Hi David it’s Mom!
“My intent with these voicemail messages was simple, which is perhaps why most of them are short: I wanted David to know I love and support him. I did not know if David listened to my messages or if he found my check-in calls annoying. I am enormously touched that David saved my messages and that he has chosen to present them in this way. What I hope is conveyed here is the abiding love of one mother for her son as he goes about the tasks of young, independent adulthood. And maybe I should quit identifying myself when I call him.”
(https://dgisser.github.io/Hi-David-its-Mom/ ) This is a fun project to commemorate all of my mother’s thoughtful voicemails she’s left me throughout the years. It’s been a running joke among some of my friends how frequently my mom introduces her voicemails with the phrase “Hi David, it’s Mom!” The following voicemails were recorded between April 2015 and December 2016 and are listed in no particular order. During this period of time I was away from my family for the most part, either on my gap year or during my freshman and sophomore years at Carnegie Mellon University. Some of my personal highlights are #71, #117, and #161.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
How to
To get the voicemails, I found my backup via this guide http://ios.wonderhowto.com/how-to/free-way-save-iphone-voicemails-your-mac-0157023/ but you have to be careful not to encrypt your backup, or this won’t work.
I then tried the script mentioned in the article http://pastebin.com/9Y43mCMN but it wasn’t working for me because all the files were in hex directories (this is probably standard now) so I cd’d into the directory and ran this http://askubuntu.com/questions/146634/shell-script-to-move-all-files-from-subfolders-to-parent-folder and then ran the original script to get all the voicemails. I then figured out which voicemails were from my mother (and appropriate to post) by going through each one (O(n) complexity).
I then made a basic Automator script (mainly because I met a guy at Apple who wrote a lot of core Automator code and said that it’s underutilized by programmers) to convert .amr files to .m4a files which are friendlier with HTML5.
All the files are hosted on Github and the page is rendered with a little help from Jekyll’s built-in scripting tools.