Victoria

I want iTunes to bust in every n tracks and use the “Victoria” speech synthesis voice to say things like “…and that wass Meeles Dahviss with Eena Silent Mood. Right before that we heard…” and so on.

Someone must have written this plugin, surely. If not, here’s a set of scripts that nearly offer the answer; the obvious deployment is to tie it to a key-command and randomize the wrapper script, so that the voice says different things as it announces the trackname and artist. The current implementation also only draws the variables from the current track, and speaks as the track is playing (paused counts as not playing, in this instance).

This has the unfortunate effect of placing the speech right over (or, as in my case) under the audio, making it even harder to understand. I’d hack it up, but I really should be looking at fixing those comments.

Der tod

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A couple of beers at The Comet with the man that married my wife.

To me, I mean.

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Then we had sushi and bento at the wonderfully quiet Oasis Cafe up the block. On the way home walked by the nearly-complete reservoir park, where that van driver plowed into the wall twentyodd days ago. The park looks lovely and I hope that my battered neighborhood’s current problems with the homeless don’t turn it into a wasteland right out of the gate.

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We also walked by Value Village’s window display of Eastertide bunny rabbits.

And of course, a learned lesson. mo:blog does not handle multiple photos in a single post. I’m also beginning to make my peace with the craptacular CCD in the Treo; sometimes it produces a certain generalization in the lighting which to me appears painterly.

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no wifi for you

I went to the Elysian for lunch on my way home from work, hoping to get some work done, and was puzzled by the repeated failure of my computer to connect to the wireless signal, which is clearly visible under the name “Elysian Free Wi-Fi.” The formerly open access point now required a password to join.

Inquiring with my server, I was informed that the network was “down indefinitely,” which seems odd given the visibility of the signal. Seems like this might be worth investigating further.