2 comments May 11th, 2008 11:23am Melinda Weathers
Incase you didn’t already know, I am turning the BIG THREE-OH in a few weeks. But I already got an early birthday present from my husband! It’s the melinthropy.org domain! Yay!
I think all of my friends have already turned 30, so I probably won’t get any sympathy. And anyways, I’m sure 30 is the new 25, so what am I worried about!
Tagged: old-age
Add comment April 2nd, 2008 08:29pm Melinda Weathers
I ran across this video on youtube. Check it out! She types in a melody, and these machines that shoot balls into the air landing on a marimba, along with some wine glasses and percussion, improvise on it!
The really cool thing is you can actually go to the website here and interact with the machines playing the music! You type in your melody (which I did horribly, because I thought I was in “practice” mode, but apparently I wasn’t — I guess you only get a second to “practice”), then you see the thing playing your melody (and its own variations) live, and then they send you a video of it. How cool is that!
5 comments March 29th, 2008 10:39pm Melinda Weathers
I just wanted to post this little video I put together on Easter (filmed on The Flip!) that shows Bunny Cakes being assembled. But of course, I had to be difficult, and embed the video rather than posting a link (since I want to start using more video in general). My version of Wordpress was too old to use the plugin I wanted, so I decided to upgrade to the one that was released just this afternoon. Bleeding edge, baby. So, of course I had to import my tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior, and then of course, I had to pick a new theme (since it should *look* different if I bothered to go to this trouble), then I had to add random junk into the theme… And then something about the Apache configuration wasn’t allowing my plugin to work, which we spent hours looking at (literally). And now my plugin breaks some of the new WordPress version… It always amazes me how much time you can sink into this kind of stuff.
Wordpress 2.5 seems very nice, by the way. I just noticed it is auto-saving this post as I write it. Also, I was having some problems with the visual editor stripping out all my line breaks (maybe because I’m using Safari), and that seems to be resolved. The interface in general looks very nice as well. And thanks to the SVN option, future upgrades will be very easy!
So anyways, here is the video (be sure to watch all the way to the end to see the special cameo from the Easter Bunny himself!) Click on the picture to watch it. It’s only about a minute long. If you click on it and you don’t see video starting up, please download the latest version of Quicktime.
2 comments March 21st, 2008 09:43pm Melinda Weathers
So, after I read a review of it by David Pogue, I went out and bought… The Flip! If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a video camera that’s smaller than my cell phone, runs on AA batteries, and has a little USB plug built right into it. It was so easy — I opened the package in the car, put in the batteries, and started taking videos before we even made it home! (And we only live 5 minutes away from BestBuy!) Then I got home, took a couple more videos, and plugged the Flip into my MacBook. It opened up a little window where I double-clicked on the Mac software, and I could immediately see the videos I had taken, and could easily save them to disk (or even trim them down first). Then I opened up iMovie on my Mac, which I’ve never used before (I don’t have iLife ‘08 yet — I have the old version.) and put together a little movie. The sound track doesn’t go with it at all — it’s just the first thing I could find that I had recorded in Garage Band (it’s me on the vocals). So about 20 minutes of editing, adding in the music, and exporting to a web-friendly size, I had this little video! It was fun. The Flip is so small, it will fit in my pocket or pocketbook, so I can take random video of things I find interesting. (Yes, this was an uncharacteristic random purchase, wasn’t it!)
Tagged: flip, garage_band, macbook, music, video
Add comment March 17th, 2008 10:48pm Melinda Weathers
Measurably
Excellent
Literature
In
New
Technology
Having
Relatively
Odd
Ponderings
Yeah!
Well, actually, it doesn’t really stand for anything. That was an example of a backronym. I recommend following that link to the wikipedia article because for some reason, I found the article highly amusing.
Tagged:
Add comment January 27th, 2008 03:47pm Melinda Weathers
I heard about Sheldon Comics from a co-worker, and I’ve been reading it ever since. It’s got people, animals, and a character who can only say “squee.” What more could you want? I enjoyed a couple recent ones. First read this one:
Sheldon Jan25
Pretty amusing. And I figured that was it. But, wait, there’s more!
