I’m super excited to be heading to the very heart of Silicon Valley and the twitterverse Wed to go hang with the TWiP and MacBreak crew in San Fransisco and possibly bust out a podcast or two.
I unfortunately won’t be there for Stevie J’s big keynote, but i’m sure one or two people will blog/tweet/lifecast about it and watching it on my MBa will be more awesome than actually being there, cuz I’ll be wearing my Shure SCL4′s in-ears during the keynote, so it will feel like Steve is actually in my head.
Oh what’s that Steve? A new iPhone? 3G? Wow! Still not in Canada? No eh. Guess i’ll just have to snuggle up with my current phone and a huge bottle of maple syrup for a few more months and watch Thundercats :p
PS. Apparently, WWDC and “Steve Jobs Keynote” doesn’t mean much to the less techie sorts of folks. As evident by this conversation I just had with my non-tech savvy friend:
friend: So what are you up to this week?
me: Yeah i’m heading down to San Fran for a big Mac conference thing.
friend: The makeup? Oh wow!
.me: No the computers
friend: Oh you mean like Dell?
me: Yes. Exactly like Dell. *throws disgusted look* iPhone? iPods? Steve Jobs? John Mayer?
friend: Oh yeaaaah. I just got a Zune!
We aren’t all meant to illuminate our minds with knowledge and enlightenment. Some people are just better off being in the dark.
Thanks for all the comment and email l0v3 and movie/tv/book suggestions. My neck feels less like a giant yarn ball of pulsating fire, and more like a golf ball of subtle flames. In my time away from the internet, I was unfortunate enough to catch “Resident Evil: Extinction” and Mila’s clunky, lack-luster wire stunts and sweet Gaussian-blurred face. Why can’t every zombie movie be like “Shaun of the Dead”.
Then, I learned some sweet breakdancing moves from Jonah Takalua and watched my new favourite show, the Australian mockumentary series, “Summer Heights High”. It’s kinda like if Christopher Guest,Ricky Gervais,Mitchell and Webb and “a dingo ate my baby” met, went to a bottlo, and threw so many shrimps on the barbie and wrote this. Either that or Chris Lilley is serious comedic genius.
Other than that I’ve got BSG: Razor on board for tonight, along with the Aliens Quadrilogy for back to back slimy, chest-bursting awesomeness and Ridley — Cameron — Fincher — Jeunet! That’s my kind of quadrilogy. Plus, one of these films has my favourite line of dialogue ever. 10 points and a place in my heart for guessing the correct phrase!
In addition, to watching movies I got some totally swedish IKEA furniture and sorta helped put it together.
And practiced my juggling techniques, one ball at a time.
And put my lomo film in the fridge for safe keeping.
I didn’t listen to the doctor when she said, “stop using your computer for 14 hours a day, take breaks every 15 mins, and find a more ergonomic work space. You are going to severely injure yourself!”
I didn’t listen one bit, and now i have a neck spasm the size of the polar caps before humans polluted the earth and made icebergs melt into the ocean… like way before Leonardo died in the icy waters of doom after the Titanic totally snapped in two.
I guess I seriously need to find some other ways of amusing myself for the next couple of days while I heal. What am I gonna do?? I’m already bored.
What can I do without a computer or internet? Any suggestions? Movie/tv show recommendations are most welcome. I would say “books” but let’s face it, unless it says, “Harry Potter” or “XYZ gear manual” on the cover, I won’t read it.
Uhh I shouldn’t even be typing this. cramp. ouch. Stop! Step away from the MB air. Away! Expecto Patronum!
I finally got round to flickring my photos of Chichen Itza, the “large pre-Columbian archaeological site built by the Maya civilization located in the northern center of the Yucatán Peninsula, in the Yucatán state, present-day Mexico” says Wikipedia. Now, I’ll look it up in my $150 university art history book to make sure that’s right (the very same one that I took for light reading on my first trip to England to seem “cultured”.)
