Picture from Muppet Wiki

I felt a bit lost yesterday without the podcast going out, it was disappointing to have broken the chain of regularity but these things happen and I’m surprised it took so long to happen given my bad luck. However, I had a rare glimpse of good fortune yesterday evening when I turned on my old virus polluted laptop. The reason I turned it on was to see if even without the Internet being connected I might still be able to use the recording equipment. My optimism is never particularly high so I wasn’t expecting things to go in my favour, so (at the risk of sounding like a faux-Buzzfeed link on Facebook) I couldn’t believe what happened next.

The last time I had the laptop switched on was the night the virus struck and so of course I assumed it was fucked. I have ordered a new laptop but for some reason last night I decided to see if I could use the recording equipment and also Microsoft Word which won’t be on the new one as I have ordered an identical model to the new and bizarre one that Mandi took delivery of last week. Not only were these programmes in perfect working order but the wireless Internet kicked in too. Realising that my curse involves one piece of good luck being a false sense of security that leads to a far worse piece of bad luck, (imagine being kissed passionately before being stabbed in the stomach with a rusty bread knife), I decided to leave the computer on and see if the virus was still lurking. When I returned to my office about an hour later, everything was still working. Maybe this was one of those 24 hour bugs? I get them in winter so I understand. I would offer this as advice to anyone who experiences an unexpected computer virus; leave it alone for a couple of days. Not taking any chances, I copied last week’s podcast and a couple of radio things onto a USB stick and carried out two disc cleans before de-Fraggle Rocking it twice. If I thought it was safe to do so I would have left it soaking in a bath full of bleach overnight for good measure.

My bit of good news means that I can carry on doing the podcast and other planned audio projects, but of course I have to suffer a setback in return. Sure enough, I have not heard from Oliver Smith so my filming schedule has gone arse about face yet again. I can’t dwell on it too much at the moment but it does mean that my to-do list has only got eleven months to go so I need to find another film maker to work with.

My creative task-a-day to tick in my diary was the downloading of music for the podcast. It might not seem creative in the truest sense of the word but it counts towards work and therefore it counts in my Seinfeld chain. The PR companies and labels that send me music carried on doing so while I have had this hiatus so I have a pretty good amount of music to choose from. I have decided that as a treat I will be releasing two editions of The Sunday Alternative this weekend, one on Saturday and the usual one on Sunday. The Saturday edition will not be part of the sequence but will be billed as a bonus which means that the Sunday podcast will be number 33. This of course is a brave thing to announce on a Monday, leaving me with four days for something to go disastrously wrong.

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February housekeeping

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