My Gadget Life

Have you ever heard your own voice as the opposite gender? It’s SO funny! On Christmas we were playing around with sound software for the Mac, called Amadeus II. We used my Powerbook to record ourselves having a conversation for about 1-2 minutes. Then we played with changing the pitch and speed when we played it back. We decided that the funniest thing was to keep the normal speed, but turn down the pitch just enough so the women and kids among us sounded like adult men. I was with my 2 friends, Sandy and Melissa, and their kids, Rosa, 14, Isaiah, 11, and Xavier, 20. Xavier has a very low voice anyway, so his sounded totally ghoulish. Then of course we speeded it up to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, which is always good for a laugh.

We realized that hearing ourselves as men brought forward the fact that as women we tend to use certain inflections and ways of speaking that were still there even though the pitch was lower. We totally sounded like an episode from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy! We loved it! All of us were in hysterical fits of laughter for quite some time.

By the way, that program, Amadeus, is a great piece of shareware. I used it to digitize my old piano recitals from my undergrad years that were on cassette tape. I could use the white noise filter to edit out the tape hiss from the old cassettes and it was also very convenient for editing out the empty space at the beginning, fading out the applause at the end, and splitting it up into separate tracks. I saved it as mp3, burned a couple of CDs to give as gifts, and put the files on my iPod. I highly recommend Amadeus!

There are 2 recent articles I found helpful about how to digitize your cassettes and vinyl, see MacWorld, Jan. 2005: “From Tape to CD: Bring your old recordings into the digital future,” or Playlist, Winter 2005: “Digitize Me: Convert your tapes and records, before it’s too late.” Both are by the same author, but the second article also covers Windows software.

So right now I’m on a walk through the vast underground tunnels of MIT (since it’s SO cold outside today). It’s lunch time and I’m doing this for exercise, since my usual exercise classes at the MIT fitness center have ended for the semester. I’m listening to a hacker radio show in my iPod, which makes the walk more interesting. The radio show is a “podcast” from 2600.com. I’ve listened to their show for years via their web site… it’s broadcast on a radio station in New York, but they put the MP3 files on their web site to download. The show is called “off the hook.”

I’ve stopped in an “athena cluster” to see how this blog looks on a UNIX workstation. The font is nice! It’s Lucida Sans Unicode, which is set in my stylesheet to appear if the user doesn’t have Lucida Grande. Time to get off the blog now and check some other web sites I’m working on for work.

I now realize what all the hype is about. It’s one thing to read about iPods, but another to own one. It’s so great to have everything on this little device that’s always with me… not just songs, but lectures, radio shows, podcasts, exercise classes (my Pilates class from last year), copies of my old piano and organ recitals, archives of mini-disc recordings I’ve been making of Xmas celebrations for the past few years (each kid and each adult is interviewed and talks about their year and then we listen to the previous years), comedy shows, audiobooks, etc.

And the thing about iTunes and iPod together is that it’s so easy to create all kinds of playlists (that just point to 1 copy of the tune). So I can mix and match things in all kinds of creative ways… mellow tunes, exercise tunes, favorites, certain genres, etc.

I’ve been reading 2 good books for ideas about my iPod: iPod Fan Book by Yasukuni Notomi, and iPod & iTunes Hacks (O’Reilly). I highly recommend both books for iPod lovers.

The next step is to import my contacts from my Palm address book, and start playing around with text notes also. I really want to get the Style Master CSS podGuide from Westciv, which is freely available as text notes for your iPod. More on that later.

Last night I saw Closer with David and tonight I saw Ocean’s Twelve with Amit. Both were not as good as I’d hoped. I expected more, somehow. Closer seemed a bit shallow and Ocean’s Twelve a bit drawn out. The best movies I’ve seen in recent weeks are Kinsey and Weapons of Mass Deception.

Hey, I finally bought an today at the Apple Store! I got the green one. I’m so happy! This is my Xmas present for myself and I can’t wait to try it. More tomorrow after I get it set up.

