Can't tell you more than I told you already
Here are some neat animated optical illusions. You may not have all the plug-ins to run all of these, but you should be able to see most of them. The snake image on about the third page is really neat.
Of course these are ripe for parody by optical realities.
For the website I did for the Sidney Lanier Bridge, I created two animated .gif images, one for a construction sequence, and the other for the tower crane (at the bottom of the page). These were pretty simple but I learned some of the basics of animated .gif images when I made them. An animated .gif is a series of .gif images compiled to run one after the other. To get smooth motion you can make each frame last a certain length of time in hundreths of seconds, but it gets cumbersome making so many frames. If you want, you can make each frame last different numbers of seconds. You can also have the animation loop a set number of times or forever. It’s interesting, but I don’t have much of a reason to do animated .gifs very often.
While fixing a co-worker’s home computer, a dilemma that presented itself was whether to use parental controls that AOL offers. At first I used the “Young Teen” setting for her younger son and “Mature Teen” for her son in 11th grade. Both settings are supposed to restrict access to some websites. What I found out was that all or nearly all sites were being blocked, even for the Mature Teen. As a compromise, I gave him full web access but enabled AOL Guardian which logs the sites he visits and sends a report to his mother. Though the whole family uses the computer, it is located in his room and he is often home by himself. Parental controls at AOL also allow her to restrict the amount of time per day (one hour is the lowest; I remember when AOL restricted you to 10 hours per month) as well as the time of day he is allowed to log on. I didn’t activate those.
I’ve been checking in to Mac5’s recently installed stats. Web statistics are always informative. I like that Eric is getting a lot of hits for not knowing how to spell “renege” in Euchre and people search for it the same way he spelled it.
Also I wondered about why the site was getting referrals from sites that were obviously junk ad sites (web4u). It seems a lot of people with blogs will show a list of the most recent referring websites on their page (I guess because they can). So these companies have web bots that do referrals so that they will in turn become listed as one of your referrers. They don’t really expect people to click on the links as much as they hope that Google will see how many websites link to their website and increase their rankings.
However in a recent attempt to find out why Google has forsaken me lately, I found that Google has turned the tables by using the number of sites that link to yours *against you* in the rankings. Apparently Google has to make constant changes to their search algorithms to keep ahead of junk ad sites and in an effort to provide better search results. It’s Spy vs. Spy all the time. They must have made a big change at the end of November when I noticed the drop off on my site. Now people are complaining because Google is sending fewer people to their websites and they aren’t making as much money. So they complain that Google has no right to destroy their business like that. Amazing.
It’s been one year since I wrote Memoparser and I get an occasional hit on its web page and 187 have downloaded it at Palm Gear. I did a search for “memoparser” and found one guy’s blog entry that said “Memoparser 1.0 sounds interesting”. That’s pretty good, I think. The guy that wrote Palm2iPod still hasn’t come up with a new version that exports memos so I’m glad I wrote the program.
However, I have to admit that I don’t generally use the notes on the iPod since I usually carry my Palm with me.
I still think the perfect MP3 player would be a Palm with a 20 GB hard drive. And it would need some kind of open source community to keep it constantly updated and configurable, unlike the iPod.
Unfortunately, I think Palms and other non-wireless (wireful? it still has no wires) PDA’s are dinosaurs. I was at Best Buy and they had maybe 3′ of shelf space for PDA’s and accessories. I think cell phones are doing more and more but I don’t really want a cell phone. I think eventually people will make fun of me for using an antiquated wireful Palm, like it’s a slide rule or something.
