KickTheLinks

Fun: Original Unaltered Star Wars Trilogy on DVD

2006-05-09T22:26:00.000-05:00

Somehow I knew when I got the last Star Wars DVD set that Lucas put out, there would end up being yet another upcoming release that I would want as well. Here we go again ... another version is going to be released in September. This time, the original unaltered trilogy.

http://starwars.com/episode-iv/release/video/news20060503.html

I think I am going to try to resist the urge to buy this version, as much as I would like to have it. How many different versions of these movies can Lucas try to sell?

For whatever reason, I bought Episode 1 when it was released. I can't remember why now. So far I have resisted getting Episode 2 and Episode 3 on DVD. Well, purchasing Episode 2 has never really been a temptation. I actually would really like to get Episode 3 though. However, I know as soon as I do, Lucas will release a new set with all three new movies that includes some extra features I will want.

Fun: Flash: Art.com artPad

2006-05-09T22:20:00.000-05:00

A nice twist to the flash-based paint programs/sketchpads:

http://artpad.art.com/artpad/painter/

Check out the gallery for some impressive work that others have done with the tool.

Fun: Interesting: 50 Year History of Play-Doh

2006-05-05T23:31:00.000-05:00

Here is a link to an interesting article on the 50 year history of play-doh. Apparently, the "plastic modeling composition" was originally intended to be a wallpaper cleaner. I guess since I am so used to seeing dozens of the plastic play-doh cans in our house, I almost had forgotten that the cans were once made of cardboard.

http://www.failedsuccess.com/index.php?/weblog/comments/playdoh_history

If you have absolutely nothing else to do, join in on the boring discussion going on about the patent and the ingredients (jeez, the product is intended to be a toy, not part of this balanced breakfast!).

Fun: The Evolution of Dance video

2006-05-05T23:17:00.000-05:00

Very funny video of comedian Judson Laipply performing "The Evolution of Dance". The routine even includes the classic centipede (no cabbage patch though???). It must have taken quite a while to put the dance routine together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg

Fun: Game Six of the 1986 World Series with Nintendo RBI Baseball

2006-05-02T12:59:00.000-05:00

This is great. This video shows a recreation of the bottom half of the tenth inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series using Nintendo RBI Baseball. Enjoy watching the Calvin Schiraldi meltdown while listening to the play-by-play by Vin Scully. The "player of the game" award is great, and of course, the Buckner error is absolutely hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JArXRxuVTgY&search=Baseball%20Lastowka1

Flash: People stealing flash games

2006-04-27T13:53:00.000-05:00

My friend, Andy has an interesting post in his blog about a disturbing trend where people are building sites around "borrowed" flash games.

http://mt.rendermouse.com/archives/000099.html

Fun: MTV Overdrive

2006-04-27T13:17:00.000-05:00

It has been years since I actually watched MTV. I think I slowly began tuning out after the San Francisco version of the Real World (the one with Puck). As the number of videos decreased and number of horrible reality shows increased, I migrated to other channels that I could waste my time in front of. Anyway, I was just googling up some artist info and accidentally stumbled across MTV Overdrive, the MTV broadband video channel. This is actually really cool. Users have access to thousands of music videos on the site. The video quality is really good and the selection seems fairly broad. There are plenty of classic videos available that take me back to a time when David Lee Roth was the epitome of cool and Michael Jackson was just considered a little weird.

Kick the link:
http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/

Fun: Super Mario Live

2006-04-27T12:59:00.000-05:00

Video of a live peformance of a Super Mario Bros. level:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2139555376132383479

A lot of work had to have gone into putting the performance together.

Found on waxy.org links.

Flash: Web_development: Next Flash Player will be Flash Player 9

2006-04-25T14:38:00.000-05:00

From Adobe Labs ...

We are changing the previously announced name of the upcoming release of Flash Player from Flash Player 8.5 to Flash Player 9. The version change will be reflected in the beta 3 release on Adobe Labs ... the features of this release include the ECMAScript Edition 4-based ActionScript 3.0 language and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), which dramatically exceeds the performance of previous players. Flash Player 9 better reflects the significance of the advancements to the runtime environment to our customers and the market. This also allows us to maintain consistency between the player version and the file format version as we have in previous releases. The SWF file format for this release is version 9. ... Flash Player 9 is expected to ship with the Flex 2.0 launch this summer.

http://labs.macromedia.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Player#FAQs

Fun: Gadgets: PSP Firmware 2.7 has Flash Support

2006-04-25T14:19:00.000-05:00

According to the O'reilly weblogs, the latest version of the PSP firmware (version 2.7) allows Macromedia Flash files to be displayed in the browser. I have hesitated installing previous firmware versions because of potential conflicts with my emulators. However, I will be installing v2.7 because of the Flash support. It should be fun building little flash-based apps for the device.

