Lewies Blog

A while ago, I won a lunch in a bet. A lot of things happened that kept delaying the lunch. I had forgotten all about it until my manager asked if we had enough time to grab lunch before our meeting today. She would pay since she owed me lunch.

We went for a walk and the fresh air did us both some good. The trees are blossoming and budding. Spring is just around the corner. You can still see through all the trees branches, but light shades of green were everywhere.

We arrived at MTS and I decided to go for the usual. I got a slice of pizza, some frozen yogurt, and a 16oz cup of soda. She poked fun at me saying that I was cheap since she was buying. I just replied that it was my usual selection.

We decided to eat outside. It was a little chili outside, but it wasn’t bad. There wasn’t any wind out, so I didn’t have to chase my dinnerware. I sat with my back against the sun so I wasn’t able to see the scenery behind me.

We got to talk about our daily stresses. I find that talking about things helps me de-stress. I don’t know if that saying “Misery loves company” applies here. It was comforting to just get it out in the open. I felt much better and less stressed.

I’ll have to eat out more often with her. We ate out all last summer and had a great time. Our other lunch partner has moved out of state, so we are short one person. Maybe well get another partner if we start hiring again soon.

From time to time, I see that someone thinks that I actually take a picture of my self every day for each individual post. If that were the case, I would have to consider myself to be uber vain. It takes too much time to go through that.

I’m a programmer, and I love to try out neat little tricks. I’ll tell you what I did. It’s actually kind of cool - and you can do it to (or I can help you). I first started out with determining how many pictures I wanted. To keep things simple, I decided on 100 pictures to make a 10×10 grid. You can have any size you want (2×4, 8×3, 3×1). You want to give your pictures as much variety as possible.

I then took all my pictures and resized them (60×45). Since I have 10 rows and columns, my final image of 100 images was 600×450 pixels. Small pictures hide the grainy details that my web-cam picked up and help keep the overall grids filesize small.

I wanted to make sure that each post had a different random image. I wanted this image to be “sticky” in that when ever someone refreshes the page, or comes back to look at the post later, they will see the same random image that was originally assigned to it. I should see the same image as someone else does on there browser.

I don’t have dynamic blog software that lets me assign a special image to each post. My rules required some javascript. I decided to base the image off of the title of the post. I would get the ASCII value of each character in the title and add it up. Then I would get the modulouse of the value by the number of pictures in the grid (100). So the modulous of 105 and 100 would be image number 5 (100 % 105 == 5).

And walah … you have the basic ground work of how my images work. Here is a sample of the image that I use. Through CSS, I am able to position the image as a background image. Since I only show 65×40 pixels, you only see one cell within the grid of images.

And for anyone who wants to really go at it and try it on there own blogs, here is the code that I made. You’ll see that I have two seperate images. One for my wife Angel, and one for me. She doesn’t have as many images as I do. This code supports multiple authors. Cool eh?

I’ve been starting to look into some tools today primarily with speech recognition because now that I’m going to be making some audio files I am going to also post the text along with that audio of what I am actually saying. The reason being is that I would like to be able to search for what I am saying and I would like other people to find what I am saying just by searching through search engines or any kind of search engine that I have on my website.

I started looking up some keywords like "Voice Analyzer/Recognition", "Speech Recognition", "WAV to text", "Wave MP3 Voice Recognition", "Lernout and Hauspie", "Speech Recognition Engine", "Microsoft’s SAPI", "Microsoft Speech SDK", and "Dictation". There are so many keywords that are surrounding this kind of technology.

I went out on the Internet and found a lot of different pieces of software that say that they’ll do the job for you. Some software says that it’ll do it but the interface is really horrible like this “Wave to Text” program. This is the most horrible interface that I’ve ever seen. Then there is another one that is some kind of dictator and I tried it out and it seems like what you are actually supposed to do is look at a written text and then just say what you are reading. That is the opposite of what I want. I want to be able to have the program read what I am saying - or at least write what I am saying.

When I started searching a little bit I learned about Lernout and Hauspie wich is a company that was purchased by someone else (Simtel).

“It understood you just fine provided you had a Belgian accent,” Lernout said. “We were working out a fix for that when our creditors went after that. Until then, we were suggesting that everyone talk like eurotrash to make it work.”

