Read a little. Learn a lot. • Tightly-written news, views and stuff • Follow us on Twitter • Be a Facebook Fan • Tumble us!

26 Apr 2011 16:54

tags

Politics: Daniel McKeague wins spot as new voice of the Aflac duck

  • I understand what’s at stake. It is not just getting behind a microphone and screaming ‘Aflac.’ If you’re a spokesperson you have responsibilities.
  • New voice of the Aflac duck, Daniel McKeague • Speaking about his view of professionalism and responsibility as a corporate spokesman, which evokes a not so subtle reminder of why McKeague has the job in the first place. When Gilbert Gottfried posted deliberately offensive jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami just after the twin disasters, Aflac cut him loose. We’re wondering, though — will the new Aflac duck voice just be McKeague imitating the old voice? Because the old voice was rather undeniably Gottfried’s creation, a voice he’s been employing in stand-up comedy, film, and television for decades. Getting paid “low six-figures” to imitate a funny voice created by someone else? Good work if you can get it! source
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Mar 2010 15:42

tags

Culture: Amazing: Roger Ebert “talks” in his real voice again

  • There are no words for how awesome this is. Ebert is an amazing human being. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

28 Feb 2010 11:58

tags

Culture: Roger Ebert will start “talking” again on Oprah. Whoa.

Ebert did some commentary tracks before he lost his voice. Those tracks were used to create a computerized Ebert voice, which will hit Oprah tomorrow. Whoa. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

27 Oct 2009 19:03

tags

Politics: The fine, very important, art of staying on point on your blog

  • The idea here is to give individuals a better way to monitor their electricity usage, with the eventual goal set at 40 million installed meters over the next few years. Great idea, guys – or you know, you could just advise people to turn stuff off when they aren’t using it, or not use energy they can’t afford. Just sayin’.
  • Engadget blogger Darren Murph • Describing the new “smart grid” technology that Obama’s pushing to implement over the next few years. We have a lot of problems with this statement – we understand the politics behind it, and while it’s a valid point (the program is quite expensive), it CAME OUT OF FREAKING NOWHERE on a technology blog which almost never talks politics. To us, it seemed completely out of place and off-message, to the point where it derailed any useful commentary about the post in the site’s comments section. It became less about the devices and more about what Murph said. This is a dangerous thing in blogging. While there needs to be a degree of feeding into people’s expectations, and a degree of breaking them, if you change the game in the middle like this, it can completely turn readers off. If you have commentary on your site, make it an integral part. Are we barking up the wrong tree here on this? • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 May 2009 22:51

tags

Culture: This guy who just died ran a real Mickey Mouse operation

  • Mickey’s the real star. You know you just have to love the little guy while you have him, because he won’t be yours forever.
  • Wayne Allwine • Who somehow drew up the pitch of his voice to allow him to speak like Mickey Mouse for over 30 years. He was the third man to voice the mouse – the first one was Walt Disney himself. Allwine died on Monday at age 62 of complications from diabetes. • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

12 Mar 2009 10:20

tags

Tech: Google wants to do to voicemail what it did to e-mail

  • The concept Google Voice is a new service that we’re sure they’re positioning as yet another cornerstone of your life. Essentially, it gives you a centralized number and a huge selection of tools to make the pain and knottiness of phone calls and voicemail easier to deal with. Good for them. source
  • The concept Google Voice is a new service that we’re sure they’re positioning as yet another cornerstone of your life. Essentially, it gives you a centralized number and a huge selection of tools to make the pain and knottiness of phone calls and voicemail easier to deal with. Good for them.
  • The key feature Google Voice’s top feature here is a piece of voice recognition software that converts your callers’ voicemails to text and lets you read them on your computer, Gmail-style. You mean we can look at speech-to-text versions of the calls we get from our bill collectors?! Awesome! source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

11 Mar 2009 10:36

tags

Tech: The iPod Shuffle was already tiny. Did they have to make it smaller?

It talks now. And it’s twice as easy to lose as before. Good job, Apple. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 2 Comments • Permalink
 

03 Mar 2009 23:10

tags

Tech: The voice of the Amazon Kindle 2 does what he does best: Talks.

  • I record a massive amount of fragments and random sentences, and they’re able to chop them up in a way that allows my voice to speak whatever is written down – that’s an over-simplification, since I don’t understand all the intricacies of how it works.
  • Tom Glynn • A Boston-based voice actor who’s also the voice of Bank of America and the National Weather Service, among other things. Now he reads books to you like your mom used to. • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
top tags