Month: March 2010

The Great Flood

It’s raining again.  Two weeks ago we had major rains.  Commuting to and from work suddenly took hours, as roads were closed, traffic was rerouted, and thousands of people were pushed into going miles around their usual travels.  And with the ground still frozen, all that water has had nowhere to go.  More rain today, and again we’re in flood watch, as rivers are expected to once again overflow.  Basements everywhere are needing to be pumped out.  There had better be a butt-ton of flowers in April and May to make up for this.

Last Thursday the weather was nice, sunny and warm.  But still there was standing water everywhere, and although most of the roads had opened up, some were still closed.  So on Friday I took the camera with me, and on my drive home, took some shots along my commute.  Click past the cut to see the gallery.

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Big News

We have some big news to share.  It’s a big deal, and a big change for us.  It’s going to mean some changes to our social life, and to almost every aspect of our life, actually.  Some of you we’ve told already, and some of you have probably suspected (or possibly feared?).  We’ve been thinking about it and planning for it for months now, and now that we’ve reached a certain stage in the, um, developments, we’re ready to tell everyone (after the cut).

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8-Bit Tubing

Back in the early 90’s, with the release of the SNES came a ‘game’ called Mario Paint.  One of the extras included with that was a a basic music sequencer/composer thingy.  It generated chirpy cheesy 8-bit style sounds, which, lets face it, were part of the hallmark at the time. Game consoles and computers (even ones with sound cards and speakers) could barely generate more than those simple sounds.

This morning I discovered that someone recreated this tool, and released the Mario Paint Composer.  And in the spirit of those who traded midi files in the old dial-up Win3.1 days, people have composed song covers, and using camtasia to screen record and stack several smaller tracks (limit of the length of any one stretch of music in the program), have uploaded them to YouTube.  After the cut I’ll include a handpicked selection of the good ones. Please note that if you are reading the crosspost of this entry, you won’t see the embeds, you’ll just get link to YouTube.
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