Microsoft was partnering with them or something and they had speech recognition software built into there operating system that listens to what you are saying and carries out commands. Now on top of this, there Microsoft Office has a dictation tool built into it and I didn’t realize this until later tonight. What it does is as I say something, it writes it out.

Problem - It’s not perfect. Now they say as you train the program you’ll get between 85 to 90% and the better it is it can get up to 95% of being correct. I don’t think that I’m up to that 85% just yet. It might be that my voice is not clear, or it might be that I just have not trained this program enough.

I saw that I was training this about two years ago. I still had a profile. I’ve been training it a lot tonight because I figure - two years, my voice has changed. It’s funny to see what it thinks I am saying. In fact it’s actually recording me as I talk into my phone rite now. I have the dictation on at the same time so I’ll just post what it thinks that I’m saying and see what it says up there. Actually it’s some bad words up here that I got to censor or something.

In a nutshell it seems that Microsoft speech dictation might be the way to go. The problem is that it works better if I am talking into the microphone. The thing that I want to try is to talk into a digital voice recorder when I’m not at home talking into this microphone so I got to figure out how toMicrosoft audio software thinks that I said the following:

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(but they’re not sure what seems like from Microsoft’s feature a steep Haitian might be the way deal the problem is a work better if I’m talking into the microphone clothing their want to try is to talk into the digital voice recorder when I arrived home twenty into this with microphone so I cannot figure out how to The

I was starting to look into the MP3 lyric tag functionality. There are a few editors and players out there that let you embed the lyrics of your audio into MP3 files. You can also embed images to be played at specified timestamps.

Has anyone heard of this and is this popular at all? It appears that winamp does not support lyrics with its default installation. I had to download a plugin to get support for it.

I find that adding lyrics to audio files may be great for indexing and search engines. I’ve done a few tests with some past audio files that I recorded over the phone and was able to synchronize the lyrics to be highlighted at specified timestamps in the audio files.

Here are some tools that I found.

• Winamp Lyrics3 Plugin - both player and editor
• LyricFX - winamp lyric player (Lyrics3v1, Lyrics3v2 and ID3v2.x)
• Vivid Lyrics - winamp/windows media player/editor
• Helium Music Manager - really deluxe audio file editor.

I’ve been hearing a lot about this podcasting for a while. I would like to do it myself, but I want to have something other then what I blog about every day. I want something with a “theme”. My current blog (this one) doesn’t have a theme. Anything goes …

The trouble with themes is that I need to be able to consistently get information on a daily basis (or close to it). I would prefer it to be interesting and unique. I would also like to have a good understanding of what it is that I’m talking about. I would also love to be able to talk off of the top of my head without writing a script first.

Well folks - I think that I have finally figured it out. For the past few months, half of the answer has been staring at me every time I load up my blog. My idea would be to just wake up in the morning and record my interpretation of my dreams into a digital voice recorder. I would then convert and upload an MP3 audio file to my blog for all to listen to. I’ve tried doing audio postings over the phone, and it is just not that convienient.

My dreams are pretty vivid and interesting to me. A lot of people say they don’t dream, or that they dream in black and white, or that it is like a slide show. Mine are a full immersion of animated interactive colored worlds with hidden (and not so hidden) meanings behind everything. I feel like I’m there. So for the few people that don’t have dreams - it may interest them to come and listen to my podcast audio blog. I may even attract a few psychologists. Maybe I could get a special guest to come on as a dream interpreter sometimes.

So recently I have been wandering around stores looking at digital voice recorders. I’ve even gone on-line to Amazon and eBay to do some research. They seem to range between $30 and $100, but can go up to $300 and higher for more features. I’m looking for specific features.

1. Digitally record audio
2. Ability to transfer audio to my computer
3. Audio file in common format that I can convert to MP3
4. Small
5. Store at least one hour of audio

I think I found the model I want. I found a Griffin iTalk Voice Recorder for iPod. This little gadget goes for $30.39 ($18.99+ used and new) and fits on the top of your iPod. It turns my iPod into a voice/memo recorder. It also has a jack if I want to add my own microphone. Unfortunately, many reviews on Amazon.com are bad ones for this hardware. Mostly dealing with freezing and not recording until many repeated attempts.

