Lately I’ve been busy working on another site of mine, PedSaid, which is a nice little collection of audible stories (transcribed as well) that myself and some others have taken out of the minds of absolute strangers. Hopefully we’ll be able to see the library grow over time and have a good package of wonderful stories to listen to.
Archive for the ‘Website’ Category
Cootie Catcher
Friday, March 19th, 2010If you would take the time to stare at the ground as you walk around town and pick up every piece of trash you see just to inspect it, you’d find a wealth of interesting things. Once I found some broken beer bottles, which was pretty cool, and sometimes I find wet, moldy clothing. About a year ago, I found a folded-up origami on the side of the road, a little child’s piece of art.
I used to make these all the time in high school–we called them fortune tellers. The bearer would present the fortune teller to whomever was playing, and, through a scientific algorithm, reveal some futuristic event in the child’s life (e.g., “You will have a hot girlfriend”). Mine, on the other hand, just had monstrous faces drawn on the outsides of them and became the subjects of paper-related experiments, like vivisection.
Otherwise doomed to decay, my treasure hunting find is now eternally preserved on my website. Go ahead, find out what some kid in California had to say about you in the Interactive Paper Fortune Teller.
Papyrus: A Plague
Thursday, June 26th, 2008There are a lot of fonts out there, but it seems that few get as reused as Papyrus does. Since I’ve begun looking for it, I’ve seen it nearly everywhere, from product labels and advertisements to the signs of the stores marketing them. Papyrus is generally the Font of Choice for the organic and healthy food market; it’ll often show up on packaging for teas and whole-grain foods. In an effort to document the widespread usage of this otherwise-unique font, I’ve developed a website, Papyrus: A Plague of Typography, in which users are free to post their own photographs of semi- to wholly- permanent instances of the font. These photographs must be coupled with a concrete street address, because, once posted, they are automatically placed on a map displaying all of these sightings from around the world.
It’d be wonderful if all who are interested would participate in this project.
Redesign!
Saturday, June 14th, 2008Notice anything different? You should, because I’ve redesigned the whole website. That’s right: I’ve crossed over from “pretty boring” to “slightly less boring than before;” this time around, I’ve cut out some doodles of mine and pasted them around the website (digitally speaking, of course). Yes, believe it or not, for the past two months I have been working on the website–I’ve just done a miserable job of updating you (the webcrawlers and one or two friends I’ve coerced into visiting this site regularly).
[NOTE: To avoid copyright infringement, I've changed the name of the Thesaurusizer to the Thesaurifier. I preferred the previous one, but someone already has a hold of it on the Net. Just be grateful I didn't name it the Thesaurinator like I almost did, and would have, had it not sounded like a stupid bathroom joke.]
For starters, I’d like to point out the Thesaurusizer. It’s basically a program that rewords phrases for you. For example, if you don’t particularly like the way the first line of A Tale of Two Cities starts, you can plug it into the Thesaurusizer and read an entirely new beginning:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness
Becomes:
It was the outflank of multiplication, it was the worst of times, it was the eld of wisdom, it was the long time of folly
And if your children’s story doesn’t really have that kick that you want, give the Thesaurusizer a spin:
Rover the happy dog lives in a big box
Becomes:
Wanderer the felicitous frump survives in a self-aggrandising box
If your word comes up with a confusing synonym, simply click on it, and the Thesaurusizer will attempt to find a new one for you.
The program’s not completely reliable, which is evident from only one or two uses, but it helps to pass the time if you’re a little bored. I plan to continue to work on it, so expect to hear back from me on the topic. If you have any suggestions, find any bugs, or just want to comment on the program, you can do so here.
Oh, and for those of you who want to know what the old site looked like, I’ve archived it.
There Goes my Content
Monday, February 25th, 2008Today I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of friends at a Chinese buffet at about 3 PM. Naturally, it was pretty empty with the exception of an elderly couple, the owners’ kids (concentrating hard on homework), and this bald guy who looked pretty cool. At one point, I got up to get myself some egg drop soup. While I was filling my bowl with the viscous stuff, which seemed to me more mucus-like than soup-like, the elderly woman engaged herself in pointing at some breaded, crispy, meaty looking things and croaking, “What is that? What is that? What is that?” Frankly, I did not know, and I was far enough away that her question obviously wasn’t directed at me. In due time, a man with cooking clothes (apron, chef’s hat, etc.) came over and pointed to the label above the dish. “Pizza,” he said, as he pointed to the crooked label that clearly read, “Pizza;” the food looked more like fried chicken than pizza, so I will unhesitatingly state that I fully believe that this restaurant worker had never seen a slice of pizza in his life.
Unsatisfied with the cook’s answer, the woman reverted to her consistent asking: “What is that? What is that? What is that?”
In less-anecdotal news:
Kristen and I recently broke up, and so I feel obligated to remove the link to the Valentine’s Day shrine to her. I’m a little reluctant, seeing as how it comprises about half of the content on my site, but I also don’t want her to beat me up. I’ve kept the page at http://www.ianmh.com/vday/ but removed it from the tab list on the main page.
I was also about a virtual inch away from having another page of content on my site, but, for legal reasons, I cannot put it up right away. (Don’t get too excited–it has nothing to do with drugs, sex, bombs, or John Elway. In fact, it has more to do with orthography than anything, which is considered by most of the world to be the most uninteresting subject ever devised.)
Image Manipulation
Friday, February 15th, 2008Although there are already several online image manipulation tools out there, I’ve gone ahead and created one myself, a simple little tool that allows you to crop images to a chosen width and height. I’ve made it for a specific purpose, which will hopefully become apparent sooner than later, depending on how much time I have to work on my projects.
You can view the image cropper here.
Valentine’s Day, Everybody
Thursday, February 14th, 2008Any previous year I would’ve sat back and, with the general Valentine’s Day cynicism, scoffed at the abominable materialism of the whole holiday; how Wal-Mart sells giant plush animals for ten times the cost of any rustic carnival; how I used to be forced into bringing silly little Godzilla Valetines taped with Dum-Dums to my entire fourth-grade class; and how anything Necco produces is the sheer antithesis of “good.”
This year, however, things are a little different. What’s wrong with pandering to the extortionists if you’re doing it to show a loved one you care? Most things, I’m sure. But still. This year, I’ve given in to the Valentine’s Day phenomenon and, as of now, don’t regret it. I’ve got a wonderful girlfriend, and I want to show her I care. (I had a dream last night that I bought her mixed nuts, and I ate a handful of them. She ate the Brazil nuts, which was gross. When I woke up, I said to myself, “Psh, more like Fathers’ Day, if you ask me!”) So, I’ve made a little tribute to her, a recent addition to the site [link removed]. Happy Valentine’s Day, Kristen!
One of these days I’m going to find out if Valentines Day has an apostrophe in it. One of these days.