Valley 98.9

[Brian Vita]

>So, I guess that means we can't even do a local weather report?

A while ago, while I was still doing the tech for WMWM, I cobbled together a real Rube Goldberg method for doing local weather when automated.

It began with an open-source program that I found that would read text aloud files to the blind.  I found another program that would pull down a NWS weather report hourly and dump it into a text file.  The magic worked like this:

1.  Once per hour the "weather" program would go to the NWS and download the text file of the weather report.
2. The "reading for the blind" program would read the text file and convert it to an MP3 audio file called "weather.mp3" that was stored in the automation
3.  Just after the TOH, the automation would run the weather intro audio file "Here's the latest weather update from the WMWM RoboWeather Center" - I deliberately made it kitchy.
4.  After the intro, the automation would run the current weather.mp3 file

The system worked fine for about a year until the student GM who thought herself to be a computer genius "fixed it".  It hasn't run since and I had a policy of not fixing stuff that was intentionally broken.

There's how you do local weather on no budget.

Brian
CJazzChannel.com