There are quality limits in both speech synthesis and recognition: to boot.
NSFW: That means Not Safe For Work. Not that you’d be idling at work, productive readers.
Archive for the ‘personal nonsense’ Category
If I hadn’t already mentioned it…
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008Two Items
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008From the rankings of baby names for 2007, I see that parents chose to name their children after me quite often. My name was the 50
John Fund’s story about the omnibus budget bill awaiting the President’s signature pointed out some exciting things. Please don’t disappoint me, GWB. Great opportunity that can’t be squandered.
Kill Some Time
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
To Save Me From Tears
Thursday, November 29th, 2007I had a fantastic 30th birthday. Aside from having a great time with better friends than I deserve, I got the best present I’ve ever gotten. This:
I mentioned to my friend that I’ve been looking for a print of that picture for a long, long time. It’s the famous, “Rick Monday Saves the Flag” picture. The story is told well at the wikipedia page. Rick Monday is a Marine who had a 19 year Major League career as an outfielder. On April 25, 1976 while he was playing for the Cubs, visiting the Dodgers, a coupla hippies went onto the field to burn an American flag. Just before they put match to lighter fluid sogged flag, he snatched it up and a cameraman caught the moment.
There’s nowhere I know of to get a print of that picture and I’ve looked for a while. My good friend heard of my search and tracked down the photographer (Dead End: He’s dead), the newspaper that printed the picture (Dead End: Bankruptcy), and searched and searched until she found the negative of the picture in the Los Angeles County archives. They blew it up and mailed it to her. She framed it for me and gave me the most thoughtful present I’ve ever gotten. She had to sign releases that it wouldn’t be publicly displayed—if not, I’d include in this post a picture of where it’s hanging in my living room, right below the 2006 Cardinals WS picture.
It’s a treasured thing for me now. It’s funny… My dad, who volunteered for service in the Army during the Vietnam conflict has no problem with people burning flags. I’ve never served anyone but myself but it pisses me off when I see people protesting in that way. Hell, I get pissed off when I see people flying the flag the wrong way. Monday says: “If you’re going to burn the flag, don’t do it around me. I’ve been to too many veterans’ hospitals and seen too many broken bodies of guys who tried to protect it.”
In any case, I had a great birthday and had a blast hanging out with good friends. And tonight, I sang some hilarious songs at karaoke. While on the way to get a new driver’s license, I heard a terrible song that I needed to sing tonight, Last Christmas, by Wham!. Also brought back a classic from the Cutting Crew.
New Look
Thursday, November 29th, 2007Whaddaya think?
From this article, it sounds like the Cards won’t be taking my suggestion and dealing for Mike Hampton. Sez Mo:
“We’re always looking to see if there’s some value out there in the market,” he said. “But, right now, we don’t want to focus on looking at someone that had a below-average year last year or performed below expectations, especially if it was related to an injury. That can be a little scary.”
Too bad. That also rules out Jason Jennings, as well, who might be a decent bet to be a league-average starting pitcher. I’ll be curious to see who Mo goes after next week at the Winter Meetings.
Unrelated, but have you voted for Mr. Splashy Pants yet?
Happy Birthday to Me
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007Wasn’t looking forward to this one. Today’s the day we celebrate the births of Bruce Lee, Jimi Hendrix, my high school valedictorian, Jaleel White, 2007 NL MVP Jimmy Rollins, Bill Nye (the Science Guy), a whole mess of adult film actresses, and me, if you’ve got any energy left after all that.
I wasn’t born until nine something at night, so I’m still in my twenties until then, as far as I’m concerned.
Update: Good times were had.
Thanksgiving
Saturday, November 17th, 2007I don’t believe that I’ve ever done a Thanksgiving post in the six years that I’ve been writing nonsense at heylisten.blogspot.com, a website that originated as a strange Zelda-themed vent for my unpopular-on-campus political views.
Things are going very well for me now, though, and so I’d like to air some things that I’m thankful for.
