Well, i’ve been concocting plans for theLocust.org Auto Radio, a completely automated, web enabled, user centric radio station o’er the weekend, and i just finished installing some text-to-speech software (TTS for those in the know), and its pretty good. This streaming radio-thing will allow users to request songs, upload ones they want to hear, view the current playlist, and every three songs or so, our lovely announcer, we’ll call him Nigel (you’ll find out why) will tell you what has been played and for whom. Yee-ha. Here is a sample of Nigel at work. Quoting Beastie Boys, nonetheless. The clip is in MP3 format, so if you don’t have an MP3 player, you are a loser. Ok, so maybe you’re *not really* a loser. Go to WinAmp to get one.

It is an interesting paradox. I pay a lot of money ($60) for BellSouth’s ADSL service. Most of the time it is well worth it. This morning was not one of those times. As most of you may or may not have noticed, theLocust was down this morning due to an outage from BellSouth.

I would hope that my $60 a month is going towards a little more stability, but I can’t say for sure. Anyway, all systems are go.

Speech synthesis has always been something I had an interest in, ever since I got my first SoundBlaster (an 8 bit card), with Dr. Sbaitso, a really bad speech synth program. So! I went off to look for some today, and i re-discovered Bell Lab’s Speech Synthesis Web demo. Damn. This thing is pretty good. Especially when compared to the others you find on the web.

“So what?” you say. Well, I’m thinking about setting up RealServer here, and playing Mp3s or whatever from my machine, and I wanted some station breaks, and possibly dynamic stuff (maybe even breaking news), so i thought “How would i automate that? SPEECH SYNTH i thought”. So, that something that might be coming up. I think it would be neat. Every fifteen minutes, a new story or something. Cool. Anyway, here are two audio clips I made with the demo of the Bell Synth: Website Ad and Radio Blurb

Update 5/11/00: Open this address in WinAmp to hear the glory of theLocust Auto Radio (limit content as yet, more later) https://thelocust.org:8000

Finally, that 10 minute clip from the White House Press Correspondence Dinner featuring President Clinton and a cast of dozens has made its way to the web. AdCritic has the film here. It’s a healthy download, but it’s worth it. (Not to mention that Pete from Pete & Pete makes an appearance.

Imagine if you will, a rock band that plays, among other things, the theme to CASTLEVANIA. Could it get any better? Oh yes. GI JOE, Contra, Metroid. And they are all in MP3 format. Check it out here.

Altavista has an interesting article on how the FBI picks the codenames for its covert ops. Pretty interesting. My fave is the FBI’s investigation into J. Edgar Hoover: Operation No Mo Ho Mo. Ok, so that’s not true. Go read the article.

Well, if you haven’t noticed, i’ve changed the layout slightly, and there are more changes to come! Soon i will implement a Login for users! This will allow certain users to post news stories (actually, for anyone to submit them, and for some users to decide which ones get in!) Yee-ha! And, i’ll fix that annoying double-quote problem in the replies.

PM has a reprint of a 1950 article about how things would be in 2000. It’s not entirely off, and some of the stuff is somewhat accurate. Albeit with a 1950 kitschy twist. Check it here.

Well, it seems that Pets.com is suing Robert Smigel creator of, among other things, Triumph, the Insult comic dog. “What for?” you say. Pets.com believes that Triumph has “degraded the image of the Pets.com spokesperson”. Smigel is counter with allegations that Pets.com stole the idea from him. Well, you can read all about it here.

Well, so i bought all of these pentium machines at the Computer Show about a month ago. Most had been rotting away in a box in my room, but then i thought “I’ve got this decently fast machine running theLocust.org, but one of these slower ones would work JUST AS WELL.” So, i swapped the drives and network cards out, and BLAM! It works. I’m pretty happy. So, if you should notice any anomalies on TheLocust.org, let me know. Check the System Information page for the changes.