GordonChild.com

At work and at home, I usually keep the lights off.  And sometimes visiting a website can be blinding (especially when you’ve been staring at a black vim session for a few hours)

I searched around and found a bookmarklet that will change any page to straight black on white.  I changed the values to be the opposite: white on black and saved the bookmarklet. Clicking the bookmark while on a page will change the colors to white on black. Now whenever I visit a page that is too bright for my cave dweller eyes, I make like a Rolling Stone and paint it black.

Drag this bookmarklet to your bookmark bar to use it: Paint it Black

Here is the code for it:

javascript: (function(){ var newSS, styles='* { background: black ! important; color: white !important } :link, :link * { color: #0000EE !important } :visited, :visited * { color: #551A8B !important }'; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet('javascript:\''+styles+'\''); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(newSS); } } )();

Congrats, you used the bookmarklet to find my super secret text!

I’ve been doing some maintenance on my website…  I’ve got it up and running on CentOS4 with cPanel.  But I wanted to add subversion support to it as well.  I found a forum post that gives details on how to set up subversion on a cPanel install, and after working on it for a while I closed my browser and all it’s tabs.

I know it’s a piece of cake to look through the history…  but it’s even more easy to just start typing into the awesome bar in Firefox 3.5 some of the text that was in that page.  I just typed in subversion cpanel and it showed up as the first hit underneath the awesome bar.

So I’ve played around a bit with some time lapsing.  It’s really a very fun thing to do.  The following video shows a time lapse that I created during a sunrise while near Yellowstone in Idaho.

I used a program called gphoto to take the pictures.  It only runs on MacOS and Linux.  I haven’t yet seen a port for Windows. As long as you have a camera that gphoto supports, you can have it automatically snap pictures. The minimum amount of time that I was able to snap pictures was 10 seconds. The reason being that the camera had to extent the lens, take the picture, then retract the lens. It would take about 10 seconds for it to do this. But the command that I used in gphoto to do this was the following:

gphoto2 --capture-image

Then I had it on a simple loop from there using a bash script.

After having taken pictures I used mencoder to put them all together into a video. Here’s an example of a command to use for mencoder.

mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf on:fps=25:type=jpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1500:vhq -ofps 25 -o timelapse-25fps.avi

Then from there mencoder takes it and makes an mp4 video of all the pictures. It’s really kind of slick.

I’ve been getting back into classical music.  It’s been really fun.  Sunday I downloaded two songs off of iTunes.  Both of them are from the 2005 movie Pride and Prejudice.  The songs are Dawn and Mrs. Darcy.  They are both very similar.  I am more familiar with Mrs. Darcy because it is a song that my sister frequently plays.  I like it when she does because I’m drawn to the room where the music is coming from.

Sunday night I set my iTunes to repeat and listened to these two songs over and over again until I went to bed.  I found myself more alive in the morning and was able to wake up faster. The morning went much better, especially for a Monday.

I think it’s really neat the effect that music can have on you.  In addition to this I’ve been listening to various songs by Percy Grainger (I played Children’s March in High School and it still gets stuck in my head!) and Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber.

A few people in my family have iPods. I have told my mother and my sisters before that they can download General Conference in mp3 format. They are always excited to hear that they can put general conference on their iPods and listen to it wherever. But the big problem is that it’s tedious to go through and click all the links and saving them to iTunes and sync to the iPod just to get them there.

The solution: Create a podcast of General Conference.

After much trial and error and manually editing xml (for shame…), I have managed to create a podcast for the most recent General Conference. Podcasts are very easy to subscribe to. You simply fire up iTunes, go to Advanced >> Subscribe to Podcast… then enter the url of the podcast. The URL is below.

http://www.gordonchild.com/conf/rss.xml

Whoever reads this, feel free to share the URL of this Podcast. It’s too great a thing not to share.

Update: As soon as the titles of the talks and the audio of the Priesthood Session is released I will update the podcast to include these.

Update 04-14-08: I just checked lds.org and it looks like they added podcast feeds for both mp3 and mp4 (video). These are not mine, they’re the official ones. Here’s a link:

http://lds.org/conference/sessions/display/0,5239,23-1-851,00.html

Just recently, I started reading Les Miserables. I’ve been wanting to read it for a long time, and have finally started it. The copy that I’m reading is unabridged and over 1,000 pages long. I purchased a copy of the audio book from Audible.com so I can read it while listening to the audiobook. I don’t think I’d be able to get through it if I didn’t have a recording to listen to. It’s a very long book and Victor Hugo goes into a whole lot of extra detail.

I have listened to the music from the musical and have seen a few different movies based on the book. So I thought I was fairly acquainted with the story. But there is a lot of detail that is left out in everything that I’ve before encountered having to do with this story.

I’ve been especially impressed with Monsieur Myriel. A good portion of the book goes into describing him and encounters that he has. At first I wasn’t sure who this person was or why he was even talked about in the book. While the first few chapters were interesting, I was slightly confused at the detail that spent on a character that I thought was unimportant.

After a while of reading I figured out and saw how important this character is in the book. I won’t give it away for anyone that hasn’t read the book yet. But had this person not been in the story, there would be no story.

I can see how Victor Hugo is trying to paint a picture of what he believes to be, and what are, problems with most societies. It really makes you look and think about… to steal a quote from Babe… “the way things are.”