Gotta Love Technology

At IBM, many of us use a product called NotesBuddy that interfaces with our Lotus Notes e-mail program. NotesBuddy gives us Instant Messaging capability (including the ability to "ping" graphics back and forth) and it monitors our inboxes and tells us when new mail has arrived. A unique aspect to NotesBuddy is instead of merely beeping or dinging when something arrives, it has a voice synthesizer and speaks to us.

For example, if my buddy Ed pings me "Look at this page" and includes the URL, the voice will read out "look at this page" and the entire URL ("http www ibm com systems storage smb" or whatever the URL is). And there are several voices from which to choose. You can have child, male, female, old male, old female. Well, of course, I chose male (and not old male, thank you very much). If I can't have a real male speak to me, at least I can have my little synthesized male speak to me repeatedly throughout the day.

When e-mail arrives, the default is for the little man to tell me "You have new mail from Jan Crews about [whatever is contained in the subject line of the e-mail]." Buuut, you can personalize the announcement. You could have him say "You have new mail from Jan Crews" or just "You have new mail". I was sick of hearing him say "You have new mail," so I changed mine to say "Hi Beautiful." The only problem is his inflection is a little off. There's no implicit raising of the eyebrows as he speaks — it's all very monotone. But at least somebody's speaking flirtatiously with me, even if he's not very good at it!

Now I want to see if there's any way to code the program to draw randomly from a file. I'd like to have him rotate among: "Hi Gorgeous", "Hi Beautiful", "You look mahvelous", "You look especially yummy today" and "What are you doing for dinner?".

What did we do before there were computers?!