One thing I was happy to find out was that I could get the educational discount at the Apple Store by showing my MIT ID. Last time I was there they told me the discount could only be via mail order. So I just saved on shipping and got my iPod for $229 plus tax.

Yes, I’ve gone so far as to create a database of movies I’ve seen on my Palm. (that is, the database is on the Palm, not the movies…. but someday!) I use SmartList To Go, which made it easy to create my own custom database. For each movie, I track title, date seen, who with, where, rating (1, 2, or 3), and category. I started keeping track on Sept. 7, 2000, and since then, I’ve seen 259 movies. Most were in theaters, but a few were on DVD, VHS, or Tivo. So now, when someone asks me what movies I’ve seen lately, I pull out the database on my Palm.

I’m in a book club and Friday night we had our last meeting with my friend Deb there. She’s moving to Madison, WI, to become head of the engineering library at U. Wisconsin. So we made this little collage of our smiling faces floating behind the book jackets of all the books we’ve read. We’ll miss Deb!

Today was our NEASIST conference, Freedom vs. Control: Rights Management in the Digital Age. We had a great bunch of speakers, see FurdLog, who blogged the whole conference. His links are:

• Jonathan Zittrain, 9:12 a.m.
• Next up, Wendy Selzter, 10:23 am
• Back at NEASIST, 1:46 pm
• Siva’s slides, 1:55 pm
• Hal Abelson’s talk, 2:00 pm
• Roundtable, 3:40 pm

Wendy Selzter spoke about the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. Hal Abelson about Creative Commons, MIT’s Open Courseware, and DSpace.

My friend, David, just happened to notice this and snapped the photo.

I’ve been playing with listening to Podcasts and I love it! I get various web radio shows using this Mac program IPodderX and since I don’t have an iPod yet, I copy them to my Palm Tungsten T3. (which uses RealAudio to play MP3s). Then I listen to the shows while on the subway or while driving (via cassette adapter plugged from my car stereo into the Palm). Some of my favorite podcasts are TinyPodCast, Slashdot Review, and Engadget Podcast. Here’s a directory of podcasts.

Last night my friend David and I went to a talk/video show by Mark Hosler, a member of the group, Negativland. It was great! If you don’t know about Negativland, here’s a quote from The Unofficial, Unnecessary Negativland Page.

What is Negativland? As a group (Mark Hosler, Chris Grigg, Don Joyce, David Wills, and Richard Lyons), they do create music, but calling Negativland a mere “band” doesn’t do them justice. On their recordings, they appropriate, dissect, juxtapose, scramble, reassemble, and regurgitate sonic material culled from a variety of sources–anything from network and shortwave broadcasts to private phone conversations and family recordings made in the kitchen. They mix this with an equally eclectic variety of instruments–keyboards, guitars, effects boxes, samplers, tape loops, squeeze toys, and so on. The end result is incredibly funny, often making a wry social comment; but it also has a strange coherence among its myriad layers, unparalleled by similar efforts of other groups.

And they don’t just record. They perform on-stage. They write amazing essays. They even produce a weekly live radio show, Over The Edge, heard early Friday mornings on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California.

Years ago (late 80s) I was a fan and collected a few of their tapes. I had forgotten about them until I saw that they were coming to the Coolidge Corner Theatre. They have been sued for copyright infringement (and lost), since they “appropriate” music and sounds from other sources. What they are doing seems more and more relevant given the changing political evironment, with media consolidation and crackdowns on “piracy” of music and copyrighted materials.

This week at work (MIT) I also sat in on a class where a video of a Larry Lessig talk was shown. (totally relevant to this same issue) You can watch the movie online here. Here’s a site where you can find links to several of Lessig’s talks

Today I’m at the Web Design World Conference. So far, the most useful for me were the 2 sessions yesterday on CSS. I like the work and ideas of Douglas Bowman of StopDesign.