stuff

Hello my dear ones,
as some of you might have heard, I spent the first few days of this new year mainly in bed since I am kind of, let's say, immobile. Just one of my feet is doing its proper job, but don't worry it sounds worse than it is, my new crutches are beautiful (aren't they??!) and I should be able to walk properly on one of the next days.
However I've had plenty of time to do something for university and I found something really cool that might show you what computational linguistics (remember? that's the thing I study) also is about, haha.
This toy is about synthetic speech which means you can enter any text (choose the language from the scrolldown menu, there's quite some large choice) either into one of the greeting card shells or here (there's a wider range of voices) and your text will be automatically spoken.
Works quite well even for more difficult words and languages!

Maybe you'd also like to play (well, shoot some bunnies that is!) with the squid alien or create your own cartoon.
Or maybe you don't find this as impressive as I do.
But I had a lot of fun with it today...

(My next task is now to find information about implementing different dialects and emotions into synthetic speech. Sounds interesting.)

The way I live

People!
I am now officially berlinized. I am registered as a Berlin inhabitant AND we had our official flat warming party (unfortunately no photos), it was cool, it was crowded, people were great and now our flat is CLEAN.
I used this rare moment to take some photos of how I'm living, at the moment my room only, I'll probably add some more of the rest of the apartment later.



[Who's the kommandør?!]





[I'm usually studying a bit before going to sleep.]



[That's my new seat built from a mattress and tape. I'm a true architect, haha!]






[My new toy #10 000! Guess where it's from... My flatmate found it ON THE TRASHCANS behind our house. It's not the best one but it's perfectly working. Wahooo!]







[The first vinyl played on my beautiful new player. My collection isn't too big yet... but it will grow!]










[The fridge.]


[The view from my window.]



[In Berlin, the cows are still happy! For example in the front yard of the neighbour house.]


[Schöneberg is full of wise people. Sigh.]

Fell from a truck!

Yippie yay!
Guess what we found on the street just in front of our house today. A working TV!!
Wonderful. The times of useless Sunday evenings have come to an end.

After Tatort and before Zimmer frei!, it's time for Germany's second best "comedian" Dittsche. You can check it on youtube but unfortunately you won't get a word. How sad.

The other thing that makes me happy: Berlin is in sight. Yeah.

See you soon, hopefully there!
-m.

(P.S.: Yes of course, this entry was written in front of the tv. Took me almost half an hour.)

Here We Come, The Beautiful Ones

Come on superpeople! I got my new toy #937426 - a cheap webcam - running and michau, Adam and I decided to have a little showing-around tonight. Some of my Erasmus kids will be there and they don't know yet that I'll have to present them to you. And I wanna see how you're living!

See you on Skype tonight!



(I have never done this before, so I have no idea if it's even working... and I cannot promise to be there for a long time myself since I'll have guests... but it would be so nice to see you!)

My new toy pt. 2

Well well. I must admit it's not too easy just going on writing some crap after Flower's last post. Feels strange.
However, I'm doing that now. The reason is: I've got a new toy. A scanner! No, actually it's not my own but at least it will be for the next 10 months. Of course I already spent some hours on scanning everything I could get (hey, it can even do negatives! at least as soon as I find out how) and as I was sitting there, drinking my third cup of espresso out of this fancy iittala-cup checking my room for the next victim, I remembered I promised my lovely Mikontalo-mates to send them the map you might also remember...

It's just the result of the first try. You might notice that :] If you're interested in a better one just tell me and I'll try once again. Also, I've got the map in a much higher resolution on my computer, tell me if you wanna have it (7 MB).

That's all for now. Suomi and Polska-reports will follow as well as some more results of my first attempts of working with a scanner, hehe.

My new toy

Just to keep you posted about the serious things happening in my life...
I've got a new toy: an espresso cooker!
Wanna come around for a coffee?
















And yes, I admit that this coffee was only prepared for showing you that my spoons I borrowed from Café Europa are still in use...

A+!
Marie

P.S.: Now I have two phantastic spoons but some original Finnish beer glasses are still missing. Would our Finnish readership please....?