Plug for Baen CDROMs, and am I crazy?

Folks may or may not have been aware of this, but mainly-military-SF/Fantasy publisher Baen Books has been putting out batches of CDROM drives bound into the back of the first editions of certain hardcover books they've been publishing lately. These CDROMs come with blanket permission to copy and share them as long as you're not selling them for money. If you weren't aware of them already, this is a good time to find out...all five of the CDROMs they've produced so far are now available for BitTorrent download. I'm helping to seed a couple of them myself.

And I've gotten in a bit of an argument in the "Publisher's Podium" board on the Baen Bar, the discussion forum that Baen hosts. It's over the audiobook files on the CDROM for There Will Be Dragons (a book title that amuses me every time I think about it, by the way, as it reminds me of that phlegmatic woman asking about "there may be giants" on track 13 of They Might Be Giants's Miscellaneous T album). Those particular files seem, to me, to be very obviously the work of a very high-quality speech synthesizer. I mean, to me it's as plain as the nose on your face that's what they are. The cadences, the inflections, the pronounciations...they're all so obviously artificial to me that its like someone's hitting me in the face with a smelly mackerel. Yet I seem to be the only person on the bar who is able to notice this. To everyone else (who's spoken up so far), it seems like a perfectly normal human reading.

It's starting to make me wonder if I'm crazy, or if everyone else just doesn't hear things in the same way that I do.

Meeting Miss Price

Ran into an old friend at the grocery store today. You all, my friends, may even have made her acquaintance in the past, yourselves. Her name is Miss Price. Whenever I encounter Miss Price, I usually end up saving a great deal of money.

Today I happened across six 1-lb packages of ground round—new, fresh packages, nothing differentiating them from the other packages in the bin—each one erroneously priced at the amazing bargain value of one cent per pound. I hurriedly grabbed every one of them before anyone else could. So, thanks to Miss Price, I got $12 worth of hamburger for six cents.

Conservation of Karma

As if the universe required some sort of balance to be restored, almost immediately after having such good luck as is mentioned in my LJ post below, I hit a doozy of a bad luck instance.

As I was on the way home from the grocery store, where I'd gone to pick up the garlic bread I'd forgotten (I planned to have spaghetti tonight, you see), my car abruptly died, leaving me motionless in the middle of the road at the intersection just north of Cherry and Glenstone. I was able to get some help to move it off the street, then I had to wait 45 minutes for a tow truck to arrive, and pay $45 (which the insurance will hopefully reimburse) for the tow to the Firestone up the street from me.

From the symptoms—when I turned the key, the ignition would only turn over once or twice, then stop—I'm guessing that the battery's run down. Why the battery would have run down, I'm not sure, especially since I only just got it a few months ago. I have a coupon for a free battery charge from Firestone...but if the battery ran down once, it means something's probably wrong with the alternator, so it might well do it again. Which means in all likelihood costly repair expenses for me. I need to go ahead and get to bed soon so I can get up early tomorrow and get it seen to.