I
got Kingdom Hearts last night.
I was hoping they’d finally get rid of all text for character speech…but
it’s still text half of the time and actual talking the other half. It’s
odd to see Disney characters in a serious game.
Forgot to set the alarm this
morning so my costume today is “The Amazing Unshaven Man”.
10/30/2002 Here’s
an exciting article about a new bipedal robot that will be coming out next
year. It will cost as much as a Sony Aibo,
though.
Where I work, they are trying
to setup an automated system to answer incoming calls. Eventually, it’s
supposed to understand voice commands but it’s not working very well yet.
They are having us test it out, so all around the cubicle farm you hear
people saying “English…English…English” as they keep repeating themselves
and it keeps misunderstanding them. My grampa has a voice recognition program
that works pretty well but you have to train it to recognize your voice
for about 10 or 15 minutes. Not a possibility on a customer service line.
CNN has an article
about how telephone companies profit on both sides of telemarketing. They
help the telemarketers and make money from them and then they make money
when you pay them to block telemarketers. The second half of this
article describes how to reduce telemarketing calls by adding a tone
to the beginning of your answering machine message. We keep getting this
auto-dialer telemarketer that babbles on and on in Russian.
I called the mechanic yesterday
and he said it was some other gasket. 46. They could be making up gasket
names at this point and I wouldn’t know. I took off of work a bit early
planning to come in early today so we could go pick up the car. Traffic
jam on the interstate precluded that. Vanessa gets a long walk today as
she walks over to the mechanic…it’s about a mile.
Last night I downloaded Yahoo
Messenger. I was doing voice chat with my cousin in Alaska and we could
actually see eachother. We had a problem or two because he’s on a laggy
modem and my computer was feeling very crashy (as usual.) Then after that,
I just went around random chat rooms on Yahoo looking for people to do
random video chats with. Most people wouldn’t turn on their webcams. And
in the voice chatrooms there was a lot of cussing (just like in the text
chat rooms.) I went into a karaoke voice chat room and sang a bit of the
Jeffersons theme song for them. I think I frightened some people. I joined
a United Kingdom voice room and two guys were calling me a Pakistani something
or other. Gettin’ all racialist, dey was. There are entire voice chat rooms
setup just for fighting. Aside from that, it’s very cool to see your relatives
and friends as you talk to them. Trillian
doesn’t support webcam chat unless you buy the Pro version. Trillian crashes
every time I enter yahoo chat in it.