Coffee Klatch

There are all kinds of screensavers out there that you can download for free. Some are based on movies, others are games, some will cycle through pictures you’ve loaded on your hard drive. But my favorite screensaver of all time (apart from maybe Johnny Castaway) is called Fog On Your Desktop.

All it does is fog up your desktop. But what’s cool about it is you can adjust several factors in the fogging process. And you can even have it use your current wallpaper for the image that it fogs (instead of one of its random images or just your screen the way it is at the time), which is really nice when you combine it with something like WebShots and have it choose between a selection of quality images for your wallpaper.

Personally, I like to have images of European scenery for my wallpaper and I like to set the FOYD screensaver to SLOWLY blur everything. Not mixing the colors much, but only slightly offsetting things, so after a while you get an image that looks like you’re looking out a rain-covered window, with the image still vaguely there but blurred nicely.

Pretty cool. And the Fog On Your Desktop screensaver is FREE through sites like Tucows.

So there you go.

Current music: Briefcase Full of Blues, by The Blues Brothers

Until the 2007 NFL football season starts! Yes, some people are eagerly awaiting the new season. And Yahoo! has ALREADY got the Fantasy Football system up and running! Nothing like getting prepared early, I guess!
So anyway, in keeping with tradition, I’ve started a Fantasy Football league for this year. If you’d like to join, here’s the link.

In order to join the league, follow the link above or go to http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f1, click the “Sign Up Now” or “Get Another Team” button and follow the links to “Join a Custom League”. When prompted, enter the League ID# and password below.

League ID#: 100703
Password: java

Why should you join my Fantasy Football league?

1. Because it’s fun!
2. Because it’s easy to sign up and to play.
3. Because you don’t have to know tons about football (but you’ll learn some if you play).
4. Because it’s FREE!
5. Because Yahoo! manages everything for you, so all you have to do is pick your players each week.
6. Because it’s a fun way to interact with some new people and have a little competition that only lasts a few months.
7. Because if you’re in one league already, it never hurts to have a backup in case you start losing.
8. Because it might get you more interested in the sport.
9. Because it will give you a chance to beat on me!
10. Oh, and did I say that it’s fun?

Current music: Deep Breakfast, by Ray Lynch

Here are a couple funny videos from YouTube:

There’s a special kind of magic that happens in a family. I’m not talking about special relationships or warm fuzzy feelings. I’m talking about the magic of how things get used, broken, or lost. Or how cups or dishes appear in the living room. All without ANYONE having done it.

The adults can usually be believed when they say they didn’t do something small like leave a cup half full of milk in the living room. But when you have children and they ALL say it’s not theirs, THAT’S THE PROOF OF THE MAGIC! Nobody filled it and took it to the living room; it just appeared there. The same is true of things that get broken or used up. Nobody did it, but the evidence remains.

This special magic eludes many people, like singles and married couples that don’t have children. For that matter, families with only one child miss out on the magic, too. After all, if somebody knocked over a lamp and there’s only one kid in the house, it’s pretty simple deduction.
Those of you with two or more children, though, know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. We are co-participants in a special magic.

This is the magic that inspired Bill Keane to come up with his “ghost” characters Not Me and Ida Know.

For at least 5 years now I’ve been using Musicmatch for my online listening. When I first got into it I bought the lifetime license for the Jukebox so I’d never have to pay for an upgrade. The other component is the subscription element, which you DO have to pay for every year to renew. For $5 a month I can listen to almost any music that’s out there, create my own playlists with just particular artists or classical composers, and all that.

Well, today I started it up and found out that the Musicmatch Jukebox has now become Yahoo! Music Jukebox. Looks like SOMEbody got bought out.

They do say on their Musicmatch Migration FAQ that the same engineers that developed Musicmatch Jukebox are the leading developers of the Yahoo! Music Jukebox. And “many of the same programmers behind Musicmatch Radio now work with the top-notch developers of LAUNCHcast to deliver a great radio experience.

They have a “Migration Assistant” to help with the transition process. I used it and everything transferred flawlessly. And I’ll be able to keep my perpetual free upgrade.

One thing I didn’t like is that, as with all Yahoo! things, when I was installing, they wanted me to ALSO install a ton of other Yahoo! products, like the Yahoo! toolbar and other utilities. So when installing you have to be careful to UNcheck boxes before Yahoo! takes over everything on your computer. But then again, you can use the built-in Yahoo! Messenger to send songs to buddies, and that’s pretty cool!

Overall, it looks like it will be a positive move for my music-listening activities (which means almost constantly at work). Now I just have to get used to the new interface and way of getting to all that music. From what I read, there will be even more music to choose from with Yahoo!’s LAUNCHcast Plus. They do have much better customization and personalization options, which I think I’m going to enjoy. And since you can rate each song you listen to, your tastes can be rather specifically described and your recommendations better suited to those tastes. That’s all under “My Music Tastes.”

Oh, and, yes, there’s still a free version, so check it out at http://music.yahoo.com/jukebox/

The American Film Institute (AFI) has again published a list that film buffs are talking about. Last year it was the Top 100 Most Inspiring Movies. This year it was the Top 100 Movies of All Time. They first created this list 10 years ago and they’ve now updated it for the 10th Anniversary. Yes, there were some changes.

