Still hard, bye bye extra $, podcasting

The water coming out of our cleaner/softener is still not soft so I decided to take another whack at it last night.  First I used the shop vac to suck all of the water out of the salt tank. Then I removed the float assembly and used my air compressor to blow out the lines just in case something was clogged in there.  I put it back together and ran it through a recharge cycle. 

From what I understand the recharge cycle follows this routine.  Water is pumped into the salt tank to create a supply of salt water.  This salt water is then pumped into the water softener where the salty water causes a chemical reaction that cleans the resin.  The salty/dirty water is pumped out and then regular water is pumped through the system to clean it out.

Well it seems to me that the process is breaking after step one.  I saw the water getting pumped into the salt tank but I never saw it get sucked back out.  I am going to contact the place I bought the parts from in Michigan to see if they can help me diagnose the problem.  They have been very helpful up to this point.

So I got the Tacoma back yesterday.  Unfortunately it turned out to be the opposite outcome of the PV AC repair, it wound up costing much more than I expected.  There were no shenanigans involved though.  In addition to the timing belt I had them do the brakes.  When they got the front of the motor apart to change the timing belt they also found the front engine seals and water pump were leaking.  It only makes sense to fix those issues as well while everything is ripped apart.  They wound up redoing the front brakes, flushing the brake lines, cleaning the rear brakes, replacing the water pump, front seals and all engine belts.  The grand total for the work was $1450.  Yep that is a big egg but the sale of the old party van covered it barely. So much for having money left over to do other projects, oh well.

So I have been messing with the idea of doing podcast versions of my posts.  I had several hurdles to making this happen.  I had to figure out how to get an Iphone voice memo off my Iphone and into a mp3 format, how to create a proper podcast feed and how to get the feed into Itunes.  I found I would be able to use a plug in for WordPress to create my podcast feed which is pretty slick.  In addition it can create a player link right inside of a post as you can see below. 

The one remaining snag is getting the feed accepted by the Itunes store.  For some reason when I submit the feed to the store it isn’t liking the URL for some reason.  I am able to manually add the same feed url to my Itunes so I’m not sure what the difference is.

Now of course, I don’t expect many people to bother to download an audio version of my blog, hell maybe nobody will.  However there are some readers of my blog that do not know me personally. For them, it may be interesting to put a voice with the wacky words that they read on a semi-regular basis. 

I’m not quite sure how I would want to do this.  I am thinking that perhaps a once a week podcast would work out the best.  It would give enough content to fill a few minutes without being too long.

Like the blog itself, creating an audio version is more about benefiting me more than anything else.  Forcing me to read out loud and enunciate clearly is something I definitely could use more work at.  My hope is as I get more comfortable I will be able to ad-lib off of the reading the posts instead of just reading them.  Who knows, perhaps I could even employ guest readers from time to time?  I mean who wouldn’t want the sultry sound of Randall’s voice dictating my mundane existence?

[podcast]https://blog.duf.net/podcast/StillHard.mp3[/podcast]