Front Row

Apple has a cool little controller for multimedia (god, I feel stupid typing that word, but it's appropriate) called Front Row that I had no experience with since I didn't really ever notice it before.

But man, yesterday instead of command ~, I accidentally hit command escape. Front Row launched and I was happy it did. Very neat.

Then I went on a hunt and found this post by Paul Stamatiou about getting Front Row to play all those nasty little decoders XviD, DivX and such. Mind you, this was last April. As in 2006.

So I emailed my friend Warren about it and he promptly sent back an email with one link . Perian. Sweet.

Leap Years

In investigating making an age of majority checker, I started thinking about leap years. I know of one person total that was born on February 29th. Statistically speaking, there are bound to be more.

Anyway, here's a good little function that'll return true if you have a leap year. and false if you don't

function checkYear(year) {
return (((year % 4 == 0) && (year % 100 != 0)) || (year % 400 == 0)) ? 1 : 0;
}

Declan is 11 months old

"Times they are a-changin'", as the bard says.

Declan is now tentatively walking. He'll do laps of the floor if you give him a finger for support. He's also walking on his own for short distances that are lengthening every day. He was sick the past few days, but apparently (Libs took him to her parents on tuesday) that's sorted itself out and he's on the mend. Mind you, I was sick myself.

But he's still cute as all get out.

gSkinner in PV3D

Grant posted about some experimentation he's doing with Papervision3D.

Nice work, G!

Amateur, shmamateur.

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR

Host Nora Young in conversation with Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture. While the potential of the internet is all the rage, Keen, a Silicon Valley alumnus, has written a polemic arguing that everything we know about the Internet is dangerous to the very foundations of western civilization. Keen believes that the democratization of the internet means an end to expert opinion, the very notion of truth, reasonable political discourse and the very business models that have allowed music, literature, movies, television and culture itself to flourish. Nora Young spoke with Andrew Keen from a studio in San Francisco.

This interview annoyed me to no end. Keen has a polished English accent and spoke with such venom in his voice towards an industry that obviously treated him very well. The very phrase "cult of the amateur" indicates that he believes he's above me because he's a published author. Bah. I'm an amateur through and through, Andrew. I'd trust a bunch of amateurs who have no vested interest to give me a more honest opinion than a paid journalist who's employer has proven leanings one way or the other.

In true amateur fashion, bite me, Andrew.

Personal Pet Peeve

This may not bother you, but when I have one of my let's surf blogs moments, I get so perturbed by spelling mistakes. It's understandable that someone may have missed something, but for the love of Pete, read your post before you publish. Take a few minutes. I read a couple of posts on one blog and was mentally tsk tsk tsking, when one post was titled What do you do with a BA in English?. I was shocked. Every post has/had at least three spelling and/or grammatical errors. How can you possibly have a degree in a language of which you have so little mastery?

Then I clicked one of her links to another blog of one of her friends. The title of her entire blog had drownding in it. DROWNDING???? Have none of your friends advised you that's an error? Haven't you noticed yourself? Criminy*.

I don't claim to possess flawless spelling or grammar and I make my own mistakes, but I do try and read my posts over so I can avoid irritating myself. Or irritating others.

*I'm working on reclaiming ol' timey words and phrases. Things like criminy, gosh, good golly and my personal fave Jeez louise. I'm also a fan of saying Easy peasy, lemon squeezy

My First Podcast

It comes down to distance, really. I don't necessarily need to make a podcast of Declan from the last year. However, I want my family (who aren't in Toronto) to be able to see how Declan's developed in his first year. Besides, I've been curious about the process of setting up a podcast. There's a good amount of documentation on the subject.

If you're a friend of mine and are interested in how Declan is doing or you're just some passerby that thinks redheaded babies are adorable, here's how you can subscribe to this sweet as sugar podcast;

1. Open iTunes
2. Navigate to Advanced
3.Choose Open Stream
4. Type in or copy paste the following: http://tb-ud.com/declanPodcast/rss.xml
5. Click OK

That's it. Enjoy.