipment it seems Apple didn’t do a good job at testing this with the […]

I was inspired by a picture I saw from another podcaster, Dave Slusher from the EvilGeniusChronicles. He made his own “mic flag” and I knew I could make one too. I mean, come ON: I’m married to an artist with a huge room FILLED with art supplies! You can buy blank ones for $25 and […]

Business is picking up for Studio 1A, so we decided to clean up the place, add some artwork and apply some sound deadening to the room.
The results are nothing short of amazing. Thank God I have Julie to help turn my ideas into reality!

A friend called recently, an important MS-Word (Mac) document she was working on started to “act weird”. It was a very large document and when editing it, it started to lose pages when repaginating. She was really smart and had multiple backup copies stored in various off-site places and other friends. Great idea! […]

My podcasting business is picking up, so I needed a second mic for studio 1A. I wanted to designate my current mic (Audix OM-2) as the “guest mic” and pick up a new one for me. I really wanted a condenser mic since I’ve heard they’re more sensitive and can more faithfully record […]

I’m collecting ideas on the best mics and/or mic-headsets new podcasters should consider. There’s a lot of opinion out there. Most of it rather dated so it’s hard to tell if these reviewers ended up sticking with their recommendations in the long-term.
Ultimately it comes down to auditioning them to see which one(s) will […]

Bob and I are creating a podcast. I always enjoyed working with broadcasting technologies, I don’t have much experience with in-home recording technologies and techniques so this will be a fun journey.
After a week of solid research, I finally took the plunge and went down to my local GuitarCenter today to buy the necessary […]

I work for a large Internet-based company. I also get a TON of “spam”, “malware”, and “phish” emails to my work email address. You simply would not believe how much I get. Most of the time they contain viruses and URLs that are so brand new most filters don’t know about them yet, […]