Ninjawords.com is Awesome

I like words a lot. A whole lot. And when I find a list of cool new words, I get excited (www.wordie.com). What's better than a list of new words? A really fast, high quality dictionary.

Check out http://www.ninjawords.com. It kicks some serious butt. Here's the top 11 reasons that come to mind about why this incredibly cool online dictionary rocks my and inevitably your proverbial socks clean off.

1) It is fast. And by fast I mean riding a shopping cart full of bottled water down the aisle in Costco and full speed fast. It's written with Ruby on Rails and implements a really clean design that brings results up quick. When you request a definition, it doesn't have to reload the whole page, just the info you need. And, with the exception of the logo it's all text. No ads, no needless images, no redirected content.
The net result: wicked fast.

2) You can add it to Firefox's search window. Just pull down the search window while you're on ninjawords.com, and you can add it. This means when you're reading a book and don't know what a word means, you can just open up old Lappy, type the word into the search bar and there she blows, a definition.

3) Once it's added to the Firefox search, you can highlight a word on any web page and right click to the definition.

4) Built in spell check, which for me is a necessity. I believe it is using Google's spell check API, but I could be wrong on that. (Interestingly enough, My Firefox spell check add on is marking "Google's," "Firefox," and "API" as mispelled words.) In any case, the NinjaWords spell check works really well.

5) Many of the words come with synonyms, just in case you're too pompous to use the word that come to mind.

6) Related words show up as links, which will add another definition to the page you are already looking at. This means you can compare multiple definitions all at once.

7) Speaking of which, you can even put multiple words in separated by commas and get a comparative definition for all the words.

8) You can search straight from your address bar. For example, if you put in www.ninjawords.com/comma,coma you get a definition for the punctuation mark and one for the state of deep sleep.

9) Spartan yet clean and functional styling.

10) It keeps a running list of words you've looked up.

11) Random word picker - for when the OED or dictionary.com word of the day blows giant uninteresting chunks.

In short, I love this dictionary -- and that's coming from someone with access to the Unabridged OED online.

< and > Don't Eat Anything

I was told something as a young rapscallious youth, something hideous, something incomplete, and just plain negligent.

They told me that the greater than and less than signs, "Eat" the larger number." While it may be true, that the big end of the symbol always points to the larger number, how is this helpful? Isn't it easier to know that it has a name, and that the numbers must be oriented accordingly?

It's all about the name, I tell you.

< is always called less than. If you see that symbol and you say anything other than less than, you're wrong. Geez, it's even shaped like an L which could remind you of its name if you forget.

> is always greater than. Al-freaking-ways greater than.

And what about when you aren't using numbers? X < Y. I want to know that X is less than Y, not that something is eating something else, so the one not being eaten must be less than the one which is being eaten, unless the symbol is anorexic in which case it is actually a thinner minus sign.

It's just so much better to say, "Oh, that symbol reads Less Than."

So here's my plea: Teachers, stop telling kids that they eat numbers. Symbols don't eat crap, they're symbols. If you don't know which number is larger or smaller than another number by looking at it and using the symbol, analogies to alligators or other carnivores won't solve that level of retardation.

24 Hours of Fun!

This weekend I entered the 24 hour LDS movie making marathon. I've never done a movie before, but I was working with my roommate who seems to have a certain competence when it comes to making kickin' movies. Being that it was my roomates, a buddy and I who would be working on the film, we decided in advacne we wanted to accomplish one simple goal: Blow some shiz up. That of course, means war movie.

So at 10:00 AM on Friday, we went down to the Scera in Orem (which, I'm sure should be pronounced scare-uh, despite disputations to the contrary). Soon the theme was announced. Sacrifice.

The heavens parted, angels sang, and we realized it was time to get the AK-47 blank adapters air mortars, and bullet hits ready. Come to think of it, we were making air powered bullet hit devices before the theme was even announced. Had the theme been "service" I'm pretty sure we would have been stuck doing something about doing service for the Russian mob. Instead, we did a movie about Chechian rebles being street contacted by LDS Missionaries. It was described by one person as, "the most violent church themed movie I've ever seen." Success.

After hours of work, the DVD finished burning and I ran it up to the Scera to drop it off -- 10 minutes before the deadline.

Upon returning home, we watched a copy of the DVD, to discover a small mistake in editing. One of the sound files didn't get cut quite right. After an Angry Russian gets done berating a missionary (the whole movie is in Russian, with English subtitles), it cuts to some action. After which you hear my roomate say, "Sweet a" You don't hear the whole word, so we're hoping no one at the screening notices the compeltely out of place English swearing.

Despite our foibles, I think the film is pretty dang good for being written, effects built, shot, and edited all in 24 hours. I'll post a link when we do some clean up on the initial edit -- for some reason, they're insisitnig that we take the English cussing out. Weird.