Tonight we’re going to Carnevale at Castle McCulloch in High Point, NC. Good times! I’ll be moblogging the whole evening, so watch this space.
Song Search by Tapping - Search for music by tapping the rhythm of the song’s melody.
// January 11th, 2006
This is very impressive!
A flash application lets you tap the rhythm of any song on your space bar, then comes back with the name of the song you just tapped.
It totally nailed both of my tries (”Smoke on the Water” and Sinatra’s slinky rendering of “Fly me to the Moon”). Give it a shot!
Legend of the Green Dragon
// December 16th, 2005Back in the old BBS days, when I was in college and just after I graduated, I played a BBS “door game” called Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) by Seth Able. Seth was 15 when he released the first version of LORD, and it sold 25,000 copies. Which kind of reminds me of what the online world was like back then…
It was a fun, challenging fantasy-adventure game that was designed to encourage daily login and play.
Now some crazy folks have re-created it under the name Legend of the Green Dragon (LOTGD). The new game is web-based, which changes the gameplay somewhat. They totally captured the spirit of the game—a huge, rich world, challenging battles, interaction between players including a player-vs-player system, lots (lots!) of paths for character development, etc.
To give you a sense of how creative and great this game is, right now it’s showing holiday-specific names for things. The Forest is called “The Winter Wonderland”. The “Boar’s Head Inn” is the “Boar’s Head Igloo”. The Gardens are “The Skating Rink”. It also knows about Talk Like a Pirate Day and April Fools day, AND it talks in l33t sp33k on the birthday of the main developer!
I’ve installed LOTGD at one of my servers here. Come play!
UPDATE: Willy pointed out a problem with email confirmation: it didn’t work. Don’t know why, but I turned email confirmation off. If you tried and failed to create a character, my apologies, and please try again.
Ugly Christmas Lights
// December 7th, 2005
1000 Blank White Cards
// September 3rd, 2005
United Nuclear - Scientific Supplies
// June 6th, 2005
BookCrossing
// May 30th, 2005bookcrossing
n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.(added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)
What a cool idea! Read book you like. Then come to this site and register the book, and print out labels with a unique ID. Then “release” the book in a public place. Somebody finds it, takes it, and reports their find on the site.
Load up your old reads, or go on a hunting for freed books in your area!
McRorie Rules!
// May 29th, 2005The bekilted and prodigiously mulletted McRorie is an electronic one-man-band. Guy has trigger pads on his chest and feet, and a pair of keyboards hanging gunslinger-style from his hips.
With this arsenal he does fairly credible covers of hit tunes from… well, from the ’80s, mostly, it looks like.
Cardstacker Gallery
// May 27th, 2005
Amazing pics of card-houses. And card-mansions. And card-stadiums. And gard-pagodas….
The Meaning of Liff
// May 25th, 2005For those who love the more modern (and more American) “Sniglets”, here’s the work that started it all, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff.
In Life*, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.
On the other hand, the world is littererd with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.
Our job, as wee see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.
Douglas Adams
John Lloyd*And, indeed, in Liff.
Nerdgasm!
// May 24th, 2005
I’d heard about these firmware wackos hacking a certian Linux-based wireless router from Linksys, but little did I realize when I went through my rigamarole in replacing a dead router that I was buying that very model!
Joy! There are few things that make me happier than hacked 3rd party firmware. I’ve got 3rd party firmware running on my Treo 650 (providing improved sound quality, mainly), my iRiver h340 (enabling it to play avi movies), I used to have it on my Archos Studio 20 (enhanced navigation and gapless playback), and soon my Linksys wrt54g (dozens of new features)!
WRT54G dot COM :: Your Source for the WRT54G and the WRT Series
Memorialize your Adventure-Seeking Loved One
// May 16th, 2005
My buddy Matthew Johnson is a rally driver. That means he takes a custom-modified Subaru WRX (that orange one above, in fact) and tears up backroads, racing the clock against competitors from all over the world.
He took second place in his class and fifth overall in the Rim of the World Rally last week. (Streaming in-car video of the entire event here) He regularly places at or near the top of his class, and is often in contention for over-all wins, too. According to the industry buzz, he’s the up-and-coming young racer to watch. The only problem with being the up-and-coming young racer, though, is funding your racing. Matthew has put serious cash into his car, his event travel and entry fees, etc. How to pay for all this has been a major question for him.
