Cat Guardians‘ annual Chocolate Sunday fundraiser will be held February 1st, 2009, 1-4pm, at the VFW hall in Villa Park.

Come enjoy a buffet of desserts, including quite a bit of chocolate. There will also be a raffle and silent auction.

Admission is a $10 donation per person.

Proceeds benefit Cat Guardians, a no-kill, cageless shelter in Lombard, IL.

Villa Park VFW Hall
39 E. St Charles Rd
Villa Park, IL

My retro mood continues…

Amy and I are big fans of the Doctor Who audio adventures put out by Big Finish.  I think the 8th Doctor (Paul McGann) got a shitty deal, only appearing in the Fox/BBC TV movie in 1996.  But, Big Finish just signed him up for a third season of audio dramas.  They also have adventures with the 5th, 6th, and 7th Doctors, voiced by the actors who played them on screen.  Each of their adventures is available on CD, and now you can get them as MP3 downloads.  They’re definitely worth the price, and they could use your financial support.

But, this isn’t supposed to be a review of Big Finish.  I set out to write something about Splasm Software’s Audiobook Builder, but I wouldn’t be using Audiobook Builder if it weren’t for Big Finish.  I listen to pretty much everything on my iPod these days, and it has extra functionality for “audiobooks”.  First, they appear in a separate menu, so they don’t get mixed in with your music.  Second, they are broken up into “chapters”, and you can put “bookmarks” anywhere in the story.  Lastly, you can speed up & slow down the playback, letting you breeze through a book if you want to.

When you rip a Big Finish CD or download their MP3s, you end up with a bunch of files for a particular “book”, and iTunes wont let you just highlight them and say “this is a book”.  That’s where Audiobook Builder comes in.

The UI is simple.  The first step has you give the project a name (for the temp files), pick an audio quality, and pick a format (basically, “bookmarkable” and “not bookmarkable”).  Next, you give it a title & author, and drag in a cover image.  The third step has you drag in files or pick files you already have in iTunes.  Each file becomes a chapter in the finished product.  You then review everything you did and click the “build” button.  Audiobook Builder then goes to work, and once it’s done, it’ll even import the finished audiobook into iTunes for you.

Splasm Software offers a demo version of Audiobook Builder for free, and you can purchase a serial number online for only $9.95.  If you’re going to be downloading audiobooks from sources like Big Finish or even Librivox, it’s well worth the $10 to improve your listening experience.

We had a quiet New Years Eve, and I just barely made it to midnight. Amy picked up some Red Bull, and we used it to finish off the rest of the Absolut Citron in the pantry. We watched the MST3k episode “Warriors of the Lost World” and a Deep Space Nine episode. Do we know how to have a good time or what?

I took advantage of AT&T’s upgrade offer and doubled our bandwidth to 6mbps down for a penny more a month. I figure I can swing that. Someone was working today, because there was a brief interruption of service and we were up & running. I logged into the DSL modem and verified that we were upgraded, and then we watched the first few minutes of Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog in HD on Hulu without buffering. Sweet!

Someone on DuPage Freesources was looking for a monitor, and I offered up my old 17″ CRT that my folks were using for a while. I cleaned it up and tested the picture, and it’s still in good shape. I think that monitor’s at least 10 years old by now, but it didn’t get much use when my parents had it.

I put together a new theme for csixty4.com and upgraded to WordPress 2.7. I’m liking the new WordPress interface, but I’m not looking forward to getting clients used to it. I wonder if there’s a training video out there.