The Mentos Mobile

mentos girlsWe were in downtown Austin last night and sitting at the balcony of The Blind Pig. I stepped away for a moment and when I returned, I was informed that a Mentos car was parked on the street below and there was a team of Mentos girls handing out rolls up and down the street. I’m sure my eyes must have popped out of my head when I saw the beautiful blue convertible with mints and logos posted all over it. I was giddy! I hurried downstairs as quickly as I could with Ken in tow (someone needed to take the photos!). We rushed down to the car and started shooting photos. We couldn’t find the Mentos girls anywhere so I reluctantly agreed to head back up. Then I got a call from Dave, one of the people we were sitting with, saying that the Mentos girls were back at the car. I couldn’t move fast enough! I think I inadvertently left Ken in the dust as I rushed back to the car.

Back at the car, there were two Mentos girls and a guy carrying a giant roll of M. I got a photo with all of them. Ken and I also grabbed a roll of Mentos to take back upstairs. Later that night the Mentos guy came around on the street below us and was throwing t-shirts wrapped to look like big rolls of Mentos. They wanted people to cheer for the shirts. I of course, had no problem doing this and they threw it up to us. We missed it, but fortunately it fell on the landing right below our balcony and I was able to reach it through the rail. So I’m now the proud owner of another Mentos shirt! Who would of thought that at a wonderful tech convention (SXSW) I would run across my other vice in such force!

Photos from the wonderful night in Flickr

Off to SXSW Interactive

Tomorrow I’m jumping on a plane to Austin, TX for South by Southwest Interactive Festival for work. I’ve wanted to attend this conference for several years, and I’m really excited to finally be able to make it. I don’t have any clue what panels I’m going to attend yet, but I’m sure there will be much to blog about (by me, and about a million other bloggers in attendance).

Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the SXSW Interactive Festival enables you to connect, discover and inspire your link to the cutting edge.

So keep your eyes peeled right here for more geeky tidbits from SXSW.

Interactive Weather.com Map

weatherchan.gifI have a love/hate relationship with Weather.com. On one hand, it’s easy to remember, and they usually have fairly accurate forecast information. On the other hand, they are LOADED with ads, and bury the information you’re looking for pretty deeply on their site. They obviously know they’re the #1 location for weather online and try to get as many ad views as they possibly can by making you dig to the data you’re looking for. They launched a nice feature the other day though, that I would put into the love category. They are now providing an interactive weather map combining weather information from the site and the drag-and-drop type map that are all of the big direction sites use. I’ve wondered why it has taken so long for something like this to appear given that pretty much all mapping sites are using this technology now. It only makes sense that it finally makes its way into weather maps. You can now zoom into street level maps with animated radar or cloud data superimposed over top. It’s definitely a welcome improvement to the static image radar images we’re used to.

King Nutter

kingnutter.pngDo you ever just think to yourself, “Man, I wish there were some site out them there Internets that I could see a collection of weird ebay auctions and videos recently removed from YouTube!” Your wish has come true! King Nutter is just that site. They have a random hodgepodge of crazy ebay stuff, and the most random collection of weird videos that you’ve seen. This is the kind of site that makes the Internet the wonderful place that it is.

Mentos Geyser Tube

geysertube.jpgThe International Toy Fair in New York just ended yesterday. I’m sure there were a lot of cool toys at the fair, but one caught my eye for obvious reasons. A company called Steve Spangler Science released a new toy called the Mentos Geyser Tube, which is basically a little plastic device to easily create the Mentos + Diet Coke geyser effect. This looks very similar to what was used for the famous Eepybird Mentos fountain videos. According to their site, Steve Spangler Science is trying to get a patent for the device. This thing will definitely make it easier (less messy) to create Mentos + Diet Coke fountains!

Copyright – Orphan Works Reform

I’ve been a fan of Lawrance Lessig for a while. He is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. He is a large proponent of Copyright regulation, and was one of the founding members of the Creative Commons license. He has recently put together a great presentation for a proposal for how to handle “Orphan Works.” The video below does a better job of describing it than I will, but in a nutshell, The US Copyright Office has issued a report on the current issues of “Orphan Works,” (content that is still technically under copyright, but the copyright owner are either very difficult, or impossible to locate). This proposal is a great step in how to deal with them. It’s a little long, but definitely worth watching if you have any interest in this.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-63593434971523176&hl=en

Lessig also hosts a few other video presentations on his site discussing similar topics.

