Summary: Please bear with us while we get through this period. As I gain more and more strength we will be returning to a full recording schedule. Yea, yea, yea…Happy New Year!! Oops, do I sound a bit frustrated? A bit negative? Maybe. Bear with me here while I try to work this out. This just didn’t feel much like Christmas this year. I know why….that’s the easy part. I had a total hip replacement December 15. That’ll put a major-league crimp in your Christmas celebration! No work party/luncheon, no Christmas Eve, no Christmas, no New Year’s Eve or New Years. Just rest, ice and therapy (three times a week). You want to feel isolated? Spend Christmas Day alone with only a babysitter to “assist” when (or if) necessary. Thank God I had my “new” Microsoft Surface Pro2 but that is another story…. Yes, you can say the holiday season is an exercise in commercialism and greed. You could say that. You would be wrong, but you could say that. You would be wrong in some instances. My family being one of them. It isn’t a gift and/or a spending contest but a celebration of the family and recognition of another year gone by (personally successful or not). Sure, the kids would have their giftfest on Christmas Eve but the rest of the time was time for one on one conversations and listening. A lot of listening. No big deal you say….I did after all replace my knee last June. This should have been a breeze. Old hat. In fact, they (please input the “ubiquitous they” here) all said this would be much easier. “The hip is always easier than the knee”, they would say. Ok, in truth, that was correct. This time around at two weeks I was off my walker and my wife had taken me out to dinner (to get the stink off reputedly) and I had a nominally good time. With the knee I was still on the walker at two weeks. I remember because at two weeks I went to my surgeon’s office to get my stitches removed. My wife tried to take me out to dinner around 3-3.5 weeks and that outing wasn’t nearly as fun. Ok, for tonight’s show, we are using some previously recorded conversations between Ed and myself. Some of this material isn’t the best recording. We did it during the “dark months” when I was having all sorts of problems with the audio. That was before I bought our Rode Podcaster USB microphone which immediately solved most of our sound issues. I guess this just illustrates the trials and tribulations of recording a podcast in a non-soundproof studio. Some of the lead-ins and endings of these talks were sort of abrupt but I’ll try to explain before each segment so it won’t be quite so traumatic for you. Also, we use Skype to record our conversations between just the two of us. Sometimes, well, Skype – let’s just say it’s got some gremlins. One of them happen during this episode. I left it in to --- well, I guess I kept it to illustrate the problems with Skype. We start off talking a little bit about the Federal e-Rate reimbursement system. The FCC has rewritten the e-Rate system and in a couple of episodes we will dedicate a whole podcast. Online testing The Fujitsu ScanSnap SV-600
