This was my first auto auction so I didn’t know what to expect. I really enjoyed looking at all of the cars but was surprised by how entertaining I found the bidding. It was a hell of a production, carried live on one of the NBC cable channels (and online, of course). This video runs less than 2 minutes. Here are some stills.
Old movies stars dance to Uptown Funk
Land Rover back in Bay Area
We’ve entered the penultimate phase of The Great Land Rover Project. The final phase being me driving it back and forth to the coffee shop every day. The restoration phase (parts 1 and 2) are done and now Mr. Wolf drives the truck until he’s found and fixed all those little things that show up after a frame-off restoration. While this is underway I plan to go out to SF for a weekend to finally meet Mr. Wolf and discuss care and feeding. Then its one final trip from the Left Coast to Hooterville. To be continued.
A Thanksgiving Prayer from William S. Burroughs
Realistic-sounding speech
Just over a year ago Google presented WaveNet, a new deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms that is capable of producing better and more realistic-sounding speech than existing techniques. It’s gotten a LOT better and is now capable of producing natural sounding human voices.
Google is using it for Google Assistant but hard for an old radio guy like me not to imagine this tech replacing radio announcers (are there still radio announcers?)