Month: July 2007

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Just like her Grandpa Maxson!

Lydia “shore” takes after her Grandpa M…and her mommy, too.  Dave and I both enjoy chips quite a lot, and Lydia has been exposed to chips plenty of times.  Matt often lets her smell them or hold them, but today she took it to a whole new level!  Matt is on his way to Thailand and Lydia and I came up to have lunch with his parents after church.  She has been expressing more interest in food…watching intently, sticking out her tongue, licking her lips, reaching for stuff, etc…  She watched us eat taco salad and  Judy picked her up and handed her a large tortilla chip to explore when we were finished.  Lydia put that thing right to her mouth and started eating practice.  When Judy took it away, my little girl just started licking her lips and fingers and reaching for more.  She did it again a few times, much to our amusement (and we have pics galore).  Once I thought she’d played enough, I wrapped up the chips and she tracked the bag the entire time.  I even moved it bag and forth and she followed it the whole time!  And she then practiced drinking from a real glass.  Judy held it to her mouth and she licked all over the rim!  She was so funny, but it won’t be long before she’s doing those things for real!!

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Live Earth — The Wackos Can’t Get It Right

If you haven’t heard, today (07/07/07) was chosen by Algore and others to have an SOS Live Earth concert thing.  From the website (no, I’m not linking to it):

Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.

 Reading more on their site, you find out that the concerts are happening in “…Giants Stadium in New York; Wembley Stadium in London; Aussie Stadium in Sydney; Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro; the Coca-Cola Dome in Johannesburg; Makuhari Messe in Tokyo; the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai; and HSH Nordbank Arena in Hamburg.”

The last time I checked, that is only 6 continents represented…not 7.  Let’s see if I have that right:

  • New York = North America
  • London = Europe
  • Sydney = Australia
  • Rio de Janeiro = South America
  • Johannesburg = Africa
  • Tokyo = Asia
  • Shanghai = Asia
  • Hamburg = Europe

 The continents are:

  • North America (check)
  • Europe (check)
  • Australia (check)
  • South America (check)
  • Africa (check)
  • Asia (check)
  • Antarctica (nope)

 I think they are misrepresenting their movement.  It doesn’t include 7 continents…only 6 are represented.

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Video Capture and Playback

Recently at work, I needed to record some screen captures and embed them into a powerpoint document.  No sweat, right?  Well, first I had to find software to do the screen capture (video not audio).  Then, I had to embed it into powerpoint.  I had used CamStudio with great success in the past so I used it.

Well, when I first did it, everything worked great.  However, as time went on, my video began to thrash (not play cleanly).  It did it sometimes but not others.  This was a pain.

I ended up an assigned an action to an item (right-click and choose action settings) to launch Media Player Classic.  Why not use Windows Media Player?  I tried; however, I couldn’t be certain that the exe would be in the same place all of the time.  I couldn’t just copy it because it requires too many dlls to be registered, etc….  MPC has a nice set of command line arguments (including having the player quit once it played the video once) that made it all possible.

Thanks for no help Micro$oft.  Thanks to the Free/Open Source Software community to rising to the occasion!