The mandatory webring code that’s supposed to let us Blogathonners easily visit our fellow lunatics and is, we were told, mandatory for participation… seems to be missing from a few sites. That makes it a bit difficult to follow the ring all the way ‘round, doesn’t it?

Gah. C’mon, people.

In other news, I have tea brewing right this very minute. I still don’t know what my next “big” entry will entail, but I’ll have something tasty to drink while I think about it. (Thank you, Dawn, for the copious amounts of yummy tea!)

Correction: Turns out that the “missing links” are LiveJournal bloggers, who (apparently) have to put their webring code on their profile/about page. Oops. Sorry ‘bout that. I’m still finding LJ’ers who aren’t compliant, but… yeah.

Putting together these promos is, among other things, hugely bolstering my already significant respect for people like Bob Brooks (you’ll recognize him as the voice behind most of the Bowflex commercials) who can do audio editing professionally. This stuff’s hard, man!

Okay. So I’m not having that tough of a time, but I also know that my piddly little efforts can’t hold a candle to what serious professionals are capable of.

The promo is about 3/4 done now, so hopefully I’ll have a review up at the top of the hour.

Hey, did you know that you can still sign up to be a sponsor? See this post for the how-to. I’m at just under $100 total (official) sponsorships, so maybe you can be the one who pushes it over into triple-digit territory. C’mon, you know you wanna.

In other news, the promo is 3/4 complete. If all goes well, I should have it uploaded by the next posting.

In other other news, there’s enough light outside that I was able to turn off my indoor lights and thus give the webcam slightly better lighting to work with. Yay, and stuff.

Part of my geeky little plan to do “album promos” involves installing some text-to-speech software. (What? You didn’t think I was going to use my own voice for this, did you?) I selected Sayz Me for my first trial. (If you want to try this at home, you’ll want to use this page for the “download text-to-speech components” part, ‘cause Sayz Me’s copy of the speech API and of the synthetic voices are hosted on the slowest server I’ve ever had the displeasure of trying to download from.)

So far so good, though I’m experiencing major flashbacks to good old SAM back in the Apple II & Commodore 64 days…

One of the “grand overall theme” ideas I came up with for this year’s ‘thon was something along the lines of a rundown of my favorite albums. Of course, I couldn’t just write about them. No, if I was going to “do it right,” I’d also include promo clips.

You know those ads on the radio promoting an upcoming concert, and they play bits of a few of that artist’s most recognizable songs? Yeah. That’s what I have in mind, pretty much.

I’m going to do a few of them today. I don’t know how many, largely because I don’t know how much of a giant pain in the neck this is going to become. But… hey, who else in Blogathonland is going to give you this kind of experience, eh? (Answer: Nobody else is crazy enough to, and/or nobody else works in radio. Heh.)

I’ve fiddled with a couple of things, as you may have noticed. Okay, the one you’d notice most easily is the webcam link just above the webring bit. This isn’t my normal office-cam, but instead a cam pointed right at my (as yet unshowered) noggin here at home as I do my Blogathon duty. I think I got the caption the way I want it… and yes, I know that the colors are off. It’s a stupid old 3Com Homeconnect, and it’s finicky that way. Ugh.

A less-easily-noticed tweak is to the server itself. It turns out that the server’s been creeping steadily behind on time accuracy, so I gave it a swift kick (in the form of ‘ntpdate 10.21.80.102’) and now it’s at least within a couple of seconds of right-on-target. I noticed the problem when my first post was marked as being several minutes before 6:00 when in fact it was posted about three minutes after…

A geek’s work is never done. And by “work” I mean “tinkering,” of course!