state of the flooz
Well its official, Gator Dave has moved to the outskirts of Delaware and working on his banjo band. No actually Delaware is kind of nice and quiet out there and I wish him and Jen well, they make a great couple. Gator Dave will be spinning up a new biz this spring/summer taking his gator skills to schools everywhere teachin kids about gators, bird feet and more. Starting a small biz is tough so if any of ya'll have any ideas on how to help the guy out pass them along, meet me in the flickrverse or check out gatordave.net today!
Although the cold is here the sun is coming and soon road trips are gonna be bound for mini madness. To step up this years mini goodness I've purchased yet another low-fi recording device to record the man great mini adventures to come. What adventures you say? Well I'll be heading back up to Berlin, Oh to see the Amish again for sure, that was a good road trip. I also plan to scout out Ohio's Covered Bridges for unique photo opportunities, and make a trip out to Hershey, Pa for a much needed infusion of good old Hershey history. I remember going to the Hershey Museum as a kid and for the longest time I've wanted to go back and revisit it all.
So what new tech to aid me on these missions? Ahh yes, the Mustek DV4000. This baby is toots its horn being a 7 piece wonder. Its an 4 mega pixel still cam, an mpeg4 vid cam with 640x480 rez at 15fps and 320x240 at 30fps, a voice recorder, an mp3 player, a data drive, card reader and a pc web cam... and its smaller than my nokia phone. LOL too funny. I didn't think it'd be soooo small but it is. There were several contenders for this camera. I considered the Panasonic SVAV-50 and the SiPix Pocket DV but in the end thought the Mustek was one to go with.. considering of course this is all low-fi recording and what not. So far so good it performs. The main reason I wanted to get this cam was because my Kodak MC3 while useful in my mini recordings, it didn’t have a backlit lcd so seeing what I was actually recording was difficult. Difficulties aside I did have a lot of fun with the Kodak last year, so to step it up a notch I wanted another camera like it. Tack on a 512mb card on this baby and we got some nice recording abilities. Already I’ve seen its output and its quite nice considering the low-fi nature of it. What's most funny so far is just how small this camera is, and I mean small, its about the size of the Sony Cybershot but just a wee shorter, that size for 4mega pixels and a dv cam make it a powerful package, and just under $200 bucks a sweet deal in my opinion. Heck it even has a tripod mount! Wooha!
In other news the flickrverse continues and with the recent exposure of flickr on techtv has introduced a flood of new people to the site. Growth is good but the medium of photo-enabled chat brings out the freaks, I'd hate to see flickr become the new porn irc client out there. My take on irc is that is ugly, mass confusion and basically just blah, ya sure ya go chat but it’s lifeless. Flickr takes it up a notch but it still has many hurdles to overcome and I seriously don't want it to turn into a glorified irc, but hey we'll see. It gets me thinking though, what are the barriers left, how can flickr become more integrated in people’s lives and at the same time not fall into the pit of irc despair. I think if flickr recognized my yhoo and aol IM ids it'd be much more valuable. I also think flickr needs to be more integrated with my environment. My toolbar is limited on space and a minimized flickr tells me nothing. I'd want it to be like trillian minimized or something. I see the potential to use flickr for research though. I could see having participants in remote locations creating online collages and what not. I guess part of me really doesn't want to just chat, I’ve chatted before, I want more, pictures are good, next I want animated gifs and eventually some kind of flickr based acceptable visual movie medium, maybe excessive quicktimes and windows movies are out, that’s ok, tell me what’s in, it would be cool to post a moving image, like a mini slideshow that plays within the gui to all that see it, like a 7fps jpg or something. In the end flickr is probably more of a social/tech experiment. From a biz perspective I could see selling this tech/concept to others yet at the same time I feel like it isn’t sparking and accelerating fast enough. The chat concept works, the pictures are good, but the groups and getting people to stay and really get into, hasn’t happened yet. Yes I know its beta but that doesn't change the vibe I me, so I can’t help but to think what are the remaining barriers for me and other to deem it "arrived" and part of my daily experience. Or is that even a goal of flickr? I don’t know.
Gah we've reached the future and SPAM is the answer. You can't escape it, its everywhere and growing, I threaten you with SPAM! How lame is that, a guy threatens google. And ya know this is just gonna get worse.
I've been playing around with some new apps lately. One of them is MindMapper from MindJet. Software for brainstorming and much more they say. Using the tablet version is pretty cool. Getting yer ideas organized is good, to me this is like a refined more useful version of VISIO no doubt it’s not quite the same but it’s far more useful in organizing ideas. We spend a lot of time in VISIO making maps, I hope to see work utilize this app more so for that kind of work. There's lots of ties to XML and HTML and PowerPoint etc for exporting out maps once they are completed.
Also on the app list lately is Fractal Edge an Explorer replacement for the tablet. And ya it pretty much replaces all I need from Explorer and is sooooo much more pen friendly. I love it.
I've been meaning to use the Rasterbator for awhile now, maybe I’ll get to it today. Discover Koovus on the net in linkdom heaven. I think i've kicked the AC2 habit.. I jumped in game this weekend for about 40mins and found myself wondering why I was there. I missed a big update to the game recently and I was behind the new goals, the new quests etc.. I still like the engine though. The world of AC2 is pretty and fun when yer into it, just wasn’t into it. Plus I wish the mobs had some basic AI other than sit in place and wait to be argo'd. I still want something new from gaming, UT2k4 is ok, its pretty, fun etc.. but the net play has been for crap so far, very laggy, and I get that jump screen effect. Maybe it was just the six instances I tried it but that’s pretty sad for my cable connection. Course maybe it was bit torrent in the background affecting it. The game modes are ok, I’m still hungry for something new though. Lately my gaming time has been creative app time, which is better for me really. I fear the interface hell of lightwave though, for as much as I want to get back in it, I’m horribly lost in the interface.
Well that’s about it for the flooz, still no comments due to mass spamming, I hate those bastards. Catch me on flickr sometime if ya want to talk, I’m listed as drock on there.