Another item I have been looking at is the Olympus W-10 Digital Voice Recorder with Built-in Digital Camera. It sells for $99.99 on Amazon, but it starts out refurbished for $39.87. It comes with a bunch of other stuff that I don’t need like a low quality digital camera.

For $30.39, it might be worth a try with the iTalk due to the convenience factor. I usually get lucky with items reviewed like this. It seems to work for half the people without a problem. Now there is one small problem, and this is where I talk about it staring at me in my face every day. My blog template advertises that you can get a free iPod if you get 5 friends to help you out.

So guess what? I need just one more friend. Just one more friend needs to sign up and I’ll begin the process of getting my free iPod delivered to my doorstep. After that, I can start an additional blog for my podcasting dreams. How would you like to hear me whisper my deepest fears and greatest accomplishments to you each day?

So here is my shameless plug. Please help me reach my dream and obtain a free iPod. In return, I’ll expose my dreams for you and any interested (and non-interested) individual to listen to. There is more to this now then just getting a free MP3 player.

Sweet Dreams.

I’ve made quite a few templates on my own in the past. They can really be a pain - especially if you are trying to make a tableless template that is valid XHTML. An extra challenge is to make a 3 column tableless template.

Tonight, I just came across a tool (Firdamatic) that helps anyone create simple 2-column and 3-column templates on the fly by just filling out a form. Here is a description from the site itself:

Firdamatic is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customize layouts easily only by completing forms, making creating skins for your Firdamatic-based layout a breeze. This is just a taste of what to come at the new Book of Styles site. Doesn’t it make you wish I’d hurry and finish re-developing the site? Well, I will, eventually. Meanwhile, just enjoy this simple toy. Oh by the way, if you need a custom tableless design for your weblog, I’m for hire! Contact me for a quote.

And here is a sample of a template I created:




One thing I do not like is that you can’t get a good understanding of how your colors look until you generate the template. Other then that - this looks like it could be very useful for anyone who doesn’t want to spend too much time going through the trouble of making advanced templates like these.

Last week, I talked about my ear wax problems (My ear stopped working again). To my surprise, I got a ton of comments about this. I couldn’t believe that people would spend so much time reading about my ear wax. (It was a pretty long post).

Anyhow, it appears that Google AdSense has detected keywords relating to this and displayed the following advertisements to me when I viewed my blog today:

Ear Candles

Wholesale-Beeswax, Paraffin, Herb
Prices low as .60 w/free shipping

You Can Make Ear Candles

Beautiful 12″ ear candles in minute
Save hundreds of dollars - have fun

I was a little shocked. I had never heard of ear candles. The fact that two different ads showed up confirmed that this wasn’t just a joke. For a moment, I was reading one of the sites and was trying to figure out if they make the candles out of real ear wax.

Here is an explanation from one of the sites:

An ear candle, sometimes called an ear cone, is a long hollow tube tapered to a hand-finished tip that fits comfortably into the ear. The large end of the candle is lit and the smoke created spirals down through the ear canal. The warmth of the smoke gently dislodges foreign debris, softens old ear wax and helps evaporate excess moisture. This is believed to relieve earache pain, provide relief from the pressure in the sinuses and allow the ear to naturally push out the ear wax.

Talk about weird stuff. This reminds me of something you would see on Repley’s believe it or not. It is strange, unusual, interesting, odd, and just plain weird.

Does anyone remember the 80’s? Back then, a lot of cool video effects were being discovered by bands who were then discovering how to reach fans at home by showing music videos on MTV. Back then, just about anything would be played on that cable channel.

Anyhow, I’ve been seeing this video circulating on the internet a lot. It appears that Zlasko “Zlad” Vladcik is a parody of the 80’s. The Electonik Supersonik video is hosted on a travelguide website about Molvania. The website advertsing a travel guide to Molvania (A land untouched by modern dentistry) is a parody in itself.

Just the lyrics alone are funny as can be. He sounds like he has a Russian accent and hasn’t learned how to speak English fluently. In the 80’s, a few bands sounded like they just picked the first thing that came out of there heads and went with that. This guy pretty much does the same thing. Those lyrics are really out there.

Hey baby, wake up from your asleep.
We have arrived on to the future and the whole world is become…

Electronik, supersonik. Supersonik, electronik.

