Two Cents and a Thousand Words

Is it just me, or does is this frame from the (amazing) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory trailer seem like a reference to a Burton/Depp collaboration from the past?

So I’m sitting in 330 Merrill Hall listening to a lecture by MTAA (M. River and T. Whid, who are both really great guys). I had the chance to talk to them during my capstone class; M. River gave me some good feedback about my project.

Anyway.

The collaboration between the two artists has been going on for a long time; they’re now showing some of the older work they did (even some stuff with CU-Seeme… oooh). They’ve done some really innovative stuff over time; one of my favorites is Website Unseen, which allowed you to buy a site title and have MTAA build it for $100 (with no input from the buyer, of course). They’re really funny guys, if you haven’t figured that much out already.

I really enjoy watching their work; they throw in some humor with some really cool implementations. It’s actually the kind of stuff I like doing, in a way; that’s pretty scary, because I’ve never really considered myself an artist. But what is art? (and what is new media?)

It’s amazing what you can send through the mail these days. 🙂

From Google News:

UPDATE (4/3 @ 12:30pm): Looks like it just takes some time for news to filter through the mainstream; now there are 5,350 sources for the Pope’s death and 2,554 for the “remind me again why we are still covering this” story.

It’s a heated battle already in the annual quest for the most outrageous prank. All the usual suspects are involved.

If you’re trying to keep up with the day’s events, here’s a quick recap: Google’s Infinity+1 storage plan over at Gmail, complete with napkin sketches; BoringBoring; more banner ads for an annual fee at Homestar Runner (including a great trial game); Google’s move into the soft drink area with Google Gulp; and an amazing discovery by NASA.

Apparently Microsoft’s even getting into the act with a mouse that hovers, or flies, or something.

News as it develops today: Urgo’s list of April Fool’s Jokes on Websites.

Perhaps the best find so far is Google’s “freedom” to express themselves on the Google Gulp FAQs. “I mean, isn’t this whole invite-only thing kind of bogus? Dude, it’s like you’ve never even heard of viral marketing.”

Last December, new media professor and Pool head lifeguard Jon Ippolito spoke at the School of the Arts Digital Media Center at Columbia University. Jon’s lecture is entitled “Hacking Copyright for Fun and Profit”; he provides a great overview of current copyright issues. He also explains the Pool in depth (ha, ha) and shows off a couple of the projects we’d been working on. I’m also quite honored that he used me as an example for Jerome Knope’s Pool grapher and showed my “Use the Source” Flash remix.

If you’re trying to keep up with copyright, Creative Commons, or the Pool, I highly recommend you watch it.

Yahoo acquires Flickr. Can’t say that wasn’t predictable.

It’s a really good time to create a useful personal Web service. I hope the Ludicorp people are enjoying their Big Piles of Cash. I just hope it doesn’t change.

My friend Bananas started out at the Bear Necessities store here on campus and has had quite a trip. He’s been from Maine to New Jersey to New York to Pennsylvania to Louisiana, and now he’s landed in Washington. His journey so far is 3,932 miles. He’s posing in the picture above with his new friend Meeka somewhere in Washington in a picture taken by Geocaching user Outward Hounds.

How do I know this? Bananas is a Geocaching Travel Bug. People move him from geocache to geocache around the country (or the world). His mission was to visit other colleges, but he’s been all over the place.

Check out his progress on his very own Web page.

The West Wing, “The U.S. Poet Laureate”

The Senate voted to drill ANWR. And yes, The West Wing is a fictional television program, but they researched it. To make things worse, the “case” for drilling can be easily summed up as “we need oil.”

Meanwhile, supporters’ clever “How long would your state run on ANWR oil?” question, unfortunately, doesn’t stand up considering that they’re using the “best” possible predictions and – oh yeah – they’re going state by state. Let’s just give all ANWR oil to, say, Indiana. Yay, 68 years of oil! Tough luck for the rest of the country. 10.4 billion barrels divided by 18 million barrels (U.S. consumption per day) = 577 days (about a year and a half). Woo. Glad to know that we’ll be set from January 2020 through June 2021, considering that it will take 15 years for the oil to reach market. Who knows if we’ll even need oil by then.

Get a Prius. Or get an Echo. The caribou and Mommy Earth will thank you.

Upon listening to a new-to-me song (REM’s “At My Most Beautiful” {iTunes|Amazon}), I realized that I’d do something I do fairly often: head to Google, do a search, and try to find lyrics. Fortunately, Apple’s AppleScript environment allows some automation of these routine tasks. I went online to see if I could code one of my own; before I could start researching, I found Google Lyric Search at the amazing Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes page (for the record, I’ve used a bunch of his scripts for other tasks before).

I was 95% of the way there – and more quickly than I could have imagined. I changed its browser preference from Safari to Firefox using a small script from g-WH!Z and made the button default to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” behavior. The result was a menu item that automatically opens the first search result in a Firefox window; in most cases, this means that lyrics are literally a click away.

I asked Doug if I could share my tweak. He agreed, so here it is:

Google Lyric Search (Firefox) (ZIP)

(p.s. donate to the guy using PayPal, Kagi, or Amazon in the right column of his page. he’s cool.)