Wired News interviews the creators of HomeStarRunner.com. Hearing the voice of Marzipan in a real interview is uncanny. If you haven’t seen HomeStarRunner.com, it’s an amazingly funny flash cartoon site run by a team of brothers. They live off of t-shirt sales and are way funnier than any million-dollar/episode sit-com.
Listen to the interview (QuickTime).
The Toyota Canada site pleasantly surprised me with this useful pricing chart showing the relative price range of most of their models. It might be even more useful if it were ordered by price rather than alphabetically, so I tried it out.
Regular readers will know that I work at the web development firm, silverorange. Several of us have weblogs of our own (Acts of Volition, CEOBlues.com, and newrecruit.org). We’ve now setup a weblog and site for our side-projects called silverorange labs.
As the introductory post explains, the silverorange team will be posting info on our weblog platform (used to publish Acts of Volition and discussed here previously), our photo gallery system, and other tools and toys.
Hello Dita. See a photo.
Tonight at 7:00PM at UPEI, Weblog Night in Charlottetown: a seminar introducing weblogs and personal web publishing. All welcome. Tune into CBC Radio PEI this afternoon to hear Peter Rukavina and Catherine Hennessey disussing their weblogs and the seminar.
Update: A good time was had by all. Peter has a good summary of the evening. We’ve also got a gallery of photos from the evening (thanks to all of the camera people).
Regardless of your views on space exploration, the fact that we can send a rocket to Mars is amazing to the point of being difficult to fathom. This makes the video of Nasa’s recent launch of a Delta II rocket en route to Mars all the more striking. They streamed live video from a camera mounted to the rocket, pointing down towards earth. The video shows the entire launch, uninterrupted, including the jettison of the solid rocket boosters.
Watch the video in RealVideo format. MSNBC has a slightly lower-quality and abbreviated version in Windows Media format if you don’t want to install RealPlayer.
Peter Rukavina of Reinvented.net is organizing a Weblog Night in Charlottetown on Monday, June 16. The aim of the evening is to introduce people to the world of weblogging. I’ll be speaking about how and why I publish Acts of Volition.
Reinvented.net has all of the details:
On Monday, June 16 at 7:00 p.m. a group of weblog publishers will be presenting an “introduction to the world of weblogs” in Charlottetown. The general public is invited to attend — everyone, young or old, Internet literate or not. The seminar will be held in Lecture Theatre A, Atlantic Veterinary College on the campus of the University of PEI.
Presenting will be Steven Garrity, Catherine Hennessey, Rob Paterson and me [Peter Rukavia].
We’ll each talk about our own weblogs (how they came to be, why we publish them, how we publish them, and so on), and we’ll demonstrate the tools we use to publish. They’ll be a healthy time for questions.
We’ve prepared a poster for the evening [30KB PDF file] that you can print off and post if you like (we appreciate help spreading the word).
The evening is sponsored by the University of PEI, Reinvented Inc., silverorange, The Renewal Consulting Group and Island Identity.
Come one, come all!
making pants – (mäk’ing pants) verb.
Another instalment in my “once in your life” series: Mad Cow Disease be damned, at least once in your life, you should juggle hamburgers (1.2MB AVI video).
Adam Kalsey kindly invited me to participate in a distributed writing project called Newly Digital: A distributed anthology of early computing experience. Adam has coordinated a group of writers who are posting about an early computing experience.
Christmas morning, 1993 – the Garrity family tears through a pile of gifts and revels in a sea of wrapping paper (I have a large family). After we were through exchanging our gifts, my parents lead us into the dining room. Right there on the dining room table, all setup, sat a fantastic new Packard Bell 20Mhz 486sx, with 2MB of RAM and a 100MB hard drive. It had a 3.5” disk drive and a 5-1/4” floppy (actually floppy) drive. It was pre-CD-ROM.
The bright colors of Windows 3.1 amazed us. We played solitaire all morning. The animation that played when you won Solitaire delighted us. My father still gauges the power of a new computer by how fast it renders the solitaire victory animation.
It had a Turbo button (after a few months, I figured out that green meant slow and yellow meant fast).
A couple of years later, we upgraded from 2MB to 6MB of RAM. Four megabytes of RAM cost $400. $100 per megabyte. It now costs about $0.20/megabyte. The PS/2 keyboard from that old Packard Bell was still used every day at my parents’ house until I bought them a new keyboard this past Christmas. That keyboard lived through 9 years, three computers, and three operating systems.
On that old 486 I discovered the web and designed my first website for-pay.
I paid $45.95 US for an early beta version of Windows 95 (then codenamed “Chicago” or “Windows 4.0”). It came on 37 floppy disks (honestly).
When did you get your first computer? I’m not looking to see who had the oldest computer – I’m more interested in what made your first computer memorable.
Other participants in the Newly Digital project: