Hi there. Welcome to The Daily Grateful. I'm Michael Kroos. And guess what we're going to do today?
The day after Valentine's Day. I'm going to answer a couple of questions that have come up, and I figured instead of sitting there and typing a bunch of emails, I would just answer a few of them. Just a few of them. So the first question I had was your opening music.
You seem to have a couple of them. Maybe three or four. Actually, only two. Let's play one right now.
Generally, when I play this opening music, it's because I've got some serious stuff to talk about that might be a little, I don't know, I'm not going to say sad, but I might say important. Yeah. If I have something important, I use this music. And it seems to set the stage.
And I don't use it very often, but I do use it on occasion when there's something important to talk about. So I will use that. But when I don't use that, I use the regular opening music, and that is this one. Wait a minute, that's applause.
I push the wrong button. I don't edit. I'm going back. You see, I have all these buttons on my thingy.
I have a thingy that I run this podcast off of. And this little thingy that I have replaces, I don't know, $20,000 worth of equipment that was in the last radio network that I worked on on the other side of the double bulletproof glass in the control room. So, you know, it just does everything. It's very simple, and it's very small, and it works.
Here's the regular opening music. I did it again. All right. What's wrong with my hands?
I don't know. But this is happy music. This is music designed to make you feel good, to make you feel important, to make you feel enriched, to make you feel grateful, to make you feel happy. How's that?
That's what that's for. That's the regular opening music. Then there is the closing music. And we'll get to the closing music when I get to the closing music at the end of this podcast.
But that closing music was written by a guy, and written and performed by a guy, a friend of mine in Nashville, called Mike Stewart. And you ever heard of the box tops? You know, what were the box tops? Big hit.
I can just see them. I saw them when I was like 17 at this hall in Tampa. He's now their keyboard player. He moved to Nashville.
He used to live in Atlanta, or just outside of Atlanta, where he did a lot of internet marketing stuff. But his passion has always been music. And he came up that way. He moved.
He retired. He moved to Nashville. He plays in a Beatles sing-along band. I want to go.
I really want to go. He plays it at a bar. A couple of other guys. And they play Beatles music.
And you can sing along. And that's the whole purpose of the whole thing. Oh, I want to go. I want to go.
But anyway, he went up there and he started creating custom music. And the closing music that I will play is music that he created. And he used to create all my opening music that I used to use on the gardening show. Do I have any of that on here?
I don't think I do. I don't have anything of that programmed here into my thingy because it's the old gardening show. But he did all that. And I used it for years.
So that's the technical aspects of that. And then people wanted to know, if I'm using a Blue Yeti microphone, why does everyone want to know about Blue Yeti microphones? If you're interested in podcasting at all, I have taught podcasting classes. And I'm just going to give you everything in a nutshell.
And what I'm going to do is I taught classes for the Tampa Bay Technology Center. So in Clearwater Flora. So what I want you to do is you go to the YouTube thingy. Go to the YouTube thingy.
Oh, my computer just made a noise. And I will not edit it out. Go to YouTube. And in the search bar, type in Clearwater Podcasters.
Clearwater, all one word. Clearwater. And podcasters. And there you will see three or four videos.
There used to be a bunch more, but I hated most of them out. But the first video is everything you need to set up and start a podcast. And that is a presentation that I made to the club. And we recorded it.
And it's on a PowerPoint. And you can see it. And not my best work, but it's full of all the information that you need. Okay, there is that.
The other question came in is... Do I want to talk about this? All right. I used to do a show called the Ernesto Durango Show.
Yeah. Back when we were doing radio, I worked for a radio network called Accent Radio Network, which was owned by, as it turns out, criminals. They went to federal prison. But a very nice couple, but yet they were criminals and went to federal prison.
But I just had my gardening show on there. I had my gardening show on two networks. One was BizTalk Radio Network out of New York, actually Connecticut. And the other, I would do an hour with them.
And then I would reload immediately. And I would hook up with the folks at Accent Radio Network from my studio here in my home. And I would connect with them. And I would do another hour of gardening show with them, which was fun.
And by the way, I had a wonderful board operator at the first network and at the second network. I had a ton of them. And they were all really cool. Well, they also had that job at that network, had the job of shipping up to the satellite.
This is technical. All of the UPI News. UPI News Network was in Washington, D.C. And they were getting ready to go broke.
They have since gone broke. But they needed a way to get the news up on the satellite. And this network did that for them. And they did it every hour, 24 hours a day.
They would feed up there. And they would feed that on two bands that went up to the satellite. In other words, two channels that went up to the satellite. And one Saturday morning, they said, hey, you know what?
You can take that four and a half minutes, four minutes and 50 seconds. It goes up on the one channel. And you can put anything on there you want. And I said, oh, okay.
Because you can do that every Saturday. And you can have that four minutes and, you know, 50 seconds, whatever it was. And I said, sounds great. When do you want to do it?
And they said, we can do it today if you want. I said, let's do it. So we started off. And I just created, right out of my brain, the Ernesto Durango Show, where I talked about nothing much like this podcast.
But I did it in, you know, four minutes and 50 seconds. Boom. Got it out. And that was that.
Well, then the production crew at Accent Radio Network, which was full of a bunch of knucklehead geniuses. And I say that with love. They came back and they overproduced this thing for me, where it had this hysterical opening and closing. And then I would go on.
If you go on YouTube and you type in Ernesto Durango Show, you will see some of the shows that I did. And one of them in particular, they came out and they said, you know, because I never did any prep for these things. They said, what are you doing? I said, well, what do you want me to do?
And this one guy, he said, I have a great idea. I want you to do the whole show on peanut butter. Go to YouTube, type in Ernesto Durango peanut butter. You'll hear my four minutes and 50 seconds of peanut butter.
It was a damn good show, if I say so myself. So that's who Ernesto Durango is. And I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it. If you go to Google, go to Google Images and type in the Ernesto Durango Show.
And you may or may not see a naked picture of me laying on the beach with two sombreros in particular places. I didn't mean to expose that on the podcast. And this is the closing music that we talk about. So I spent this entire podcast talking about podcasting and music and Ernesto Durango.
By the way, Ernesto Durango got up to like 500 stations that were picking it up. It was on fire. And then the Accent Radio Network went out of business. Like we had one minute's notice that they were out of business and they carted those people off the jail.
And Ernesto Durango was gone forever. How sad. So was UBI Radio Network because they had no place to put it on the satellite. All right.
Tomorrow we will have fresh new wonderful content. I hope you're having a terrific day. And happy day after St. Patrick's Day.
I hope you're having a terrific day.