Regarding the audio quality of the VBUG show...
We got email from a few listeners concerned about the audio quality during the group interview in this week's DNR. So, here's the story:
The conference was held at the Microsoft office in Reading. The audio visual guys there take their job very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the answer to all our requests for recording was "you've got to be joking." As the first day progressed it looked like we weren't going to get a recording. I had to get borderline rude with the guy to get him to agree to send a feed to the stage from which I could record. We had 10 minutes in which to do this and get it up and running. There were 6 lav mics. three on one side of the room, and three on the other. Apparently the feed we got only had signal from one half of the room. I tested my microphone when I got the feed plugged into our recording device, and there was signal. Silly me. I assumed that since my mic was coming through and we could also HEAR all the other mics, that everyone's signal would be included in the feed. Nope. We didn't discover this until after the recording.
Geoff did the best he could of manually increasing the signal of the guys off mic (picked up from the three that worked) but as you can imagine, or perhaps you've heard, it sounds really crappy.
Lesson learned: The next time we go to a conference with the intent of recording a show we are going to bring our own lavs, our own mixer, and our own sound enginner. If the host won't pay T&E for the enginneer we will won't expect to get a recording out of it.