Brian Risk’s Blog

Kemp shows up with his new digital camera and starts snapping some candid shots. Never afraid of hamming it up, I pull off my shirt and do a Hulk Hogan-style flex, showing off my rippling abs… right as someone who works at Rho comes up to the bar. “You don’t have to tell anyone about this,” I say. I held some apprehension for this show as 04 was both good and bad; the only thing mildly out of the norm last night was was catching some guy with heat exhaustion. A girl I taught freshman math to was there and drinking, so I guess teaching high school must have been five, no, six (!) years ago.

More: the new iPod software must try to use every bit of space on my Shuffle because the last few songs it ads are always very short, like its filling in holes. As a result I get a lot of MuSing beats and comedy skits. Perhaps funniest though is that I tend to get these little snippets that Dan sent me generated by the ATT text-to-speech website. A very dramatic song will conclude, then I hear what sounds like a synthetic James Earl Jones saying, “can I get some pretzels?” I this T2S technology to get that interview in NY about a year ago, but that was born out a program I wrote to convert chat transcripts to audio. Nothing’s funnier than hearing a computer saying, “this pussy’s never been smoother.”

Even More: I like the cover of this eWeek. It showcases Steve Ballmer as a hand-wringing maniac. (The image on that page really doesn’t properly convey the maniacal expression.)