Had been around 20 years ago. Sony DAT recorders were way tooexpensive back then.

re: backup audio

Glenn, I use a Olympus WS-110 WMA Digital Voice Recorder with a phone attachment (Olympus ME-15 Microphone). It works graet and it records in mp3 file extension. Both can be had on Amazon for less than $80.

-- druidbros

The fellows at Boing Boing gave the Olympus a great review last month. This is the way to go. I need to get out more but I try to avoid that if possible. I refuse to own a cell phone. Glad I got rid of the damn thing.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/30/olympus-ws110-digita.html

WASHINGTON — Six years after labeling Steven J. Hatfill a “person of interest” in the anthrax attacks, the Justice Department formally exonerated him on Friday and told his lawyer it had concluded that he “was not involved in the anthrax mailings.”

The Justice Department agreed in June to pay $5.8 million to settle Dr. Hatfill’s lawsuit against the government, but until Friday it had conspicuously avoided declaring that he had nothing to do with the attacks.

Jeffrey A. Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said in the letter to Dr. Hatfill’s lawyer that “we have concluded, based on lab access records, witness accounts and other information, that Dr. Hatfill did not have access to the particular anthrax used in the attacks, and that he was not involved in the anthrax mailings.”

The lawyer, Thomas G. Connolly, declined to comment Friday, except to say that “the letter speaks for itself.”

=========================================================

Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee and has been a frequent critic of the pace of the F.B.I.’s anthrax investigation, said in a telephone interview Friday that Congress needed to conduct formal oversight hearings to determine what went wrong in the investigation.

“We’ve had a seven-year investigation and $15 million spent on it and one of the ‘people of interest’ bought off for $5.8 million over what was obviously an F.B.I. screw-up,” Mr. Grassley said. “We need answers.”

=========================================================

Wonder if this frees Hatfill to speak.

link my name

Glenn,

FYI, I don't think that Battelle Ventures owns Battelle. From what i can tell, Battelle calls itself a non-profit organization promoting scientific research. They are certainly a defense contractor, but not in the typical Lockheed/Boeing kind of way.

from their website:

Battelle makes commercialization part of the process to bring products to the marketplace. Battelle technology may be embedded in a product; it may be licensed to a manufacturer; or it may be developed and launched through one of our many subsidiaries.

As a company, we use every option to bring products to market - from forming an independent venture fund, Battelle Ventures, which invests in technology companies at many early stages of development, to sharing the risk of technical and commercial success with customers.

Since playing an instrumental role in developing the technology that led to Xerox®, Battelle has negotiated hundreds of agreements that protect information, expedite collaboration, and speed commercialization of technology. Our know-how and insight has propelled other companies toward commercial solutions.

I've had rotten luck with voice recorders. Quite a few micro-cassette recorders have conked out on me over the years (sometimes while conducting interviews for magazine articles). Once I used a minidisc recorder and ejected the disk without first stopping the recording and I lost everything.

When I interviewed Martha Stewart for Wired last year, I used both a tape recorder and a microphone attachment for my iPod to record our conversation. When we sat down to talk, I decided at the last second to I pull out my laptop and used the built-in mic to record the conversation.

When I got back to the hotel room and turned on my three recording devices, I learned that the tape recorder and iPod didn't record the conversation (probably my fault), but the laptop recording was OK. If I hadn't used the laptop, I would have been dead in the water. No way would Martha have granted me another interview.

Currently I'm writing a book about DIY, and I'm interviewing a bunch of alpha-DIYers. As I'll be walking around talking to people in their yards, workshops, launch-sites, compounds, and so on, using a computer to record my interviews with them is not practical. Last week I bought an Olympus WS-110 digital voice recorder. So far, it's worked beautifully. The interface was pretty easy to figure out, and the built-in USB plug is very handy. I just stick it my computer and it mounts like a disk. I copy the file (WMA format -- bummer) and use ffmpegX to convert it to MP3. Then I use the excellent Listen&Type to play the audio file when I transcribe.

It uses a single AAA battery (advertised to run 21 hours per battery), and you can switch the microphone between dictation and conference mode. The 256 MB of flash memory records almost 18 hours in the high quality mode (which is what I use) and 69 hours in the lowest-quality mode. I guess you could use the thing as a jump drive, too.

I'll let you know if this thing let's me down, but so far I have a good feeling about it.

Olympus WS-110 ($64.68 at Amazon)

The case is being closed and dealt within this fashion because the FBI knows who is responsible for the "Anthrax Terrorist Mailings" and is protecting the guilty parties. It was obviously a sanctioned operation.

I can't help thinking that these calls for further investigation by the Times, the WaPo, the WSJ and others might not have been heard if not for folks like Glenn who have refused to let the MSM gloss this over and -- as the FBI and the administration would have them do -- consign it to the dustbin along with so many previous BushCo outrages.

--------------------------

This is the creepy one: the sudden and suspicious deaths of 11 of the world's leading microbiologists working in bioweapons research in the 5 months following 9-11-2001... most of them violent "accidents."

What are the odds?

The following is an excerpt of the summary in the news report in the online edition of Canada's Globe and Mail, May 4, 2002, byline by Alanna Mitchell -- the entire article is at their site -- http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

or reprinted at mine --

http://Saintperle.blogspot.com

---------------

1. Nov. 12, 2001:

Benito Que was said to have been beaten in a Miami parking lot and died later.

2. Nov. 16, 2001:

Don C. Wiley went missing. Was found Dec. 20. Investigators said he got dizzy on a Memphis bridge and fell to his death in a river.

3. Nov. 21, 2001:

Vladimir Pasechnik, former high-level Russian microbiologist who defected in 1989 to the U.K. apparently died from a stroke.

4. Dec. 10, 2001:

Robert M. Schwartz was stabbed to death in Leesberg, Va. Three Satanists have been arrested.

5. Dec. 14, 2001:

Nguyen Van Set died in an airlock filled with nitrogen in his lab in Geelong, Australia.

6. Feb. 9, 2002:

Victor Korshunov had his head bashed in near his home in Moscow.

7. Feb. 14, 2002:

Ian Langford was found partially naked and wedged under a chair in Norwich, England.

8. 9. Feb. 28, 2002:

San Francisco resident Tanya Holzmayer was killed by a microbiologist colleague, Guyang Huang, who shot her as she took delivery of a pizza and then apparently shot himself.

10. March 24, 2002:

David Wynn-Williams died in a road accident near his home in Cambridge, England.

11. March 25, 2002:

Steven Mostow of the Colorado Health Sciences Centre, killed in a plane he was flying near Denver.

-----------------------

---pretty scary, huh, kids?