melinthropy

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!)

As I always mention, I’m very happy with my MacBook. Also, I know of at least 2 people in my office other than me (and I only hear from about 30 people or so) that have recently puchased Macs. So I predict that the market share for Mac is going to start going up and up and everyone realizes how cool it is and how they really don’t need to run Microsoft Word (and that they actually could if they really wanted to. Infact, Excel for Mac seems even better for Excel for Windows according to my husband.)

So now is the time to become a Mac Programmer! Everything seems to be prettier on the Mac, actually. Even websites that look kind of crummy by themselves look nicer on the Mac since each window has a drop shadow, and it makes the website look a little 3d. Apparently, the reason everything looks nice and consistent is the Cocoa toolkit. I did a tutorial with xcode when I installed xcode in order to get gcc. It was fun, and I created a Hello World window in Cocoa, but I didn’t really understand what was going on, especially since I had never even seen Objective C before.

Anyways, I recently came across this article from someone who made the switch, and it seems like a pretty interesting thing to try out! Maybe in all my spare time

I’ve recently completed a project for a friend of my mom’s. I knew years of my mom’s bragging about me would eventually come back to haunt me, and here it was — my mom’s friend, Robin, a science teacher, who had heard all about my genius, super-incredible, awesome musical talent, asked me to help her finish up some science songs she had been recording. I had just bought my new MacBook and had played with Garage Band a bit, but I was wanting a reason to play with it some more, so I agreed to help out.

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Someone mentioned to me that they liked my day-glo blog, and I thought to myself. Hmmm, they’re color blind. And then I looked at it on a regular monitor (rather than my laptop which I tilt in an odd way when I sit on the couch) and I thought Augh! it *is* day-glo. Anyways, these are closer to the colors that I thought I was choosing before. (I still can’t get it quite right, and that gray rectangle is still there, of course.) The moral of the story is not to use your laptop to pick colors. (My first attempt was apparently a hideous bright green against rusty orange. John walked downstairs and looked at me funny and then tilted my laptop to the proper angle. But then I guess it un-tilted as I re-selected the colors.)

mel·in·thro·py /mel’ ən throh pee/
–noun.
Melinda’s cool new blog.

Yes, that’s right, it doesn’t even get any hits on Google! That means no one ever thought of it before! John said there was a reason no one ever thought of it before… Clearly he means because I am an innovator. Honestly, people should hire me to come up with names for their companies.

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