First, here’s the Top 10 of the list:

1. CITIZEN KANE
2. THE GODFATHER
3. CASABLANCA
4. RAGING BULL
5. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
6. GONE WITH THE WIND
7. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
8. SCHINDLER’S LIST
9. VERTIGO
10. THE WIZARD OF OZ

Citizen Kane is AGAIN at the top of the list. Raging Bull and Vertigo are new to the Top Ten list (in 1997, they were ranked #24 and #61). The Graduate and On the Waterfront WERE in the top ten, but have moved down to #17 and #19. Films that are new to the Top 100 list are The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (#50), Saving Private Ryan (#71), Titanic (#83), and The Sixth Sense (#89). Visit the AFI website for more trivia and info about the list.

And visit the AFI’s Top 100 Interactive Tour to see them all in groups of ten (requires Flash).

Okay, this is getting to be a big enough thing that I’d better have SOMEthing on my blog about it. Twitter is sort of a “micro-blogging” system. Micro because each entry is limited to 140 characters. That really gets you thinking about your word usage.
I’m not real big into Twitter. Mainly because it’s still pretty clunky and all the decent functionality seems to reside in outside programs that individuals have written with the Twitter API. Within the system you can’t even search for a friend. It’s REALLY hard and awkward to find a friend and add them. There are some tools, as I said, that people have created to help remedy that, but a decent social networking system should take some of those basic things on themselves.

Mostly, Twitter is about answering the question, “What are you doing?” It’s a way to stay in touch with other people without having to write long blog articles. Most of the entries (called “Tweets”) that people write are really NOT very interesting to people who aren’t close friends with them. Things like “I just woke up and really need a cup of coffee” show up a lot, and, frankly, I could hardly care less that somebody in New Jersey is having a hard time waking up.

That being said, there ARE some interesting uses that people are starting to put to Twitter. My favorite is TwitterLit, which each day posts one opening line of a book. No attribution or citation. Just the first sentence of a book. Of course, the entries also have links to Amazon records, so you can find out who wrote it and what book it’s from. Since the link takes you to Amazon through their Amazon Associates link, anybody who buys a book linked through Twitter generates income for the TwitterLit people. Great example of capitalism along with using a new technology to support and further literacy in general and books in particular.

Other interesting uses are posting daily quotes from comedians, etc. Sounds like the only way to keep a Twitter account regularly interesting is to take quotes from other people. Otherwise, for most people it requires some serious work adding (and FINDING) friends and getting people to add you before it gets really useful.

Here are some interesting links with discussions about Twitter or lists of Twitter tools:
Library Clips: Twitter Roundup
Twitter Fan Wiki (and list of Apps)
Welcome to the Twitterverse (from the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase)
5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good
Twitter Support (Help)

This morning I stumbled upon a blog post that had YouTube clips of The Maury Show where he had different people on that had really strange phobias. Things like pickles, balloons, mustard, and peaches. Like REALLY afraid, not just dislike. Click the link to view the weird phobias.

Granted, the people could have been faking (maybe they’re acting students or something), but the people on the show certainly weren’t trying to help them. They were just trying to get the audience to laugh at them about it. Oh, and then “thank you for being brave enough to confront your fear and be on our show.”

You know, this is just a modern-day version of the old-time carnivals, where people paid money to see “freaks.” Not really any difference, is there?

Current music: Tibet, by Waterbone

A “captcha” is one of those little boxes that have squiggly text in them that you’re supposed to type so that the form you’re trying to submit knows that you’re a real person and not one of those stupid BOTS that plague our networks with spam. You’ve probably seen these when you’ve tried to post a comment one someone’s blog or signed up for an online account of almost any type.

David Warlick posted this morning on his 2 Cents Worth blog about how books are being digitized and thousands of people are helping with these projects by using “captchas.” His article is Re-Capturing Books through Captcha…

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

Since the human eye (and mind) is more accurate than OCR programs, this kind of user-involved digitization project results in a much more accurate transcription. Plus, it takes advantage of Distributed Computing, only of a more organic nature. What a cool way to take a new-ish technology that sometimes seems like a pain and turn it into something useful!

Be sure to visit the ReCAPTCHA site to learn more about how the system works (it’s very ingenious) and to help by typing a few words in.
Current music: Soundtrack from The Time Machine

Yesterday my handbell ensemble, the Circle City Ringers, had a new group photo taken. (I say “my” handbell group only in the sense that I’m a member of the group.) The first set of pictures was taken over a year ago. Since then we’ve lost one member and gained five more. It was well past time for a new picture. We used a local company called Portrait Innovations who took pictures of us for an hour with two different outfits and quite a few different poses. At the end we got to choose which of the pictures we preferred; we got ten different pictures with 3 sheets each and three complimentary 10×13 pictures of any of the ten finals. We also got all ten raw images on a CD, so we can use it for the website, marketing table, promotional materials, etc. All for $159!

Above is one of our pictures, with all of our current members (minus one who had a perpetual schedule conflict). How cool!