DL

November 27, 2007

Robo Guitar

Filed under: Music — Dave @ 10:54 am

robotguitar Gibson is set to introduce the first automatically tuning guitar. I wonder what took so long? This seemed like an obvious idea to me since the electronic tuner was invented.

This is different than the Fender Strat VG guitars which are more like the line 6 variax in that it uses electronics to pitch shift the strings into different tunings.

This guitar actually has motorized tuning pegs to bring the guitar into any of several tunings.

I also think it has a beautiful finish.

No doubt it will be too expensive for me though.

Robo Guitar

Princess Cruise Lines Customer Service

Filed under: Uncategorized — Dave @ 10:53 am

I know there are worse things happening in the world (the Iraq war for one) but these kinds of stories just make me feel so sorry for people.

This 78 year old woman saved for 10 years to go on an Alaskan cruise through Princes Cruise Lines. She let Princess book the air flights and ended up with this tortuous route through three different flights.

Well, something went wrong and she ended up missing the cruise. It’s Princess Cruise Lines policy to keep all the money. Apparently that’s an industry standard. The airline refunded the money but since PCL booked the flights, they’re keeping that too.

What PCL did might be legal but I don’t know how a corporation, which after all is made up of people, can be so heartless. I can’t imagine the disappointment of saving $250 a year, over 10 years for something that gets snatched away from you, along with the money.

How do corporations become so sociopathic?

Story vie the Consumerist

November 18, 2007

Posted from Windows Live Writer

Filed under: Technology,blogging — Dave @ 3:55 pm

I heard some tech podcast and they seemed very impressed with this tool.  It allows you to write your post offline and post later when you are online.  I’m curious about what’s so cool about it.  One clear advantage I can see is that you can write posts in a situation where you can’t be online, but that’s not the advantage they were talking about and it’s not such an advantage to me since I’m very rarely at a computer that’s not online.

Another advantage I can imagine is, if you have several blogs and they are all on different platforms, you can have one interface that works for all your blogs.  I do have a couple of blogs but they’re both WordPress and I’m not considering any other platforms, so that’s not much of an advantage for me either.

Yet another advantage is, if your blog’s editor is poor, this does seem to have a nice, responsive and full featured WYSIWIG interface.  Again, that doesn’t do much for me, the WordPress editor is pretty nice as well.

If you write your posts over a period of time and your blog platform doesn’t provide the ability to save drafts, Live Writer lets you save a local copy.  WordPress does allow drafts.

WindowsLiveWriter

This is what the interface looks like.  I just inserted this picture of the interface.  I’ll admit, if this works, it was much easier than putting a picture into a post with wordpress.

The text is wrapping and I just had to select a wrap option rather than going into the HTML code and adding a class to the img tag.

Another pretty sweet touch is, when you set it up, it attaches to your blog and pulls down information about your blog configuration.  For example, it pulled down my blog’s categories and the list is available in Live Writer.  Pretty sweet.

There are shortcut links on the right for inserting common items, such as pictures.  Also hyperlinks, tables, maps (microsoft maps, not google maps), tags (but I can’t tell quite what they mean by tags) and video.

It’s free, but it’s windows only.  So far I like it well enough that I’ll use it at least for my next post.

November 8, 2007

Timed Art

Filed under: Music — Dave @ 12:56 pm

I saw a lifehacker post about NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month, which is this month (November). Then my girlfriend told me about NaSoAlMo, which is National Solo Album Month. Write and record an original solo album (of about 30 minutes) in the month of November. So I started looking around for other timed art events and found that this seems to be a “thing” people do.

Most of these have a specific start and end time while a few can occur on your own schedule as long as you adhere to the time limit. Also most of them have no judging – it’s just a matter of finishing.

Here’s a few that I found:

Song Fight
New week a new fight. They post a title, you email them a 128kbs MP3 song and the internet votes.

Album a Day
Write and Record 20 minutes, or 30 songs in a 24 hour period. This one does not have a common time period.

the 3-Day Novel Contest
A more ambitious challenge. Write a novel in 3 days over labor day weekend. It’s actually a Canadian based contest but the world is invited. The winner gets published.

Script Frenzy
Write a 20,000 word script running about 120 minutes over the month of June.

24 hour comics
If you like pictures with your stories, here you can attempt a 24 page comic book in 24 hours. Any 24 hours will do.

48 Hour Film Project
This is a bigger deal. Sponsored by Visa and it tours from town to town. You have 48 to produce a short film of 4-7 minutes. You’re given a genre, a character, a line of dialog and a prop to help ensure the creation occurs in the alloted time. The 48 hours must encompass screen writing, rehearsal, all filming and editing and delivery to the judges.

The National Film Challenge
Is basically the same thing but, doesn’t travel from city to city. It happens worldwide in October. Also it doesn’t seem to have a big sponsor.

Powered by WordPress