Cathy went to visit Sarah in New York City. The grandparents basically had Amy and Evan for the entire trip and Noah for much of the trip. That left Tommy and me at the house alone. Tommy, like Freakzoid, gets sucked into the Internet so I basically had the house to myself for duration of her trip minus the time I spent for clients and the time I spent juggling at Boo at the Zoo. So what happened in that time? The yard had a major cleaning of the junk which had been accumulating for a decade. The house received a sweeping and mopping. Then there was this surprise for Cathy:
Tag: Video
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Minister and family on mission to keep violent video games from youth
On October 20, 2007 a tragedy occurred. A 16 year old had been home bound with a staph infection. During his time from school, he secretly purchased Halo 3 and played up to 18 hours a day. Discovered by his parents, the game was confiscated. He then shot them. The mother died; the father survived. Now the pastor and his family crusade against violent video games.
The family is now on a collective mission to keep violent video games from the hands of America’s youth.
"I’m gonna fight them," says Petric of the video game producers. "They put weapons in the hands of our children that teaches them murder, and that killing is okay." (emphasis added)
This is a horrific crime. I’m making no excuse for any party and, although studies have shown no link between violent video games and real life violence, I am not defending the games either. I take issue with the statement that " put weapons in the hands of our children" because, in this case, the weapon clearly came from the father.
Daniel, who had raided his father’s lockbox, raised his 9 mm handgun — loaded with hollow point rounds…
Daniel used his father’s key to unlock the lockbox and take back his game. Daniel also took his father’s 9 mm handgun along with the game.
I am not suggesting that we take away people’s guns. This is not an attack upon the second amendment. I am suggesting that this crime would have possibly been prevented with an appropriate gun safe, gun locks, or not having a weapon in the house at all. Please lock up your guns in a way your children cannot access them. Please teach your children gun safety.
It’s not the game. It’s not the gun. It’s not the parents. It’s the person holding the gun.
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Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
A Tiny Day in the Jackson Hole Backcountry from Tristan Greszko on Vimeo.
This looks like something that belongs on Adult Swim.
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Your thoughts on embedded WMVs with progress bars
Let me reach out to the community for a moment. I’m trying to deliver a movie to be played in a web browser. The movie must play in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox and Safari. The movie sits on a LAMP box. The movie is roughly 35MB windows media (WMV). jQuery is available. The challenge: Deliver the movie to the client without the client impatiently clicking the play button repeatedly (elevator syndrome), reloading the page, or giving up and leaving. This implies some sort of progress bar or loading spinner. I can’t seem to get a loader to work to save my life.
I’ve tried:
- Various attributes on the object and embed tags
- Using jQuery plugins like jQuery Media plugin and jMedia
- Looked into other players and ruled out Flowplayer and SWFObject2
- Tried getting Ajaxy but the document finishes before the movie completely downloads and the spinner quits too early.
- I’m testing WVX streaming right now but it’s not looking good.
- Some other stuff
The goal is simple: Take a large wmv movie and present a loading indicator until the movie is cached in the user’s browser. This one is giving me a real hard way to go.
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Outlook Dim
I am retiring Outlook as my email client and moving entirely to GMail. I’ve used numerous clients over the years including Fidonet and the other BBS packages (my first email experiences), sendmail at the command line, emacs, cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook, and others I can’t remember. Outlook express isn’t bad if you are simply checking email. If you are doing scheduling, group collaboration, todo lists and the works, then you should be using Outlook (not Express). As much as it goes against my philosophy of "be in control of your content," I think that using an email client and downloading email to your desktop is old school. Collaboration is moving to portals such as BEA’s Plumtree and Microsoft’s SharePoint. Meetings are done online now with Webex, GoToMeeting, Skype (I am djuggler), Adobe’s ConnectNow, and even Microsoft’s instant messenger using ShareView. Communication is being accomplished through instant messengers and in some cases instant messengers are being replaced by services such as Twitter. Text messaging is frequently favored over a voice call as it reduces the urgency of the conversation and can provide additional benefit such as retention of information (if I give you a phone number via voice you have to memorize it or write it down..in a text message the number is stored). I can make argument that email is in its death bed. Much like snail mail and fax, it won’t go away completely but is bound to be ignored in favor of better technologies.
The way we communicate is changing rapidly. Video conferencing over mobile phones was promised by AT&T last fall in the Motorola RARZ v3xx and
looks to be delivered on July 11, 2008 with the new iPhoneswill come sooner than later. Collaborative tools are far more powerful than hording information on single machines. And using third party or server tools to store information makes the information portable and available to you from any computer and any location. A couple of decades ago Bill Gates said the personal computer would evolve into a terminal and all software and data would be managed on network connected servers. He was right.ps. I didn’t forget IMAP but that’s for a different post.
Note: During my transition from Outlook to Gmail I may overlook some email. If you have emailed me and been ignored, please resend your message as I am having to adjust some email habits in light of the different way Gmail handles email.
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Video Comments Now Allowed
Thanks to the power of Seesmic, you can now comment on any Reality Me post by simply using your webcam. Below the regular comment box, you will find a link "add a video comment"
If you have a Seesmic account, you can log in and post a video. I have also opened comments up for anonymous comments which means you don’t have to have a Seesmic account. Try it out! You will be prompted to allow the plug to use your webcam and nothing gets installed on your computer. I have heard that there may be a problem with the video commenting and WordPress 2.5.1 but I am sure that will be addressed rapidly.Update: If you add Seesmic video comments to your blog, be sure to immediately add yourself to the wiki. It takes only seconds. I could have been within the first 100 but ended up being like 187 because I waited to look at the wiki.
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The Internet Can Shutdown Now
Best comment e’var!
Somewhere, a fat, nerdy kid with a broom stick in hand feels utterly vindicated. [Source by Jon]
The comment was a response to the The Most Amazing Video Of A Girl Playing Star Wars On The Trumpet… EVER video seen below.