Archives for category: Feelin' Geeky
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What are words worth?

May 21, 08 //
1

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I love words and word games, as I’ve said before. Yesterday I learned that a cringle is a grommet. Not that I know what a grommet is… Where did I come by this useful information? At Free Rice.

If you like words, take pride in your vocabulary, and want to test yourself, go take the vocab quiz at Free Rice. You’ll find plenty of GRE-type words, but also lots of archaic words, imported foreign words (some of which are pretty obscure), as well as some British English words and slang. It’s a serious challenge and tons of fun if you’re the verbal type.

But the best thing about it is that for every word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program. As of today, over 33 billion grains have been donated. I am personally responsible for 3,180 of them. I guess you can tell I played the game for a while.

I don’t know how they calculate “your best level” but it can go up as you go along. Yesterday when I played, I got to 50. If you get a word wrong, the “vocab level” score goes down. You’re shown the correct answer and you get another shot at the missed word later. By answering a few missed words correctly the second time, you can make your “vocab level” score go up again. I was totally hooked and by the time I finished (at the 159-word point), my score was 47. The only reason I quit was because my damn browser crashed. (Not because of Free Rice, but because my new Firefox update didn’t like me trying to upload the rice bowl picture to this post. I had to go through Opera to do it. Sorry for the geeky details.)

I’m going to go back and play some more. I hope the site is set up to recognize my IP address and give me different words… I’ll see if I can beat my score. Can you?

If you want to do more than donate rice by playing the game you can help pay for all those rice grains I’m piling up too.

(via Ross Mayfield’s Weblog)

Serial bloggers

April 19, 08 //
6

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Blogging is addictive. I don’t know how I ever survived without it. I started in October of 2006 with frogblog and now I have four blogs and am a contributor to one two three others.

It’s an outlet for “that ever-bubbling spring of emotion which, without some conduit into space, will surge upwards and ruin all but the greatest men.” Read that in a Thomas Hardy novel last week (The Well Beloved). I wish my Former Life friends would figure it out. Lots of them could use it.

Up till yesterday, I had Vincent beat by one blog, but he’s caught up to me now.

He’s been annoyed with himself lately because he hasn’t been writing as much music as he used to. (I haven’t been writing any poetry either, for that matter, and I’m also annoyed. I figure it’s because we’re too happy.) He was very prolific for a while during his mad-at-America phase, but he’s over it. He’s given up hope and says I do a much better job of America bashing anyway. I don’t agree. The lyrics to his Bye-Bye Murka series of songs are brilliant.

One of the many things we have in common is that we both like it when there are constraints on our creative projects. I like writing sonnets and villanelles because of the strict rules. I like writing poems with fridge magnets. For some reason, it stimulates my brain when I have to work within a prescribed framework.

Vincent’s the same way. So he decided to try to force the muse to put out by imposing a constraint on himself. He picked the first word from the beginning of a random news story on Libération just to see if he could make a song out of it.

It worked. And he had so much fun with the process that he decided he’ll probably keep doing it from time to time. And so, of course, he made a blog dedicated to his project: 1 mot, 1 chanson.

He picked a gorgeous WordPress theme (if you like that spare, Swiss style) that he discovered through his favorite design blog, Smashing Magazine. He spent a couple of days tweaking it and building an adorable little Flash player. (I was so jealous that he got a new site to play with that I decided to give my personal website a makeover, or relooking, as they say in French.)

The random word for the first song on 1 mot, 1 chanson was “acteur.” You can hear the song and read the (French) lyrics on the site. He’s already got another one in the pipeline. The word is “minute.” Rumor has it I may be singing on that one. If I don’t suck too bad. I’m not making any promises.

Tiny little things

March 12, 08 //
3

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When I was a little girl, I loved tiny things. I had a room full of them. Teensy-weensy plastic animals, a delicate miniature porcelain tea service, 80 million Barbie shoes… My poor mom.

This cute little fascination lasted into adulthood; I talked my son into giving me one of his micro-machines when he was in preschool. It was a lime green 50s-looking car. Too cool. I kept it in an itsy-bitsy glass curio case full of other itsy-bitsy things.

Being a grown-up geeky girl with a tendency to travel light, I don’t have much tiny stuff anymore (although I do have a little red Eiffel Tower and a red majolica poodle from the 40s on my desk…). These days, I mostly get my cute little fancy tickled by widgets. Even the word is adorable, isn’t it?

The term used to refer to a non-specific, small mechanical thingamajig, maybe something you’d find in a plumber’s toolbox. But today, a widget is a little box that displays info on a web page. Widgets are interactive, which means that they don’t just sit there and look cute; they actually do something.

One of my favorite websites, Etsy, made a widget that sellers on the site can use to put a mini store on their own blogs and sites. Advertisers are capitalizing on the widget trend. A huge improvement over those infuriating, migraine-inducing Flash ads that make my fans kick in at full blast… If only those would all go away.

Today I discovered my favorite widget of all time! I’m biased, of course. It’s a Vincent widget. He has some of his music up on SoundClick, and they’ve added code you can use to put a widget on your site and play all the songs in an artist’s songlist.

Isn’t my Vincent widget cute?


