Kids are really impressed by this video game

Yeah, dad knows all the cool character video games.

Fear my mad skillz.

festival speech synthesis on my debian laptop

Last night I was mucking around with festival, the text to speech tool (ala the old DECtalk. On my [laptop](http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/321957-64295-89315-321838-f33-367367.html) it was speaking too fast.

The solution is found in the Festival FAQ: Running Festival

Create the file festival/lib/siteinit.scm (if you don't already have it) and add the following



(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "sox -t raw -sw -r $SR $FILE -c2 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp")



On debian, you put those two lines in /etc/festival.scm

Saw some Olympians today at Gymnastics Village

At noon time [Gymnastics Village](http://www.gymnasticsvillage.com) had a clinic taught by three former female Olympic gymnastics team members -- Tasha Swikert, Hollie Vise and someone whose name I didn't catch. Mary Lee Tracy, the Women's International team coach was also there promoting _Rock with the Stars from Athens_ at the Whittemore Center next week. It was really focused on just the girls, so we didn't stay too long after buying tickets to the show for Trevor and a parent to be determined later.

Here are some photos:

Tasha Swikert, Hollie Vise and someone whose name I didn't catch (drop me a note)



Hollie Vise showing the girls how to stretch

John Kerry in Derry, NH today

Wendy and the kids were invited to a John Kerry house party today in Derry, NH. Griffin, the budding artist/photographer took these pictures. Addy was disappointed Mrs Heinz-Kerry wasn't there, but thought she drove Kerry there. (She didn't) Trevor has decided he wants to be one of those cool secret service men, one of which looked like Agent Smith except for his hair.

Here is the press release for the event:
[Kerry Outlines Health Care Plan to Bring Down Costs for Families, Strengthen the Economy and Create Jobs](http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2004_0819a.html)

Wendy estimated there were a few hundred people there to listen. Apparently some of the neighbors were not Kerry supporters and had a bunch of W'04 posters on their lawns

Alpha RIP

[

Hewlett-Packard Co. will release the final processor upgrade for its AlphaServer line of Unix servers on Monday.

](http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/16/HNendofalpha_1.html)

Goodbye old friend.



[Check out the tombstone generator](http://tombstone.dogcrap.net/tombstone.php)

HP, Motorola, Debian Linux

HP just won a large contract with Motorola which includes Debian running on Itanium.

From InternetNews, [HP Get Call for Carriers](http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3395271)

"Virtually each of the network equipment providers is migrating to next-generation platforms based on Linux," Joy King, HP director of its worldwide marketing for its network and service provider business, told internetnews.com.

HP has modified the Debian Linux distribution to optimize it for carrier grade systems

Also in CNET, [Motorola and HP in Linux tie-up](http://news.com.com/Motorola+and+HP+in+Linux+tie-up/2100-1039_3-5311739.html) and Information Week [Motorola To Incorporate Integrity Systems Into 3G Call Path](http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=29100410)

messing around with tiles

Over on taprats there is a cool java applet that lets you create geometric patterns in the Islamic style.

Here is the original. The app doesn't save to disk, so I did an image grab with gimp and
edited it down.



This is an attempt to get just the minimal tile portion, but it still makes a nice tile on the background.

Donate blood

The Red Cross came to work this week and I've finally had the nerve to look at the needle while in my arm. Okay, so I had the [phlebotomist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_donation) take the photo and I looked later.





20+ years of donating and the thought still wigs me out.