Why, Elliott, why?
2006-06-01 - 9:26 p.m.

I recorded L!ve with Regi$ and Kelly this morning so I could see Elliott's performance. He sounded great, but he's gone back to his old, dorky-looking hairstyle; all smashed down on his forehead. Yuck.

He said the Ameri@n Id0l concerts are selling out all over the country, so they added, I think, 16 more shows to the tour. That's really cool for them. Must make them feel really good.

I had an interview to transcribe today that was over an hour long and it seemed like it took me all day to do it. Generally an hour of audio takes about 3 hours to transcribe UNLESS the audio quality is bad and/or the speakers are hard to understand, and the latter was true for this particular interview. Actually, only the guy being interviewed was hard to understand; I could hear the interviewer okay most of the time.

The problem is, some of these interviewers occasionally do in-person interviews (most are over the phone) and it sounds like the place the tape recorder in the middle of the room. Great idea in theory, except when the recorder is set up that way, usually it doesn't pick up either party very well. In the case today, I could hear the interviewer because she was speaking clearly and loudly, but the interviewee sounded like he had a cold and had gravel in his mouth. Plus he was mumbling and talking really softly.

I decided very early on that I wasn't going to try real hard to figure out what he was saying because I could only catch words like "uh," "um," "and," "but," and other words like that really wouldn't mean much if someone were to look over this interview for factual information in the future. So I just concentrated on what the interviewer was saying, and fortunately she tended to repeat what the interviewee said most of the time. Like if he said, "I saw him on Saturday," she would say, "Oh, you saw him on Saturday?" So at least the transcript will make some sense because of that.

Geez, it was frustrating, even though I didn't knock myself out trying to understand him, like I said. I don't know why it bothered me so much.

Eight weeks and five days till the lipo! Whoo!

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