- I’m thankful for my family, and for the happy relationships I’m fortunate to have with each and every member of that family, in spite of my selfishness. Also for the good feelings all of my deceased relatives had for me when they passed on.
- I’m thankful for my friends. I have more of them than I deserve.
- I’m thankful for my doctoral committee, the finest collection of minds I’ve ever had the opportunity to speak to.
- I’m thankful to have a research project on my desk that I’m excited to tackle and that I believe worthy of significant effort.
- I’m thankful to have a satisfyingly difficult job that I’m good at.
- I’m thankful that I don’t have any enemies foolish enough to declare themselves as such.
- I’m thankful to be what I am, a healthy man with a stable, useful mind built into a strong, useful body.
- I’m thankful for all the jobs I’ve had and the skills my employers have invested in me.
- I’m thankful for the valuable education I’ve received at the expense of my parents and the states of Missouri and Illinois.
- I’m thankful to be a citizen of the United States of America and for the people who work anonymously and tirelessly to ensure it lives for another day in spite of our greed and beliefs in entitlement.
- I’m thankful to Dave Karaff for scouting and signing Albert Pujols to the St. Louis Cardinals so that I could see the greatest ballplayer of my generation on a daily basis
- I’m thankful that I’ll be honored to carve a couple of turkeys next week that my parents will roast.
- And I’m thankful for my grandfather Jerry and my father Ed for teaching me how to be a proper man: gentle and useful, but dangerous when necessary.
- I’m thankful for everyone I’ve remembered who’s been kind to me for their generosity and for anyone I’ve forgotten who’s wronged me for keeping me from being a fool—and thankful that there are many days ahead for me to be kind to the good people that I’ll meet and stern to the fools I’ll ignore.
As for tomorrow: Go Illini!
No Outlet Mini-Review
Friday, October 19th, 2007I got to see Nick Vatterott‘s one-man show last night and it was freaking brilliant. A polished work of art.
Structurally, it’s similar to a Shepard Scale from psychoacoustics (Listen here for a demonstration) or to M.C. Escher’s Waterfall lithograph in that the act returns to its beginning at the end, tying up loose ends left dangling during the course of the show. (A play on the “No Outlet” theme.)
He managed to crowd the act with a bunch of his stand-up jokes. It’s impossible to remember everything he worked in, but all day I’ve been remembering great bits. Really funny show. He needs to take it somewhere else, as the run at iO ended last night. I’d love for him to bring it down to Champaign and then to St. Louis.
We have it videorecorded—it’ll be edited and produced during off-hours next week. I’ll send Nick a DVD of it and see which bits he wants up on YouTube. My friend who did the video work is an accomplished film school grad. She was suitably impressed with the show that she wants to do a full shoot—two cameras, proper lighting (no offense to Steve), and with a hot crowd miked. That would be outstanding. We’ve got to make it happen. It has to be seen to be understood, and it really should be seen.
I’m very proud of my old friend.
(And check it out, a profile of another old friend…)
I’ll Get You When the Puck’s Dropped
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007My last name is Moran. I took a bunch of crap about it when I was wee. Fortunately, I played hockey, so most of the strangers who had the opportunity to mock my last name that I encountered were heavily armored on a sheet of ice that I was better at maneuvering on than they. Make fun all you want, Sally, you’ll get the puck on your stick eventually and you’ll get popped.
See, ‘cuz it looks like Moron when you mental midgets read it.
I had a meeting with a new Swahili instructor tonight who’s pleasantly enthusiastic about getting good teaching materials provided to his students. This meeting was encouraging enough for me, since it’s always a great thing when someone takes the initiative to talk to me about providing new listening materials for students, since it’s my job to make them.
At the end of the meeting, though, we talked about setting up a new meeting and so I gave him my contact information. When he saw my last name, he was impressed… Asked me if some of my other North Central African friends had told me what the word means…
Moran is the Masai term for something analogous to “Real Man.” After passing through the coming of age ritual, you become a “moran,” a real man—one who is equipped to marry and start a family. I’m not a sociolinguist, but from this conversation, it sounds like moran is something you casually call someone you like and respect, akin to “hoss” or “bro” in my speech.
