fun

Hey everybody! Long time, no blog. Things have been crazy around here as of late, but now that it is spring break, I have one week without OLLIE gigs to catch up on everything that I have been neglecting. That means four short movies to edit, some DVDs to create, and a website to build. We'll see how much I actually get done. In other news, I managed to put together another Kirsten Academy class (after nearly 3 months without one). The topic this time was stop-motion animation! Check out the movies we made here. We used a program called iStopMotion, which can be purchased online for about $40. Recently, however, I was talking with Andrew of YVXN/NYMAP fame, and he recommended a program called FrameThief, which is actually free! …read more

I've been playing around with tag and word clouds lately. Clouds are basically interesting (and esthetically appealing, in my opinion) ways to visualize the prevalence of words. Words that are more prevalent show up larger/darker than more rare ones. Oftentimes you will see Tag Clouds which show how many posts there are in certain categories (we have one on the CTC VISTA Digest). …read more

Imagine if you could run Windows XP, Mac OS X, and multiple versions of Linux on the same computer.  That's already a reality--you just have to reboot to switch between them.  Now imagine that you could run all these operating systems at the same time on the same computer.  You could run MS Word 2003 at the same time you're running Safari, all while programming in Eclipse.  It's possible.  The technology that makes it possible: Xen. …read more

Good Morning, Well, the sun is rising here in Michigan on chilly Friday. My computer is now by the window, so I can look out on the sky, the trees, the road, and the apartment complex office. …read more

While at the PSO I wore a black t-shrit that said Recoil on it. Recoil is the name of a local free magazine printed on newsprint. On the front is a magazine devoted to local events and advertising, articles about and interviews of bands (local or those coming to town) and reviews of CD's local and national. On the back is a satire magazine of fake and funny news articles a la "The Onion".  I was wearing this shirt when we took the big group photo. That photo that greats us when we all when we click on"vista blogs". The word Recoil has been removed from my shirt. I'm guessing someone thought that it was a possible copyright issue or something. But I hardly think a local Grand Rapids magazine will be suing AmeriCorp for use of the logo. …read more

Check out the video of VISTAS at this summer's CTCNet Conference.