robmello.com

Road Warrior

After a year of crazy travel, my schedule is returning to a more normal pace.  While it’s great to have elite travel status with airlines, hotels and car rental agencies, I hope my road-warrior title is permanently retired!

Our Favorite YouTube Guitarist Revealed

This is another “you saw it here” post.  The NY Times has posted an article on what has become one of the five most viewed videos on YouTube with over nine million hits so far.  The Times reveals our guitarist as Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old  from Korea.

The Thinking Person's YouTube

If you read this blog, then you know that I'm a big YouTube fan.  Google is now competing with a site that has much better performance.

My favorite video site is soon to be VideoJug once they get more content up.  I realize that the name implies an entirely different type of site, but these folks are putting together a library of thousands of how-to videos.  Some are produced in-house and others will be uploaded by members.

All content is approved before it is posted, so VideoJug should turn into a very high-quality site.

 

31 Ways to Lace Shoes

Ian's Shoelace Site illustrates 31 different ways to lace your shoes.  The author points out that while mathematically there are there are over two trillion possibilities, these 31 are his favorite.

Add Streaming Video to TypePad Blog with Stickam

Stickam™ allows you to easily place streaming video on your blog and/or web site.  The video is uploaded via the Flash browser plug-in and displays as a flash movie - NICE! 

However, if you copy and paste the Stickam code as the site suggests, you’ll get a very busy full-sized 160 x 400 interface on your blog that takes up a lot of real estate.  (See the image to the left.)

If you are not planning on using the chat features, and simply want a streaming web-cam, then you can mask the display using HTML and have a nice streaming video window on your web site or blog.  Here’s how to do it:

Internet Guitar Hero

If you read this blog, you already know that I'm a big fan of YouTube.  This video of a kid in his bedroom shredding Pachelbel's Canon is what I think the Internet is all about...

Welcome

Welcome to the robmello.com blog.  Here you will find mostly technology tips and random musings with a sprinkle of politics and home movies. 

Like most blogs, this one is written for the author, not the audience, but what you won’t find is the all-too-familiar "here’s what I did today" entry, so don’t be afraid to click around.

When you see a PLAY button in the image above, what you are seeing is streaming video from my home office web-cam.  Not especially exciting, but I find the idea of streaming video to your blog pretty neat.  A few moths back, I setup streaming video using Stickam, but I've found that Ustream TV is much better suited for this.

Nomar is Back

You’ll notice that I don’t have a sports category on this blog.  While I’m a Red Sox fan and Nomar Garciaparra fan,  there are enough sports pages on the web right now, and we certainly don’t need another one.  (Remember Nomar.net?)

However, I have to post an “I told you so” about my boy.  At the all-star break, he’s leading the NL in batting (.359 ), on a pace to hit 100+ RBI’s and only has one error at first base in 66 games with 59 double-plays.  Nomar also is going to his sixth all-star game this year.

Nomar is back.  Stay tuned! 

Stock Photo Industry Blog

I frequently use free-to-use photos to add a little sizzle to my posts.  (See my entries about sites that feature free-to-use photography.)

For those whose interests include both free-to-use photos and stock photography, check out Andy Goetze’s blog about the stock photo industry.

Also, see Yotophoto CEO Mark Thomson's comments which help set the record straight about Yotophoto being the first internet search engine for finding free-to-use photographs and images.

Two Useful TypePad Hacks

There were a couple of things I wanted TypePad to do better.   Once was searching and the other was opening external pages in a new window - so that visitors could easily come back to the blog after clicking on a link.

TypePad has a widget for the new browser window feature, but even though it seemed to have code to handle the situation, it opened all links - even ones within the blog - in a new window.  You can imagine how annoying this is.