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.
It was a lot of fun, although I couldn’t use Garage Band’s loops in most cases since she had guitar, drums, harmonica, and vocals pre-recorded and mixed together already, and I couldn’t get Garage Band to really lock onto the beat. So I had to play a lot of it myself — I did keyboards (midi keyboard), bass lines (midi keyboard), flutes (midi keyboard), and some goofy sound effects through garage band. I also recorded vocal harmonies. Overall it was a lot of fun, and it came out sounding pretty good. The songs were very amusing, and educational! They cover arthropods, echinoderms, phloem, and more… And they’re very very catchy so John winds up singing them all day after I work on them.
I had thought about posting a song or two here, but they’re Robin’s songs that she intends to sell, and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to post a snippet of it. So instead, I recorded a Melinda Weathers original song, “Good Morning, Mr. Fish”. (And yes, I seriously sing the chorus of this to my fish when I feed him in the morning. And yes, I’m insane. I had to write the verse and the rest of the words this morning when I decided to record it.)
(Click the play button to hear it…)
All the instruments are coming from Garage Band. There’s drums, a bass line, piano, and some synth stuff, and I didn’t record any of it. Well, I did have to play the synth melody, but I used Garage Band’s built in musical typing (where the keys on the mac keyboard represent keys on a musical keyboard) instead of hooking up my midi cable to my midi keyboard. And I transposed the piano and bass lines to go along with my chord changes.
I gave back the condensing mic I was borrowing already, so I recorded this with my Karaoke Revolution USB headset. I’m currently pricing condensing mics since I already have a USB pre-amp and phantom power supply that Robin bought for me as a gift for helping her out, but I havent’ picked one yet so for now the USB headset did pretty well. Also I didn’t really want to spend that long on it, so I only did a couple takes and left the out-of-tune bits alone. I figure when the record companies call, they will want me to re-record in a studio anyways
So anyways, Garage Band is a lot of fun. Everyone who has a mac should try it out (It’s part of the iLife suite that comes with every new mac). I recommend the on-line iLife tutorial. It’s very easy to put pieces together and make fun little songs even if you aren’t genius, super-incredible, awesome like I hear that I am from my mom’s friends
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.
So I always thought that my having a blog would be kind of a dumb idea, because who would read it? And also I’m not really into journaling about stuff I’m doing. But I was inspired by The Mendicant Bug that you can just post cool stuff that you find interesting. Because right now I resort to emailing it to people, and I think it causes them to start deleting my emails by rote. You know who you are ::cough:: Josh ::cough::. Or at least I imagine people are deleting my emails because I’m paranoid like that.
Also, I thought this would be a cool way to familiarize myself a little with the latest web technologies that all the cool kidz are doing these days. This blog is proudly powered by WordPress and hosted on the Weathers and Humphries SliceHost Slice. I thought I would start out easy and pick a pre-made WordPress theme, but I looked at (literally) about a hundred of them before deciding to go with the default theme and just mess with the colors a little. So I’ll probably play with it some more at some point. But for now I guess it will do.
And the underlying reason for wanting a blog — it gives me more of an excuse to play with my new MacBook I heart my MacBook.
So, Hello World, and I hope you enjoy Melinthropy! (And if you don’t, I don’t care. Ha. Okay, yes I do. Just don’t tell me.)
