As proof to Scott of my video embedding skills, and also as an indulgence as the partial owner of my own blog, I present to you a video of my son singing the Blues Clues Mail song. It was filmed about nine years ago.

Steve

My dear brothers,

Because of your incessant whining I have installed a plugin on our site cleverly called “Smart YouTube“.

Now if you wish to embed a post with a Youtube video, simply copy the URL (not the “embed” code, the URL in the address bar of the video you are viewing) paste the URL into your post and then change it THUSLY:

Change the “http://” at the beginning of the URL to httpv:// <<<< SEE THE “v”? NOTICE THE “v”?

Sincerely,

Scott

You are walking through a mall and all of a sudden you walk past a guy talking on a…banana (double take). Thats right on a banana. And then a couple walks past holding hands while one of them talks on a banana phone. Then you see someone dialing someone up on a banana phone. Alternate Reality? Possibly. But more likely you are in on a gag (or mission) being conducted by Improv Everywhere, the improvisational group (or more like a movement) founded by SC native, Charlie Todd. Charlie and the group became an internationally famous internet phenomenon about4 weeks when it posted this video of its mission in which the agents (as the participants are called) froze in place for 5 minutes in the middle of a cold Saturday afternoon in Grand Central Station:

Some interesting details about the mission can be found here.

According to the website over 4.7 million people have viewed the video on YouTube.

My favorite is their Food Court Musical Mission in which random people randomly break out in song and dance in the middle of a busy mall. The unexpected response of Mall Security is priceless:

I have a good friend who is really into, and quite good at, Improv comedy. I hope to have an interview with him about the genre available within the next couple of weeks.

Enjoy,

Steve

The Onion has detailed here the failure of Activision’s Virtual Instrument game: Sousaphone Hero. This is a big surprise given such innovative features detailed in the article as this:

In the career mode, you can rise from playing in park gazebos for church picnics to performing in the halftime show of the Harvard-Yale game,” Hendleman said. “If you score enough points, you can unlock the ultimate level: playing in the John Philip Sousa–led Marine Band at Grover Cleveland’s inauguration.

Hopefully they will have more luck with their forthcoming Panpipes Hero VR Game.

Steve

UPDATE:  I have removed the direct link to The Onion article due to offensive content on the page.  The link now directs to another blog post about it.

Read this news article from the Rocky Mountain News:

Don’t Waste Company Time Looking For a Bathroom…just use our company supplied Urinal Bags.

To install the Dilbert Firefox plug-in go here.

Seth

I am not writing this post from a browser window. No…I am using Cool Tool #2. Blog Desk is a very lightweight windows utility for posting blogs.

It loads fast and for a quick post it might be preferred to firing up your browser…going to you web site…logging in…going to the write page.

It is not perfect…for example…it doesn’t show sub-categories…so even for this post I am going to have to go in and edit the categories. And for posting with images (although I think it can be setup to do it) I think I would prefer the Wordpress Write page. (Another reason I will be editing this post after posting.) But, those conditions notwithstanding, it is a good tool for short, quick posting of ideas that pop into you head…I have enjoyed using it.

To download it click here.

Click the image below to see a screen shot:

Seth

My daughter sent me a link to this picture:

How long would YOU last in the vacuum of space?

Enjoy!

Seth

UPDATE - Today’s competition was the regional one and below I have marked how they did.
They were competing at the 7th - 8th grade level.
Hint - Every website won!!

Of my kids. No. Not my real kids. Although I am very proud of all five of them because they are, without exception, AWESOME KIDS.

But in this case I am talking about the kids I have been working with at the local middle school wherein I have been volunteering to teach web design for the last few years.

Tomorrow they will be going to their regional technology competition, where the will be competing in web design, robotics, programming, and General Applications. Here are some links. One of the requirements I made for the kids is that the look, feel and formatting for their sites use something called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Thats a lot harder than the older kind of web pages. All of them met my requirement. Plus they wrote the content and used other applications and tools such as The GIMP, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash.

Today I did a final review of their work and all I have to say is . . .
WOW!! Check out the links below and tell me they won’t win.

HONORABLE MENTION — FOOD - This is a team site using almost all AJAX. In other words, very sophisticated using the cutting edge technology used by Google, Yahoo and other big web companies to make fast and interactive web pages for building web-based applications. It has a random fact generator (Did You Know?) As well as an quizlet tool. The hard-core technical stuff here was all done by a 14 year old.

HONORABLE MENTION — ALTERNATIVE ENERGY - This is a team site that makes extensive use of another technology called Flash. Its only the most commonly used 3rd party add-on for websites to make them interactive and, well, “flashy”. For example, every time you watch a video on YouTube, you are using Flash. This site also has great content and is Standards Compliant. Impressive!

FIRST PLACE — HUMAN TRAFFICKING - This is a team site. Standards Compliant (Click on the two W3C images at the bottom of the home page).Great use of Flash (The Header. Plus see what happens when you click on the “Where is it Link”). Random Fact box. Great Content. WOW!

FIRST PLACE — DANCE - This is an individual site on Dance. Simple but very nicely done. With good use of CSS.

THIRD PLACE — ANCIENT EGYPT - This is an individual site that makes good use of CSS. and has a nice layout.

I will update this post when we have the results of their competetion.

Scott

I found this very interesting link on Wired Magazine about a coupla Japanese architects who have managed to turn PowerPoint presentations into an art form!. There’s a YouTube example supplied with the article.

I think I could really get into that.

Read about it here.

HT to another Joel Spolsky site…the Business of Software blog.

Seth

Just askin’.

Scott

My brother Scott has posted to a very useful screen cleaner over at his blog.  Just click over to the blog and then click on the LINK at the bottom of the post.

Steve

PS. It is very funny!

I got an email alert from a friend notifying me of a credit card scam earlier today.  My default position about email alerts (or any email that says please forward  this email to everyone you know) is ”it’s probably a fake”.  It almost always is.  So if you ever get an email telling you to forward an email to everyone you know, here is a checklist for how to process it:

1. Go to www.snopes.com and see if the fraud alert is real.  The Snopes folks do a very good job of keeping up with all the latest rumors and frauds.  The search engine could be better but usually just copying the subject line of the fraud alert will get you the goods.
2. If you fraud alert is real and you think it is worth letting all your friends and family know about it, then by all means forward it.  But always send it using blind carbon copy (or BCC:). If you forward it any other way, you are exposing the emails of all your friends and family to potential spammers and even viruses.  Those email addresses have the potential to be seen by potentially millions and are easily harvested by those with designs on your wallet.  So don’t expose your friends emails to spammers unless you know they really do harbor deep insecurities about size and performance.
3. IMHO, it is tacky to forward emails that are political in nature except to a well-defined group that you know share your political opinions.  The possible exception may be alerts related to immanent legislative action.  

As it turns, out the alert I recieved this morning was for a very real and very clever fraud.  I could see myself easily falling for this one.  You can find it here on www.snopes.com.  The moral is never give your credit card security code to anyone (except for online purchases), even if a caller claims to be from Visa or Mastercard and knows your credit card information. 

Steve