:: Katnip ::
What's in this section?
The stuff I'm digging at the moment, stuff that makes me happy and stuff that makes my little heart smile. :)
Testing my new gallery
Friday, June 03, 2005
It’s about time i got thumbnails!
Thanks to Jimbo, i got this thing called Simple Viewer that has this cool flash interface. Setting it up right is kind of a pain in the butt, but it’s worth the way it turns out. :D
So my first test of it is of Ange and Shawna’s wedding. So you can click the link below to see the gallery:
Ange and Shawna’s Wedding Album
What do you think? Is this a good solution for the gallery section?
Dwarves Can't Dance
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
This movie had me rolling! This is the result of seriously bored people.
Due to my recent exploits into the world of gamers and particularly that of WoW, I’ve discovered some rare and wonderful finds. Well, I’m not sure how rare they are, but they are certainly wonderful! I went to this one site, warcraftmovies.com and found this great dance vid called, “Dwarves Can’t Dance” that was created by using the avatars of World of Warcraft. It’s great.
Check it out here: Dwarves Can’t Dance
One man's cry for female attention results in spontaneous community
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
When is unwanted male attention ever a good thing?
Apparently, it *can* be good...in very very specific instances. I witnessed one such scenario today. I was getting on the train, when a man struck up a conversation with a women sitting across from me. I didn’t listen very closely until i noticed that other people were paying attention to the interaction. At first, I thought he was really gutsy, but i became confuse by their relationship--it seemed that he knew her from some prior context. She was friendly enough, though didn’t seem to have any burden to speak more to him. He continued on in his friendly banter until we came to his stop. He said his good-byes and exited.
...Only to leap back on the train again! The man next to me let out a flabbergasted comment about how obvious the man was and why wouldn’t women do that for him. The train leaper made an embarrased remark about how he got off at the wrong stop and continued to talk to his “friend.” She politely responded. The train finally arrived at his “real” stop, and so he bid her farewell, and leaped off the train again.
No sooner had the doors shut than the man sitting next to her said, “Phew, I thought he’d never shut up! For awhile he had me convinced that you knew him!” She responded playfully, “Oh, so you *don’t* go up to random women on the train?” The man next to me chuckled, “I bet he has to catch a train going back downtown so he can actually go home!” The woman next to that man threw her 2 cents worth in. For about 5 minutes, everyone exchanged pleasant jokes all, of course, at the suitor’s expense. Conversation eventually died down, but each person had a warm glow and a smile on his or her face--an unusual site in NY’s MTA. As each rider reached their stop, the participants bid each other good-bye as if they were old friends.
It was a peaceful moment on the ride home tonight.
One really great book
Friday, March 04, 2005
I don’t read often. In fact, i don’t even read the text that I’m assigned for school, but this is one book that i’ve read because it’s GREAT!
Not that I’m trying to push a book on you or anything, but this book just speaks to me on so many levels!
It’s called “Universal Principles of Design” by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler. ISBN 1-59253-007-9
It’s basically a culmination of design principles gleaned from various fields of study. The authors’ point of view is that designers used to be more generalist, learning about everything and interrelating those things to produce something useful/feasible. As time went on, designers had to specialize more and more until there seems to be very little discourse between the various disciplines. What you end up having is 7+ methods of getting at the same information or maybe one particular discipline carrying out their study/work without knowledge of a very applicable principle in another discipline.
Here are some examples:
1. 80/20 rule - A high percentage of effects in any large system are caused by a low percentage of variables. Example: 80 percent of a product’s usage involves 20 percent of its features; 80 percent of errors are caused by 20 percent of the components; 80 percent of the wealth belongs to 20 percent of the population, etc.
2. Progressive Disclosure - A strategy for managing information complexity in which only necessary or requested information is displayed at any given time.
3. Scaling Fallacy - A tendency to assume that a system that works at one scale will also work at a smaller or larger scale.
This book is soooo great! Go check it out!
Me? Why i LOVE large white rats!
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Please read sarcasm into the title of this. Please.
This weekend, Nathan took care of his friends little princess: a pure white chihuahua named Lily. This little pup...had some frenetic tendencies. Don’t get me wrong, it was extremely cute. Yes, i know it’s a chihuahua, but it’s still cute. It was just really really yappy. It shivered. It peed. It wore clothing. It was a strange wee beasty. It even had its own set of shoes.
I was so torn. So cute. So annoying.
You can judge for yourself. Maybe i should have included sound files…
Lily in all her princessy glory
Lily kept getting into the trash, so i punished the trash bag (a tip learned from Les & Laura!) which sent Lily into such shock that she almost curled up into an catatonic trance. Nathan, being the good person he is, comforts the shivering, shocked dog.
They’re even named after her...
I've been stuck on this song for days now
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
If you’ve seen the movie Garden State, then you’ve heard this song called “Let Go.”
It’s by this artist, FrouFrou who weaves a haunting melody with soothing background instrumentation. It’s sort of mysterious, sort of melancholy, sort of a nice song to listen to when it’s raining, misty and gray outside and you’re wishing you could be with that special someone to drown out the dreariness instead of the coffee you have in your mug.
In short, i really enjoy this song.
I’ve got a link below so you can download it if you want to listen. I think it’s about 7.7 MB and is a .wma.