Julia Sherred's Geeky Pleasures

On Tuesday, September 22 2009, I had the pleasure of interviewing geek music sensation Jonathan Coulton for my Geeky Pleasures radio show on Party 934 | 102.5 FM Hudson Valley NY. Since it has now been aired, I will share it with those who could not tune in and listen.

Jonathan is such a talented, gracious, humble, funny and generous man. I had so much fun with this interview. I think one of my personal favourite highlights of this interview is when Joco teased me not only once but twice. We talked about his music, shared geeky pleasures, discussed sources of artistic inspiration, PAX, his current tour with Paul and Storm, his DVD Best.Concert.Ever., family, his fancy pants, put a rumour to rest  and a lot more.

Once again, one of my stupid tendencies came out in this interview. I do not know why this happens, but I always get so nervous when I am about to do an interview. I can meet the people I interview in person and am completely cool and not at all nervous. But as soon as it comes time to interview them, a mixture of excitement and nervousness hits. This can be a dangerous combination. I warned Jonathan about this prior to the interview. Thankfully, he understood. When I had the chance to briefly talk with him at PAX, I was good. Sure enough, the crazy insane dork decided to rear its ugly head during the interview. I think part of this issue is that I find it beyond cool that these people, whom I have so much respect for, decide to take a couple hours out of their day to geek out with me and allow my audience to share in it. For me this is a huge honour and is very surreal. Even if I were able to interview people weekly, I doubt these feelings will ever stop and I will continue to get stupid when there is a microphone recording our conversation.

For those who have not listened to or downloaded my past interviews and are not familiar with my style, let me try and explain it. When I do an interview, I want it to have the feel of two friends sitting down for coffee and just chatting. Even so we are just chatting, I try and make the chat interesting enough where people will want to eavesdrop in on the conversation. I do not prepare questions (unless someone sends in a question or I am requested to bring up something specific) and my guests do not receive a list of interview questions prior. I do have a general sense of a few things that I do want to talk about but I leave enough room in my thought-up outline to allow for a natural conversational flow. Also I want to clarify something, one of my comments may sound like I am making fun of geeks when the topic of Hobbits came up. That was not my intent. My intent was to say that I thought it cool and another reason I <3 Geeks and am proud to be one myself.

Technical note:

Yet again technology was not my friend during this interview. For some odd reason, whenever there was a slight pause in the conversation, the audio between the left and right channel would stop syncing. For every couple minutes of talking the channels became, on average, 1/2 second out of sync. By the end of the interview there was over 30 seconds where our conversation was completely out of sync.

What I ended up having to do was break up the interview in 17 sections, split the channels, time-shift the audio in one channel so that the conversation aligned as closely as possible with the other channel, recombine the channels and then paste it all back together. If you listen to the interview with headphones, you will still hear synchronization issues from time to time. However after 10 hours of editing and the fact I am not an audio engineer, what you hear now is the best I could do given time and resources. You will also hear periods where there appears to be dead air. That is a result of the time-shifting. I tried to clean that out but was unable.

I hope that you enjoy this interview even just a small fraction of how much I enjoyed doing it. It is available below in both streaming and download.

EDIT: Thank you to Joe “Covenant” Lamb for cleaning up the audio for me. You are awesome and did a great job! You can follow him on Twitter @JoeCovenant.

Total time: 1 hr 21 min 57 secs

Format: mp3

Size 75 MB

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Download, share, geek and be merry.

If you do share the interview with someone else, please be nice enough to at least mention where you got it from.

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