When Tom first suggested to me that we actually do a podcast instead of just talking about it, I went out to buy a headset. In India there aren’t a large selection of electronics stores to pick from, so I had a friend take me around the town nearby (Hosur) and we eventually found a little shop that sold a “Zippy’s” headset (it’s a popular brand here in India). The headset seemed to work in the store when he let me try it and it was only $5 (Rs. 250) so I bought it.
After taking it home, it worked great. I used it for a couple of skype calls – with Tom and my sister and even used it for some language-learning on livemocha.com. Then, one day, inexplicably, the microphone stopped working altogether. I messed with it for a while but was unable to get it to work. I was quite frustrated – tried to take it back to no avail, prayed about it (thinking of this verse), and tried messing with it a bit to see if it was a bad connection. Nothing worked. All this and I hadn’t even gotten to do my first podcast with the microphone.
So, despite my best efforts to have a nice microphone, I have done all of my podcast recording with a set of earbud headphones that I got with my creative zen touch a long time ago. That’s right, headphones are perfectly functional as microphones (at least the left side of stereo headphones, anyway). In fact, I’ve come up with a pretty cool although sketchy setup where I rubber-band the headphones to the boom of my headset. It’s ghetto, it’s geeky, but it works.
