mikefisher.org

My wife’s cousin recently wrote a book about her grandmother’s life.  Her other grandmother really wanted to read the book, which is unpublished, but she has difficulty reading.  My wife’s cousin sent the Word files of the book to us and we were going to print them out for my wife’s grandmother to read.  Michelle said tonight that it is a shame there isn’t a way to get those Word files on a CD so she could listen to them.

Google is your friend.  I searched for “convert text to mp3″ and found a number of different programs that do just what I wanted.  I found a program called TextAloud which has a nice 15-day free trial.  The trial version is limited to one particular computer voice, but you can adjust things like tone and speed.

There is no way that this kind of software can produce a high-quality human-like recording but I was surprised at how good it actually was.  Mostly though I was surprised at how quickly it converted files.  I am in the middle of converting right now and I am guessing the whole book will take less than a half hour to convert from Word documents into mp3 files.

I will burn them to audio CDs so she can listen to them.  Hopefully she will be able to enjoy them in spite of the computerized voice.

Libvrivox.org has just finished recording part 7 of Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible.  I blogged about part three back in January, and someone from Librivox just commented on that post. The commenter mentioned that the scans of the study guide from the back of the book were posted on archive.org.  This is very interesting.

Yesterday a friend said that his family uses Hurlbut’s book as a Bible textbook for the children, with the study guide for student work.  This would be a great idea for a homeschool.

There is something about the style of writing that makes these stories very interesting to listen to without being “fluffy” or “light.”  A wonderful way for children to learn the stories of the Bible.

This is a recent picture of Mike’s family.

Peter Hoover writes:

Do not fool yourself into thinking that by casting one vote this way or that you are making a difference, or “doing something” about it. You are just scampering along with the rest of the lemmings.

SteveK over at Young Anabaptist Radicals has written a short blog post about why he does not vote.  He writes:

I just want to say at the onset, that I am not really an evangelist about not voting. But I am tired of people telling me that I am immoral or unpatriotic for not voting. And given that some have spoken of the presidential election on this site, I figure I can give my “third way” point of view:

1. The system of choosing leaders requires the leaders to boast about themselves, to be self serving. But Jesus tells us to have our leaders be humble, to serve others, not themselves.

Read the rest here.  Some very good points.