For some reason — I’m going with sheer spite — more than a billion people retroactively removed themselves from ever having ordered something from me through Amazon.com.

Either that, or some naive programmer was working directly with a signed 32-bit number and forgot what signed number representation was being used, which in turns leads me to believe that the back end of Amazon is (and this is surprising to me) c or c++.

(If your primary response is “You make less than $2 per fiscal quarter through your Amazon Associates ID?!”, the answer is, “Yes, and that was a good quarter.”)

• I think I may have forgotten to eat today. Again. If my hunger triggers aren't working, I really need to set a timer. #
• RT @JohnKerry "Troubling story – DC firm forging … letters from minority groups to block progress on climate change?" http://bit.ly/11f01y #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

espeak is, in the developers’ words, “a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.”

I cannot comment on the Windows version, but the Linux version has a command-line interface with a lot of options.  So I wrote three wrappers, called, respectively, mespeak, mespeakf, and mespeaku.

mespeak, to be used as mespeak "some text":

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp "$1" --stdout | aplay

mespeakf, to be used as mespeak file:

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp -f $1 --stdout | aplay

mespeaku, to read a webpage as mespeak http://www.website.com:

lynx --dump $1 | sed 's/\[[^\]*]//g'| mespeak --stdin

So sorry about the sed script.  It becomes rather write-only when one is matching against literal brackets.

I don’t think I have the willpower to have kept myself from clicking to find out what filled the ellipsis on this excerpt from a Google search result:

A hotbox, a slang noun used to refer to a woman who is eager for sexual intercourse (from … causing it to fill with smoke in order to maximize the effect.

Niall, from the back seat:  Why are you using the GPS?  You know how to get there.

Joshua:  In case there’s traffic.  And I like using the computer.

Niall:  Do you let me play computer games?

Joshua:  Yes.

Niall: All the time?!

Friend:  … which is why they say the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.

Joshua:  But that’s not quite true.  The expected return is less than 50%, yes, but the distribution is extremely skewed.  In terms of risk-reward, most people can spend a dollar without thinking much about it — and the possible return is enormous.

Friend:  But the people who buy lottery tickets usually aren’t spending a dollar.  They are spending twenty or forty dollars, and usually they are the people who can least afford it.

Joshua:  I agree, that’s irresponsible.  But for $1, people could take it out of their entertainment budget, not their investment budget.  Some people really enjoy the rush of waiting for the numbers to be called.

Friend: [huge 'gotcha' grin]  Do you play the lottery?

Joshua:  No, of course not.  That would be ridiculous.

I was in a checkout line at a 99¢ Only store today.  A woman got into line behind me, picked up a package of condoms from the “impulse buy” rack, and said, directly to me:

Woman: This is a good starter kit.

Joshua, internally: [Working ... working ... working ... nope, have no idea what that means]

Joshua, so close to uttering: Yeah, well, they’d be too small anyway.

Joshua, out loud: Probably not something for which you want to go bargain hunting.  That would be an expensive failure.

Woman: Yeah.  Probably too many holes.

Joshua, internally: [OK, that was really weird]

Q: So, where is the most expensive place in the world to call with Google Voice?

A: It appears to be Tuvalu.

Q: How much does that cost?

A: US$0.55/minute.

Q: Wow.  That is really cheap for a series of atolls about 1m above sea level.

A: Yeah, I thought so too.

Q: Wow.  Again.  More expensive than Ascension Island?  Wouldn’t Google have to buy a satellite to talk to them?

A: I would have thought so.  But, in addition to radio towers and useless stamps, they have a newspaper, so you never know.

Q: A newspaper?  But there are fewer than 1,000 people there, and none of them live there permanently!

A: Yeah, I know.

Q: Wow.  I wonder how I could get a subscription.

A: I can see you are a collector.

Q: Guilty.  Maybe they would send them with otherwise-unusable Ascension Island stamps!

A: Might be expensive.

Q: Like what?

A: Like, US$0.55/word.  Or thereabouts.

Q: Oh.  Well, I still can’t believe Ascension is cheaper than Kiribati.

A: Wow, you have heard of Kiribati?

Q: Yeah.  You see, I collect stamps and specialize in remote islands.

A: Ah, yes.  We established that in the post title.  Apparently you cannot call Kiribati at all.

Q: Oh, yeah, that’s reasonable.  I’m not sure there are any phones to ring even if we called.

A: You know, many of your responses don’t qualify as ‘Q’s.

Q: They don’t?

A: There you go.  Welcome back.

Q: Gotta go.  I just got a bank mixture of Atlantic island stamps to sort.

A: Like, St. Helena and stuf?

Q: Now you are just showing off.

A: That wasn’t a question.

Q: No?

A: That was.

Q: Seriously, I’m leaving now.  Call me later?

A: How much would that cost?

Q: Not sure.  Where am I again?

• ¿ʞsɐ noʎ `ɹǝʇuıʍ ʇou `ɹǝɯɯns uı uns ǝɥʇ ɯoɹɟ ɹǝɥʇɹnɟ ǝʍ ǝɹɐ ʎɥʍ #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

• Is anyone else getting more and more amused by the use of "Information Age" in the 80s?  Anyone else longing for intravenous information? #

Powered by Twitter Tools.