Being a techie and creative boy, Vincent built a few of his own little Flash players for his music. You can see mini Radio Vince in the banner of his blog and, on his website, he’s got Radio Vince (click “a single mouse click away“). You can get to players for most of his songs here, and others here. He widgetized himself years ago, long before it became The Thing To Do. So avant garde.

I think one of these days when I’m bored I’m going to check out some widget makers and play around with them. I have multiple Internet incarnations I could work with…I wanna widget!

Fun with words

February 28, 08 //
7

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I love words. I love figuring out etymology and the relationships among words. For example, just the other day, I figured out that right in the middle of the French verb entasser (to pile up), a new word for me, is the noun tas (pile), a word I’ve known forever. So now I’ll never forget what entasser means. And when I was just a little Francophile, it always thrilled me when I found out an English word came from French.

I wish I’d had a blog when the clueless conservatives decided to rename french fries to freedom fries. I would have loved to dare them all to eradicate all words of French origin from their vocabularies and then see if they could form a sentence… Morons. Nearly a third of the English language comes from French (or Latin via French).

Today, on a geek blog called Daring Fireball, Vincent saw something about The Big Word Project. It’s the brainchild of Paddy and Lee, two grad students in multidisciplinary design from Northern Ireland. They love words too

Their project allows you to pick an English word and link it to your website or blog. Then, whenever anyone clicks a word on the site, they’re taken to your site. Forever.

(And the words on the home page all look like MagPo magnets, which I also love.)

You pay a dollar a letter. The project is brand new, so there are lots of good words left! Quick! What’s your word?? If it’s in a dictionary, you can use it. They let you suggest words if they’re not there yet.

The guys will be able to have a couple of beers on me. I bought francophile and francophilia. You can guess what those link to. I bought geeks. Love is taken. Leah in Chicago beat me to it.

What’s the point, you ask? Well, who knows? Does it have to have a point? Maybe every now and then if I’m bored I’ll pop in and see who has taken “moribund” or “fallacious” or “calliope” just for kicks. Maybe I’ll stay on the sites long enough to figure out why the people picked the words they did. Maybe I’ll meet some cool people. You never know. I like serendipity (the word and what it represents).

In fact, I think I’ll go and buy serendipity and link it to this blog… What’s another 11 bucks for a couple of starving students with a fun idea? Wish I’d thought of it.

If you’re wondering how many words there are in the English language, give it up. This guy claims he’s counted them all and we’re nearing a million. These guys say baloney. Either way, there are enough.

So go get a word! And tell me what you picked!

Teach your children well

December 17, 07 //
2

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In March, Bill Gates launched the i’m Initiative, a program that makes it possible to give to one of several major charities with every IM you send using Windows Live Messenger (which used to be called MS Instant Messenger).

You don’t pay anything. Microsoft makes the donation. Gates has pledged that each charity will receive a minimum of $100,000 dollars this year no matter what, and there’s no maximum.

What struck me about this program was that one of its goals is clearly to awaken and sensitize the young to giving, while also giving them the means to do so. That’s why I’m blogging about this.

I don’t use Instant Messenger, and I don’t usually promote Microsoft products, but I do admire Bill Gates for his philanthropic activities and think this program is worth talking about.

I had a teenager not that long ago. In their teen years, as you all know, kids struggle to assert themselves and take control of their own lives, often in not very constructive ways.

This program can help channel that energy in a positive direction and reduce kids’ sense of powerlessness in a very meaningful way. Besides, anything you can do to encourage American kids to be less self-centered is a good thing. They grow up altruistically challenged thanks to the values of their culture…

There are over a quarter billion Live Messenger users, but this program only applies to IM’s originating from the US.

These are the currently participating charities:

Watch one of these adorable videos with your teens! Empower them! It’s your job.

Le Monde, suite

December 10, 07 //
0

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Claire’s article, Plus belle, ma vie en ligne, was obviously so popular that Le Monde decided to put it on their home page today under Technologies.

So for those of you Internet-lovin’ types who can read French, once again, I recommend it highly.

[Update January 18: Looks like it's gone to the archives and you have to pay for it. Lucky for you, there's a nice PDF online.]

For all the world to see

November 30, 07 //
5

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Already it bugs me that Amazon tracks the things I look at and tries to tell me what else I should buy. But Facebook’s latest outrage is really just beyond beyond. Can you say “class action”? I knew you could.

Evidently, with Facebook Beacon, companies can add a few lines of code to their websites that will allow the company to publish the actions the user took while on their site to that user’s Facebook profile (buying, adding things to wishlists, etc.). According to Facebook, users will be “alerted that [the] website is sending [the info] to their profile and have a chance to opt out.” However, it doesn’t look like it’s working that way! Apparently, people are getting to their Facebook profiles and seeing things like a list of movies they added to their Blockbuster queues on their profiles…

Do you really want the fact that you are renting Prison Girls made public?

There’s all this noise about Beacon right now, and it’s happening just at the moment when Francophilia is starting to generate some interest among advertisers who’d like to reach the site’s Francophile members. I’m sure there will be advertisers who’d love to get their hands on our mailing list, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Some people still have principles.

Just because so many of us choose to publicize things about ourselves and our lives in various ways on the Internet doesn’t give anyone the right to make those choices for us. Personally, I’m going to find out if companies are using Beacon code before I shop. If they do, I’m taking my business elsewhere.

And I don’t even use Facebook.

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