When text to Speech breaks down and other work travel observations
Adding blog entries from the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. I feel so geeky and jet set like. Actually I’m just finding the challenges of traveling alone and trying to accomplish some work while on the road in ultra anal post 9/11 TSA land. You drink too much coffee because you had to be on the road at 5:00 to catch a flight. You deal with all of the people that didn’t read about the TSA 3-1-1 rule and are trying to clear security with too much liquid, no clear baggie, explosive shoes and what not. Uh, how can people not know that you aren’t supposed to have large volumes of liquid or things like pocket knives?
Finally I get to Phoenix for a 4 hour layover and fire up the laptop. Happily, Phoenix airport offers free wifi. So I’m connected and actually have been pretty productive for a couple of hours. But then it hit’s you, time to get rid of that cup of coffee and nobody is going to watch a strangers stuff for a couple of minutes, heck they’re announcing on the overhead not to do that all the time. What a pain! Pack up the laptop, carry your stuff to the bathroom take care of business find your way back. Oh great, someone “stole” your seat next to the power outlet. Argh, find new territory.
Next time, maybe I’ll just mark my territory like a dog and kill two birds with one stone.
What about the first part of the subject you say?
Sky Harbor clearly is using some text to speech tools for their various announcements, for the most part it seems to work pretty well. Then the following statement came across, you’ll have to imagine the voice, but we all know roughly what a computer traditionally talks like.
“Passenger John Doe, please call one billion eight hundred million four hundred sixty six thousand four hundred eleven.”
Not only that, it didn’t even repeat it. I don’t think John made his call. It’s only about half way through hearing that you recognize it is a phone number and by then the processing in my brain was already behind.
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Update on Gmail and Imap
Last week IMAP was finally enabled for me. I set it up according to the instructions from google for Thunderbird 2.0. So far it’s been good, I have less sorting going on than when I was using POP. Some funny labels started showing up in the web client though. [Imap]/Drafts for example. On top of that, I spent about 40 minutes writing up an email the other night before sending it off. When I next logged in to the web client, I was surprised to see roughly 10 additional threads to the conversation. Every time Thunderbird had apparently auto-saved. Gmail thought it was a new revision of the thread. Thankfully, I was the only one who saw this behavior and the recipients had only seen a single email from me. In any event, I did a little searching to see what I could do about the new labels and possibly the bizarre threading. I found a good article on Lifehacker that gave a good explanation on how to clean things up.
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Metallica on strings
I’ve always been a Metallica fan, even if Lars has been something of a complainer over a variety of issues. In any event, they have a great sound and have long been a favorite of mine when time crunches appear at work and a driving double bass will help push me through a coding effort. Metallica has also incorporated orchestras into their music in a blend of metal and classical that works quite well. Enter a Fin group called Apocalyptica, they aren’t new on the scene, but thanks to YouTube they are a new discovery to me. Metallica covered on Cello and these guys rock.
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Another Google Great
So maybe I’m a Google fanboy, but I love a number of their applications. Maybe love is the wrong term, I certainly appreciate their applications. Picasa is a great bit of software for dealing with all those digital images. Notebook, Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Then you’ve got their telephony app Goog411 and their SMS search capabilities. Let’s face it, they’ve got some cool stuff. Through a side conversation with Mike I found out about Google Sketchup. It’s awesome. A quick, easy and fun way to model things in full 3D. I’ve been looking for ways to model my kitchen in order to figure out how to remodel it (in reality). I’ve had a piece of architectural foam board staring at me for a while. I was thinking I’d cut out counters and mark out the floor plan and get busy, and then came Google Sketchup. It’s a great tool for the geek handyman. Check out the tutorial videos to really see the power of it.
Here is my first attempt at a kitchen model. It took a few hours to build after I took measurements of the kitchen and that time includes watching tutorials and learning the tool. After a few more hours, it would probably only take about 15 minutes, if that, to recreate. I didn’t take the time to model all the clutter, but I’m sure you could.
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sdrawkcab oediv
This was a pretty cool video I stumbled across assembled and choreographed to be played back in reverse.
http://www.break.com/index/balancing_point_in_reverse.html
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Time to rule with an iron fist
Apparently to get ahead managers must make sure their employees are miserable. I’ve been approaching this work and management from the wrong direction.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSN0230737820070803
Holy flicking fingers Batman!
Friend of a friend link off a link kind of Youtube find.
Despair Inc. raises hope for new lows of motivation
Hopefully you are all familiar with the posters, calendars and other products available at http://www.despair.com/, but they have really driven up the opportunity to demotivate with their Parody Motivator Generator. I can see a fair bit of time wasting opportunity here.
What does your pet do all day long?
Here is one way to find out. I think I’d end up with a bunch of pictures of my couch as the dog spent the day sleeping there.
No $30 iPod adapter required for video out
Turns out that Apple’s proprietary TV Video out interface isn’t all that super secret. Just use the red wire instead of yellow.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2005/11/18/video-ipod.html
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