Melinthropy

Easter Bunny Cake

5 comments March 29th, 2008

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.

Flipping!

2 comments March 21st, 2008

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!)

What does MELINTHROPY stand for?

Add comment March 17th, 2008

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.