The Masai are our friends.
What’s in Store
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007Thought I’d come up with some songs to sing ahead of time for Wednesday, when I’ll get to celebrate a really long four days. I was at the office until 2:30 last night, losing my temper at a room full of uncooperative equipment. Three hours of sleep, and I was heading back out the door. Fortunately, my recording session today went shorter than expected and I got to leave at 6:15pm.
So anyways, here’s what I’ve got in mind:
Sara — Jefferson Starship: Ridiculous song. Was used to good comedic effect in Groove Fighters (which wasn’t as funny as AssassinZ that did a whole lot right.)
La Bamba — Los Lobos: Guaranteed to get laughs. There’s a bunch of extra syllables tossed in there that’ll make it difficult to keep up with the lyrics.
It’s Not Unusual — Tom Jones: Easy, easy laughs. Watching that video, I figured out why women are so attracted to Tom Jones. Any guy who can perform that manual percussion routine while acting like it’s not an asinine thing to do would have no trouble holding a woman’s purse while she tries on an armload of clothes at a department store. Face it, ladies—I can practically read your minds at this point. If I do any dancing though, it’ll be more in this style. See? I know what women want.
Final Countdown — Europe: Short and sweet. Probably a waste of time, though, considering how little singing there is, and how uninteresting that little bit is.
Maybe I’ll bring back a few songs that I’ve had fun with once before, Everybody Wants to Rule the World — Tears for Fears or Arthur’s Theme — Christopher Cross.
I know how engrossing this material is. If you know any really, really stupid songs, leave me a comment.
Olio
Sunday, September 30th, 2007I wrote this comment at the tail end of a rather bitter post at VeB regarding the Cubs going to the playoffs while the Cards hit the links:
Last October, I was watching game 7 of the NLCS at a bar that was 90% Cub fans—all rooting fanatically for the Mets. After Wagonmaker froze Beltran, there was a split second of pained silence (aside from my celebration) before a chant went up: Lets Go Tigers! *clap* *clap* *clap*clap*clap*I’d never be so lame as to root for whatever team is playing the Cubs, but as a fan of the Cards, I find it very hard to root for them to win—not for any hatred-fueled rivalry, but for what it would mean going forward.
The Cubs have a small window to win the World Series before all these backloaded contracts they recently signed turn into pumpkins. If they can ride these new horses to a world series, the faithful in the friendly confines would be grateful enough to give Cub management a free pass for whatever they want to do, and if they’re wise, they’d rid themselves of those contracts to some dumb GM who pays more attention to the playoffs than to the likely future performance of players with large contracts and restock their farm system with a supply of top prospects to tap into for years to come.
This would be a very bad thing for the Cardinals, since it would give a division rival in a big market huge payroll flexibility and a stream of talent coming up for years to come just when they were on the brink of being handcuffed through the first half-decade of the second century of their World Series drought.
The Cubs are very hot right now and have a good front three in their rotation, but it’s hard to believe that the worst division in baseball could produce two WS champions in consecutive years.
I’m not rooting against ‘em, but most definitely not rooting for ‘em either.
It was a difficult season, come to a close today in fine fashion on a five game winning streak. Rest up, birds. Be ready to have some real fun again next year.
****
Wasn’t feeling great last night, so I used the evening to read Bing West’s The Village. This morning, I read through this webpage maintained by marines who fought in Combined Action Platoons. Included are West’s Marine Corps Gazette article, Fast Rifles, and scans of his pamphlet Small Unit Action in Vietnam. Incredible stories. I couldn’t stop reading the book until it was finished. Every review mentions that West’s style of writing is emotionally detached and without pretense. It’s a palpable effect—you learn of these amazing men and come to admire and respect them only to have their deaths at Viet Cong hands reported with unceremonious brevity.
It’s a good thing to take from the book—and impossible to miss—these men deserve respect and gratitude for their work. Not just those men in the book, too. At the CAP Veteranas website, there’s an anecdote of digging three VC out of a tunnel and finding them in possession of boxes of clothing donated by Berkeley students. Shameful.