LibraryThing

librarything.gifAs sort of a New Year’s resolution (which I rarely do), I decided I wanted to track all the books I read in 2007, and maybe longer. I thought to myself, “there’s got to be some sort of software or website that does this kind of thing,” After doing a lot of digging, I didn’t come up with a whole lot. I found a few pieces of software that would keep track of media (CD’s, DVD’s, books, etc.), but they were more for a home library, and geared toward checking out pieces of your own media to your friends. I just wanted something that would keep a limited amount of information about what books I’ve read, and when I’ve read them. Anything else on top of that would be a plus. There were a few online apps that one could install on a server that kind of did this, but they were either way to simplified (just storing title and author), or they were like an online version of the media tracker, being more like check out management software. I was beginning to wonder if anything like this existed out there, or if I would need to write something myself, when I ran across a cool site called LibraryThing. The best way to describe it is that it’s like Last.FM for books. It does the few things that I wanted, and a lot more. I can track my books by all of the information I was looking for, and it allows me to rate them, and review them as well. It also has a nice social aspect to it as well. It compares my books to other people’s books and makes recommendations based on what other people with similar tastes liked.

LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 60 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, “tag” books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection.

If you want it, LibraryThing is also an amazing social space, often described as “MySpace for books” or “Facebook for books.” You can check out other people’s libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, swap reading suggestions and so forth. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.

So it turns out LibraryThing is just what I was looking for. I think it will be interesting to see how many books I get through in a year’s time.

Netflix Watch Now

This past fall, I finally made the jump to Netflix (yah, I know… what took so long?!?) after paying something like $6 for a new release at the local video store. I had eyed the service for a while, but paying for that video was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Anyway, I’ve been very happy with the service for the past 6 months. Delivery is very quick, the website is very intuitive and works very well (they’ve got all kinds of cool AJAX stuff going on). All in all, Netflix has been great, and there isn’t a DVD that goes by where I regret making the move away from the local video store at all.

watchnow.jpgSometime around the middle of January, Netflix launched a trial of a new “Watch Now” service that allows you to instantly watch movies online via the Netflix site. Being the happy Netflix user that I am, I jumped at the chance to try their cool new addition. Well, turns out I wasn’t special enough to get to use it. I kept getting a message that the “Watch Now” feature would be rolled out on a limited basis and would be fully launched in June. You can image how disappointed I was. Then when listening to the Buzz Out Loud Podcast, I learned of a little trick to get myself into the limited release of the new “Watch Now” feature. If you log into the site and type “downloads” into the search bar, you’ll get a message (Looking for our instant watching feature?) that takes you to a page where you can activate your account for this new feature. Well, I did this, and kept getting the same “coming in June” message that I’d been able to find before… hmmm! Then after a little digging, I found another tip that said the new feature only worked in Internet Explorer, which I try to stay as far away from as possible. So I fired up IE and low and behold, it worked… almost. I had the new “Watch Now” tab in my menu, but trying to actually watch a video gave me several crazy Media error messages. Well, after a little digging and an e-mail to Netflix they got me straightened out. Turns out Netflix uses Windows Media DRM (IE & Windows only!) for this service and there were a few hiccups, but I seem to be straightened out now.

netflixplayscreen.jpgNow that I’ve got the service up and running, things are working pretty well. The pricing is nice. Since you are obviously a Netflix subscriber if you’re trying this, the pricing is pretty much free. The new instant watching service is tacked onto your account as a feature. You get however many hours of video watching as dollars per month in your subscription. So if you have the 2 at a time unlimited subscription for $14.99/month, you get 15 hours of instant streaming movies per month. The movie selection is a little lacking. I’m hoping this is just due to the service still being in limited release. There are still a good number of movies available though. As for actually using the service, after the initial hiccups everything has been working smoothly. You pick the movie you want to watch and simply click the “play” button. It pulls up a new viewing screen with your typical video playback toolbar (also includes a full-screen mode) and after a few seconds to buffer, the movie streams to your computer. The quality is what you’d expect from streaming video. It’s not super great, but it’s really not that bad either. I’m sure much of the quality is dependent on your Internet connection speed. I’d like to try this out on an HTPC, and see how it looks on a TV screen, mainly because I don’t have a couch in front of my computer monitor.

