Pug’s Place

According to the New York Times (article link: inhalation of terminal Ebola required — registration-free link), Yamaha and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain are putting the finishing touches on a computerized voice synthesizer that can reproduce a variety of “concert-quality voices” in an exceedingly life-like fashion.

Well, um, good for them, but I’d rather have real humans performing at restaurants and… concerts! Though it would be quite cool to have my computer sing to me… Well, when Katie is unavailable of course!

I plugged my USB flash drive into a Windows XP computer’s USB 2.0 port this morning while it was set to write-protect mode (hardware switch), and once plugged in the status light started blinking rapidly. It wouldn’t get recognized by Windows, either. So I pulled it out and hooked it to a USB 1.1 port on the back of the computer. The light came on as it should and the computer recognized it, but said it was not formatted. Windows 2000 said the same. I’m going to have to get a Linux box and check it, but it appears I somehow wiped my flash drive. This meant I had to proxy through the UF computers this morning to re-retrieve some Science articles from the mid-70s for a report I’m going to write today.

I spent last night dog-sitting my brother Jay’s three Boxers. They’re cute, but they like licking wayyy too much. They’re more demanding of attention than even I, the Pug, am! I took a couple of cute pictures though; I’ll see if I can’t get them online before the week’s out. Anyway, this morning when Jay got home from work (he works nights), we hopped in his hot tub (it was about 65 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but 104 in the tub!), talked for a bit, and he took me out for breakfast. That was great. Anyway…

The documentaries on The Two Towers Extended Edition are so far pretty cool - I’m about an hour and a half through the first disc of appendices.