May 26, 2006
Voice In My Head
the voice is tracy ullman of all people. as i post here i hear the voice saying as she would say at the end of her shows "go on now, go". really, if you are reading this shouldn't you ask yourself why? :)
one of the most amusing things i read recently was a single word from a soldier in iraq (a sniper) who was being interviewed:
Interviewer: What do you feel when you shoot an insurgent
Soldier: [pause] recoil.
equally amusing is what i ran into today. some buy sold someone else a laptop on ebay -- nothing new there -- but apparently the laptop didn't work. the seller didn't want to make good. the buyer got angry. the laptop hard drive still had data on it. laughter ensues. blog is created. now we all get to laugh. and it gets even more weird in the comments... or at least the couple dozen i took the time to read. this would have been a rec.humor.funny classic.
on another note, i listened to an excellent program on NPR the other day. it was an interview with dan gilbert (a harvard psych. professor) discussing happiness. i'm going to have to listen to it again, but parts of the show [at the time] seemed particularly insightful. i've already grabbed the podcast of it off of itunes, but for people who prefer mp3 over realaudio, it should be in forum's rss feed
on the flip side of happiness.... comcast, you suck! the digital cable service has been getting worse. the "on demand" service used to be great... i could watch the sopranos or huff on my own schedule. now when i try and watch it, the video quality is terrible and i'm lucky if there is sound. call comcast about it and find out... oh, that is a "free service" so they won't credit my bill for an outage. bah! so being the idiot i am, we get the box with a built in dvr to try and time-shift the few broadcast shows watched. lets just say that has been met with similar results all too frequently. fortunately the season ending of boston legal recorded fine. g*d, i hope i'm still alive when video/tv service can be pulled in over my internet connection and if vendor-X isn't cutting it, i can switch to someone who is more interested in my business.
thinking about how itunes now does limited tv shows, i would be very tempted to drop cable completely if i could pay $2 per show that i actually watch. my entertainment budget would get simple... $15/mo for WoW and given that i watch maybe 5 shows (boston legal, grey's anatomy, house, sopranos, huff) $2 x 5 is $10/wk. assuming 4wk per month, that would be ($40/mo) a lot cheaper than cable. of course, i couldn't veg-out to discovery & history channels at night or watch the occassional old episode of mash. *sigh*
earthquake. had a 3.2 shaker the other day. have had those before, but i was talking with my son and explaining to him how the scale works and it really hit me -- being just moments after the little quake -- wow, a 6.0 quake really would be quite awesome (not in a good sense, but a scarey sense).
May 18, 2006
Sounds In May
interesting, they are generating gif images on the fly for this service. sadly, it isn't real-time-ish. you'd think they'd have a flash or iframe version and dump the info as a webservice. i guess they'll stick to being web 1.0 for a while. i'll be curious to see how their listening suggestions works.