So far I’ve been happy with this nice new Netflix feature, minus the fact that I have to use IE for it. It’s a nice add-on for a service that I already enjoy. I don’t think I would think as highly of it if there was an additional charge for viewing online. The fact that it starts streaming quickly (no waiting for a long download), and is available on just about any (windows) net connected computer is a really handy feature for Netflix. I could see taking advantage of this when I’m between mailed DVD’s or even on vacation, or at a friends house when we want to watch a movie, but don’t want to go out and get one. Netflix has definitely positioned instant watching well to making it very useful, and to get people to subscribe to their bread-and-butter online rental service. It easily blows the current collection of online streaming rental services (don’t get me started on Unbox again!) out of the water.

Hacking Netflix has put together a nice screencast of the entire “watch now” process.

I Love Music Video

Who doesn’t love a good YouTube lip-sync of a popular song?!? Well you can thank your lucky stars… there is now a way to find them by searching a particular artist! iLoveMusicVideo.net will give you a long list (depending on the singer) of YouTube videos from whatever artist you’re looking for. It’s not only great lip-sync videos. You’ll also get the real music video too if it’s up there. The thing that makes this site cool, is that it will hook to your Last.FM profile (if you have one), and automatically bring in artists you listen to.

2007 Bloggies

It’s time again this year to vote for your favorite blogs of 2007. The Bloggie Awards have opened up voting for this year’s awards in a number of categories.

Time once again to get out your blogrolls. The Weblog Awards are a non-profit project created in 2001 to award the best blogs. All the Bloggie winners are chosen by the public. Who are you going to vote for?

As always, there are some pretty cool sites out there to chose from. Get out there and pick the best sites of 2007!

The Day Traditional Photography (equipment) Died

A little late on this post, but the day after Christmas there was a little bit of housecleaning done at Frederick’s Photography. Over 1100 lbs. of old traditional photography equipment was loaded up and taken to the scrap yard. It was kind of a sad day to see thousands of dollars worth of equipment being tossed out as junk because there is simply no market for this type of stuff any more (even on ebay, auctions for similar equipment go without any bids). My parents have operated a photography studio for over 27 years now, and like most of the industry, has switched to all digital. So now this 1100+ lbs. of equipment has been replaced by a few computers. The load of equipment we hauled off to the junkyard included quite a bit of stuff. There were several darkroom enlargers, including one that I spent a fair amount of time on in high school printing proofs while working for my parents. There was also a big old photo paper processor that just about took up an entire room hauled away with the other junk. I’m sure I’m probably missing something or totally wrong on the equipment that I remember. I’ll let me dad fill in the details in the comments area. So it was a little sad to see almost 3 decades of equipment being tossed out as junk, but I guess that’s technology for you. Always pushing forward.

Flickr set of the whole process

iPhone & AppleTV

Apple_Logo.pngI always seem to be on vacation when Apple does their big January announcement. And since that happened over a week ago, (and since the media goes crazy any time Apple releases something new) there’s isn’t much of a chance you haven’t heard at least some sort of rumblings about the new Apple iPhone.

I won’t go into incredible detail on what it is and what it does, since that information is plastered all over the internet. I will say this thing is a sleek looking device (most things Apple creates can be called “sleek”). They’ve put together a nice smart phone, though they stray from calling it that. Regardless of how this thing eventually performs, at the very lowest level, I think the iPhone is going to be a good thing because it will force the cell phone carries to bump up their phone choices. With a nice powerful internet/music device in the iPhone overshadowing the tiny locked-down selection of phones typically offered by carriers this could be a good thing. Even though I like what the iPhone can do, and it looks like a very well-designed device, I don’t think I’d go right out and buy one (when they’re available in June). I’m very happy with my Treo. The clincher for me (and maybe it’s just because this is what I’m used to) is that I feel I’m able to expand what it can do more than the somewhat locked down iPhone. I have a lot more choices for applications that can go on my existing device. Plus, I’m not spending $499 or $599 for it. Who knows though, just like all things Apple releases, I like to see it close up/hands on. Maybe after doing that it will win me over. Guess I won’t know till June.

