Jason Griffey

…you’re my only hope.

While I’m the mack-daddy of image formats (wanna know the dif between LZW compression, and GIF compression? Just ask), I am largely ignorant of the intricacies of audio manipulation. So I call to you, blogosphere: I have a WAV file of my blog presentation that I gave this morning, and I’d love to equalize the volume…it was recorded on a stationary mic, while I moved around. Thus, it fades sometimes, and I’d love to normalize the volume. Any open/free tools out there that anyone would recommend for VERY basic sorts of audio editing?

….I’m giving a presentation called Blogs and Wikis: One of these words is English for MTSU and their 2005 IT Conference. Wish me luck! Oh, and check the blog out if you’re curious about the conference. At least, I hope the blog gets a workout…we’ll see. This is all new for MTSU.

Last night, our Tarheels beat Michigan State to move into the NCAA finals!

Mitch passed away a couple of days ago, but I hadn’t had a chance to talk about it yet. He was a fabulous comedian, and I feel sad that I just discovered his stuff months ago. Another brilliant mind gone away due to heroin. How many comedians have we lost to that?

Bit of a buzz around the wordpress forums and such today regarding Matt Mullenweg (the originator of WordPress) and his psuedo-ethical adword scheme to help pay for wordpress hosting. From the waxy.org link above:

I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here’s a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Here’s an example of some results in MSN.)

Ok, so…scamming the adwords in google seems a tad slimy, but understandable. Hiding the adwords articles with odd CSS positioning tricks lends even more oddity to the issue.

As someone on the waxy thread says…why didn’t he just do a straightforward ad-words column on the page? WordPress.org has enough traffic to make that worth his time, I would think.

In any case, we’ll see what Matt has to say when he returns from Italy.

EDIT: Google and Yahoo have both already removed these from their results. MSN still lists them, and here’s a direct link showing what Matt did. Load the page, then view: source and check the last DIV.