Cazmanian_minx's MFi3 diary

cazmanian_minx

It's been quite a productive morning so far. It's now 9.15am and I've:

• Followed up on a lead sent to me by a mate for some more transcription work - fingers crossed!
• Spruced up an old short story and sent it to an Australian magazine
• Answered all my eBay customer queries bar 1
• Balanced my mortgage account (payment date is the 5th & MS Money never gets the interest right because it can't cope with the offset)

The rest of the day will probably go rapidly downhill! I had a stock delivery yesterday and still have approximately 20,000 beads and findings to count and bag, so I'm off to slump on the sofa in front of Jeremy "GET OFF MY STAGE!" Kyle and let my brain dribble out of my ears for a couple of hours

Caz

taka

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

I had a stock delivery yesterday and still have approximately 20,000 beads and findings to count and bag

:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: Thats a LOT of beads and findings :eek: Can you not do them by weight instead? Ummmm good luck???

cazmanian_minx

taka wrote: »

:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: Thats a LOT of beads and findings :eek: Can you not do them by weight instead? Ummmm good luck???

Unfortunately not without forking out for a set of scales that weighs accurately to 0.1g I'll get through them, it's a nice excuse to crash in front of the telly

The transcription work is looking promising - he emailed back and asked if I could do some files being recorded this afternoon, so I'm waiting for a call/email to let me know if they're on their way or not :T

Caz

taka

Caz... I've just PM'd you

cazmanian_minx

Thanks, Taka, will check it out :T

The next few days are going to be hectic. The good news is that I got the transcription work. The bad news is that it's coming on cassette, so I have to transfer it to my PC before I can start, he wants it back ASAP and I'm going to Scotland on Sunday for 3 days. There goes my Saturday I think - he's not sure whether it's 2 hours or 3 hours and a rough rule of thumb is to quadruple the speaking time to get the transcribing time.

He's sending a courier with the tapes, they should get here around 5.30, so if I can get them transferred to my PC tonight and go at it like a bat out of hell tomorrow and it's only a 2-hour tape, then I might be able to have a breather on Saturday. Worse case scenario is that I spend the journey north plugged into headphones working on the laptop (the bits of it I'm not driving, anyway!) and try and find a wireless connection I can piggyback onto briefly somewhere in Caithness!

Normally I wouldn't over-exert myself to get it done (after all, he said he was going to get the tape to me yesterday afternoon, which became this morning, which became 5.30pm tonight, maybe 6.30pm...), but this could turn into regular work and 6 hours of tape a month at £50 per audio hour would be a nice big chunk of mortgage gone over a year, so impressing him would be a Good Thing

Caz

taka

How do you get cassette recorded stuff on to your PC?

cazmanian_minx

taka wrote: »

How do you get cassette recorded stuff on to your PC?

You need a cassette deck with red & white outputs and a cable that'll run between it and the microphone input on your PC (about a quid from somewhere like Richer Sounds).

Then download a program that will record analogue sources (the full version of Real Player will do it, but there are plenty of free programs out there - I've used one called Exact Audio Copy this evening, which seems to do the job), connect everything up, hit record on the PC and play on the tape deck.

A quick listen shows that I've got just over 2 hours of audio to work through and it seems pretty good quality. Going to get an early night and start when OH goes off to work at about 7am tomorrow.

catshark88

Happy transcripting!

That sounds a really useful extra income if it does become a regular thing, well done you!

cazmanian_minx

I am *knackered*.

But I've typed up an hour and a half of tape (or 15,500 words - that's just under a third of a Mills & Boon novel!) in seven hours and have only got 36 minutes left, which I'm going to do tomorrow. I've been asked to email an invoice over with the completed work, so it looks hopeful that I'm going to get paid quickly - it'll work out at £105 :j

Also sent out 20 bead parcels, but haven't had a chance to sort through any more stock. My hands aren't really in a fit state for bead counting, so I'm going to go and crash out with OH in front of the rugby

Caz

tsharp

This looks like an interesting diary, I'll be following it for the writing element. I sold my first piece to a magazine earlier this year, got paid very little and had to send about a million emails to actually get it!

I have about 80,000 words of a novel sitting on the hard drive at the moment which i so badly need to complete and send off to some agents etc....