TV
[Nostalgia]

This is the funniest thing I've seen in a while, I think it's an actual game that's determined by physics and controlled by artificial intellingence. It's modeled after a traditional Sumo wrestling competition.

Sumotori dreams is a small 90k sumo game, the unique thing about it is that the players are governed by the laws of physics and controlled by Artificial Intelligence, which is largely governed by the player.

The goal of the game is like sumo, you lose if you get thrown out (Or in the case of the game, if you fall over) and you win if you do this to your opponent.

From the MythBusters, a show that I watch when I'm being particularly lazy on a week-end afternoon. This is a short clip, but it's funny.Helium versus Sulphur Hexafluoride

I've had a lot of fun with this one. Available at sourceforge.net you can go ahead and download yourself a copy. You can manipulate digitized music, as well as create digital files from on air broadcasts and even tape recordings. I was digitizing a collection of PBS's "This American Life" that I'd got recorded a few years ago. I have an old VCR which I figured out how to record off the radio and I just timed it to record on Saturday mornings. I'd then tediously record this again onto cassette tapes and I've got a shoebox of them somewhere.

I've even recorded some music where they wouldn't allow you to download the music but you could play the files online. I just used Audacity like a tape recorder and "viola" I had my own digital file of said music. I've only done this with a couple of files, though, I'm not really a hoarder of music files. Somebody at work was bragging that he could get something like 2,000 music files to fit on his MP3 whatchamacallit and I said to him I can think of 200 music files that I would want to carry around with me.

Getting back to Audacity, I haven't played a lot with it lately so if you are going to try it out I'll have to search my memory banks to remember how I was able to get it up and running. I remember that initially I had a little challenge in getting Audacity to "hear" the stuff that was playing on my computer. That's something you set up in the "options" or "preferences" and you choose where the source of the audio is. I can't predict what that might be for your computer but if you want to try it and get stuck, I'll go looking in my set-up and see if I can get the info to get you going.

Once you figure that out, though, there's the matter of learning the tricks of manipulating the music tracks. You can add multiple tracks and move them around with the sliders to make the timing perfect. I have my own modest accomplishments available for downloading on this very web page.

The first one is a musical piece that I cobbled together in a big hurry about 4 in the morning, some years ago. This was for a Halloween event at work. We used to create a kind of huge "Haunted House" out of our office building every Halloween and each department was charged to come up with some "theme" for their work area. The idea was that the families would bring their kids to this thing and we'd feed them picnic type food and cookies and then they'd go around and look at all the decorations. Our idea in Project Management that year was to have 8 or 9 "dioramas" set up in each cubicle to represent the basic ways that you can get yourself killed or injured in our business, a kind of "Safety First - Or Else" kind of message. Well, we set up some makeshift "scarecrows" out of PVC pipe and old clothes and pumpkins for heads with each one showing how you could get electrocuted or shoot yourself with a nail gun or get run over by a forklift.

Anyway I pulled this thing together from a muscial piece that was in public domain and some free Halloween sounds that were available online. It's really quite good if you consider that I put it together so quickly. Of course, I thought the whole idea of this "8 or 9 Ways to Kill Yourself" had it's comic aspects, though I think my co-workers were a little more serious. I was going for comedy; kinda "Pee Wee Herman" style. Click here to download FallFest2 Windows Media File

You can also subtract things very precisely with this program. Here's a file that I cut and pasted using Audacity from an old Science fiction film "The Earth Versus the Flying Saucers" The scary space alien is making a broadcast to the whole world and, because in the film the broadcast repeats a few times, I was able to edit out the actors talking over the speech and was nearly able to create a file of the entire speech, without interuptions. (You can here, towards the end, the audio flutter a little bit. That's because there wasn't a place in that section that wasn't being talked over. I just trimmed it out. You hardly notice it.) Click here to download "People of Earth" wma file

And I even have a shorter version. These are also Windows Media files. I hope you can play them on your computer, if not just send me a note.Click here to download "People of Earth" short version wma file