Sheldon Jan26
Anyways, this has been my cartoon appreciation post for the week.
4 comments December 8th, 2007 07:01pm Melinda Weathers
A friend of mine posted a link to this geek test. I thought it was pretty amusing, and I got to take a stroll down memory lane of my geekiness past and present. My score was 45.16765%, which makes me a Super Geek! Woohoo! One of my geekier things that wasn’t in the list was that I was nominated for “Most Intellectual” in highschool. (I was one of three, but I wasn’t the winner. The valedictorian won it, which kind of makes sense. We had a photo shoot at Phipps with all the nominees.) Oh, and I like to count on my fingers in binary. If you take the test, add a comment with your score, and something geeky about you that wasn’t on the test!
Add comment November 17th, 2007 12:57am Melinda Weathers
Come on, Nintendo.
The Wii has been out for OVER A YEAR. Why is it so hard to find one? Even on-line! Don’t you understand I really want to play the new Zelda game over the holiday break?
What gives?
[Update: I broke down and ordered one! I got it as a bundle with extra games and accessories, which was more than I really wanted to spend for a gaming system, but I put my fudge website money towards it and justified the rest as John and my Christmas present for each other… Wiiiii!
If you are looking for a Wii, I recommend this site: http://www.xpbargains.com/wii_locator.php I found a few other places that were out of date, but this one seems to be on top of it. They have a nice xml feed that shows you the latest availabilities. Now I’m going to immediately take that xml feed off my google page before I see one that’s cheaper!]
Tagged:
2 comments November 17th, 2007 12:54am Melinda Weathers
Or as some would say, “Fudge Renaissance” 
I’ve just finished a month-long project to build a website for a colleague of mine and his wife to sell fudge! Check it out here: Renaissance Fudge Company
It was pretty time consuming, as I decided to write it in Rails (with zero Rails experience, although I had been working with Ruby already). And I had no CSS experience, or really any web development experience to speak of, nor am I good at visual design, heck I didn’t even know how to take full advantage of TextMate, my editor… Actually I felt a little bad taking the job because of all that, but I’m in a bit of a rut at work (PL/SQL wears very thin after a few solid years of it), so it was really good to learn some new skills.
My violin practicing got cut pretty much completely — I would work for 8 hours at my main job (instead of my usual 9 or 10!), then come home and work on the site until midnight, plus a few solid weekends. But the site went live today! And my customer was happy, and even paid me! It’s kind of funny that I get all excited about this given that I’ve been a professional developer for 8 years, but it was really good to have a change of pace. And a new and shiny technology. And Rails is pretty darn cool.
Fudge. It’s what’s for breakfast! (and lunch and dinner.) Eat more fudge!
(Actually, I haven’t even tried the fudge, given my severe food allergies. I’m going to work with them and figure out what flavors are safe for me to eat. But I’m sure it’s good!)
Tagged: fudge, pl/sql, Rails, TextMate, web-development
5 comments October 1st, 2007 07:31pm Melinda Weathers
I thought this was an interesting article about languages that are nearing extinction. The article talks about how “More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to die out by the end of the century, often taking with them irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world”.
I thought it was a little weird that the knowledge about plants and animals and culture would necessarily die with the language. The article talks about how the languages usually die slowly as children decide that another language is more popular to learn and don’t learn the old language. But they still learn enough of it to mostly communicate with their elders. Then the next generation learns less of the language, and so on. But it would seem to me that the knowledge of the medicines and plants would still be passed down to the generations that only “kind of” learn the language. Then those children would be able to assimilate that knowlege into whatever the more popular language is, and continue to pass it down in the more popular, surviving language.
But, I guess it just doesn’t work like that. Maybe when children reject a language as not being worth learning, they are also rejecting the culture that goes with it, so that would be why that knowledge dies with the language.
Tagged: languages