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/04/sony_psp_270_firmware_update_a.html

http://www.us.playstation.com/psp.aspx?id=SoftwareUpdate

Useful: Available jobs by region

2006-02-09T13:28:00.000-05:00

Job Postings Per Capita for the 50 most populous metropolitan areas in the United States.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends.jsp

I got the link from a new blog I just found, sparkplug9.com, when doing some Flash vs. AJAX research.

New Web Hosting

2006-04-20T10:37:00.000-05:00

I changed my hosting account for this site and a few others that I host under the same account (which means you may need to update your bookmarks for this site). I had been using affordablehost since 2003 and had been pleased for the most part. I have even recommended their service to people in the past. However, their service has been downright lousy over the last few weeks. The site was down for at least two or three days one week, two days the next week, and at least one day this week. Their support kept referring me to their forum, which was full of messages about this server and that server being temporarily down, and endless entries about how it was coming back up shortly. I didn't even know what server the site was hosted on, so the forum did not help much. I would have appreciated an email letting me know that they were having problems with the servers and an estimated time when they would come back up. The company was sold about a year ago to dotcanada. The old owners used to send out information when a server would go down or when they were going to make some upgrades and anticipated any downtime. The new owners haven't done that once. I recently got an email from the old owner with an offer to switch to her new hosting company. I will pass on that if her business model is to build up a list of clients and then sell to someone like the current affordablehost owners.

Anyway, the whole thing has turned into a joke with affordablehost. I went to my FTP site yesterday afternoon just so I could back up my files to move to a new server. Of course, the site was down for most of the day again. Once things came back up, I grabbed my files and ran! I moved this site and the others to my dreamhost account, which I had opened on sort of a whim a few months back (couldn't resist a great deal). So far, so good with them. One more site to move and I am done. I am also in the process of moving the last of my domains to my godaddy account and out of their horrible affordabledots account.

I actually have three hosting accounts at the moment, including the affordablehost account I am in the process of abandoning. I realize that is excessive, which is why I have been planning to close one of my accounts anyway. I was actually considering closing my mediatemple account, which I have used since 2000 or so. I rarely use my site there anymore, save for an email account and occasionally posting some work samples. Their service has been fantastic over the years though, and having access to the space really saved me over the last three weeks, as I had to upload client files to that site instead of the affordablehost server. So I will stick with them and see how the dreamhost thing goes. Dreamhost has some great deals. If you sign up, use my email address as a reference (hellorobert at hotmail dot com) or click this direct link:

http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?126694

Fun: Videos from Japanese version of Spiderman TV Series

2006-04-07T15:05:00.000-05:00

Kick the links to some hillarious videos from Toei Spiderman (made around 1978?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABcsBS1GHL0
(apparently this episode featured the Japanese Desperado, some sort of Power Ranger character, and lots ot cool karate moves)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTZRYwfO_PA&search=Toei%20SpiderMan%20movie
(includes theme song)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w3LTEJZ2ig&search=Toei%20SpiderMan%20movie
(includes fan subtitles)

Fun: SportsCenter top baseball fights

2006-04-07T06:51:00.000-05:00

Here is a link to a SportsCenter Top 10 clip from a few years ago. Top 10 baseball fights I guess. Or perhaps the Top 10 fights between pitchers and batters.

It doesn't include the bizzare 2003 incident between Don Zimmer and Pedro Martinez . It does, however, include the classic Pedro quote, "There's no crying in baseball" and the legendary 1993 beating that Nolan Ryan put on Robin Ventura when Ventura made the big mistake of charging the Ryan Express.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma1A5cBB0Y4&search=sportscenter

Useful: Web2.0: ://URLFAN - Top 100 sites in the Web 2.0 world

2006-04-07T06:38:00.000-05:00

I can't remember where I found this, but here is a list of the top 100 ranked sites in the web 2.0 world:
http://www.urlfan.com/site/top_100/100.html

Rankings are based on number of rss feeds that reference the site. Not really surprising that flickr is #1.

A little more about ://URLFAN from their site:

://URLFAN is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It ranks sites according to their popularity in the world of RSS feeds.

Kick the link:
http://www.urlfan.com/

Music: AllTunes

2006-03-30T23:01:00.000-05:00

Allofmp3.com has released allTunes v1.0, a browser/interface to their ever-growing (and very CHEAP) music catalogue. I assume that allTunes will replace the AllOfMp3 Explorer. Apparently the service is available to Smartphones as well as a PC desktop.

I have used allofmp3.com for quite a while now. It is a Russian site that offers music priced at 2 cents per MB downloaded. An album in mp3 format typically costs anywhere from $1 - $3+ depending on compression users choose. One might ask, "Why pay for music when you can download for free off of bittorrent?" The answer is simple - convenience. Users may choose file type (including FLAC) and compression setting for each song/album to download. The mp3s are tagged. Users know that what they are downloading is as advertised instead of the crapshoot of downloading from a file sharing program.

