01.06.09
Beautiful video: This Is Where We Live
via slog:
This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.
created by Apt Studio to celebrate the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate, a literary division of HarperCollins. more about the film.
12.20.08
how to…
Carrie just introduced me to a fun game: start typing “how to” on google and check out the popular searches that pop up. It’s like a little peek at the zeitgeist. The incredibly awkward, nerdy zeitgeist.
A relatively SFW example:
Have fun!
12.04.08
Prop 8 - The Musical
If you haven’t seen this star-studded 3 minute internet musical, you should. Starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, Margaret Cho, Neil Patrick Harris, and many more. Book and score written by Mark Shaiman, composer of Hairspray (about six weeks later than he shoulda, he admits).
Check it out: Prop 8 - The Musical
Lips: why I’m really excited for v2.0
I recently acquired Lips for Xbox360. I expected to love this game because I enjoy doing vocals on Rock Band. And now that I’ve played it for about 2 hours - yes, it’s fun, but there are enough annoying little issues to prevent me from going ga-ga over it.
A word on delay: LCD HDTVs have lag, whereas receivers don’t so much, so the sound ends up ahead of the video. Rock Band provides a configuration tool that allows you to globally adjust for the lag and get everything synced up. Rock Band 2 can even do the configuration automatically if you one of the newer guitar with light and sound sensors. Lips also allows you to adjust for lag… on a per-song basis. What? I tried 9 different songs, and they all needed a -0.2 second adjustment to work right. Why do I have to set it in every song?
Also, these per-song settings are way too difficult to access. To adjust for lag, I have to select a song, select the video I want to use with the song, then hit start to break out of the flow and see settings, L stick to the delay page of settings, hit A, use the L stick to adjust, hit A again, L stick to another settings page, hit A, hit L stick to select “Yes, apply changes”, and hit A. Really?
There are a few other UX things that need polish. For example, once you’ve added a song to your instant playlist (what you’re about to sing), it seems the only way to get rid of it is to sing it all the way through. (I would love to be wrong about this - please correct me if I am.) Once the second mic joins the game, there is no way to remove it and get back to solo mode - and it’s easy to join the second mic by accident (knocking it off the couch does it pretty reliably).
That said, I did just play for two hours. I like the included song selection: out of the 40 songs, I knew 19 of them by name, which made for a good first experience with the game. It’s very clear how to buy new Lips songs from Xbox LIVE (though the selection is currently small), and not so clear how to add songs from your own collection, or what kind of experience they offer for plain ol’ mp3s the lack the karaoke lyrics/timing metadata that the Lips songs have.
I wish there were more quest-type things, a la Rock Band 2 (play this gig to get a Merch Girl!), but Lips does level you up as you amass more points, and the achievements flow freely.
In summary: great concept and great start on implementing it, UX needs some more love, and a more compelling story would really help.
In short, Lips 2 is really going to bring down the house.
11.22.08
FolderShare is dead. Long live FolderShare!
For those of you who are wondering what the heck I do all day at Microsoft, you can read about the upcoming launch of Windows Live Sync (the artist formerly known as FolderShare) over at the Windows Team Blog, ars technica, or over on our official announcement page.
Sync will roll out soon with the rest of the new Windows Live services. Stay tuned… I’m sure I’ll be posting more once everything’s out in the open.
10.30.08
Halloween at Microsoft
Today I stumbled upon some very strange pumpkins in my workplace, courtesy of the SkyDrive team. This was my favorite.
(Don’t get it? Click here.)
10.20.08
Dinner Club, Part 1
My [just-out-of-college] friends and I have decided that in order to mitigate our collective failure to cook anything other than freezer food and pasta when we’re cooking only for ourselves, we will take turns hosting Monday night dinners for the whole gang.
Tonight was the first night of the Dinner Club, and I cooked. Now, I have a copy of the joy of cooking and everything, but it seems to be targeted at a different audience. I mean, it seems to assume that I know what kind of dishes exist and just need to know how much x to stir in with the y. This is not a great assumption, especially since I’m new to cooking on a regular basis.
As usual, the internet came through for me. After browsing Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes for a few minutes, I had easy recipes for guacamole and cheese enchiladas, and Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen popped this wonderful (but slightly more challenging) pumpkin swirl brownies recipe into my RSS reader yesterday.
Anyway, the cooking was fun and everything went over very well. Thanks internet!
Now I just need to learn to cook without completely wrecking the kitchen - it took me about an hour to clean everything up after my guests left, which was a little bit fail.
10.19.08
The Big Picture
Since May, The Boston Globe has been publishing an amazing photo blog. Since I found out about it a few months ago, it’s rapidly become one of my favorite RSS feeds. In their own words:
The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.
Recent topics have ranged from the Special Olympics to Sapphire mines in Madagascar to the first ever Formula One race held at night.
Check it out: The Big Picture
10.13.08
Blogspeed fail
Hey guys,
One blog post a day until the end of 2008 was too ambitious given my other obligations (ie, the xbox I bought recently. Hey, just being honest). I’m scaling back a bit, but the blog will stay active. Seriously, I mean it this time.
Rachel
