Microsoft Surface - table top computing - video

Courtesy of Make.

Hil and Lil's 24 Hour Adventure - Videos

Hilary's Hideaway: Video!

Yesterday, Hil and Lil, embarked on a 24 hour adventure around the borroughs of New York. Hilary is posting pictures of all the craziness here.

You can read about this adventure kick off here.

So if you are the least bit curious about what a girl from Brooklyn and her friend did for 24 hours in New York, then follow some of the links above. You'll enjoy the pictures and the videos.

Yours,
Tojo

Photo2Text.com - TojoAscii

Photo2Text.com - TojoAscii

That's me in the Ascii, that's me in the text light...

Go there, check me out, make your own.
Tojo

Son's Graduation!

My youngest son just graduated this last Saturday. The link takes you to the portrait studio shot of him receiving his diploma. Please give it a quick look.

Yours,
Tojosan

Birthday High Jinks for Ultima Online's Richard Garriott

Birthday High Jinks for Ultima Online's Richard Garriott

From the article:

The evening was billed as "Magic at the Manor," featuring performances by 18 of the world's leading magicians, but with a twist that had Garriott feeling particularly giddy. In the party invitation, itself a cryptic message that had to be heated in an oven to display the URL where guests could find details for the event, he vowed to re-create a long-forgotten method of sawing a woman in half — then reveal how the trick was done.

The article describes past parties themed around the Titanic and Beyond Thunderdome, and leads into the current party. Magic is intertwined with a mystery as guests are lead through Garriott's castle.

The finally sounds worth the wait as Garriott leaves his guests with these parting words.

"It's all about secrets," said a grinning Garriott. "I imbue my games and my parties with the process of discovery, with a physical manifestation of unreality."

Click through and share in the fun.

Tojosan

The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches

The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches

One of my favorites from this wonderfully long list:

Logan's Run Rule
RPG characters are young. Very young. The average age seems to be 15, unless the character is a decorated and battle-hardened soldier, in which case he might even be as old as 18. Such teenagers often have skills with multiple weapons and magic, years of experience, and never ever worry about their parents telling them to come home from adventuring before bedtime. By contrast, characters more than twenty-two years old will cheerfully refer to themselves as washed-up old fogies and be eager to make room for the younger generation

If you've ever played any RPG game, then this list will make you laugh. Quite a few of these extend into more modern games such as WoW and Everquest.

Click through, reminisce, and enjoy.

Tojosan

The Tao Of Programming

The Tao Of Programming

Thus spake the master programmer:

``When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.''

Hilarious, insightful and reminiscent of the Tao and Sun-Tzu.

Click through and enjoy.

Tojo

Support the play! The Boy on the Other Side of the World

Rails Envy: Hi, I'm Ruby on Rails...

Rails Envy: Hi, I'm Ruby on Rails...

Programmer? Love your language? Check out this link and laugh.

Yours,
Tojo

MyMiniLife: Your Embeddable Virtual World

MyMiniLife: Your Embeddable Virtual World:

From the site:

"MyMiniLife is a Flash based virtual world/social network. Users create and customize a character and then build out a virtual space, adding walls, floors, doors, windows, etc. Users can then add customized goods ranging from lamps to cannons to the space, and embed video or photo elements into items, or link to web pages (click on my moped in the embed for an example)."

Warning: this page has a flash object or three. :)

Michael Arrington gives us a quick blurb about a new craze in website coolness, My Mini Life. My Mini Life allows you to create your own virtual home, complete with pets, pools, and posters. Their site is here.

I checked it out and found it a bit simplistic. However, it did include a wide array of objects to include and even a controversial piece of art. You can add objects that link to YouTube too, which proved slightly buggy in Firefox for the Mac.

If you guys at My Mini Life read this, my one requested feature already is the ability to link my minihome to a friends.
Maybe I missed that but this would make the creation of a community very quick.

