DeRamos’ Clipboard

He offered me three wishes for his freedom. I will look up catfish recipes.

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More good times.

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Click here to download:

shewasbeauty_bunner_rd.mp3 (878 KB)

Earlier this morning, I uploaded my first contribution to the LibriVox public domain audiobook library,  The LibriVox administrators (also volunteers) will soon add my recording (a poem in the public domain by Henry Cuyler Bunner entitled "She Was a Beauty") to the monthly compilation of short poetry.  Until then - and I don't know if my Blogger blog will embed the mp3 correctly - you can listen to my recording at my Posterous page.

I've been a fan of LibriVox audiobooks (free to download and in the public domain) since early 2007.  The volunteers (LibriVoxateers) - from the readers to the proof-listeners to the website administrators and every position in between - do magnificent work.  I've felt that way even before I signed up to volunteer (in early May 2009) and eventually put electrons to hard drive and read a poem (in late June 2009).

If you are an aspiring (or even established?) voice artist, you can practice (or show off!) your chops and help us bring history to the digital age.  If the microphone isn't your thing, proof-listeners are needed to compare what is recorded to what the text says.  If you are a proofreader or copy editor, LibriVox is just a stone throw's away from Project Gutenberg-related, text-based, public domain book digitizing projects.  If you are neither/nor and just want to read - that's the best kind of volunteerism:  With minimal ulterior motives!

If you don't want to volunteer (yet!), please check out http://librivox.org and download your pick of their - or dare I say our - extensive library of novels, non-fiction, short stories, poetry, and other forms of the written word in the public domain.  If you don't know where to start, I recommend either David Barnes' (slow and deliberate male BBC English) or Cori Samuel's (warm and friendly female Home Counties accent) recordings.  Be warned, however:  The reading voice inside your head may never be the same.

In any case, please spread the word about LibriVox to as many people as possible - people with failing eyesight, multitaskers who want to listen to good literature, and students who don't want to read their English homework (I must avoid making a cynical comment about the state of education).  If you help spread the word about LibriVox, you'll, in turn, help spread exponentially more words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, books, and bibliographies!

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Pseudo-sushi (smoked salmon) because I don't want to give myself dysentery.

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Something is up with many users' Googling experience today.  Appropriately enough, Google News loads slowly and (at last check) does not mention today's Google Empire sluggishness.  A usually mundane Google search with Firefox's Google Toolbar failed several times today by timing out.  This could be a pirate attack by Microsoft to influence Googlers to try out Bing.  (Could this Google slowdown possibly be targeted to Microsoft operating system users, since I use an XP Netbook?  CONSPIRACY!).

Right now, Blogger (run by Google) is nearly impossible to access today, and my daily DeRamos.org blog is a Blogger blog.  That's why I am on Posterous typing this reflexive meta-entry in the hope that it will auto-repost at DeRamos.org, too.  Gmail - typically the no-brainer webmail host due to its immense convenience and space - is also slow going.

As I finish this short rant of a post, Google seems to be picking up the pace as the sun sets in Pacific Time.  The moral of the story is to not put all your eggs in one basket, whether it be a G-basket (Gmail, Blogger, YouTube, Google Search, Google News, Google Apps, Google Docs, etc.) or an iBasket or a Microbasket or even a Penguin-basket (for the revolutionaries out there).  Diversification is the key, even though it may cost synergistic efficiency.  The Google Empire had a hiccup today (for many users), and those who rely on Google for virtually all of their Web-based needs had a hiccup of a day by consequence.

As for me, I'm glad I had things to do offline, as there is always something to do in my daily existence - Google or not, personal computer or not, electricity or not, and civilization or not.  Even though the mind can play tricks on you (I'll have to blog about today's perceptional experience later), the human brain is a beautiful biological supercomputer.  Virtually all our modern day toys are here to supplement the brain's power, not to complement it.  For many of us, the human brain (and by extension, the human spirit) is already pretty complete; maybe cooperation with other people's brains can complement our own when websites, applications, and technologies cannot.  And sure, there is the question of artificial intelligence, but remember that we usually compare the possibility of artificial intelligence with the decision-making of humanity.

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Good times.

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When @antsiogghlas suggested I tweet in Irish for St. Patrick's Day, I was excited to accept the challenge but still thought it was a challenge.  I had been (and am almost done with) learning the Irish language through the Pimsleur method.  Now I could speak choice conversational phrases, but being literate was a problem.  Fortunately, I found a transcript of the Pimsleur course at a website of Gaeilge language enthusiasts.  Apparently, Pimsleur teaches the Munster dialect of Irish, so that the phrase "ana-mhaith" (very well) is pronounced somewhat like "ah-nah-vah."  Anyway, the transcript (as well as other resources found through Google) helped me tweet in Irish yesterday.  I tweeted the following:

Is maith liom Guinness.

Ba mhaith liom rud éigin a ól.

Breithlá shona duit, Liam Pádraig Corrigan! :-)

Sláinte,
Riain

Ar mhaith leat beoir?

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