I've always disliked the default Mac OS X 10.5 background image, let's hope 10.6 is a little classier.]]> http://www.gollygee.com/weblogs/jblocksom/2009/03/more_dated_than_stripes_1.html http://www.gollygee.com/weblogs/jblocksom/2009/03/more_dated_than_stripes_1.html Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:43:01 -0400 About a month ago I took my kids to the Busytown play up at Imagination Stage in Bethesda, MD. It's based on the Richard Scary Busytown books, which are very popular with my kids. The play was great (here's a review) and my wife even took the kids back a second time.

The play was commissioned for a theater in Seattle a few years ago, and the songs were a lot of fun. I would love to have a recording of the songs, I'm sure we'd be singing them at bedtime now if I could remember anything other than the chorus to the Pickle Car song. And those three lines are beginning to grate on me.

The problem is that Imagination Stage doesn't have the rights to make their own soundtrack CD, or even just a recording of the play, available for sale. It seems to me that playwrights are missing a big opportunity here and need to more aggressively license these rights. CD and DVD production is so cheap these days that putting together a good soundtrack or DVD of the play shouldn't be too hard or too expensive, and it's a great way to get some more revenue from the people who attended. We paid about $60 to attend the play and paying $25 for a soundtrack afterwords would probably have been a no-brainer.

At this point I'm hoping to catch one the actors and ask if there's a bootleg making the rounds, or maybe order a copy of the script and music and learn to play the songs on the piano. But there's a market out there for the forward thinking children's playwright.

You can read the whole review of Bubbles on iTunes.

Oddly enough there are two other bubble popping programs available as well. One costs $1 like mine but seems to have worse graphics, and the other costs $2 and has fancier looking bubbles. I will have to be a ruthless business person if I hope to corner the market on handheld bubble popping software. Beware, competitors!

Another great part of the concert was watching the 1927 silent film Fluttering Hearts with Jim Riggs' live music accompanying it. The movie was fairly amusing and the live music really added to it.

One way I know it was a great concert is that I just wanted to go play music when I came home. I've found that hearing great live music always encourages people to want to go make some themselves in a way that recordings never can.

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realname: Linda ******
email: *****@yahoo.com
subject: E-Mail
body: I need to send a news letter 8 pages out to folks 
on our list for a rabbit show. How do I do this?
----

This of course had nothing to do with our children's 3D modeling software. And our software has nothing to do with rabbits, in fact until this post that word never even appeared on our web site. I wasn't sure what to do and I was really curious about where this lady came from.

So I did some digging and found that she found our site by searching for "sending email tech support" on yahoo.com. We're currently the eighth result, don't ask me how. I can't say why she chose us over the other top 7, maybe she just liked our name.

I haven't responded to the email yet, in the past with random requests like this I've sometimes responded but I just don't know what to say. Though if anybody's interested in going to a rabbit show, I can probably hook you up with about 8 pages of information.

Tools like this are a great way to get kids interested in programming. The immediate feedback and visual rewards really let kids get into the programming aspect of it, incrementally increasing their program complexity to make more and more elaborate visuals. I could see tons of uses for this tool in math and science curriculums as well; for example, you could simulate an experiment, measure a real experiment, and then render the two results on top of each other.

Here's a screenshot of a program I was playing with, follow the link below to see it in action.

I'm reminded of all this thanks to the song below. I'm glad the BBS archives are probably lost to the ages.

Someday maybe we'll be able to pay a web designer to come up with this stuff, but for now I think it was $13 well spent.

Here's an example:

I'm using a script called Lightbox JS to do this, but I got the idea when I saw Cabel's FancyZoom. FancyZoom is pretty cool, but it looks a little clunky on Windows with IE6. About 25% of our web site visitors are using IE6, so I decided to go with Lightbox even though it's not quite as fancy.

Hopefully this will be the first of many updates to our website over the coming months.