The Red Frog Blog

People may call us a crunchy, liberal folk, but my heart leapt with pride to be an Ithacan at the annual Earth Day celebration at the Ithaca Farmers’ Market this Sunday.  It’s not what you might expect.  Sure, there’s the bellydancing vegans, the solar powered folk band performance, and the ubiquitous drum circle (all admittedly a bit granola), but you’ll also find some of coolest people you’ll have a chance to meet doing some pretty awesome things!  Like Marlo of Garden Gate Delivery who was doing a blind milk taste test (Evan’s non-homogenized milk vs. Wegman’s organic milk) Benj and Julie of Dovetail Builders who were showing off all of the beautiful, sustainable carpentry work they do, or Jennifer Dotson, the brain behind Ithaca CarShare, who was taking her very first enrollments!  Not to mention all the cool stuff I learned about the composting with worms, humanure, the Locavore project, compact fluorescents, etc.  And to top it all off, I had the pleasure of witnessing the 4-H rubber ducky race down Fall Creek on my way down to the event.  Nothing like seeing kids jumping into the creek after those little yellow guys and seeing real ducks get very, very confused by a swarm of rubber ones.  There’s no place like Ithaca.

Just saw a great documentary that I thought I’d review (in an attempt to win Tyler’s “blog today!” contest). It’s called “My Kid Could Paint That“, and it’s about a 4-year old girl named Marla from Binghamton, New York who has an amazing ability to create beautifully mature abstract paintings. A quick summary from NetFlix (my main source for DVDs):

Amir Bar-Lev directs this thought-provoking documentary about a precocious 4-year-old artist whose abstract works have drawn critical comparisons with modernist greats such as Kandinsky, Picasso and Pollack — and whose talents have already profited her more than $300,000. Is her gift with a paintbrush just an illusion, or is she truly an artistic visionary trapped in the body of a child?

Inspiration or manipulation??? I won’t reveal to you what happens because Amir does a wonderful job of telling the story as it unfolded… but let’s just say it’s not so pretty at the end. Amir gives a balanced take on the events and leaves you as the viewer to decide what really happened. And it’s the kind of movie that you just have to talk about immediately after watching it. Admittedly, I was also really intrigued because of the local proximity of the story.

So add this right to the top of your Queue, this is a must-see documentary!

Ahh, the Commons Cam.  What would we do without our frivolous little mental-health-preserving project?  If you’ve noticed a lack of posting here at the Red Frog Blog, it’s because we’ve been busy.  Really busy.  Brains-on-wall busy.  And with all manner of projects, print, web, application development, you name it, we’ve done it in the past month.

So with a new, amazing, beautiful, slick version of WebTree coming out sometime next week, I took a short break from application development today to play with our Commons Cam site, and added a cool new feature.

It’s called a visual time stamp.  Any time someone makes a comment on the site, the system now automatically saves a copy of the webcam’s view.  That way you can see what the hell someone was commenting about, or you can comment when you see a particularly pretty view, or a particularly strange one.

So go ahead and visit the Commons Cam and let us know what you see.  And perhaps share it with some friends?

Enjoy!

This past week has been exceptionally beautiful here in Ithaca. We even repositioned the Commons Cam to show more of the beautiful blue sky and trees. And since we’re usually cranking away projects on our computers all day long we’ve been taking our lunch outside

We’ve also been taking the camera with us. Here are some of the highlights:

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So we’ve been all over The Flickr lately. All over it. Since we created a new photo studio a few weeks ago Molly and I have tried to get some fresh shots each day. 

But last week we freaked out when we saw that you can now upload 90 second videos to Flickr. Which is a good thing. We’ll post some soon, most likely of our super-awesome band jams, but who knows what this means. Vimeo will always have a place in my heart, but I’m all for the one-stop visual extravaganza.

The extra bonus is that Flickr also now allows double the photo size while uploading (for Pro mmbrs). It used to max out at 10mb per shot, but now we get 20 glorious megabytes. This is a good thing.

Thank you Flickr.