Oh wow. I’m actually reading a book. It feels weird and unnatural. I can’t scroll. Ack! I have to turn these big heavy pages. Ug. So apparently Chichen Itza means “at the mouth of the well of the Itza”, and has nothing to do with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but rhymes nicely with pizza. Hmm… there are only 3 paragraphs about Chichen Itza in this 1167 page book! What a jerk! I guess we will just have to rely on the web as our guide to this weird and wacky Mayan world.
The massive and awe-inspiring Mesoamerican pyramid in the middle of the site is called el Castillo or the Temple of Kukulkan.
El Castillo was built by the Maya Civilization somewhere between 11th and 13th century AD when *the Decepticons first came to earth.
The massive structure is guarded by these crazy man-eating alligators. Well, actually they are supposed to be serpents, but I called them alligators on flickr, then felt sheepish, so I changed the title to “Mean Slytherin Dudes”. PS. I also spelled serpent, ‘serpant’. Sir Pant! So regal.
Right after the Decepticons came to earth and built the pyramids, an *alien race of evil cats called “los Gatos Malignos” ruled the Mayan empire with an iron fish! I mean fist!
According to *archeologists, Mayan youths were quite rambunctious and would let off steam before the “virgin sacrifices” by drawing rude graffiti on the temple walls.
While visiting this new Wonder of the World, I felt moved to perform a feat of agility.
As a result of performing this feat of agility, I was 8 minutes late for the bus back to the hotel, which angered and greatly annoyed my ever punctual mother. She wouldn’t even speak to me for like half an hour.
To make matters worse, I climbed this pyramid model at the hotel and made Gozilla noises for an embarrassingly long length of time. She was not amused, but I felt that this was an important step in my self-growth as an adult.
I just got my gadget geeky hands all over the Canon G9 (12.1 Megapixel, Canon DIGIC III Image Processor, Optical Image Stabilizer) a few days ago, and I must say, I am really impressed.
I really wanted a high quality point and shoot that I could use capturing the behind the scenes action on photo/video shoots and for grabbing quick video for my blog videos.
Although my media company owns 2 Canon HV20s, I almost always use a 2-year-old simple point and shoot, the Canon PowerShot A510, to capture most of my videos. Even though it’s from back in the days when it was cutting edge to sport a 3.2 Megapixel camera, it’s just lower maintenance, smaller, and less fragile than the HV20 and seems to scare and anger less people than the HV20 with the intimidating Rode Video Microphone. Plus, despite it’s age, the PS A510 has a great lens and can capture good 640×480 video. Also, it just quicker to just upload to upload and deal with the footage sans TB HDs.
(aside: I always bring my Gorillapod tripod (pictured above) with me wherever I go. It’s a really handy little tripod. It can bend around things and grip them. Much more flexible and lighter to carry than a standard tripod.)
And now I’m getting all gooey with the Canon G9. I may even have “love feelings” towards G9′s video quality. It shoots really sharp and clear 640 x 480px video at 30fps which is more than adequate for web content. It also shoots HD: 1024 x 768px at 15fps. The auto exposure works very quickly when moving from contrasting light conditions and it’s cool that you can zoom during video recording. It’s not optical and it does look fairly pixelated, but it’s still great that you are able to zoom.
This is getting super technical and nerdy. I promise my next post will be super fun for those who could care less about pixels, though you must admit, pixels are pretty neat. You are looking at some pretty neat ones right now. Respekt.
Does any one else love the Canon G9? What point and shoot camera are you using? And if you use your camera to capture video, give me your impressions or link me to one of your videos. Fanks!
PS. w00t! I just convinced my mum to buy the G9. First the iMac and now the G9… we are moving slowly, but surely in the right direction. Now, i just have to get her to ditch her 15 year old, very round screen TV!
Ok. So I went to Vidfest and was super inspired by Dooce, the sassiest female blogger ever and MightyGirl’s Maggie Mason.
Then, I went to the Vancouver Apple Store launch and waited in line for 2 hours and cried because i didn’t get a free t-shirt until they gave me one out of pity and embarrassment. And then upon returning home, I realized the t-shirt was sooo big I could fit my entire body inside it.
Then I accidentally URLed my blog on a few iMacs in the store. Oops. And I realized that there wasn’t anything in the store to see that I hadn’t seen when I went to the London Apple Store.