Hey baby, ride with me away.
We doesn’t have much time.
My blue jeans is tight,
So on to my love rocket climb.
Inside tank of fuel is not fuel but love,
Above us, there is nothing above
But the stars above.
All systems gone, prepare for downcount!
5!
4!
3!
1!
Offblast!

Fly away in my space rocket.
You no need put money in my pocket.
The door is closed I just lock it.
(Hah!) I put my spark plug in your socket (Hah! Ha ha hah!)

The sun in sky is bright like fire!
You and me gets higher and higher.
Heart of communication fire!
Only thing can stop us is flat tire.

(Hah! Hah! Ha ha hah!)

Hey love crusader, I want to be your space invader.
For you I will descend the deepest moon crater.
I is most stronger than darth vapor.
Obey me, I is your new dictator.

For you is Venus, I am Mars.
With you I is more richer than all the czars.
Make a wishes on a shooting stars, then for you I will play on my cosmic guitars!

Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your beltseats.
We has commenced our descent.
I trust you enjoy this flight as much as you enjoy this accent.

Now, back on earth, is time for down splash.
Into sea of eternal glory my spaceship crash.
People have arrived for to cheer me from near and far.
And as I gloat, I open door and shout:
“I am world’s biggest washed-up superstar!”
(Supersonik, electronik)

As for sure as the sun rises in the west, of all the singers and poets on earth, I am the bestest.
Come, let me put ring of jupiter on your finger.
Then, like a smell around you, I will forever linger.

Okay, is time for end, no more will I sang.
Let me take you back in time, I want for you to experience big bang.
Long live space race, long live Molvania.

Related links:

• Molvania disqualified from Eurovision!
• Zlasko “Zlad” Vladcik Performing Elektronik - Supersonik
• Zlad - Electronik - Supersonik Lyrics
• Map of Movania
• Fansite with MP3

I found another little generator tool that is fun to play with. It’s called The Evil Clown Generator. I had lots of fun with this one. This guy even looks a little like me.

The controls are a little hard to play with. You pretty much generate everything randomly. Have fun.

My brother called and woke me up. He was in the area and wanted to know if he could come over. I replied “Sure”. I went to the living room and slept by the door until he came knocking.

After BS’ing for a while, he shows me the new car that he just purchased. Man … This thing was nice. I think he said he spent $23,000 on it.

We went over to CompUSA and looked around. I found a pack of 10 DVD’s with slimline cases and picked them up for under $6.00.

He wants a DVD burner, but he is picky about the color. He wants silver, but the only thing that comes in silver is from SONY. Krozy doesn’t trust Sony because they have a vested interest with media or something.

I personally don’t have a problem with Sony. Actually, I think of quality when I hear the name. I just purchased an external Double Layer DVD burner (DRX-720UL) from them just this past week. Man, that thing is faster them my old DVD burner.

We went over to the HDTVs and were impressed with the most expensive ones. I looked at some projectors that supported HDTV. The price was really low compared to the regular TV’s. Krozy pointed out that the lumens are pretty low and that the eyes can’t adjust to the projector as well as a regular TV. So we passed them up and continued looking around.

We headed on over to Burger King and then went on over to the movies afterwards. We watched Robots. There were hardly any sexual innuendos that most children’s movies have these days. It was actually a cute and innocent movie for a change. I had fun watching it.

My brother came back to the house and for the next few hours, we played Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and ate spaghetti. I found a pimp mobile at a mansion next to the VINEWOOD letters. These huge letters appear on the top of a hill and remind me of Hollywood.

Pimping is really cool. You start to rack up some big money when you pick up the girls from there customers. We ran into a problem with the fourth pickup in that a customer didn’t want to pay up. We were able to chase him down and kill him and collect some cash, but a police officer busted us before we could pick up the girl. It was horrible. This girl would run after us with the police officer, so we couldn’t pick her up without getting into trouble.

Krozy tells me that San Andreas isn’t available for XBOX and won’t be until the beginning of June. That seems to be a long ways away. I want it for the PC because I prefer the higher resolutions. It’s hard to see markers on the map when looking at a television. He also mentioned that the XBOX2 is going to be revealed at E3 this year. That’s great news. I hear that the PS3 will also be revealed at E3. If XBOX2 is going to be released this Christmas, then I hope that the PS3 will be released close to that time as well.