Your Non-Starter for Ten

In which The Author takes the path of most resistance

After a long absence from the big chair, I've finally given into Ian the guvnor's nagging and agreed to set a quiz in the Cambrian. Bear in mind that the Wednesday Night Wingding was my idea in the first place, many years ago. It seems only right that I should come out of retirement – especially as my old pal Alan Everett wants to try and reboot the Cynon Valley Quiz League after a nine year absence. Doesn't time fly when you're not having fun?

Alan captured me at Iwan's leaving party on Friday evening and gave me a couple of posters to hand out. He's hosting a meeting tonight, to discuss the plans seriously and invite teams to register. I've spread the word around over the weekend, but a bit more notice might have helped. He's got my number now, so he can keep me updated on developments. Suddenly my 'social life' is actually starting to resemble a social life.

Anyway, I put my name down originally to do the first Wednesday in November. It falls neatly between Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night, so I've got two possible themes to explore when I start putting it together. Then a space in my diary opened up unexpectedly over the weekend, so I've agreed to set the quiz in a fortnight's time. In fact, during the most sleepless night I've experienced for several weeks, I sat up all night making notes and jotting down possible avenues to research. In fact, last night the creative juices were definitely flowing.

I was having a pint and a chat with my old pal Mel C. (who's a male musician and singer, not a former Spice Girl) before the Cambrian open mic night got underway. Mel was born in Nottinghamshire, and – perhaps unsurprisingly for a folk singer – is very interested in history. He mentioned an important sporting figure who was from his local area, and it gave me an idea. It's sort-of related to the exhibition at the newly reopened Cynon Valley Museum and Gallery, about the legendary Victorian cyclists of Aberaman. I wrote a couple of pages of ideas, sketched out a couple of drawings, and made a list of people to sound out about it. Describing it as embryonic would be overstating the case – it's still more of a zygote than an embryo – but the idea might have legs. Watch this space …

This afternoon I decided to plunder the YouTube archives for music for my first quiz in several years. I'd drawn up a list of possible songs overnight, so I listened to my choices for real (as opposed to vaguely remembering most of them). After that, I pulled a couple from the field of play and sent the substitutes on. Having compiled my definitive list, I decided to acquire them for real.

There's a nice Firefox add-on which allows you to convert video files to mp3. I've used it before (primarily to source offbeat karaoke backing tracks), so I knew it was perfect for my requirements. I converted all the files, shoved them into a subfolder, loaded them into Audacious (Ubuntu's answer to iTunes), and saw that it was good. Then the fun really started.

I knew from bitter experience that it's almost impossible to regulate the playback volume of videos uploaded to YouTube. Luckily, Ubuntu comes with a nice little utility to batch tweak the gain, so they all come out at more or less the same level. It only takes a couple of minutes to equalise a cluster of files, so I let it run in the background while I updated my Answer sheet.

Then the fun really started. I had to use Audacity to cut out the chunks of the song I'd be using on the night. After watching a parade of clueless Loteks trying to skip to the exact same spot on a CD using the remote control during the second play through, I discovered several years ago that there was a much better way to go about it.

Audacity is a nice (if rather fiddly) open source mixing console, with a huge range of features and bugger all documentation. I've been using it for about ten years on and off, and I've still only scratched the surface. Since I wasn't trying to lay down live guitar tracks, like my pal Louis M. was failing dismally to do a couple of weeks ago, the basic features were all I needed. I snipped, tweaked and shaved the samples individually, saved them to a subsubfolder, and then loaded them into Audacious to make a playlist. After a great deal of fiddling around, I was able to save the music round in an easy to use format.

Have you spotted the flaw in the argument yet?

Neither did I, until I was walking from the library to Thereisnospoon for a glass of Pepsi and a piss (I'm not necessarily listing them in the right order). You know the moment in cartoons when the light bulb goes 'ping' above a character's head? That was pretty much what happened to me as I was passing the old St David's Presbyterian Church.

I didn't need to make a bloody playlist. I just needed to stitch all the samples together into one big mp3 using Audacity, insert a couple of seconds' silence between tracks, mix it down, load it into Audacious in one shot, and Robert would be my father's brother.

When I got to the bar, I told my friend Casey what I'd just done, then told her about my amazing conceptual breakthrough and Gibbs-slapped my own head for being so bloody dim. Still, I guess that's what happens in the early stages of sleep deprivation. There was a young chap at the bar, so the three of us started chatting. He told me that after Day 3 of enforced insomnia, people start to hallucinate. On that basis, this week could start to get really interesting by about Wednesday …