I’m currently treating myself to a song a week from Amazon MP3 for progress on an important and time-sensitive project. The song that I downloaded this week was “Sunny Came Home”
I wasn’t initially sure who sings this song (Shawn Colvin), so I searched for it and found a video on YouTube. I’ve been meaning to have a copy of this particularly remember this haunting, melodic song and its harsh beat for a while.
If it sounds too good to be true… not that I would necessarily call something that creates unemployment “good”.
Obama sounds populist themes in Virginia bus tour – Yahoo News
By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 14 minutes ago
MARTINSVILLE, Va. – Democrat Barack Obama is sounding tough populist themes on the campaign trail, pledging to create union jobs to build energy-efficient cars and to end tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas.
Jevons Paradox, anyone?
A simple example: cost and speed pressure means that when you get your car serviced, it’s unlikely you’ll be greeted by the mechanic himself, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, telling you exactly what he did to your car. Instead, you’ll get a difficult to decipher printout.
Why not use the technology to give more?
The mechanic can have a simple digital voice recorder. As he works, he can describe each thing he’s testing and what he finds. You can then email the digital file to Iowa, India or Israel, have it typed up and beautifully formatted and waiting for the customer when he returns. How can that not be worth the $1.50 it would cost?
- Seth Godin, “Old marketing with new tools“
This is not a complete game; it’s just an animation as it is. But it’s not bad considering I knew virtually nothing about Haxe or Actionscript just yesterday (Ok, I knew Actionscript was a JS varient…)
I’ve been doing some research on Flash games, and found someone with a lot of sense on the subject, but he doesn’t know much about capitalism:
Capitalism: Some people pointed their finger at me saying I am doing “capitalism”. Let me explain one thing: monetizing a Flash game is not capitalism. It’s almost an utopy that reminds me the early 80’s when lonely programmers in their rooms/garages made games that we still play today, in some retrogaming sites or with new fancy graphics.
Some people have a generally dim view of capitalism, especially in Europe. But still, this is capitalism. You use capital (human capital in the form of existing libraries and programming tool, and the physical capital of computer systems), you create something useful to other people, you make money off of it. Simply operating at a smaller scale within the market doesn’t magically make you a non-particpant in the market.
The word of the day? Spoony. The band website I just happened to be looking at in another browser tab when I found out? The Spoony Bards.
FanCruft, my anime website, has just gotten a much-needed facelift. Here are before and after pictures:
When I first made Fancruft, I wanted to make it look good even in Internet Explorer 5 running on a fairly low-resolution screen (640×480). Many “Web 2.0″ concepts were new; RFC4627 was published just earlier that year. People were still advocating Smarty for PHP templating. I had been a Wikipedia administrator for maybe around a year and a half, and had not yet read The Wisdom of Crowds.
A lot of works still needs to go into FanCruft, but it now has a fairly modern face. IE 5 is no longer a concern, and the site now renders much more consistently across IE 7, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera, and Safari. IE 6 doesn’t seem to understand fixed positioning and misinterprets it as absolute positioning, but this is still acceptable. The site is now designed for a screen of 800×600, but linearizes fairly well and should still be acceptable on smaller screens.
The independent “scattered” buttons have been replaced by a bar with a uniform height and no margin. Min-width is now supported well enough that I don’t mind just setting it and forgetting it, instead of using the IE5/6 hacks of yesteryear. Also, the buttons now glow gold on hover; yay!
The fine print at the bottom of the page has been cut down to a minimum, and the RSS icon now hovers on screen, just in case it isn’t noticed in the browser’s address bar. Overall, FanCruft is sleek and good looking.
image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace