All this wonderfully warm weather makes for some impressive lightning and thunder shows. Last night was viewed in lightning strikes per second. Once the windows got too wet I had to pack it in, but there are still some great photos to be enjoyed. Click over here to see them.
Presenting some materials at work this week, I realized I wanted to mark up the screen at select times while I was talking. While a laser pointer would have been sufficient to get people to look at an item of interest at a given time, it would not allow me to further illustrate any points.
Enter the tiny software program called ZoomIt. At your whim, you can freeze a screen, and proceed to draw, type, and otherwise mark it up as if it were a whiteboard. When you are done, it all erases and you are back to your original screen/presentation.
The amusing thing is that this small feature was almost as impressive as the stuff I was talking about. Almost ;)
ZoomIt is available alongside other useful utilities in the Sysinternals collection.
The World just got a tiny bit smaller for Lola.
After much excitement watching Snickers chase his ball countless times - to the point that her arm waving practically has her hovering above the ground - Lola decides she wants the ball. Very badly. So badly that she willed herself in its general direction, gave a pull with her arms, then a push with her legs, and had traversed about a foot in order to connect one extended finger on one extended arm to a drool covered red ball.
Touch!
She even repeated her stunt for mommy after being whisked upstairs and placed on the floor with ball in sight.
There are legal issues surrounding the imitation Scrabble game known as Scrabulous. The fact that this is making news headlines around the world is very intriguing. I’m guessing that before the game was available via facebook, it did not have anywhere near the popularity and user base. So here we have this facebook entity shaping our lives in such ways as to determine what constitutes ‘major news’ in our society.
People are sad that they can no longer play Scrabulous on facebook (in Canada and the US). The reality is, these people are lazy. It appears that the same game is served up for play through their regular homepage, which I think was available well before facebook went mainstream. So what people are really sad about, is the fact that they lost their convenient way to play it — from within facebook.
Will I miss Scrabulous? No. To me, turn based games follow a sort of bell curve pattern. To start, its kind of fun, you see how things work out. Then, something catchy about the game, plus additional people available to play against causes urge to play more. Then, you are checking it every couple of minutes. And then, slowly and without reason, the interest wanes. The game is played less, and then almost never. In the case of Scrabulous, I couldn’t be bothered to check if it was my turn anymore, nor did I particularly care. In the case of netrisk, after a few games, I think I got my fix, and didn’t feel the need to either find people to start another game, or wait for everyone to actually finish their turns. And in the case of Scrabble (the real board game), Tiffany and I go through cycles where we play it a lot for about three weeks. And then it goes onto the shelf for another two to six months. Just a natural flow.
The reality is: if I want to play Scrabulous or a Scrabble type variation, I can sign up at the Scrabulous site, or try out the official Scrabble facebook game. Or pour some juice and set up the board game at the kitchen table. Or play one of the other millions of anagram-based web games widely available on the internet. That’s enough options for me.
Do I think the imitation game should have been taken down? Sort of. While I don’t think that legal action was necessary, and admittedly would like to see Scrabulous live a long internet life, I think that it was the right thing to have happen in the end.
Am I biased? No.
When Coca Cola was getting started, lots of imitation beverages jumped onto the scene, trying to cash in on Coke’s new found success and popularity by offering similar product with intentionally confusing similar names. I’m not saying that Scrabulous is trying to be deceptive here, but Coke had the right to protect its product, and Hasbro/Mattel do too. And at the end of the day, I’m glad that I can enjoy the refreshing taste of the one and only Coca Cola.
[A response to Brad's Post]
The best way to make a lightning storm go away is to run out and attempt to photograph it. While I did watch a good light show from my living room, by the time I went outside, it was making its way out. I did manage to catch a few bolts though…
This has to be one of the best experiments I will never perform:
Somehow, blending glowsticks seems like an awesome idea!
My car has rolled over another milestone in its lengthy history. This morning, the odometer rolled over 400,000 kilometers! Lucky for me I was able to hit some light traffic to watch the nine’s roll up in mesmerizing fashion. I can’t imagine that you’d get the same experience from a digital dashboard.
In honour of this event, I have assembled a collection of related milestones. With this information, it appears that I have had an average speed of 1.75 km/h all day every day over the last decade.
June 11, 2008 - 400,000 km - near Whitemud Amusement Park, Edmonton
August 21, 2001 - 300,000 km - near Didsbury, Alberta
October 7, 1998 - 250,000 km - Ardrossan, Alberta. Just as I rolled onto the cement pad at home. I do not have a photo from this, but I did manage to dig up an email I sent from my University account!
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 19:40:27 -0600 (MDT)
From: Christopher Christou <christou@ugrad.*****.ca>
Subject: Milestone!My car rolled over 250,000 as I got home from campus today!
WOOHOO!!! Time for another quarter-million! :)
Chris
Other Milestones — Heat
August 9, 2003 - 322,744 km — 37°C - Okanagan Region, B.C.
July 25, 2006 - 365,525 km — 53.5°C [WTF???] - Kelowna, B.C. This was what registered after being parked outside for an hour. It was actually in the high thirties out that day
ELLEN L THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE VANILLA CREAM GOURMET SODA FROM THE STATES!!! IT IS SO FREAKING TASTY!!!
Henry Weinhard’s Vanilla Cream Gourmet Soda for the win!
Whenever the elevator at work moves between Ground and Second floors, the display flashes a 5 for a split second. Also, the elevator frequently makes phantom stops on the second floor.
How hard can it really be to program an elevator?
If you hear for the first time that Steven Spielberg made a video game, you’d think it was going to be an Epic Story told with Rich HD Graphics. Instead, he simply wanted to make something fun and simple for his kids.
How many times have you taken a collection of small rectangular items and stacked them up? And then how many times have you knocked your tower over (or someone else’s)? Boom Blox takes these primal urges just a little further, and then gives it to you in hand-wavy simplicity on the Wii.
While there are other things available in this game, I have mostly played modes involving throwing baseballs or bowling balls at various towering structures composed of blocks. I can’t stop knocking stuff over! As soon as one mission is complete, the craving to knock over another tower quickly sets in. Its a good thing I am mostly unpacked now, or the piled up moving boxes would have become some tempting targets…
I can’t help but wonder if Boom Blox and Jenga are some sort of Grade 1 “virtual sandbox” course for terrorist children.