Shareware – MPEG Streamclip

Let’s say, just as an example here, that you do a lot of video work, including DVD authoring. Further, let’s say you have an old project that you need to use part of. And, sadly, the hard drive with the only backup of your original project has died with a horrible whining crunch.

Enter MPEG Streamclip.

Holidarity!

Very nice office lunch today, our at Zingerman’s Roadhouse. I don’t know if I mentioned the place before, and I’m lazy enough right now to not search my own archives to check. I had a very good fish and chips, although they called it “Bell’s Beer Battered Cod and Roadhouse Fries”. It was extremely tasty. I’m not sure it was $14 worth of tasty, but it was darn close.

Yum!

Has it been almost two years since I last sang the praises of Nixanz software? How remiss of me.

For those of you with elephantine memories, that’s the company which made the software which made addressing tons of wedding invites so incredibly easy. They also make a really cool recipe book program called “Yum!“

I Saw a Sith, A Sith I Saw…

Saw the most recent Star Wars movie on Saturday. Last night we got talking about it with folks at my sister’s game. More specifically, we got talking about how to talk about a movie without giving away too much to people who haven’t seen it yet…

On the other hand, there are some obvious “safe” spoilers:

Anakin turns to the dark side!

Padme has twins!

Obi-Wan, Yoda, C3P0 and R2D2 all survive at the end of the film!

Review – Delicious Library

I’ve been playing around with a new program: Delicious Library by Delicious Monster. Not only does their company have a really cool name, but the program does some really cool things. Basically, it’s a library management program. It helps you track your books, DVDs, CDs and video games. It’s useful for tracking who has borrowed what and when (which is why we’re looking at it for the expanded office environment). But the really cool thing is how it handles data entry.

Yet Another Nifty Shareware Thing

Some work related cool shareware: MacOSaiX is a freeware mosaic builder for Mac OS X. You just specify a start image, a source for thumbnails and let it go to work assembling a big image made from hundreds of tiny images. We’re setting up an image for work using a big photo of the hospital and lots of tiny images of the various docs & support folks.

Good vs. Bad

Frog Island beer – Good. Very good. We got a six pack of one of their ales from Whole Foods last night and it was very tasty.

Elliot Ness Ale – Bad. Of course, you should probably expect that from a beer named after someone who was famous for keeping people from drinking.

DayQuil – Good. Right now it’s what’s keeping me from having to breathe through my mouth. Yesterday’s minor throat-tickle has morphed into a full-blown cold.

Perception change

Every so often, you find a book that changes how you look at the world. I’m not talking about religious conversion or huge philosophical changes, I just mean more subtle things. It could be a great physics textbook that gives you an unexpected insight into the Leidenfrost effect, so that you can never look at a pancake the same way. Or a software manual that suddenly and unexpectedly clarifies absolutely everything about PHP and CSS, giving you a deep appreciation of a well done database-driven website.

Or it could be a book about zombies.

Bowman!

For all you Akira Kurosawa fans out there, it’s “Throne of Blood” – the home game!

Just click on the image and see what sort of on-the-job day care situation William Tell’s kids had to deal with…

Cool rotation

Have I sung the praises of GraphicConverter lately? Because if I haven’t, then I’m long overdue. It’s possibly the coolest shareware graphic conversion and editing program out there for the Mac. Without Graphic Converter, I’d still be lurking around in Minnesota, working on the first days’ pictures for the Webcast.