Archives May 2015

I hope you all got the opportunity to check out the excellent Google Doodles honoring Sally Ride yesterday, on what would have been her 64th birthday. Sally was the first female astronaut in the United States, riding the space shuttle Challenger into space in 1983 and again in 1984. In addition to her inspiring career with NASA, Sally started a company helping to educate and inspire young people, with an emphasis on girls, to pursue careers in science.

Below are the five Doodles covering aspects of Sally’s life and career, as well as a “behind the scenes” video by the artist/animator of the doodles, Olivia Huynh. You may have noticed that the Doodles loaded randomly each time the Google home screen was refreshed.  This random image rotation effect can be accomplished with a small bit of Javascript, and we currently make use of it on several websites. If this effect is something you are interested in placing on your site, give us a call at (417) 496-9905.

With the passing of troubled, yet undeniably genius John F. Nash, I felt like sharing this opening track to the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’ by James Horner. Soundtracks are fast becoming a lost art, sadly, but inspiring works like this still pop up now and again to fire the imagination.

If you have not seen the movie, a Ron Howard rendering of Nash’s life as a Nobel Prize-winning mathmetician who struggled with schizophrenia for many years, I highly recommend it. In fact, you should watch it at least twice to really appreciate the nuances in the plot and the acting.

If you enjoyed this, seek out the rest of the soundtrack — you won’t be disappointed!

Anyone who knows me at all will have known that it wouldn’t be long before I posted something from the early ’80s! (Boy, that was a convoluted thought.) For those of you who weren’t around at that time, well, you missed out on something truly special, musically-speaking. The early ’80s was, and is, a treasure trove of so many wonderful songs and bands that it still pays dividends today, even thirty years later.

One of the bands I completely missed back in those days was Altered Images, led by the lovely waif from Scotland, Clare Grogan. Probably best known for “Happy Birthday” (included in one of the first scenes of Sixteen Candles), they weren’t around for too long, only putting out an EP and three albums, but during that time managed to run the gamut from punk beginnings to synth-and-bass New Wave. Here is a tune from their last album, sung “live” on Top Of The Pops, ca. 1983.

Yes, it is cliche to say that every song from the time had a saxophone break in it — though most did, ha! — but how many can you say had a trumpet solo? This next song did, and a heartbreakingly lovely one at that. Easily my favorite Altered Images tune, and a lovely but sad way for their career to end, as they broke up after this album (“Bite”) came out. Ach, but we miss ya, lassie!

In our never-ending quest for all things ‘Net-nostalgic — and because the ‘Net isn’t that old, a lot of them refer to AOL — here is the latest: Verizon has agreed to purchase AOL lock, stock, and 5-bazillion-CD-cache, for $4.4 billion.

Sounds like a ton of money, but maybe not so much when you consider AOL was at one time valued at well over $200 billion. Then again, for a company almost no one under the age of 25 actually knew still existed, maybe that’s not such chump change after all.

In any case, here’s a terrifc “chat history” of AOL’s up/down/up again timeline from Mashable.com: