neorants

Ripley’s New Toy. My dad took this video of my cat playing around with a toy we got for her when we were out grabbing groceries for their visit. It’s just this little fish hanging from a fishing pole mounted to the sliding glass door with a suction cup, but she’s spent hours with it already. I decided to toss it on youtube (with horrible editing, I know) for some family to check out.

This would be awesome. That is, unless they destroy all of my childhood memories in one fell swoop by doing it poorly.

My folks are coming in tomorrow and staying for a few days for my birthday. It should be fun. If anyone has any suggestions for (preferably inexpensive) things to do while they’re here, feel free to shoot me an e-mail or post here. :)

I just transferred my domain registrations over to Gandi. They’re a little more expensive ($15.00/yr instead of $10.00/yr for a .com) than GoDaddy, but their site doesn’t try to sell you an add-on package every time you click anything, and it’s far less cluttered and more navigable. Plus, they include domain privacy in the price. The only gotcha is that since they’re based in France, making a payment can be a bit of a pain, depending on how your credit/debit card is set up. Still, highly recommended.

This article was written almost 2 years ago, and was pretty darn prophetic, if you ask me (which you didn’t). Sums up a lot of the problems I always had with MySpace, and why I can actually tolerate Facebook.

Image Metrics has some pretty amazing facial animation tech on their hands. There’s another demo at the link. In case it’s not clear, the face on the woman in the video isn’t real, until they remove the overlay at 1:30.

This is just scary parenting. I don’t know what else to say. As a lifelong gamer, I can certainly appreciate the lure of playing video games over going to school, but if I’d ever told my parents I wanted to do this, they’d have (rightly) spanked me silly. From the article:

Mike and Hunter do not believe in one-size-fits-all parenting.

That is not to say that it was an easy decision for them to let Blake leave school last September. They would have preferred that he stay in high school with his brother. But he bugged them until they let him quit.

“We couldn’t take the complaining anymore,” says Hunter. “He always told me that he thought school was a waste of time.”

Wow. A kid who gets whatever he complains enough for. That’s one kid who’s destined for a rough time in life.

This song has really been an inspiration to me lately. It helps remind me just how big God is, and how He doesn’t need my help to accomplish His will. He’s fully capable of doing that on His own. All he requires of me is a willing heart to obey and follow where He leads me. Not because He needs me, but because I need Him.
Continue reading ‘You are God Alone’ »

LiveLeak.com – Female reporter hit by zorb ball

The balance of the universe is upset by reporters who attempt to act EXTREME. Thankfully, order is restored.

Entertainment Weekly’s writeup about the making of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (which, by the way, is worth picking up on iTunes if you missed it) is a really interesting read. It covers everything from the initial pitch to the actors all the way to the extras they want to pack into the DVD release, including panther noises:

We’re not sure that we can accomplish it, but we want to have languages: French, Spanish, Japanese translated back very badly into English, classical Latin, and panther noises. –Joss Whedon