The first story, “The Evolution of Video Game Music,” was replayed this morning on WUSF …
April 12, 2008
The Evolution of Video Game Music
May 29, 2009
Video Game Music: Big Business, Big Money
January 7, 2010
When Play Means Pay: Video Game Jobs On The Rise
When you spend a dollar today, you’re giving up about $16 that could be yours 36 years from now.
The “Rule of 72” is a well-known rule of thumb.
The Rule of 72 estimates the number of years required to double your money at a given interest rate. Just take a hypothetical rate of return, say 8% — divide 72 by eight and you get nine. The Rule of 72 says that at 8% your money will double every nine years.
That means a dollar invested at 8% today will be worth $2 after nine years, $4 after 18 years, $8 after 27 years, and $16 after 36 years.
This is GREAT news for Nintendo Wii owners and Netflix subscribers: Later this spring the Wii will begin supporting Netflix streaming in standard (not high definition) resolution. If you’re already a Netflix subscriber, you can apply on their website to receive a Wii disk which will enable the service / functionality when it becomes available later in the spring. Netflix streaming is a great deal: No matter what level of subscriber you are, you can stream an unlimited number of movies from Netflix per month.
There is no additional charge for the Netflix Wii disk.
Have you ever happened upon mister-wong.com? I did this morning while researching battery prices for my notebook computer. At first I was mad because Mister Wong seemed to be one of those websites that tricks you with fake content, but I’ve been trying to figure out what makes a website good for earning adsense dollars, so I clicked around for a while. Mister Wong seems to be a social networking site that shares members’ lists of bookmarked websites.
Now, here is a list of things I’ve never heard of: Pearls Before Swine (except as in “do not cast …”), Neil Gaiman, and Y La Piedra Filosofal.
Pearls Before Swine is a comic strip? I can’t imagine reading a whole book full of comic strips.
Well, I looked up Neil Gaiman and found he is quite prolific. I came across this picture:
… obviously a Harry Potter rip-off. So, I googled +Gaiman +Rowling (3,070,000 hits) and found that I’m not the first person to notice the similarities. However, The Books of Magic were published in 1990/1991, six or seven years before the first Harry Potter book was published, so it seems Rowling may have been inspired/influenced by Gaiman.
HP y la Piedra Filosofal, o en inglés estadounidense: HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Wow. I had to have a Spanish:English dictionary at my side and consult daily with my friend from Argentina just to get through All the Pretty Horses, which was only about 5% Spanish. I guess reading a few comic strips is OK after trying to decipher Piedra Filosofal.
I have decided to give Google’s Picasa a try. I have about 20,000 digital images that need organizing. Most of them are now stored on a tall stack of CDs and DVDs … a real pain to find a particular image, especially if you can’t remember the approximate date it was created.
I have a 1 TB external hard drive. I will copy the CDs and DVDs to the external hard drive, download and install Picasa, and let you know my initial thoughts.
If you’d like to play along at home, here is Picasa’s website.
1. It took about 15 minutes to download and install Picasa, open Picasa, and tell it to not scan my entire computer at this time, but to instead scan only one recent folder of images. I ran into a problem with Outlook Express, with which I was trying to compose an e-mail while Picasa was installing. Outlook Express locked up; I should have closed all other applications while installing.
2. Picasa does not recognize the *.PSP file format which is the native file format for images created with JASC Paint Shop Pro.
3. Another hour has elapsed during which I have edited one image, created one photo-collage, “tagged” seven images with keywords, created a Picasa Web Albums account, and attempted to upload seven images to Picasa Web Albums. Although I am able to login to Picasa Web Albums, from Picasa I am getting an error message: account not enabled for web albums. Trying to figure out what that means.
OMG! It takes about 45 minutes to copy the contents of one DVD to my external hard drive via USB. I don’t know if it would be much faster via Firewire, but my computer doesn’t have a Firewire port. Firewire (aka IEEE 1394) is just another kind of ”wire” (really an interface standard) used to connect electronic components, like USB, RS-232, HDMI, MIDI, SCSI (“scuzzy”), S-video, XLR, and on and on. You don’t need to know all the differences, just put the plug in the correctly-shaped hole. In this case, Firewire may have been a little bit faster, but I didn’t have a correctly-shaped hole in my computer.