Of course, I took all sorts of video and photos at these awesome events, but I’ve had so little time to set up my MB Air and my MB slowed down to G4 stylez last night because I packed it so full of media goodness that it had no room to breathe. It was gasping and overheating and complaining a lot, so I’ve decided to take a good chunk of today and spend it on sorting my heaps of GBs, reformatting my MB, reinstalling Leopard on my MB, and digging into the MB air.
iJustine/eJustine reminded me about some software that I always forget about when my machine is acting up called Disk Inventory X. It’s super at showing you what stuff is taking up so much room on your computer and why it’s moving slower than a dehydrated donkey. I also used this opportunity to add more cartoony arrows and text in Skitch cuz it’s sooo fun!
Yikes! I take a lot of photos. almost 30GB in 4 months. I’m glad i found those old iMovie HD files though. Saved me a bunch of room!
Oh yeah! I got a Lomo last week! I’m ready to get so lomosexual.
This Holga Lomo has a hot shoe so I bought this awesome Colorsplash flash kit that came with a little rotating wheel that you can put coloured gels in to get extra snazzy tint in your shots.
Photonic is an awesome flickr desktop client for Mac OSX. Just drag and drop photos, add titles, description, tags, add to albums and groups, and upload. I talked about it more in depth here. Works really well and it looks like it actually belongs on a Mac. Ahem twhirl.
Skitch is a desktop app that works hand-in-hand with Skitch.com to allow you grab screenshots or take photos from your iPhoto library, add sweet text or arrows, and with 1-click, upload and share them.
I’d seen Skitch on people’s twitter feeds for a while but I thought it was just another flickr wannabe, but oh was I wrong! This app combines three of my favourite things: Capturing screenshots of silly skype chats, drawing funny things on said screenshot, and sharing with my iFriends.
Before I would do everything in Illustrator or PS, and it would be laborious and very un-fun. But Skitch is heaps of fun, basically like having a revamped 2.0 MacPaint Now all I need is the Moose.
If you are a PC User you should check out Jing. It’s like Skitch, only it doesn’t look as good. I guess they didn’t want to scare PCers with cool design stuff. On the flip side, it does let you screen capture video, as well as photos which is pretty sweet. Mac users can use it too. I’ll give it a go and tell you what I think.
VLC is a cross-platform media player. This awesome app plays everything – every video format you throw at it VLC (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, avi, mov, mp3) it plays. Never download another obscure Codec or QT plug-in again! It also seems to play videos with video errors or audio issues that other players will completely reject and allow you to correct audio sync problems in preferences.
Visual Hub is a universal video converter for Mac made by Techspansion. It offers wikkid fast conversion from nearly every video format to iPod, PSP, DV, DVD, AVI, MP4, WMV, MPEG and Flash. If you work with video, that previous sentence probably make your eyes enlarge a bit and maybe bust out a little nerdy grin. VisualHub solves the most frustrating part of video production: Converting. Especially if you are working with clients who have no idea about compression, frame rate, or video in general:
Yeah, can you make it big. Big?
Yeah, big enough for my screen. But don’t you want to put this up on your website? I’m pretty sure you don’t want to go bigger than 640×480.
Yeah. Can you make it that big? And make it look HD. But we didn’t shoot it in HD.
Well can you make it look like HD with some kind of ‘bells and whistles’? *stabs stylus in left eye.
I use VisualHub on a daily basis. I’ll even use it to burn simple DVDs over Popcorn when I’m in a rush because the presets are so quick and easy to use. Also, if audio is more your game, you should check out Techspansion’s new audio converter, AudialHub.
iShowU is an awesome screen capture app that allows you to grab video and audio with great presets i.e., . I recently used it to create a short demo of a new firefox plug-in, PriceAdvance.
PodWorks is an app that allows you to move songs from your iPod back to your Mac. Don’t you hate the unidirectionality of the iPod? I sure do. This app solves that screaming face you make when you can’t do something you want to do something on your Mac and can’t. Take back your iPod!
What are you opinions on these apps? Is there a multimedia application that you love? Let me know if I’ve missed anything.