Best regards, click through and read the quick review, and check out My Mini Life.

Tojo

How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community -- Social Networks

How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community -- Social Networks

The Internet Tough Guy is a feature in all Internet social forums. These are people who poison discussions with anger, hatred, and threats. Some are malicious. Some are crazy. Some are just afflicted with a rotten sense of humor. Whatever their motives, they're a scourge. It takes precious little trolling to sour a message-board. A "troll" -- someone who comes onto an online community looking to pick fights -- has two victory conditions: Either everyone ends up talking about him, or no one talks at all.

Cory Doctrow brings his slant to us on the troll problem in Internet communities. He starts off with recognizing just what or who trolls are and do. This leads into some insight into the effects of trolls on a forum or community. These obvious but interesting points aside, Cory gets into how we react and what methods people have tried to deal with trolls.

In summation, Cory doesn't recommend any one particular procedure or trick over any other, but rather a strategy. He sees a marriage between the civilian community runner and the geeks to find tools that let those leaders deal.

It's an interesting read, if not a bit long in the tooth if you are familiar with trolls already. Check out Cory's opinion, and give some feedback from your experience.

Tojo

Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer

Official Google Blog: Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer

Why?

"With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results."

Google has now managed to one up themselves. The introduction of universal search may not sound a lot different from how search worked before but once you see it at work, you may feel differently.

Before universal search, if you searched on the Web for Red Corvette, you'd just get links to articles about red Corvettes. Now you'll also receive a link for all of the images turned up by that search. Again, some of you may have searched just for images and been happy.

This new format and search capability intends to bring you the best relevant answer to your search. Search results will tie together all types of media, including book snippets, images, and video.

I look forward to our new search overlords. (wink)

Tojo

Communication Nation: What makes a place great?

Communication Nation: What makes a place great?

Dave Gray makes an excellent point in this post about work spaces. He references this study done by the Project for Public Spaces group.

My favorite from the list is:

2. The space is comfortable and projects a good image.

Good luck finding that at a work place near you.

Tojo

iTunes Offers Exclusive Pre-Order of New Paul McCartney Album “Memory Almost Full”

iTunes Offers Exclusive Pre-Order of New Paul McCartney Album “Memory Almost Full”

Good news from Apple:

CUPERTINO, California—May 15, 2007—Apple® today announced that thirteen-time Grammy award winner Paul McCartney’s new album, "Memory Almost Full" is available for digital pre-order beginning today exclusively on the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). iTunes customers pre-ordering the 13 track album in the US will receive the "Dance Tonight" music video when the album is delivered and the single “Ever Present Past”, immediately upon pre-ordering the new album. Additionally, Paul McCartney's full catalog of 25 solo albums will be available for the first time digitally on iTunes later this month.

This is very exciting; I can't wait to dowload some of these.

Yours, Tojosan

The Adventures of Jill and Hil: Jill's play will be in FringeNYC!

From Jill and Hil's blog:


Jill wrote a play. It's called The Boy on the Other Side of the World. It was accepted into the New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC). The festival runs from August 10-26, 2007.

Hilary is psyched to be co-directing!
Jill is mucho psyched to have Hilary co-directing!

We are already gearing up for the event. We are looking for help in the form of services, materials, information, and money to help make this show what it deserves to be! If you can help in any of the following areas, please contact us at jillandhil@gmail.com! Lifeblood Theater Company is a 501c3 not-for-profit, so your donations are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.

The following is an initial list of people/things we are in the process of tracking down. More info to come, but please browse through it and see if you or anyone who know fits the bill!

People we need:

• Actors: The show has three females and two males. We'll be posting a specific casting notice soon, but we definitely need you to spread the word among your contacts to find... a male rock star type who needs to perform two scenes with an Australian accent. And isn't bothered by taking his shirt off on stage. (For the rest of his scenes, accent is irrelevant so long as it's not Aussie.) AND a boy-next-door charmer who performs MOST of the play with an Australian accent and a few scenes as a not-very-intelligent American.
  