Matthew’s father, his biggest fan, passed away about two years ago of brain cancer. He and Matthew always dreamed of going together to compete in the premier Rally event in the US: The Pikes Peak Hillclimb, where Matthew is scheduled to compete next month. But his death left Matthew with another question: how do I take my Dad with me to Pike’s Peak? And is there any way to let other bereved families join us?
Matthew’s answer to both these questions? Auction memorial rides up Pikes Peak for the cremains of adventure-seekers. He’s offering to take a vial of your loved one up the world-famous 14,110-foot mountain at high speed and under real-live race conditions. “Passengers” will ride in a specially built cargo container, and one extremely prestigious position is available as the car’s hood ornament!
Matthew plans to have a chaplain available at the summit to say a few words, if you like. You can come attend the race and meet Matthew and your loved one at the top of the hill, if you want to. He got it cleared by the US Forest Service to scatter ashes at the peak, if that’s your choice, or he’ll mail the remains back to you after the race.
UFO Sighted on Google Maps Satellite Images
// May 13th, 2005
Hysterical raving from the tin-hat contingent (along with a long and equally hysterical comment trail).
While you’re there, check out googlesightseeing.com. Cool stuff.
Google Sightseeing � Post Archive � UFO
Money Origami
// April 23rd, 2005
A cow-orker of mine once showed me how to make a pair of pants out of a dollar bill. This was the same guy who invented the Fancy Pants Dance. He discovered what David Letterman knew all along: pants are inherently funny.
This site doesn’t have the pants-folding instructions, but it will show you how to fold boots, glasses, sailboats and sepants from dollar bills. Good for impressing young children!
Swing Dance Update
// April 17th, 2005Last night Marcy and I competed in the finals of our first Lindy Hop competition. Out four couples dancing, Marcy took third and I took fourth. I deserved fourth place — I got randomly paired with the weakest follower in the contest and didn’t really dance my best — but Marcy was clearly robbed. Anyhow, it was fun and a good experience. We met a bunch of new people, made a bunch of new friends, and we’ll definitely do it again! Or, I will, anyway. Marcy, fierce competitive creature that she is, wants to compete in a venue she has a little more control over. This random partnering thing gives her Type A Personality Seizures.
In other news, Marcy is now Vice President of the Piedmont Swing Dance Society. She and two other PSDS board members and their partners (that’s me!) get to be on a Greensboro TV station dancing to promote an event we’ll be participating in. Fun!
Lindy Hop Contest
// April 12th, 2005
Last weekend, Marcy and I competed the preliminaries of our very first Lindy Hop competition! We’ve been swing dancing for about a year and a half now, and we’re getting pretty decent. This event was a “Jack and Jill” competition, where leaders and followers are matched up randomly for two dances, and individual winners are selected.
We kicked some butt–separately in the first dance and, as luck would have it, together on the second. I threw in some of our lifts and arial tricks, and totally wowed the crowd. It was great.
I wish I could say that we won something or beat somebody… The structure of the thing is, however a bunch of people dance in the preliminary heat, and then five leads and five follows go on to the finals. There WERE only five leads and five follows in the prelim, so we ALL are finalists. From what I heard from folks in the crowd, though, we were the best ones out there, at least when we were dancing together.
Finals are on Saturday night. Wish us luck!
Build your own Electric Self-Balancing Unicycle
// April 10th, 2005|
|Brilliant work here from the guy who DIY’d himself a Segway-style two-wheeled scooter.
This unicycle stays upright thanks to the same principles of gyroscopic feedback that keep Segways working. Lean the unicycle forward and it accellerates. Back to decellerate. Gyrate your arms wildly to steer.
Complete with parts lists, instructions, and source code (for the microcontroller, of course). $1500 total.
Don’t miss the video!
Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time
// April 2nd, 2005
Now that it’s over and it’s safe to talk about it: here are the top 100 April Fools Day pranks of all times. Included is a RealVideo file of the famed BBC broadcast on the Swiss spaghetti harvest.
Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time
Brilliant Information Design and Fascinating Word Usage Information
// March 24th, 2005This site is an art project that presents 86800 of the most commonly used words, scaled in size by their relative frequency of use, and layed out in a histogram. It’s browseable (though slowly) and searchable.
The most common word? “The”, of course. The least common? I’ll let you find out.
WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /