The Wonders of Football's Yellow First-Down Line

Whew, it takes a lot of behind-the-scenes effort to make that yellow line appear (click the image to play):

Microsoft Songsmith - Your Digital Accompanist

The press release says: "Songsmith software automatically composes accompaniment music for whatever tune a singer belts, hums or whistles into a microphone, regardless of skill level."

Besides the singing "family" bit in the demo, this is pretty amazing.

You can use the demo download for 6 hours for free. I don't see any restrictions in the EULA on using the final musical output, do you? Update: nope, the EULA says you can't use it for commercial purposes without permission.

Dierks Bentley On A World Stage

What a GREAT job Dierks Bentley did at the recent Nobel Peace Prize concert in Norway:


A better quality video is HERE.

Updated version of "Did You Know"

Quite worth the 5 minute running time:

Turning the iPod Touch into a phone | Apple - CNET News

Turn the iPod Touch into a phone!

"WHAT DO PEOPLE SCREAM when they SEE YOU COMING...?!"

Ha - so clearly more than a little borrowed from Monsters, Inc. here, but it still looks funny:

Beatles video game is coming

How amazing is it that 40 + years after their first hit that The Beatles are still in the center of pop culture?

"Every member of the Apple team -- Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono Lennon have been part of the conversation, have seen demonstrations of the game, understand how it's going to roll out, what you're going to see on your screen, how the interactivity and the immersive experience will unfold and they will be involved along every step of the way creatively and musically, with Giles Martin [son of Beatles producer George Martin]," said Apple Corps' Jones. "They'll be involved in the design and the implementation of the design."

It's Mini-PC!

Okay, it's probably a bit clunky, and most Smart Phones do as much, but I'd love one, wouldn't you!?

Wimax comes to Baltimore

Now you can get wireless access anywhere in Baltimore (at least that's the spin). A promo video from Intel:



The word from USA Today is it's fast, but not free.

"Fence Off" your wireless access area

What if you could "wall off" an area of Wi-Fi, where anyone outside a set perimeter couldn't access your signal? Check out the video:



I first saw this on the Seattle PI's new Seattle Tech Report site.

Wario - Ha! This is clever

Watch carefully... (will open in a new window)

Attention! And then some $$ to go with it, please

We're drowning in choices - music, tv channels, web sites. Why does so little truly excite us? And why are so few people making any real money from all that's being put forth?

I think Kevin Kelly is really on top of it, with so many nuggets here:

Where ever attention flows, money will follow.

Maintain an incoming flow of attention and money will follow.

...the fact that something does work or is helpful is no longer sufficient for success. Good, useful stuff is now the minimum standard. I might even make the argument that great stuff is the minimum.

Now anything that lasts has to also maintain our attention.

Getting a quick blitz of attention is a no-brainer. The challenge is maintaining a flow of attention in an environment where you are surrounded by millions of similar things that are good and useful.

The problem for a band is not being "discovered" but remaining interesting.

Time (does) not equal attention. I spend a lot of time in my car but I don’t give it much attention..

- all from Kevin Kelly

and

The challenge for everyone is that we are getting better and better at creating “interesting stuff” but there is a finite supply of attention. Our dynamic range of “interesting” is lessening, as everything in the technium is more perfectly designed to grab attention.

- from Stan James (www.wanderingstan.com) in the comments

Again, here's the piece.

Where is Your Username registered?

Wanna use the same username over a large number of sites?
Check here first.
Note: I couldn't get it to search using IE7, but worked fine for me with Firefox.

100 sites that will make you brighter

So much to learn, so little time.

Quite a list here of 100 places online to get smarter.

A now some words from McCain

A word cloud from Wordle.net of John McCain's acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican Convention (see Barack Obama's a few entries before). "Country" was the word of the night.

God bless the Guitar Man, the great Jerry Reed, who passed away today at age 71.

"Amos Moses" was one of my FAVORITE songs on Top 40 radio growing up. "...knocked him in the head with a stone." BOMP. Classic.

A nice short piece on Jerry from Rolling Stone from 1999 here.

And I've always loved Jerry's take on "Patches," hear it here.

Online storage for those big files to send or share

Using one of these types of sites - list from smashingapps.com - is so much better than sending someone a massive audio or video file by e-mail.

I've used mediafire.com with no problems, and yousendit.com many times, but you have to register.

Here's another list of file storage sites.

And another.

How to do more with your pictures at Flickr

Lots of tips on how you can get more out of Flickr, or get started, with this from ReadWriteWeb.

Word clouds - easy to make at wordle.net

I've seen word clouds around for awhile, but wordle.net sure makes them easy to create. To get a grasp of what Barack Obama said in his Democratic Convention acceptance speech, I made one of his prepared text. "Promise" looms large, but it looks like if "America" and "American" were combined, that would have been the most used word. Click on the image to see it better (wordle.net lets you use their images in about any way as long as you give their site attribution).

Stanley Kubrick, box by box

Boxes. Lots and lots of boxes. A fascinating video look inside the mind of director Stanley Kubrick.

Side note: I smiled that in the film one of the fan letters to Kubrick was noted to have been from Sequim, WA (one of my favorite places in the Pacific NW).

And - quite a lot on Kubrick in his imdb.com bio.