Current events...
Aug. 11th, 2003 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpYuri Malenchenko and Ekaterina Dmitriev got hitched today, in about the most dramatic manner possible: the bride had her feet firmly planted on the ground while the groom (and best man) were hurtling in low earth orbit aboard the International Space Station at 17,500 miles per hour.
Strange to say, but I know both of them. Yuri is a very quiet fellow, very businesslike, and though I interpreted a few crew training sessions for him back when I lived in Houston full time, I haven't spoken to him for several years. Katya used to work for my current client back when I was a full-time manager there, though our paths rarely crossed outside of work.
Good luck and good fortune to them both!
* * * I'm beginning to see red Audblog icons here and there on LJ, and signed up for the trial free Audblog post.
The idea of Audblog is to allow people to create posts with links to mp3s of voice recordings. This is done (after registration, naturally) by dialing a number, inputting some ID information, and then basically leaving a message. A few seconds after hanging up, the service posts an entry to your LJ account (it knows how to do this because you supply your LJ name and password). It's very straightforward, and has an intial cost of $3 per month, allowing up to twelve 2-minute posts in each month, billed quarterly, if memory serves.
I wish the folks who run Audblog the best of luck, but I'm likely not inclined to subscribe to the service, nor would I be too jazzed to see a proliferation of audio posts on my friends list, for the simple reason that I can absorb far more information in two minutes by reading or looking at photos than anyone could reasonably speak.
There are also collateral issues, the primary of which is the fact that very, very few people normally speak in a manner that one might call "polished," including myself. This is not a slam, just a fact of life. Very few people speak in complete sentences.
One of the proposed future enhancements to the service is some kind of voice-to-text capability. While that may sound sexy at first, it is said that one of the best ways to make anyone "sound" like an idiot is to transcribe what they say word for word and then have the intended audience read the transcript.
In any event, the good news about links to such mp3s is that you don't have to wade through the recording if you don't want to, and there may be times when a recording will provide a level of information that the phosphor word (or photo) simply cannot support. We'll see.
Cheers...
Strange to say, but I know both of them. Yuri is a very quiet fellow, very businesslike, and though I interpreted a few crew training sessions for him back when I lived in Houston full time, I haven't spoken to him for several years. Katya used to work for my current client back when I was a full-time manager there, though our paths rarely crossed outside of work.
Good luck and good fortune to them both!
The idea of Audblog is to allow people to create posts with links to mp3s of voice recordings. This is done (after registration, naturally) by dialing a number, inputting some ID information, and then basically leaving a message. A few seconds after hanging up, the service posts an entry to your LJ account (it knows how to do this because you supply your LJ name and password). It's very straightforward, and has an intial cost of $3 per month, allowing up to twelve 2-minute posts in each month, billed quarterly, if memory serves.
I wish the folks who run Audblog the best of luck, but I'm likely not inclined to subscribe to the service, nor would I be too jazzed to see a proliferation of audio posts on my friends list, for the simple reason that I can absorb far more information in two minutes by reading or looking at photos than anyone could reasonably speak.
There are also collateral issues, the primary of which is the fact that very, very few people normally speak in a manner that one might call "polished," including myself. This is not a slam, just a fact of life. Very few people speak in complete sentences.
One of the proposed future enhancements to the service is some kind of voice-to-text capability. While that may sound sexy at first, it is said that one of the best ways to make anyone "sound" like an idiot is to transcribe what they say word for word and then have the intended audience read the transcript.
In any event, the good news about links to such mp3s is that you don't have to wade through the recording if you don't want to, and there may be times when a recording will provide a level of information that the phosphor word (or photo) simply cannot support. We'll see.
Cheers...
