Another Voice
I don't watch may US television programs, I mostly watch movies and Japanese anime. One of the shows I do watch though is the medical drama House MD, starring Hugh Laurie playing the doctor of the shows namesake.
One of the more intriguing things to me, however, is off the camera. Hugh Laurie is British, but he is playing a character that is American, so he has to alter his speech to mask his accent. I had never heard of him before House, and I wasn't aware of this fact... Until I saw him in passing on one of the late night talk shows, where he was talking as he would normally. It sounded, honestly, like it was someone else entirely. Not only was the accenting on the vowels different, but the way his consonants are pronounced as well, and even the normal pitch of his voice was different than as Gregory House. It was very surreal the first time, and honestly didn't sound like the voice was coming from Hugh at times.
If you're wondering, here's a link to him talking to Dave Letterman. It's quite interesting the way accenting can be affected and masked.
Tags: accents television
Evolving
I don't really have much time, so I'll keep this fairly short for now, and go more into what I had wanted to talk about tomorrow.
This blog - and it's older sibling the AnacondaSoftware Devblog - are run on a software called Pivot. As I've mentioned before, I've expressed desire in having more than just this blog on this site, I've wanted to move my writings over from AnacondaSoftware and have them branch off of this blog. One of the biggest things that has been holding me back on that is I wanted a way to smoothly integrate it with the blog side, so the site kept an overall congruent feel to it, not different things stitched together.
A few days ago, the first alpha of the new version of the software - now called PivotX - was released. I installed it into my test server to play around with a bit, and it has exactly what I'm looking for: a feature it refers to simply as "Pages". The Pages live in categories called Chapters, and are listed in a specific order, rather than an archival order like the normal blog system. They aren't bound by dates or time, and are listed in a simple Table of Contents allowing access to any page. They also allow for arbitrarily assigning any template to any individual page, so it can look like whatever you want while not affecting any other pages. This is the perfect platform for me to add writing to this site, so I'm watching closely now the advancement of the software in anticipation.
As it appears so far with the alpha, the first thing it looks like I'll have to address is the actual look itself. The blog is switching to a new template system, and some of it's commands are a little different. As of current, dropping in the template files unedited, the actual text of the template shows up in the right places, but no images load, and the entries aren't inserted into the page. I'll have to look into how the new system works, and update the templates accordingly.
Tags: anacondasoftware website_design writing
A Moment of Silence
Christopher and David's mother passed away this week. With great respect, I will reproduce her obituary here.
Denise Barton Beckstrom 11/13/1956~11/25/2007 -- Denise Barton Beckstrom passed away November 25, 2007 surrounded by her loving family. Denise was born November 13, 1956 in Salt Lake City, Utah to Gordon and Marjorie Barton. She was a proud mother of two sons and one grandchild. She spent the final years of her life in the same neighborhood that she grew up in and loved. She blessed those around her with a kind and giving spirit, and with her wonderful musical talents.
Obituary Link
She has left a great legacy, and will be missed by all who knew her.
Tags: memoir personal
A short guide to lolcats
Originating in the depths of the internet, on a day of the week known as Caturday, now you can see the "lolcats" everywhere, permeating every nook and cranny of the internet and taking over as a supplement to internet speak. It can be found in translations of the Bible, and even its own programming language! Poor spelling aside, here's a couple aspects of it's structure:
All objects are plural: internets, pies, books, most everything singular is plural, especially referring to posessives.
All verps are present tense: the only forms of the be-verb in use usually are "is, are, and being", other verbs become such as "has", and so on. in some cases "ed" is added onto the end to mutate it into a shoddy present tense verb, such as "eated" or "breaked"
There's some more idiosyncrasies to it, but those are the general rules to the grammatical structure of the language.
Tags: internet linguistic
StoryLines
One of the things I was taught in Elementary School was to organize for large writing projects. I had done that using index cards, and on the computer using the Cardfile program in Windows 3.1. That program was unfortunately deprecated and not released in future versions of Windows, so I had to find other tools for doing it.
For a while I was using a program called AZZ Cardfile, which worked pretty much the same as the original Cardfile, with a few more features. However, once I started owning my own computer and shuffling them around every couple of years, I at one point lost all the work I had done in Cardfile, because it by default didn't save in a place I thought to look for moving. Only a few pieces of work that work I lost survived, a few pieces I had copied into other documents for use in those places. I have still yet to recover from that loss; I haven't bothered to sit down and rewrite the stuff.
After that loss, I started doing everything in my Word Processing software. I had used WordPerfect for a long time, but my old version wasn't compatible with Vista when I got Vista, so I switched over to OpenOffice temporarily until I got a new copy of WordPerfect (although now I'm stuck using OpenOffice until WordPerfect can open OpenDocument files, since OpenOffice can only open WordPerfect documents, not save them). I would save different things in different files, so at this point my WordPerfect file count is over 100, most of those having less than one page of writing, and some even having only a few lines of writing. That started to not work very well anymore, so I started looking for some new solution.
Some of my documents were reference documents, quick descriptions of how something in a storyline works. For that I decided to use a WIki, and ended up with Wiki In A Jar as I have mentioned in the past. The remaining things were story fragments, or comments in stories using WordPerfect's comment system, and I needed something else for that. I started looking back for card utilities, but wanted something more functional than a simple card collection like Cardfile and it's clones. I wanted to be able to take cards with fragments, and arrange them and rearrange them to fit them together as I needed, like I could do with actual physical index cards. So after a good deal of searching, finding nothing that fit what I was looking for either in commercial or Open Source projects, I was nearly ready to just sit down and program a tool for my own use, when I stumbled upon Writer's Café and StoryLines.
I only recently started using it to plan out Skewed, because I was still working off of notes in my WordPerfect documents, so there's only cards starting at the point where I started using it for Skewed, the beginning of Chapter 10. I have though planned out a couple of other stories in it to their fullest. Each card gives you a myriad of properties: descriptions, card notes, setting information, image attachment, and so on. And even more functions that I probably won't use very often.
Overall the software's been incredibly useful to me, and is one of the few times I've bought a specialized software like this instead of going for Open Source software or writing something myself. Love it, use it a lot, and the song that comes with the software, Jay Goldmark's Untie My Tongue, is pretty awesome too.
Tags: computer music skewed software writing