Sunday, 20 January 2002

Transferring Book Reviews and Interviews. I have decided I am going to transfer over to this site all my book reviews and then the interviews and other articles from my Manila site, after I complete the Jock Sturges magazine article. I am enjoying using Radio 8 so much that I want to have everything all in the one location. 2:26:27 PM    Add a comment.

Weekend Woes. I bought several packs of painkillers after the toothache began Saturday, and am popping pills continuously to get through the weekend. It feels like a nerve has been exposed.       I’ve never really looked after my teeth as much as I should have, starting from childhood when we couldn’t afford orthodontists. I didn’t go through years of wearing braces like all the other kids at school, and it shows. Dental care was considered a luxury, and that bad attitude is something I am still working to shake off. I sympathized with Martin Amis when he received so much criticism for getting his teeth fixed.       I did the telephone interview with Jock Sturges, and used a comically jury-rigged set-up to make the recording. When I did these interviews in the early 1990s I bought a signal splitter from an electronics store, one that had a lead to plug into your tape recorder and another for the handset. You only got a mono signal going into the recorder, but the sound quality was pretty good.       I lost that device years ago in my travels, so I tried to buy one again. The original was dirt cheap and plenty of stores had them. This time, when I rang around the Perth electronics stores and told the assistants what I needed to do, a note of fear came into their voices and they all blurted out that recording conversations on the phone was now illegal and the splitters had been banned.       Telstra used to make phone answering machines that could also record your conversation and they’ve been discontinued. I’m sure that radio broadcasters like the ABC have all sorts of wonderful high-tech devices in use when they record their telephone interviews, but I wonder what regular journalists without big budgets use when they need to do the same?       I used an ancient speakerphone and taped a lapel mike to the speaker, but as the phone has no volume control I ended up jamming my ear to the speaker in order to hear Jock. The line was pretty poor and the recording is adequate at best. He could hear me quite well, but my mouth was right over the phone’s microphone. It must have looked a comical sight. 2:11:07 PM    Add a comment.