Taking the dark and bitter, then making it light and sweet.
It’s like a tangerine in a wooden bowl cast off to sea under a deepened cyan sky.
greenKarat-Jewelry Product Detail Page
This is a geeky-cool-lovr product.
It’s a binary ring with five pits going across the ring to represent 2^5, or a binary representation of the digits 0-31. That’s more than enough to represent the 26 characters of the English alphabet.
There are a series of 20 spaces around the ring for your characters. Even better, it’s made out of recycled gold or titanium. These people are very enviro-friendly.
Every once in a while I come up with what I think would be a totally cool idea. Maybe one out of twenty of those times do I actually spring for it.
Flickr is amazing. It’s API is moderately impressive, too. I thought: “What if I could go through all the tags of all my favorite photos up on flickr, ordered them by popularity, then did a search for photos that matched the top X tags in that list?”
I expected to discover some incredible art that would be right in line with what I already enjoyed. BTW – what is it that I enjoyed?
First, I discovered that flickr can only handle searches up to 20 tags. Any more than that and you get back zip – zilch – nada. Doesn’t matter if any photo in their database actually contains all 21 tags – you get nothing back.
Second, I discovered that some people out there have over 150 tags on the photos of which only 2 tags might apply. As a result, when searching by relevance you get these over-tagged photos in the list along with the worthy ones.
Blame the upload tools. They don’t ask the user to tag each photo, but rather to list out all the tags used for the batch of photos being uploaded. Non-savvy users might batch upload a photograph of a donkey and another of a stop sign. Given only one box for all photos to list their tags they would enter something that places stop-sign related tags on the donkey and vice-versa.
All the same – try the tool out, it actually does a shot-gun result of what I hoped for. Try sorting by “interestingness, descending” for the most polished works first, then try the others for works that are “sleepers” (fantastic photos that are uploaded while people are dozing off, and therefore rarely discovered).
I used to lead worship for our church’s children regularly for about 8 years. During that time I found it necessary to ask kids if they knew what they were singing about.
I recall reading some humorous notes from school teachers where a class had been required to write out the pledge of allegiance (to the flag…).
From that, and through some of the college classes regarding music instruction to grade-schoolers, I understood that children don’t necessarily know what’s going on with the song so you have to ask some basic questions.
So we were singing “Peter and John” also known as “Silver and Gold Have I None”:
Peter and John went to pray
They met a lame man on the way
He asked for alms and held out his palms
and this is what Peter did say:
“Silver and gold have I none,
But such as I have give I thee.
In the name of Jesus Christ
of Nazereth rise up and walk.”
He went walking and leaping and praising God,
Walking and leaping and praising God,
“In the name of Jesus Christ
of Nazereth rise up and walk.”
Noticing the look of blank seven-year old faces in the crowd I stopped and asked some questions. I could understand the younger kids not understanding the content, but by seven I expect them to understand the gist of the song.
Me: “Does anyone know what lame means?”
only one boy held up his hand – he was about 7 or 8.
Boy: “Boring!”
(Insert snickering from the present teachers)
I know he only understood “lame” in today’s slang context … as in “That movie was lame.” But there is a hidden allegation that children’s worship is also “lame.”
One of the frustrations felt as a worship leader is that the children expected to be entertained. Their short attention span could only be held by a laser-light smoke-machine strobe-light pounding hard-core show … or at least some puppets.
Our overabundance of TV watching and video games are designed to under-sensitize children. If you laden their little brains with flashy videos and fast music then you can grab their attention more than your competitors… which means your sponsors are happy.
Those children from homes without much TV – or any TV tend to be more responsive to their environments and definitely hold longer attention spans … and who knows … they might even know, by looking at the social behavior of their peers, the real meaning of “lame.”