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Glorious Corn

All I wanted to do was look up how to cook corn! How long do I boil it? 30 seconds to 3 minutes it turns out, about 7 minutes shorter than I expected.

But no, I had to be suckered in to read all about how they won't cook it in Europe because they "feed it to the pigs," how one sweet little old couple still hand picks and drives the corn to market every day, and how hunting and eating the critters that eat their summer bounty in a little town called Punxsutawney spawned a national holiday.

Sometimes I think I'm starting to get a feel for writing by doing this little blog, then I happen upon a piece like this that just blows me out of the water. Kudos, Elaine Light. You write as well about corn, of all things, as I do about the most significant moments of my life.

• Check out her piece "Glorious Corn" at post-gazette.com. It's well worth the read.

9:43 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Geeky fun with LSmaker

A brief conversation at work today gave me a reason to play with LSMaker, a handy Light Saber effect generation tool.

One of my co-workers suggested going to see Star Wars Episode III for what would be my 3rd time, and I responded: "How many times can you actually see it in the theater before you start to believe that your umbrella is a lightsaber?"

"What do you mean my umbrella's not a lightsaber?"

Watch the short movie:

• XivD AVI (Please use this one if you can)
• Quicktime (more compatible, but bigger)
• Quicktime Hosted at OurMedia (Please be kind to my bandwidth :) )

6:18 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Mplayerplug-in: It Just Works.

Wow. I just realized something - I'm an Open Source Nut. I've graduated from Advocate to total fanboy. My walls at work have the Business Week with Linus in a Penguin Suit on it, the Firefox ad we put in the New York Times and two Oracle-on-Linux ads. My white-board even has a crappy drawing of tux on it.

That said, I'm still rational and clear-headed about using what works. Although I run Linux at home, I'm fully aware that Sara basically just puts up with it because she loves me. There's just too many times when it should "just work" and I've got to tweak things to make them do what they should. It's not quite ready for the average "mouse-only" user.

The main place where this is evident is surfing the web. Yes, Firefox is great, but on Linux, good plugins are hard to come by. Apple and Microsoft have a vested interest in keeping their media formats to themselves, and I don't think we'll be seeing Quicktime for Linux or Microsoft Linux Media Player anytime soon. Thankfully, Macromedia and Real are putting out fantastic plugins for Linux, so at least for now, their formats are easy to play. We'll see what happens now that Adobe has bought Macromedia.

Mplayer to the rescue for the rest

Last night I installed mplayerplug-in, which handles any media that the full-fledged mplayer handles (just about anything) and it's amazing.

Installing was as simple as apt-get install mplayerplug-in on Fedora+atrpms. Be sure to follow the "for firefox" directions at the bottom of the mplayerplug-in page)

With flash, realplayer (which is great on Linux now!), and mplayerplug-in, the browser finally "just works" on Linux, and I'm a happy camper.

Linux is one step closer to being seriously "wife" friendly.

5:24 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Push to Talk

I just remembered a funny story from when I was taking Summer Classes at HVCC:

Excerpted from my comments at Joelle's journal:

My Psych teacher at HVCC was great. He was really down to earth, but didn't take crap in his class. One day some kid's Nextel went off (when they were still really new), the kid looked kind of thuggish, but the teacher was just like "give me your phone," and started talking to the guy on the other side in speaker mode, with those annoying Nextel beeps.

"Hello?"

do-bleep! "Who the f*ck is this?"

"Wow. Well, this is your friend's teacher, he's in class right now. Who is this"

do-bleep! "How the f*ck you get his phone, yo, give him back to me"

The professor still has the phone, and turns to the kid in the class.

"What's his name?"

"Murder"

Silence. The prof blanches a little, and then the class laughs. "You're serious, his name is Murder?"

The kid nods, embarrassed, but trying to maintain the thug machismo.

The prof pushes the talk button.

"Hey Murder, I'm going to give you back to your friend now, but he's in class, so he'll have to call you back"

silence again.

"Huh, I think he hung up on me! He's not going to kill me now is he?"

"Let me call him back" The kid said, and walked hurriedly out of the room going "yo yo, it's okay, he's just my teacher" His Nextel never went off in class again.

Classic stuff

That's what I'd want to be like if I was a teacher.

Wow, I just realized that I really miss teaching. Maybe I should start doing some tech classes in the city...

3:32 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Open Source Fun With Inkscape and SVG

Okay, this is just going to be a quickie picture-tutorial, because I've got a very long text-based one coming out "any day now." Meanwhile, I just want to share the joy that is working with Inkscape.

For those that don't know, Inkscape is a free and open source vector image editor, much like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. Vector editors differ from photo editors in that your drawings always remain a bunch of parts that get rendered, rather than being saved as pixels. For example, if you draw a circle, the file will contain information about the position and radius of the circle, as well as its color and outline rather than thousands of little dots representing the image.

SVG is the free, open standard for describing vector graphics and Inkscape is the best tool there is for creating and editing them. The fact that Inkscape is open source means that you're free to download it and share it with friends. If you have 45 minutes, download it and play along with this article.

First, get the program here. I don't normally recommend getting nightly builds intended for the developers, but the 0.41 build for windows is borked and the latest nightly appears to fix whatever problems it had. Just unzip it in a directory and run the inkscape.exe file.

Once you're up and running, download furboa3.svg. It's the final frame from my bit of fan art at my friend Colleen's web comic, Fluff In Brooklyn. (Take a look! It's stuffed-animals-meets-three's-company hilarity).

Now that you've got Inkscape and a bit of art to work with, lets look at what we've got. (Or at least pretend if you're not playing along...)

See more ...

11:52 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Single Serving Wendy

Buses are strange things. Last Thursday, I slept at "hotel greyhound" from midnight to 6am on a bus to Plattsburgh and arrived relatively bright eyed and bushy tailed, enough so that I was good company for the friend that I was visiting and didn't feel like I'd been up all night. For all the tossing and turning I'd done, the 6 hour bus ride had been fairly uneventful, and everyone kept to themselves.

After two days seeing my best friend off from college (so to speak, he graduates in 2 weeks) it was time to head home, and I didn't have the luxury of overnight travel this time unless I wanted to go straight into work from the bus Monday.

Immediately, we were delayed more than an hour by our bus, which was stuck in customs at the Canadian border.

I should preface this story by telling you that I stick out like a bit of a sore thumb in Plattsburgh. I was the only one there that I saw wearing any black at all, and due to the fact that I kept my hoodie on the whole time to keep from freezing, I was pretty much all clad in it the entire time I was there.

Standing out in the parking lot, waiting for the bus, I wandered from the sun to the shelter a few times as the weather changed (it fluctuated drastically for my entire stay). After a few trips back and forth, I noticed a girl walking towards me. I was moving towards the shelter of the bus port, and she changed direction to match.

I turned and smiled, which is my default reaction whenever I notice someone on a collision course.

"Can I ask you a question" she said in a pronounced southern drawl. She sounded like Tate, a friend of mine from Texas, did when he first arrived in NY.

"Sure." I said, somewhat apprehensively. I was half expecting a "why do you look so weird" or "do you war-ship say-tan?"

"What kind of music do you listen to?"

See more ...

11:50 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Aaaaaand, We're Back.

Well, this little server certainly isn't immune to some downtime here and there, and last week it was down for a few days. The beauty is that google felt so bad about my server being down that they decided to take their's down in a show of solidarity. If that's not nice, I don't know what is.

11:00 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |