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!

Well, here we are, on just a few hours’ sleep, ready to tackle another Blogathon. Are you surprised that I managed to wake up on time? I’m not. It wasn’t the getting up I was worried about. It’s the staying up that gives me the ever-so-slightest bit of worry. (Okay, you pervs. Get your minds out of the gutter, now.)

What can you expect from me for the coming diurnal? I plan on throwing out some creative writing bits along the lines of the dialogues I’ve done recently. I want to review a few music albums, both new and older-but-obscure. Other than that… well, I can’t remember right now. It is awfully early in the morning for that sort of thing, wouldn’t you agree?

So. Let’s do this. Woo hoo!