About 45 minutes ago we were sitting down watching Law and Order when we heard some screaming across the hall – something along the lines of “OH MY GOD FIRE!”. I thought I had smelled something funny but thought it was just someone’s horrible cooking. I got up and looked out into the hallway to see what was up – thinking it was just some drunk chicks, I was wrong. The hallway had a bunch of smoke and it seemed to be coming from one specific apartment (right across the hall from mine). I have spoken with the guy on several occasions so I decided to invite myself in to make sure he wasn’t dead. Instead he was passed out on the couch somehow not affected by the thickest smoke I have ever seen.
I hollered at the guy – “Dude, you apartment is on fire.”… no response. One more time somewhat louder (I didn’t want to wake the neighbors as it was 2AM) “Your fucking house is on fire, do something about it”. He rolled over and said “That”s not mine”. Luckily someone pulled the alarm and he was in the back of the cruiser in no time.
I grabbed my Mac, some smokes and a blanket and waited outside in the rain. Definitely an exciting event, some people didn’t find it as entertaining.
Tonight’s lesson : don’t drink and cook.
Since Youtube is such a wonderful source for all types of media – I decided to modify a script written by one of the guys at T*UG for quick and easy Youtube audio conversion for Asterisk playback (Music on hold or dial out prank goodness).
To get it going you need mplayer, sox, mpg123 and lynx (if you are using Trixbox to convert you can add the DAG repo, disable it and install the dependencies using –enablerepo=rpmforge)
So without further adieu, the script :
#!/bin/sh
echo "Downloading and converting..."
FILE=$1
URL=$2
RES=`lynx -source "$URL" | grep fullscreenUrl | cut -d'&' -f4,8` > /dev/null 2>&1
mplayer "http://www.youtube.com/get_video?$RES" -dumpaudio -dumpfile temp.mp3 > /dev/null 2>&1
mpg123 -w temp.wav temp.mp3 > /dev/null 2>&1
sox temp.wav -c 1 -r 8000 -w $FILE.wav > /dev/null 2>&1
rm temp.wav
rm temp.mp3
echo "Your file is ready - "$FILE.wav"
Usage :./script <new-file-name> <youtube-link>
You can test the audio quality by calling 425 606 3524 – this is my IPKall DID, it goes straight to Hold Music.
This sure can be a lot of fun, but remember : with great power comes great responsibility – don’t prank people you don’t know.
Have fun!
This is a snippet from http://www.clientcopia.com and is extremely accurate :
- Client won’t supply content
- Client thinks you’ll magically make up content
- Client thinks you can use a competitor’s content
- Client needs the website to be done ASAP while simultaneously not supplying content or getting back to you during the design process
- Client is computer illiterate and expects you to design a wide-target audience website around their inabilities (IE, no scrolling, “CLICK HERE” on links, etc)
- Client thinks they’re a better graphic/UI designer than you are and micromanages you to ultimately creating a shitty website
- Towards the end of development, the client doesn’t understand why you can’t quickly redesign the whole site based on a sudden whim and still meet the deadline
- Client does not understand “dummy text” and “dummy images” and subsequently hates all design concepts – worse when they still won’t supply text or images
- Potential client doesn’t understand why it costs so much, and classicly always has some friend or relative who’d do it for $30 and a pack of beer
- Job postings that require redundant proficiencies, like Dreamweaver, FrontPage and GoLive
- Job postings that require 5 years expirience, a graphic design major, and proficiency in Java, JavaScript, PHP, CGI, .NET and ASP for $9.25/hr
