Month: May 2009

Hastings Cakes video

I shot my first real video with the new camcorder this morning. I did a mini cooking show on how to make Hastings Cakes.

I shot it and edited it this morning before heading out to work, just before leaving I started it uploading.

It came out kind of long, 6 mins 16 seconds, I can probably get it down to 4 minutes by cutting out the washing and waiting to cook parts. But I think it came out OK for a first try.

Hastings Cakes Recipe from Tev Kaber on Vimeo.

Memory Test

I was riding home yesterday, Carl was driving, and we were listening to that iTunes Weekly Rewind podcast, which is just a few people talking about music and playing a variety of clips.

There were a few that sounded interesting, and I wanted to remember what they were.
My first instinct was to reach for my iPhone and write myself a note, however, I decided it would make a good experiment.

So there were 3 phrases that I wanted to remember, either band, album, or song names. The phrase would be enough to find out more with a Google search later.

The first phrase I converted into a visual mnemonic.
The second phrase I converted into a mixture of visual mnemonic and text.
The third phrase I left as text.

I forgot to try to remember them when I got home (metaforgetting?).

So today I remembered the experiment, and was trying to remember the three phrases.

The first was easy to remember. I visualized a clothing iron and a glass of wine. This is for a band called “Iron & Wine”.

For the next phrase, I could remember the visual part of the mnemonic, but not the words. I had been visualizing one word, with a line drawn under it, and another word underneath. But I don’t remember the words. It was something like “____ under ____” or “_____ below ____” the second blank mighta been a longish word.

The third phrase I didn’t remember at all.

Clearly, visuals are extremely easy to remember when compared to words.

When a new programmer was hired to our team at work, I came up with a visual mnemonic for his name, and can now recall it easily. I pictured a guy with lots of keyboards and a camera, “John Tesh” and a “Konica”. His name, therefore, is Shantesh Kanekar.

Reminds me of an example Derren Brown gave for how he does a card trick. He said he visualized a room, and in that room are 52 objects, each representing a specific card. When a card had been played, he would visualize putting a bright ribbon tag on that object. In this way, he would be able to remember which cards had been played, and which were still in the deck.

I guess to remember the missing two items from that podcast, I’ll have to download it and listen to it again. I checked for show notes, knowing my memory would be jogged if I saw the missing phrases, but oddly they list the songs for every episode except that one.

jQuery

Started using jQuery yesterday, just starting to get into it, but so far I’m liking it. It’s a Javascript library that has a bunch of predefined functions and structures set up to make it quicker to write stuff. There’s also a UI component to make it easy to do stuff like dialog boxes and such.

Nice to be able to write something quickly and have it work in all browsers.

Here’s my first test, a simple box with a slide animation between 4 boxes of content when you click buttons.

For some reason it has a slight tearing happening during the animation in FireFox on Windows, but looks good on every other browser (even FireFox on Mac). It only does that for the 1/5 of a second during the transition animation, so I guess I can live with it.

I could do the same thing without the animation pretty easily with basic Javascript, but jQuery’s animation makes it look that much slicker. I’m also starting to do some drag and drop tests with jQuery UI which I may use in a project at work.