I tried allTunes out and it works well. I like that data results are updated as I type in the Search field. The results appear very quickly, which I assume is because the catalogue has been downloaded to the client. However, that catalogue download is much quicker than the download with the old Explorer for whatever reason. Performance of allTunes seems much better than the old Explorer as well. I occasionally get an error when trying to preview a song in the browser. What is bizarre is that I tried to play a downloaded song in the browser and winamp opened (my default mp3 player, even though I usually have iTunes open all the time). I would like to see a "Similar artists" section when I am viewing a particular artist or album (similar to the site structure).

One note on the actual site itself - An email subscription is offered, but an RSS feed of added albums would be much more useful.

allTunes:
http://www.alltunes.com/

AllOfMP3.com:
http://www.allofmp3.com/

Similar article on TechCrunch(includes numerous user comments):
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/29/allofmp3-launches-alltunes/

Useful: Find similar sites

2006-03-29T12:22:00.000-05:00

If you would like to find sites similar to one that you currently enjoy, try using similicio.us.

http://www.similicio.us/

I subscribe to the Dodger Thoughts blog, so I thought I would try to find similar blogs using the similicio.us site. As expected, I got a number of baseball-related links, including Dodger Blues. However, I also got a few strange results, such as a link to hackingnetflix.com, which looks interesting, and graycharles.com, a blog about some American Idol talent show contestant.

Found the original link to similicio.us on http://www.waxy.org .

Fun : Dr. Seuss Bedroom

2006-03-27T15:57:00.000-05:00

Last year, I painted some Cat in the Hat images on one side of my son's bedroom. This year, I added images from a few other Dr. Seuss books on the other walls - some scenes my son chose from Green Eggs and Ham, Fox in Socks, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.

Flash 8 required (I used the nice drop-shadow filters):

http://www.kickthelinks.com/seussroom/

Blog : del.icio.us introduces private saving

2006-03-21T08:38:00.000-05:00

Now you can save your links on del.icio.us as "private":

http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2006/03/private_saving_.html

Flash : Web Development : Actionscript 2.0 Best Practices

2006-03-21T08:27:00.000-05:00

Found this on Monkey Bites as well ... macromedia.com has an article listing Best Practices for Actionscript 2.0 development:

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flash/articles/as_bestpractices.html

Also check out the Flash 8 development Best Practices:

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flash/articles/flash8_bestpractices.html

Web2.0 : Fun : Web 2.0 or Star Wars?

2006-03-21T08:21:00.000-05:00

Take a quiz and see if you can tell which are names of Web 2.0 companies and which are names of Star Wars characters:

http://www.cerado.com/web20quiz.htm

Link from Monkey Bites:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/

Flash : Fun : Monty Python's Silly Walk Generator

2006-03-17T11:46:00.000-05:00

This is fun - create your own silly walk. Choose characters and backgrounds, then adjust your character across multiple frames to create your own walk. Adjust the speed and silliness meters. Built in Flash.

http://www.sillywalksgenerator.com/

Another one found on news.com:
http://news.com.com/2061-11200_3-6050280.html

Web2.0 : Interesting : March Madness Mashup

2006-03-17T10:10:00.000-05:00

Map containing all 64 teams in the Big Dance. Popups show a mascot icon, with a link to the team page on cbssportsline.

Kick the link to the March Madness Mashup (slow load - be patient) :
http://www.internetbargaincenter.com/ncaa/

Found on news.com:
http://news.com.com/2061-11200_3-6050686.html?part=rss&tag=6050686&subj=news

Useful: Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service

2006-03-16T13:47:00.000-05:00

Amazon has launched Amazon S3, an internet storage service "designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers."

Apparently, users may upload an unlimited number of objects up to 5 GB in size. Download protocols include HTTP and BitTorrent for now. Additional interfaces will be available in the future.

The pricing model is as follows: pay only for what you use, $0.15 per GB of storage used, and $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

Kick the link below to learn more:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-5080668-3599102?node=16427261

While this seems cheap at first glance, I am not sure this solves my ever-growing problem with file backups that I would love to have access to from any computer (digital photo originals, video, .fla and .psd files, audio files, etc.).

Fun: The origin of the high-five

2006-03-16T12:26:00.000-05:00

Apparently the first known high-five was between Dodger outfielders Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker after Baker hit a grand slam in Game 2 of the 1977 National League Championship Series. Although this happened a little before I was watching baseball, I am a big Dodgers fan, so I find myself taking pride in this for some reason. I'm sure that this interesting bit of trivia is debatable.

Kick the link for more information, including a story of how seriously Baker took the high-five:
http://dodgerthoughts.baseballtoaster.com/archives/331386.html

Original article:
http://www.thebookpimp.com/dodgers/index.htm