Huh.

I would not have guessed that Kanye was a fan of classic lit, but here you have it:

50 Cent

If you're not following 50 Cent on Twitter, you're missing out on a lot of amused-head-shaking.  I was going to offer some excerpts, but they're too full of banned words to show here.

Internet fun

Since you all are enjoying Xtranormal, I thought I'd offer links to all the fun free tools I know about on the web.

Memes, Macros, Etc.

• Create your own motivational posters
• Meme generator
• Create a word cloud at Wordle (upload text and it'll size words according to how often they're used in the text)
• Custom animated text. There are oodles of sites that provide this. Here's one. And another.
• Add caption bubbles to an image.
• Add text to photo using popular ROLFBOT.
• Sign generator. Again, there are oodles, but here's one.
• Gif animations.
• Graphs that are easy to make and embed at Graphomatic

Artsy stuff

• Make-a-Flake
• Tartan plaid generator
• Make and color patterns at ColourLovers
• Draw "pencil" animations at Pencil
• Make your own cartoons at GoAnimate
• Textures

Less fun but useful is this html testbed.

I will update this post occasionally, without any update notation, as I learn of new things.

Party Post...

HAPPY 5th BIRTHDAY, SSJ



I baked us a cake, figuratively speaking. You'll be familiar with the dialogue:



Lastly, pretend our name is Terrance:

Using the power of the internet for good. This time: learning languages

Here's yet another way that social networking via the web can be harnessed for good. A person trying to learn a language can, through world-wide social networks, get access to native speakers. And, perhaps more importantly, one can get a motivational boost to learn:

Still, he finds it ultimately worthwhile to work with others on the Web and search for the better partners because that provides a real connection that cannot be found from a book or a simple computer program.

“When I have to do an exercise and submit it to the world, when I know that real people are going to look at it and comment on it, it really jacks up my brain,” he said.

Amazon Associates Program

Blogger is offering a new feature in conjunction with Amazon. You can register your blog/site with Amazon to be an "Amazon Associate", whereby if your blog/site drives a customer to Amazon (via clickable cover images that are linked to Amazon) and results in a book sale, you get a little kickback.

Seemed completely harmless, so I signed my book club web site up to be an Amazon Associate. I figured that at worst, I'd have a license to the cover images (for absolute sure) and a super-easy way to add the images. Also, Amazon provides code for a nifty widget that shows 10 book covers in a rotatable carousel GUI, and I have been hunting for just that sort of thing for both our book club site and for SSJ but haven't been able to find one that I can make work. At best, our book club might make 30-40 cents a year in kickbacks; our book club tends more toward borrowing books from our libraries.

I got an email from Amazon yesterday (emphasis added):

Hello Associate,

We noticed that you were accepted to the Amazon.com Associate Program several weeks ago but have yet to refer a sale.

Oh, Amazon, you crack me up.

Twitter as social commentary

Speaks for itself (here).

Testing the embedding of an audio player and audio file

Testing how to embed audio clips with an audio player. Here; have a bit of Slash talking about Adam:

Update: Cannot get this to work. Ought to be easier than embedding video, but it's not.

Update II:  As an unintended consequence of my efforts here, I may have turned the blog into a podcast.  Oy.  Why is this difficult when video is easy?  Back to the drawing board.

Go To FileFactory.com

Update III: OK. That's a huge and ugly player, but it works!!! I'll see if I can find a better looking one.

Update IV: Because it's so much easier to embed video, some user forums describe turning your audio file into a video by adding a picture, then uploading to youtube.



GRRRRR - doesn't work Test

I've finally reached my breaking point

Not sure if anyone else has taken the time to delete spam comments we've been getting over the past several months. Doing so has been part of my morning internet routine and I've finally gotten to the point where I'm getting VERY tired from doing so. I also hate waking up to see 10+ comment emails in my in-box, knowing that more than likely they are all spam comments.

I've made some changes to the blog settings to see if that will stop them - the changes shouldn't affect anyone, other than a certain named ex-blogger. Sorry....

Nine Inch Nails community video project

LJ has previously mentioned Trent Reznor's blog and Reznor's thoughts about band marketing.  Today, there's an announcement about the release of a fan video project (Part 1 of 32 starts on YouTube here):

dozens of fans and a network of thousands spanning the entire globe pooled their efforts to create this professional quality ... concert film, and have released it in every format from Blu-ray and DVD to iPod and YouTube.  It combines footage from all three shows and includes DVD menus, bonus footage, a PDF booklet and more.  That something of this scale was produced entirely by fans, on their own time, purely for the sake of giving something back to the community, is absolutely unprecedented.

The result is a full-length concert edit of their Lights in the Sky tour.

(H/t to Adam's bass player (and AMA kiss-ee) Tommy Joe Ratliff who re-tweeted Trent 's tweet about this.)

This is the wave of the future, letting fans create derivative works freely.  (As I opined before, Sony was way off the mark when they made the Singapore dancing group remove their youtube video of the choreographed dance to one of Adam's songs.)  NIN gets it right:  support it, promote it.

Testing email alert for new blog post

Stephanie and Michael should receive an email about this new post.

Testing new features in the new editor

There's a strikethrough feature: handy for snarky editorial comment.

There's a jump cut.  Follow me below the cut.

You have been invited back

You know who you are. I think I sent the invites correctly - if not, then I'll need instruction.And yes, the whole Adam Lambert/American Idol stuff bores me and I have absolutely no interest in it/him. The only subject that would bore me more is any discussion about "Twilight".

That being said, it's not an excuse for not posting about other things....such as the disaster that is the image of Tiger Woods.

I write for the wrong blog

as we all know. But I've just discovered where I belong, thanks to M.



BACONTODAY.com

Searching the blog

My experience has been that searching SSJ using the Blogger search box in the upper left corner of this window doesn't work very well. It fails to find everything that contains the search word. So I suggest we test an alternative search gadget. I put it below our This Day in History. I tested a couple searches and the results looked complete to me. See what you think.

Ultimate Productivity Blog

is here.

H/t SusanG at DKos.

Twitter's best days now behind it

First there was the U.S. Open curtailing players' tweets, and now WaPo is strangling its reporters' tweeting. Bummer. I loved the tweeting from reporters.

Speaking of bacon and internet nonsense

Look what I can do! I can speak in dancing bacon.

Kanye is everywhere

In case you haven't heard, there's a Kanye-ruins-people's-moments meme that's on fire about the interwebs. See more here and at knowyourmeme.com.

Update to post an example of the fun people are having with this. This is one of the silliest:



One more of the animal variety:

Plaid

I have kind of a thing for plaid. Here's a plaid generator: www.tartanmaker.com

You can add bands and select colors for the bands. The slide bars for each color affect the relative size of the stripes. Then you can download a .png of one repeat of your plaid (that you can "tile" in graphics software to make a bigger sheet of your plaid, say, for example, for a desktop background).

I'm doing this rather than reading David Brooks for a second time to figure out what he's saying.

Update to show examples: