My 13yr old has a video iPod - whatever it’s called - iPod Grande or something, I don’t know this new starbucks Apple lingo.  It’s the one that’s small, 8GB, has a video screen and a dial on the front.  Yeah, I know, “real helpful” right?

Ok I looked it up and it’s an iPod nano video.

(note: no actual hands or wrists were cut at the bottom while making this picture)

Anyway, I was bored so I borrowed it because she’s subscribed to “bestofyoutube.com” podcasts and has all these funny short clips on it.

This one caught my eye (as did many others) so I thought I’d share it.

This is something that could easily be one of those competitions where people come up with the funniest dubs.  There’s that one of Hitler and the downfall of the Cowboys which, although it contains some foul language in the subtitles, is pretty darned creative and funny.

There’s been a lot of talk and interest in Post Secret, the website, the meme and the book.  The idea is that people can anonymously confess to deeply held secrets by writing them on a postcard or submitting it online.  The book is a collection of the secrets.  Some are incredibly thought-provoking.  A lot are heart-wrenchingley sad.  Others are perverted.  There’s even a promotional video

I wonder how many are fake secrets - like the one that says “Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I’m dead.”  I mean, I can imagine a lot more people who would make that up than would actually live it.  But it still gets you.

Maybe this phenomenon will usher in a new era of honesty, tolerance and open-mindedness.  Maybe it will be the downfall of society.  Who can tell?

So, you may be wondering why I’m bringing up secrets.  Well, it’s time I did my own confessing.

Due to the nature of my confession, I’m putting it in the extended entry, below.  Only read it if you have the time and inclination to stomach the horrific.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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The guy’s face says it all.  I took this screenshot just after he realized his mistake.

Ok, confession time.  One of my deepest, darkest fears is to be this guy.

As a member of a family who runs a large beauty distributorship, there are still times I get amazed at the power of makeup. I mean, I know it stands to reason that there would be a measurable aesthetic difference between a person’s face with makeup on and their face without the benefit of makeup. But some of these examples are truly drastic!

The before and after pictures tell it all. I dare say I think I might want to get the number of a couple of these girls (heh, heh, heh) if for no other reason than to get in contact with their makeup artist. I know I could use a makeover sometimes.

Some of these are just too good.

http://forums.corvetteforum.com/showthread.php?t=1182735&page=1&pp=20

This commercial for volcanic-based water shows off Man’s creativity and ingenuity.

Basically if you like Daffy Duck, you’ll love this mp3 file. It’s a combination of Daffy Duck sound bites and some text-to-speech computer having a conversation with him.

The file is at http://blog.whall.org/files/daffy.mp3. Enjoy!

History

At work, we’re getting a new phone system. We’ve been working with announcements and sound files and such, and I needed a little project where 1) the sound file (announcement) was pretty long, 2) had voices in it and 3) had some music or sounds from a TV or movie.

The phone system is pretty particular about the format the sound file is in — specifically, it needs to be Mu-law, 8-bit, 8000KHz and mono. I found Adobe Audition (which used to be CoolEditPro) to be a suitable tool for doing the conversion and also to string different sound bites together to mix down into the right kind of file. I downloaded the 30-day trial from Adobe to see if it will work for my purposes.

Adobe Audition also has batch processing capabilities for when we need to work with lots of sound files together.

So I needed some voices and some sound samples. I happen to like Daffy Duck quite a bit, and I found http://www.barbneal.com/daffy.asp to have a ton of wav files I could use for my project. So that made up my sound samples — they came from a variety of sources I’m sure, and maybe at different times and different volumes so if I used enough of them, they should suffice.

I tried my own voice, but you know how it goes with that — you always hate the sound of your own voice. I also didn’t want to waste anyone else’s time on this little side project, so I figured maybe there were some free text-to-speech web engines out there, and you know what? I found a cool one at http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html.

At that site, you just type in your text, choose a voice and it’ll say the words for you.

So I decided to string together some of the Daffy sound bites, intermingled with an announcer-type person having a kind of conversation with Daffy. Mostly, the person I chose was Rich, because he had the smoothest voice. The result is the mp3 file found up at the top. I have another sound file I made just with about 6 or 7 of the voices all arguing, kind of like the Airplane “loading and unloading” zone arguments the intercom folks had in the movie. This version has it all — arguments, english speakers, french speakers, people talking over each other, men/women, insults, a Trogdor reference and of course, making fun of Phillip Simpson.

Since we were testing announcements on the phone system with key presses, the original announcement told callers to “press 1 to repeat this message. Press 2 to hear a duck. Press 3 if you dare”. This mp3 file is what was played when they pressed “2″. This was initially inspired by the “if you’d like to hear a duck quack, press 7” bit that was going on a few years ago. And when you pressed 3, you got some Simpsons quotes, particularly ones with the telephone operator telling Homer his fingers were too fat.

Hope you like it, I know I enjoyed making it. And it’s always amusing to make fun of Phillip Simpson.