****
I’ve made significant academic progress (finally) over the past few weeks. I wrote my proposal and the first draft was accepted. I’ve scheduled my written Prelim for two weeks from now and the oral defense in a little over three weeks. I’m swamped with non-academic work this week—I’ll be working 8am-7pm the next two days for two very important clients and it only gets slightly better the rest of the week. I’m going to get working on my research project in whatever downtime I have, though. I’m hoping to put myself into a position where I can go into my oral prelim with some proof-of-concept work in my back pocket to address whatever issues my committee identifies as areas of concern.
I’ll be working late in the lab tonight getting things ready for the week, so I don’t expect to sleep much the next three nights.
****
On a monthly good-news note, a new episode of Cautionary Tales of Swords will be out sometime tomorrow. Hopefully it comes back for a fifth episode. Because I laugh hard at it.
****
In non-Cardinal sporting news, the Lambs got their butts handed to them by the Cowboys today in a game I didn’t watch. Fortunately, the Illini beat #21 AP-ranked Penn State (19 in the Coach’s poll) and a promising young Blues team starts the new season on Thursday. In this week’s polls, the University of Illinois football team received 59 votes from the AP, which I guess lands us at #28 in their rankings. Put up a good showing (or even, dare to dream, defeat) #5 Wisconsin this Saturday and we’ll start getting some national recognition. To have a team built on talented freshmen and sophomores having that kind of success would do wonders for Zook’s already exceptional recruiting efforts.
****
Barbarism in Burma: this blog is a good place to start.
Split-Pea Soup
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007The theme for last night’s Monday Night Marathon was the horror… The horror…
The first movie was Wes Craven’s directorial debut, Last House on the Left. It was disturbing, sure, but not frightening in the least. It’s an absurd movie. The music is ridiculous, irrespective of the era the movie was made. The primary emotion I felt during the film was complete frustration and annoyance with the characters for behaving foolishly in a survival situation. It’s clear that the young Craven had no understanding of basic human psychology, for all the Freud references he makes in all his early movies. It was hard to understand any of the characters’ motivations in any given scene. Worst of all, he had a woman voluntarily perform oral sex on one of the men who kidnapped, tortured, raped, mutilated, and murdered her daughter just to get the opportunity to bite his wiener. I suppose it’s his job to horrify the audience more than to show people behaving as they would in a horrific situation, but still, he made a silly, annoying movie.
Next was his second movie, The Hills have Eyes, a vast improvement over his first attempt. Craven’s understanding of human psychology was still a glaring problem, with a few exceptions. The characters were also better at improvising defenses in this film, something I appreciated, of course. Nothing beats seeing the baddies get some. It’s a disturbing, but enjoyable flick.
Finally, A Nightmare on Elm Street, a flick I never saw in my youth. It’s one of those movies that scares more by startling the viewer with Freddy Krueger jumping out of bushes than by depicting horrifying savagery as in the other two. The heroine of the movie sets up a decent gauntlet to defend herself from Krueger in the film’s climax. Craven has no clue how much blood a human body contains, though, something he knew in Last House on the Left, when the lead villain is weakened towards the end from blood loss caused by flesh wounds, by horror standards.
For the thematic meal, we had a pumpkin pie with one of Freddy Krueger’s fingers coming out:
And some split-pea soup, using a slightly modified version of this recipe:
The split-pea soup was meant to conjure up the barfing scenes from The Exorcist, recreated stylistically here:
As bad as it looks in that light, it was a real tasty soup. Thankfully, since I’ve got enough to last a week.
Reading List
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007I just read through this excellent article from a month ago that surveys underappreciated books about battles in the Vietnam war from the perspective of the warriors who fought them.
The U of Illinois library has several of them in stock, so tomorrow morning, I plan to pick up The Centurions by Jean Larteguy, translated by Xan Fielding; and The Village, by Bing West.