• Scenic designer: Think surreal. And movable. We have 15 minutes to put up the set and take it down before and after each performance. We'll be sharing the venue with at least 10 other companies and we won't have a heckuva lot of storage space.
  
• Lighting designer: Whichever venue we end up in, it's going to be a repertory plot. We'll have one tech rehearsal in the space, probably about 3 hours long. So lighting design basically entails having a good plan for what needs to be done, showing up at the tech and writing the cues rather quickly.
  
• Sound designer: Jill is aurally-obsessed. Jill wrote characters that are aurally-obsessed. We need a sound designer. As far as ambient sound, the show requires some ocean. Plus, as the co-directors, we hope to get a bunch of cool music in the show. But we're poor. And unknown. So famous people will not give us permission to use their music. Thus, we'll be trawling MySpace Music and our contacts looking for...
• Cool musicians wanting some love and publicity and willing to let us use their music in the show if it fits. Got something?
  
• Costume Designer: Did we mention one of the characters is a five year old girl?
  
• Stage Manager
• Publicist
• Graphic artist: Postcards are the single most important publicity tool at the festival. We're envisioning edgy, sexy, and proclaiming: "This is a dirty romantic comedy that the guys will NOT regret they came to." There will very likely also be small posters made. AND the same design or a variation thereof will be featured on the Fringe website and in a few print advertisements.
  

Stuff we need:

• Audition space
• Rehearsal space
• Printing services
• Materials for set
• Props (TBD)
• Music
• Sponsorships
  

So this is why we are raising money. A lot goes into a play!

Don't think you have anything to give? How 'bout you skip that latte and send that Fourbucks to us? Donate $50 or more and get a Jill and Hil print! Donate $100 or more and Hilary will personally bake cookies for you.
(Ed. Note: Hilary's cookies are really good.)

Online ticket sales begin July 27th! Thank you in advance for your help and we hope to see you at the show!

Apple Mac OS X Tips

Apple Mac OS X Tips

If you've not visited this page and own a Mac, you are missing out. Apple provides this page of tips and tricks free of charge.

The tips range from uncovering EXIF data on a photo to how to create a PDF. Most of the tips are straightforward and user friendly enough even a Mac newbie can make use of them.

Note: These tips show up on the Apple news feed RSS as well if you've given up on visiting websites directly.

TJ

Apple - Get a Mac - more new ads

Apple - Get a Mac

Apple has more ads for us to enjoy. Two of them focus on Vista, but the Genius one is halfway funny. Not their best work though.

Click through and enjoy.

Tojo

Addicted to memberships

Before I left for Montreal the last time, I cleared my wallet of all the nonessential for travel cards. I discovered I'm addicted to memberships!

Just a taste are the following:
1) Saint Louis Zoo - Zoo-Goer
2) St. Louis Science Center - Family & Friends
3) Missouri Botanical Garden - Regular Member
4) Borders Rewards
5) Sam's Club
6) Rec Plex Pass
7) Best Buy Reward Zone - note this one is WORN out
8) AAdvantage for American Airlines - hey it's free and I've traveled four round trips in just over a month
9) Blockbuster Video - shows heavy use but we are Netflix users now.

And the list goes on. I've got Chinese restaurant frequent eater cards, a library card, more store membership cards and more. Removing these from the wallet made it a lot easier to sit on.

I think I'm going to start a group, Membership Anonymous. We'll be issuing membership cards immediately.

Tojo

SCI FI Tech | SCIFI.COM

SCI FI Tech | SCIFI.COM: 10 Techs That Give You Superpowers

Fun article focusing on up and coming technologies that mimic some well known super powers. Will these things make you the next super hero about town? Probably not, but one or two my make you the super soldier of the future.

Click through and enjoy a fun techy read.

Tojo

Think before you post

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