One cool thing about the Picasa software is its face recognition feature. Picasa will scan the images and find all of the faces. This makes it easy to tag the images with the names of the persons pictured. Picasa is smart enough to group similar faces so you can select all of the “Tracy” images and tag them at once. Scanning the two DVDs worth of images for face recognition took about 30 minutes (note: The two 4.7 GB DVDs contained both the *.jpg and the *.nef files for each image. I only scanned the jpegs (about 15% of the content), so figure about 15 minutes per CD full of jpegs).
Picasa found 46 unique faces (247 faces, total). Hey, how did Heath Ledger get on my DVD? Answer: I took a picture of the TV while we were watching “10 Things I Hate About You.”
Going through all of the images and adding “tags” (e.g., birthday, flowers, jazz) takes quite a while, but when you’re done the filtering process is almost instantaneous … start entering “flowers” in the search box and before you finish typing all of your flower pictures are displayed.
So far, I’ve done the first three-quarters of 2007, all of 2008, and the first half of 2009, a total of about 42 GB. The last quarter of 2007 is missing; the last half of 2009 hasn’t been burned to DVD yet. It’s pretty depressing … a lot of crappy photos. I’ve uploaded a few images to Picasa Web, but you can’t view them unless you have a Google account and are a registered user of Picasa Web.
There has long been an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. That alternative is known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP. Now, there is an open source alternative to vector graphics editors like Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. This alternative is Inkscape and it can be downloaded here. Photoshop and GIMP are bitmap editors, while Illustrator, CorelDRAW, and Inkscape are vector graphics editors.
Vector graphics editors are often contrasted with bitmap editors and the capabilities of the two types of graphics editors complement each other. Vector editors are better for graphic design, page layout, typography, logos, sharp-edged artistic illustrations (e.g. cartoons, clip art, complex geometric patterns), technical illustrations, diagramming, and flowcharting. Bitmap editors are more suitable for retouching, photo processing, photorealistic illustrations, collage, and hand drawn illustrations using a pen tablet. Many contemporary illustrators use Corel Photo-Paint and Photoshop to make all kinds of illustrations. Recent versions of bitmap editors, such as GIMP and Photoshop, support vector-like tools (e.g., editable paths), and the vector editors such as CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator, Xara Xtreme, Adobe Fireworks, Inkscape, and SK1 are gradually adopting tools and approaches that were once limited to bitmap editors (e.g., blurring).
I came across this interesting quote on the crsociety.org website this morning.
“There are many pesticides and other toxins in our food supply that are fat soluble. Human bodies store these toxins relatively harmlessly in body fat. If you lose that fat too quickly, however, all these toxins are flushed into your bloodstream, and your detoxification mechanisms (i.e., your kidney and liver) are unable to remove them [B120YD, 78-80]. You may thus wind up with much higher blood toxin levels than what people are normally subjected to, which may have any number of life-shortening effects.”
This was meant as an explanation for why to not lose weight too fast.
B120YD seems to be a reference to the book Beyond the 120 Year Diet, by Dr. Roy Walford.
If the kidney and liver are to able remove the toxins, how did they get stored in the fat?
If your body accesses fat deposits for energy (i.e. you are losing weight), then the CRS idea is that toxins stored in those fat deposits will be released. If your kidneys and liver then remove the toxins from the blood, where do the toxins go? back into fat? into the urine? If the standard mechanism is back into fat, then that wouldn’t work if you were in the process of losing weight. If the standard mechanism is into the urine, then how did the toxins get into the fat in the first place?
It seems like the proponents of a lot of these “fad” type or extreme solutions are concerned about toxins, but more mainstream medicine does not recognize “toxins” as a problem.
There are a lot of contradictory definitions on the internet … this site seems authoritative:
http://www.fabriclink.com/Dictionaries/Textile.cfm
Flannel – A medium-weight, plain or twill weave fabric that is typically made from cotton, a cotton blend, or wool. The fabric has a very soft hand, brushed on both sides to lift the fiber ends out of the base fabric and create a soft, fuzzy surface.
by John Updike
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.
Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.