I spent a lot of time in university. A good 6 years to be exact. I took classes in almost every subject, partly because I was interested in so many things, but mostly because I was distracted by figure skating and continually moving all over Canada in search of a ice dance partner who didn’t require serious emotional counseling.
In those 6 years I took 52 classes. 52 classes in linguistics, journalism, writing, philosophy, psychology, neuropsych, physiology, anatomy, acoustics, English lit & grammar, Spanish, Russian, history, art history, music, film studies, and drama. I know! That’s a whole lotta knowledge I’ve crammed into my short term memory. How much actually made it into my long term memory remains to be seen.
Now, obviously I think learning stuff is cool and fun or I wouldn’t have spent so many years doing just that… or maybe I just stayed so long because of the free medical/dental plans, scholarship money, and lack of adult responsibilities…
Every now and again when I hear students whine about super hard final exams, endless assignments, and less than adequate beer at Pub night, I think to myself, “What did I actually learn in university?” Here, I explore this topic in moderate detail.
Things I learnt in university:
The formant values of the Swedish vowel “ö”, the Russian vowel “ы”, and the Canadian vowel “aboot”;
The inner turmoil of Ivan the terrible
20th Century European History (in general) AKA war sucks;
How to review a really long & boring English Lit book by skimming, plagiarizing & half watching the movie whilst watching a super cool action flick in your peripheral vision;
Philosophy & the Matrix (in general);
The twisted and shady side of chiaroscuro;
Modern poetry doesn’t NEED to rhyme;
MS Word & Excel is the devil’s handywork;
Psychology (in general);
Why Tolstoy was such a giant stick in the mud;
Nazis and Soviets were all over that propaganda shizz;
It’s best to stay far away from the snacks on the Battleship Potemkin;
The anatomy and physiology of the ear & mouth/throat area (in ridiculous detail);
Infant screams/cries are less than soothing to acoustically analyze than say, Enya;
Don’t sit next to the guy that sucks on pens causing them to explode over everything within a 5m radius;
You really have to commit yourself to produce a good Patronus charm;
It’s inevitable that you will get your worst mark in the class you took because you thought it would be super easy;
Tutoring ESL is a great way to meet cute foreign exchange students;
There are better ways to spend your time than failing to teach a monkey/chimp/gorilla language
Pavlov was a jerk to his dog
Things I didn’t learn in University:
How long it takes to boil an egg;
How to earn money (in general);
Anything about taxes;
Tener una conversación inteligente en español es más complicado que ordenar tacos en un restaurante mexicano;
How to fix a broken toilet or plumbing (in general);
How to navigate around Home Depot;
“Food-in-cupboard” maintenance;
How to negotiate with cell phone carriers;
Stuff about fixing cars or fallen off mufflers;
The complexity of screwdriver heads;
Where the missing socks go and who steals them;
Cooking food that tastes good (in general);
How to deal with over demanding, ambiguous, & clueless clients
Exactly where the maple syrup comes from. Trees? The ocean? Bee hives? Mounties? Beavers?
Anything about grout;
How to fix broken electronics;
Getting out stains produced by dark beverages, spaghetti sauce, and ink/jiffies/markers, on more often than not, white clothing;
Where all the money goes and who steals it;
Credit card debt. I swear, no one told me!!
Computers, using software, coding, photography, video production, editing, design… basically everything I need to know. Oops.
What did you learn or not learn in university? Also, if you know the practical solution to any of the above please leave a comment. Teach me and I’ll listen… mostly.
PS. Why am I sat in front of an uber kit? Kind of random isn’t it? More sweet photos and a special DIY photo blog from my latest shoot with uber Vancouver drummer, Jesse Godin this week!
A few weeks ago, I was a nobody. I know it’s hard to believe, but I was basically rabbit kibble. Do rabbits eat kibble? Chomp?
But then G4′s Attack of the Show ranked me as the 5th hottest woman of the web and my life went from bunny kibble to like, a really expensive cheese… that’s been aging for years and packaged in fancy paper and served on a silver plate from a store that sells uber fancy plates. Don’t forget the Crystal.
