I came across this crazy video on a blog belonging to someone who calls herself simply, Mom. She wrote a comment on one of my posts yesterday, so I checked out her blog....as you do. It goes by the name of Family Adams Magazine - and she has a couple of review posts of M Night Shyamalan's latest movie, The Happening - with spoilers. So don't read these if you're intending to catch up with the movie at some point.
But more recently than those reviews, she's posted the video I was talking about. It's sung throughout to the tune of The Times They Are a-Changing, and the words are subtitled at the bottom in case you miss any of the subtleties.
It's cleverly done, quite witty and doesn't let anyone off the hook. At the end it tells you how you can make a similar video by going to JibJab.com. JibJab seems to specialise in pre-made videos that allow you to substitute your own face/head for the one that's already there. And then, using the old Monty Python technique of dropping the jaw of the face, they make it look like you're singing - in a loose sort of way. You don't even need the IQ of an airhead to do it (that's IQAir for short)
I was working on the Internet the other night when various sites became unavailable. One or two stuck with me, but after I closed the browser down, I couldn't get anything to load up again.
I tried undoing all the plugs and replacing them and checking all the wires and so on - the usual sort of thing. You always think it's a hardware problem. In fact the Internet was still functioning, because an AVG update went ahead and did its thing quite comfortably. It was only the browser that was out of action.
I discovered a temporary solution, resetting the browser back to its default. But while this worked perfectly on that occasion, when I tried it again, the browser was dead again.
Finally, by chance, I happened to be talking to the IT guy who fixed my computer up a few weeks back. He suggested it might be a problem that had arisen between Zone Alarm and the latest Microsoft updates.
Fortunately we have a laptop in the house as well as the PC, and in checking out Zone Alarm on Google I found reference to recent problems - as well as some solutions. I tried the easiest: switching Zone Alarm Internet Zone Security down to Medium, and voila!, everything worked again.
To be on the safe side I downloaded the latest Zone Alarm upgrade, and it looks as though we're all back to normal. But how would I have found all this out without a chance encounter with the IT guy?
It's like being foreclosed on and not having anyone to give you foreclosure help!
Rather amazingly I was alerted to a video about Australians invading New Zealand by the Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog, which usually writes about stuff related to Christianity. I mean, the last several posts have been on such topics as Pope Benedict’s visit to Oz and the best of the biographies of the man; Faith; Alan Jamieson talking about his recent book, Chrysalis and the way it looks at Christians who, for one reason or another, no longer go to church; and St Brendan.
Apparently on a talk show in Oz, they proposed that a couple of ad agencies should do a short video promoting a reason for Australia to invade NZ. The two agencies came up with quite different approaches, both of them very well done…and funny. (Australians being funny? Yeah, I know it’s hard to believe.)
I had reason to come across the site, isthisyourname.com, again tonight, and thought, after having checked out the name that came up, it might be interesting to see what results I got by putting my name in.
Of course the stuff that comes up is really pretty ridiculous - like, do I need to know what my name is in ASCII binary? Probably not
This should really have gone on my other blog, WorkReport, since that usually talks about things green, but I put it on here by mistake and couldn't be bothered to shift it again.
The only person I’ve known with the surname of Pickens was the actor Slim Pickens (perhaps most famous for riding a nuclear warhead at the end of Dr Strangelove). I’m not sure if T Boone Pickens is any relation, but he sure talks in the same way
I don’t have a lot to do with memory cards. I think the only card I ever use is the one that goes in the digital camera. (It’s an XD for those people who have to have this sort of info.) It’s fairly small but apparently by no means the smallest available.
Seemingly there’s a much smaller card than this. It’s called the micro SD and it’s 15mm × 11mm × 0.7mm. About the size of a fingernail, apparently. (A fingernail rather than a thumbnail, that is, and presumably the fingernail of a person with smallish fingers
My son alerted me the other day to a blog post about type designers, including one New Zealander, Kris Sowersby. The article itself is worth checking out, if only for the great type faces or fonts that are on display.
But I went to Kris’s site as well. There, under Retail typefaces are four styles: Newzald, National, FF Meta Serif, and Feijoa. I can’t reproduce them here, unfortunately, because I can‘t transfer the fonts to this site. So go to the site itself and take a look.
Next in line are the custom typefaces, that is fonts made for particular customers. Hardys, Hokotohu, Victoria Sans and Serif, NZ Rugby Chisel (ain’t that a name!), Rewards and Eliza. Hardys was made for Constellation Wines in Australia; Hokotohu was made for the Hokotohu Moriori Trust (Moriori as opposed to Maori. The Moriori were an earlier people in NZ, and seem to have been pretty much wiped out
The Internet is full of toys of all sorts. One I discovered the other day was the Google Zeitgeist. This mightn’t be what everyone else calls a toy, but it appeals to me, with my leanings towards stats and such.
The site is broken up into sections and the one I happened to have a link to was the one that looked at the top searches for Who is…? What is…? and How To….?
Got the word from Firefox Mozilla today: I am one of 8,002,530 people who downloaded Firefox 3 in a single day, and helped Firefox set a new Guinness World Record.
8,002,530. Crikey, that's around twice the population of New Zealand, or 002 percent of the world's population...I think
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