"If you are experiencing writers block, please press 1 now..."

I've made a lot of headway with Asterisk on OS X over the past couple of weekends (the only time I seem to find to work on personal projects of late).

The collection of applications I've finally gotten around to writing is a rather hodge-podge lot. None of them really have anything in common, other than they are telephone-based and I am writing them.

Which leads to my dilemma: what's the best way to present a main menu? Should I do synthesized speech (I quite like the Cepstral voices I purchased) for consistancy, or would it be better to record a real persons voice? If so, then who? (Certainly not my own; like many people I don't particularly care for the sound of my own voice...)

And regardless of whether I record someone speaking, or use the computer, I need something that won't bore the people who call (who admittedly will all likely be calling just as a personal favor). Yet whatever the menu is, it needs to explain things well enough that they know what option(s) they want to choose.

And so I feel stuck, going back and forth between ideas and approaches; and through it all I have yet to unleash my telephone applications on my unsuspecting friends & family. (Maybe they'd prefer it that way? ;-)

— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, March 20, 2006 at 20:57
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April Fool's Conferences

The Waterfall 2006 conference on April 1, 2006 looks hillarious. Lots of great talks planned! For example, in regards to Web development:

The only important design elements to tie down are those that affect the project's buzzword compliance. The project must be implemented using trendy technology and some forethought is required as trends may change over the three months it will take to implement. You don't want to be stuck trying to sell something based on a 1999 also-ran like J2EE when all the cool companies have moved on to Ruby-on-Roids.

And the talk about Working Harder, Not Smarter reminds me of something that certain executives at my previous job might have gone to...

— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at 22:10
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