Just as server 1 was sitting there without a hard disk as that failed a few weeks back and the one I ordered from eBay was also broken, there was a power cut in my house, which cut off server 2 resulting in a hard disk failure – first power cut for this machine and the hard disk fails! Luckily I had a spare 40GB hard drive lying around so just over an hour I managed to install it, Windows Server 2003 and restore a 3 day old backup. The point is, the hard disk that failed was 120GB. Thats much better than a 40GB hard drive, but at least I had a spare one. I think I’m going to buy a UPS and make daily backups…

Recently I was experimenting with a piece of software called CrazyTalk 5. Basically it makes it look like the subject of the photo you import is talking – and boy does it do a good job.

I decided to put it to the test, and this is what I came up with:

Yes, it’s the Celine Dion Cat, a bit random yes, but I wanted to see how well the program could make the subject sing, not just talk! All together it took me about 15 minutes to do (including the photoshopping of the background as the cat and the flag are two separate images) – but this excludes time taken to render, process, edit in WMM and upload to YouTube. I don’t really like that song much, but CrazyTalk seems to have difficulties synchronizing the lips when I tried using a fast-paced song, hence I used a slow-paced song.

CrazyTalk really does have infinate possiblities, and its sooo simple to use – I was introduced to it at school and they said that year twos were even using it. Its one of the programs, the more time you spend working on your project, the better it becomes.