Wow… Facebook is really taking my time away from my website (Farmville is only making it worse). This is the first post in about 5 months. I’ll have to post something nerdy soon…

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I have to hand it to Microsoft… if this is a supposed to be a serious tool (the promo seems to sell it as such) then they should just throw in the towel now before they tarnish their image anymore. The idea behind SongSmith is that you sing the melody and it will auto-generate the backing music… I’m sure you can already see where this is going. Many people have run the lyric tracks from popular songs through it with funny results. I’ll let you find the actual SongSmith demo video on YouTube yourself… I’m posting my favorite SongSmith results below.

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

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I’m sorry, but this is too funny not to post…

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

If this video ever gets deleted from YouTube, you can download it HERE.

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I’ve been jealous of Rob’s screensaver for awhile now. I thought it was Mac only until I asked him about it… nope. I installed the Windows version today. What a beautiful piece of art! The creator, Jesson Yip, describes it like this:

Analogy is a typographic clock which fuses the immediacy of digital with the visual-spatial quality of analogue into a hybrid format. It presents an everyday object with a fresh twist.

Click on the image below to visit his site and download it. Enjoy!

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What a wonderful gift to bring home on Christmas!

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I saw a Linux logo I liked on Google Images a while back, but all instances of it have been removed. I got tired of searching, so last night I hacked around in Photoshop and recreated it.

• 500 x 750 JPEG
• 500 x 750 PNG

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So, we’ve been developing a slick cross-platform media framework to standardize or products on (proprietry, of course), and I couldn’t resist building an ASCII text renderer. It was surprisingly easy using our SDK and a free library called libcaca… seriously, that’s it’s name. It looks okay small, but of course it breaks down as you scale up. Anyways, now we can watch video using xterm via ssh… use case? Who cares!… it’s ASCII video

Okay, now the large size (video source: D1 MPEG-4 30 fps):

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Okay, stories like THIS irritate me (emphasis mine):

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials say they want to give struggling children a chance, but the district is raising eyebrows with a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work.

At the same time, they said, the 50 percent minimum gives children a chance to catch up and a reason to keep trying. If a student gets a 20 percent in a class for the first marking period, Ms. Pugh said, he or she would need a 100 percent during the second marking period just to squeak through the semester.

“We want to create situations where students can recover and not give up,” she said, adding a sense of helplessness can lead to behavior and attendance problems.

While some districts use “F” as a failing grade, the city uses an “E.”

“The ‘E’ is to be recorded no lower than a 50 percent, regardless of the actual percent earned. For example, if the student earns a 20 percent on a class assignment, the grade is recorded as a 50 percent,” said the memo from Jerri Lippert, the district’s executive director of curriculum…

This is just stupid! It lowers the value of a diploma and doesn’t prepare kids for real life… the harsh reality where people don’t care how you feel and performance is king. A quote by Albert Einstein in a RECENT POST of mine comes to mind:

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.”

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Okay, this is classic… a parody on Tickle-Me-Elmo. It’s hilarious if you’re familiar with the Emo movement. Enjoy!

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

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