Ten Types of Sportbloggers
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007On this ontology of Sport Bloggers, I used to be an 8 but lately I’m more of a 2, to the detriment of this hot piece of internet real estate.
There’ll be plenty to talk about this offseason, for sure.
Depression
Saturday, September 15th, 2007Nine game losing streak. Work progressing slower than it needs to.
I don’t know whether it’s worse seeing so many Cubs fans celebrating in Busch stadium or the Cardinal fan dipshit smiling and waving to the camera behind home plate down by a run with two outs in the ninth.
Everything sucks right now.
I’m gonna go mow the lawn, get more writing done, and watch the Cards win tonight.
At least the Illini won a well-balanced 41-20 game today.
Post-game-2: Done, done, and done. My lawn’s mowed, I wrote another section of my dissertation proposal, and the Cards squeaked out a win to avoid going to ten straight wins for the first time since 1980. Incidentally, the last 11 game win streak was in 1978, the last time a Cardinals team lost 12 in a row was in 1916, when they dropped 14 straight en route to a 60-93 season.
I also replaced my car’s brake pads in between games. Not a bad day after all.
Cowabunga
Thursday, September 13th, 2007Ladies… Eat your hearts out:
Free Content
Saturday, September 8th, 2007Hadn’t done one of these silly things in a while:
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Your personality type is SCUEI
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| You are moderately social, calm, moderately unstructured, egocentric, and intellectual, and may prefer a city which matches those traits. |
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The largest representation of your personality type can be found in the these U.S. cities: Washington D.C., St. Louis, Albuquerque/Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, W. Palm Beach, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Raleigh/Durham, Denver, Seattle/Tacoma, Minneapolis and these international countries/regions Slovenia, Israel, Czech Republic, Russia, Netherlands, Denmark, Argentina, Argentina, Ukraine, Romania, Norway, Croatia, Hungary, Turkey, Sweden |
What Places In The World Match Your Personality?
City Reviews at CityCulture.org
Summer’s Over
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007I’m back from my weekend getaway to Florida sporting flip-flops with a church-key built into the sole. Some unimaginative fools pointed out that I might step in crap and then open up a beer with a crappy beer opener—failing to realize that I’ve got two feet, dumbasses.
While down there, I was fortunate to spend two days in a mansion a block from the shore on Hutchinson Island.
I kayaked the Haulover Canal and was able to watch a manatee eating grass about six feet away from me.
I surfed the outers off New Smyrna Beach the day the Orlando Sentinel declared it the shark-bite capital of the world. It was pretty sharky according to the experienced surfers I was with. It was my first time trying to surf—as if I didn’t have enough to concentrate on, I’d occasionally see a black-tip poke up out of the water about 25 yards out to see. None came too close that I noticed and nobody was bitten on the day I was there that I know of. The waves weren’t great, but I caught three of them. Wasn’t quite able to stand up, but I rode one all the way to the shallows kind of squatting at the back of the board.
I only saw one alligator, a little three-foot youngster who was ineptly and unsuccessfully stalking some attentive carrion birds fighting at the water’s edge of Lake Dora. I did eat some alligator and also conch for the first time, further dwindling the number of animals that I have yet to eat.
There was a lot of beautiful stuff to see and the weather cooperated perfectly. An outstanding end to the summer. I did miss a lot of good baseball, as the Cardinals clomb to within one game of the NLC division lead; and some bad baseball in that Juan Encarnacion suffered a grotesque injury that may end his career. I missed Illinois fail to come back in what sounds like an exciting season opening football game—the return of the Sub Shop vs. Jimmy John’s Cut Above Game.
Without Further Comment
Friday, August 31st, 2007From my favorite comedy:
Have a good weekend.
