In last weeks tutorial we were given a loaned audio recorder, the Zoom H2/N recorder, and were sent off in pairs with a sheet of paper and a mission to awkwardly record sounds in public. My pairing and I had some good ideas; we captured a strangers phone call, birds in a tree, a lot of silence from the library. However, we failed to set the MIC gain and instead adjusted the recording level, meaning almost all of our sound was inaudible. Should we have read the instructions more carefully? Listened more absorbedly to Rachael? One thing we should have done is to have listened back to the sounds after the first couple of recordings, instead of after an hours worth of red button pressing. So you could say this was a successful activity, successful in teaching us a lesson and giving us something to reflect on. This did help me when I used the recorder for my project brief, as I was aware of how much of a failure my audio would be if I didn’t set the MIC gain to something that wasn’t 0. So, thank you unsuccessful activity for helping me.