Apple also officially released their AppleTV which was announced last fall. I pretty much feel the same way about this as I did before. I think this thing would be perfect if it had a built in DVR. Add the Tivo functionality and I’m totally sold on this thing. As it stands now, it’s mainly just an extension of iTunes to the TV. I see the need they’re trying to fill with this, but for me the need isn’t really large enough for me to plunk down $299 for this device. Again, maybe this is just the foot in the set-top-device door for Apple. They did remove “computers” from their name and are now just Apple Inc. which could be seen as a move to focus more in the home entertainment/consumer electronics realm. Or it could be that they’re just changing it now because of the focus they’re already putting into that area. I guess the future will tell which direction they’re going to go with this thing.

Google 2006 Zeitgeist

The Google year end Zeitgeist data is out once again this year. The year-end Zeitgeist is a list of the top searches in various categories on Google. Most year’s results are things I’ve at least heard of. This year there were some interesting things on the list that were foreign to me. Hmmm, what should I do about that… I think I’ll Google them.

There were three top search terms this year that I’d never really heard of: Bebo, Radioblog and Rebelde.

  • Bebo – Apparently this is a new (?) social networking site that is beginning to jump in popularity. From what I can tell it’s much more popular in the UK and Ireland which is interesting since it is the number one search term for 2006 on Google.
  • RadioBlog – This is a flash (php?) player to easily stick audio files into your own website. It looks to be based at RadioBlogClub, where they catalog all the audio made available by RadioBlog users.
  • Rebelde – I think this one was made popular by the Spanish-speaking googlers (probably in and ouside the US). Rebelde is a Mexican Telenovela (TV series).

Thank you 2006 Google users for pointing me to some cool tools, though I probably won’t be tuning into Rebelde any time soon.

My New (musical) Friend

ipodgreen.jpgIt has finally happened. I’m now the proud owner of a shiny green iPod Nano. I’ve used iPods since the first one was released way back when (we’ve used a couple of them at work), but haven’t ever had one of my own that I could load up with my music until now. I’ve lovingly named it Lola (she was a showgirl), and after putting it (her?) through its paces for a little over a week now, I’m really happy with it. There were a few things I had to get used to though.

The first thing to go was the headphones. Apple updated their headphone design with the last iPod updates, and from my experience, they’re not that great. First of all, they don’t come with the little spongy covers on them (or at lest mine didn’t) so they’re not that comfortable… maybe it’s just my ears aren’t the right shape. The killer for me though was what they did in cold weather. It’s December in Iowa, so it’s a bit chilly outside. Out in the cold, the wires for the headphones get really stiff and isn’t very flexible which was a bit annoying when walking outside with the iPod. I quickly switched to my previous set of cheap-o ear buds and have been doing fine with those.

The other thing I needed to get used to was having iTunes manage my music. I use iTunes, and have been for quite some time, but I don’t use it as the primary player for mp3’s on my computer. It’s a bit large and bulky to open every time I just want to play a single mp3 (I’m using WinAmp instead). I do use iTunes for PodCasts and when listening to my entire music library though, so it’s not like I had to get used to a new program. What I did have to get used to though was handing over total control of the iPod to iTunes. My previous mp3 player was just a cheapy Sandisk player that showed up as a removable drive when plugged in. All I had to do was drag songs to it to add them. The iPod is a bit different since all the syncing has to be done in iTunes. It took me a little playing to get things set, but I think I’m good to go now. Since the Nano is only 4Gb, and I have more than 4Gb of music in my library, I had to figure out a way to make iTunes only put a portion of my library on it and still leave room for podcasts. What I did (and it’s been working well so far) is create a smart playlist that randomly selects approximately 3.2Gb of music for transfer, leaving me about 800Mb for Podcasts. For the PodCasts, I have it only sync the ones that I select since I like to download more of some podcasts (daily released) than others (weekly released). So far this system has worked pretty well. The only thing I think I’d change about this setup is maybe creating some sort of smart playlist for the PodCasts, but so far things are working the way I want for now.

So far everything has been working great! I need to find another charger though… and maybe one of those cool Nike + iPod running things.