Hey y'all. Didn't think you'd hear from me today, did you? Well, my workload got lifted a little (moved, actually -- professor moved a deadline to later), so this week isn't quite as frantic as I'd expected.
Meeting tonight at 6 to find out about a job helping to author the Mills pages. It pays diddly over squat ($5.75/hr -- I haven't made that little in the last 6-7 years), but it probably wouldn't be that hard, and might be a nice web authoring credit to my name, and I could use a little extra cash. Have to think about whether I really want to commit to 6-8 hours/week of doing this. Maybe maybe. A nice small regular income wouldn't hurt.
Okay, so today I'm playing with sound. I'm in a fairly private room at Mills, and am going to try reading some of my poems out and then put them on here so people can hear my voice. Comments? Anything else you'd like to hear? I'd like to keep it short, so I won't do any of the long stories. Maybe a journal entry? I can't remember what the HTML book I read said about formats -- the program automatically saves in AIFF, but I'm not sure that's the best format to put them up in.
Okay, I'm gonna get kinda techie here. Feel free to skip. So I used Soundhack to record my speaking a four-line poem (not one of mine). Saved at a 22050 sample rate, a 16-bit linear sample size, and stereo. Ended up 1.6 meg, which is huge, as far as I'm concerned. Am I doing something wrong? It's taking forever (22 minutes) to Fetch over into my account -- surely I don't need the files to be this large? I can't tell yet whether it's going to take an unreasonable amount of time to download. All of my pictures together only take up 1.8 meg. This is silly. I'm going to try recording it at a smaller sample size -- don't know if I'll still get reasonable sound quality.
Hmmm....looks okay (I mean, sounds okay) from here. Recorded at 11025, mono instead of stereo, still 16 bits (8 bits gives me nasty feedback), down to .3 megs. When the large one finishes transferring, I'll Fetch this one, then put them both up here so y'all can hear them and let me know how it works.
T'ang Poem - 1.6 meg.
T'ang Poem 2 - .3 meg
Argh. Can't hear those. Apparently Netscape doesn't read .aiff format. Have converted second to .au and am uploading now.
T'ang Poem 3 - .3 meg, .au format
Double argh. Still can't hear anything. Don't know what I'm doing wrong. Any inspiration gratefully accepted. I'm going to give up for now and try and get some work done.
4:15. Managed to write another 1K of the novella. I think I'm only going to do 2K more and call it quits. Turns out the darn sound files do work -- they're just appallingly slow. At least the .au files work -- I'm not sure about the .aiff, as I'm pretty sure Netscape can't read 'em.
5:17. Oh, and they're really soft. Going to see what needs to be done to fix that.
5:44. Cropped and interlaced the main photo of me. Can you tell I'm avoiding work? I hate that it's dark already. Hope I can get a ride home from this dumb meeting. Appear to have messed something up, so I've gone back to old photo. Weird.