Weekend Recap
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007I made my now-annual trip to the Lou this weekend for all three games of the home series against the Braves. This year’s trip was even better than last year’s, although with tamer weather. (Unrelated, but I found this Contra/guitar video while digging up that link to last year’s recap.) We got off to a late start as I needed to spend about an hour talking to sundry ticket office employees about why I wasn’t able to print up the tickets for this weekend, so by the time we got to St. Louis, we only had time to pound a few beers at the Majestic before taking the Metro down to the stadium. Friday’s game was an unpleasant tilt in which Kip Wells struggled in front of a porous defense. Afterwards, the sole Braves fan who made the trip after the other two moved off to Colorado Springs this summer joked that he regrets forgetting the broom he’d bought last year in misplaced anticipation of a sweep (the Braves were up 2-0 on the series with Carpenter starting game 3).
We went to Grant’s Farm fairly early on Saturday and had a great time looking at widespread tree damage caused by a violent Friday afternoon storm with gusting winds at 60 mph, exotic animals, and drinking free beer. Shockingly, I’d never been to Grant’s Farm before then, in spite of having gone to the Affton ice center across Gravois at least a hundred times for practices and games over my youth hockey career. Grant’s Farm is definitely a good time and the weather cooperated beautifully. After that, we drove down Gravois and had a few drinks and some tasty skewers in the Venice Cafe biergarten. Chris met up with us for Saturday night’s game, an exciting game that had us on the edges of our seats all night. All five of the Cardinals runs were scored during a smoke break. It took that long to walk down from the upper decks to the smokers-aren’t-welcome-here patio outside the open air fence. At least I got to hear some of it on the audio feed they reluctantly piped outside for us scum and peeked in through gates on the climb back up to see some more. Due to some undersized sneakers, my feet were causing me some pain by the time we got back to our seats—more on that later. The Cardinals ended up scratching out a close win, 5-4, and I went home happy with the series split and to be decided by an Adam Wainwright vs. King Jo-Jo Sunday matchup.
After the game, we met up with the crew at Majestic for some drinks and then were invited to play a demo of EA’s Rock Band for the XBox. Review here, pre-order for the low price of $200 here. My friends had set it up on a hi-def LCD projector, running through several hundred watts of JBL goodness. Incidentally, Rush was drinking some beers at a bar down the street after playing St. Louis Friday night and a friend of mine conjured up the moxie to invite them to join us for the game—I swear that happened and yes, they declined immediately.
If you haven’t heard of Rock Band, like I hadn’t before this weekend, it’s something like Guitar Hero except with a drum kit and vocals. (Two guitars, the drum kit, and a microphone are included in that $200 price.) I played all four instruments: lead guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. The lead guitar and bass are pretty much exactly like guitar hero with the exception that parts of the songs allow the band to jam out and go into improvised solos. I was having too much fun to do a scientific inquiry, but I’m pretty sure the software employs some sort of scoring algorithm to rate how well the players’ solos worked with one another. I know of people who’ve made AI agents that try to make those kinds of subjective judgments, and it would’ve made sense to include one.
The drum kit is four round synth drum surfaces on the same level and a floor kick. I had a hard time my first try because I’m a little color blind and had a hard time telling green from yellow. The second time through, I took the advice to just go with the positioning, where the columns on the screen are analogous to the drums on the kit, left to right. My shins are too long to work the kick and whip over to the drums on the left very well, but I think I got the hang of it. It was hella fun, to say the least. Drums solos are a blast.
Including vocals seemed pretty ambitious of EA, but they did a very good job. The original vocals are included and do a good job of making a chorus effect with your own crooning to make a decent sound for the spectators. How well you sing was measured, as far as I could tell, in two dimensions: in frequency and duration. They may have used a Hidden Markov Model on a drastically filtered waveform, but I’d guess they just sampled F0 and gave you a window (sized on difficulty level from Easy to Expert) in which to match the target frequency and another window on how close your transitions to stop and frequency changes match up to the targets. As I said, it worked pretty well. Jeff tried singing “Creep” by Radiohead on Expert and the margin of error was very, very small.
That’s an incredibly fun game and at $200 is going to sell to every dorm room on every campus this Winter when it’s released.
Sunday, we met up with Boxcar Fritz and HLF for Wainwright’s dominant start and Isringhausen’s 200
Two-day weekends don’t get much better than that.