Category: right

Thanksgiving 2008 short documentary

** This is a guest post by my brother **

The film was made using windows movie maker.  I imported the images and video from my sony cyber-shot camera.  The voice-overs were recorded with my iriver mp3 player.  This was my first short documentary and I learned quite a bit.  First, my laughing was too loud and a bit obnoxious.  I’m right next to the mic, so I need to tone my voice down quite a bit.  Next, lighting is important to consider.  The footage in the kitchen with my mom is too dark, since the lighting is in the background instead of the foreground.  Last, it’s important to get close to the interviewee without making them feel uncomfortable.  Some of the shots are from a bit too far.  I’m no Spielberg for sure, but it was fun nonetheless!  I think it will be fun to continue making short documentaries like this about random events in my life.  I’m glad I learned the capabilities of movie maker.  It was sufficient for making this type of video, although it did freeze up on me once and I had to start over again 🙁

Next up….Christmas 2008…coming soon to a computer near you.


Thanksiving 2008 Short Film from robotchampion on Vimeo.

My Autumn Safari through mopey Montrose park

As a self-proclaimed hater of the seasons I am starting to come around. There are minutes and sometimes whole days where I enjoy them (the rest of the time they just annoy me).

Today was one of those days. I am a naturally mopey emo person and so this time of year delights me. The leaves are dead or dying. The trees are starkly dark, bereft of colour and beauty. Yet, many of the vibrant colors of the last falling leaves remain richly colorful.

Today I found all of this in colors of purple, fire, red, yellow, neon, green, and orange. Great day and the weather was in the 60s.

Today I like the seasons.



Autumn 2008 Photo Safari from steven mandzik on Vimeo

Don’t deny it, Obama is all Web 2.0

I have been telling friends this for a while: Obama (his campaign) is the most powerful and far-reaching Web 2.0 business in the world.

The fact that he has gone from a virtual nobody to a near land slide presidential victory (typing this at 10:45 EST on election night) is absolutely transformative. He is reported to have raised 150 million dollars in one month. Which includes 632,000 new donors, added to his three million established donors. These are transformative feats, game changers.

An article in NY Times explored this issue by interviewing some of the Obama campaign officials.

“Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004…”(this) year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down.”

That’s right, hyper speed and bottom up. Sounds a lot like the Wikipedia cycle and a lot less like the cable/news cycle. Though, to be honest, Obama charted a road in the middle. Able to reach voters where they were are give them what they want. For me it was my cell phone and youtube. For others it was door-to-door, and still others was on tv and through debates.

Most of the time it seemed as if the McCain campaign just ignored this sound advice “reach voters where they were and give them what they want”. As if the Internet and its various capabilities is still a side show. Even after months of Obama turning the tide first against Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, they still refuse to accept.

Accept it or not. It’s here and its happening.

Web 2.0 Terms for the Intelligence Community – pic

Hey All, just created this for a panel on the utility of Web 2.0 in our community. I welcome feedback and missed terms:

Also, for reference here is the orginal I used to create this one. Taken from: http://www.suniljohn.com/blog/?p=14

Give me your deepest darkest movie thoughts!!

Hey Everyone – I finally talked myself back into netflix. They still don’t offer support for mac’s on instant viewing, but I miss my movies. I am definitely a hollywood fan. I need some quality content and good stories.

So, now that I am back into the flix of the net, I need some friendses. I never really tested out the community features on netflix, but now that I have a wonderful world of twitter friends I can do so. Let’s sink up the worlds and maybe I can get into your deepest darkest movie desires.

Here is the link netflix gave me to make friends: be my netflix friend

Lemme know if it doesn’t work and have you seen/heard/tested the roku??

Steve

Sharing the Angry Letter I sent to Comcast

Ya, I’m gonna stay away from serious ranting. Just simply going to say that Comcast pisses me off. Here is the email letter I sent to their customer service via prompting by frank at comcastcares:

Dear Sir/Madam - I recently began getting service from your company (Feb
08). At the time I was told I would be receiving 88$ worth of service
through some combined (complicated) package for cable and internet. Since
then my bill has been over 100 each time. The last two bills were 170.81 and
114.03$. I remember the bill before that being ~112.00 as well.

This is extremely frustrating and annoying. Personally, I am fed-up with the
service and will gladly cancel. Fortunately for comcast, my roommate likes
both enough to keep them, but I am working on him to free ourselves of this
madness.

Am I to understand that 22$ + is the norm for taxes on this product? I can't
imagine voluntarily subscribing to a service where taxes/surcharges account
for 25% of the charge.

I was hoping that you could explain to me these over-charges, or false
statements about my original subscription price statements?

But, even more so I would like to figure out how I can become happy with
your service. Which doesn't involve "sir you are paying over 100$ for these
reasons". It involves here are your options, how much it will (really) cost,
and a guarantee of those services/price.

P.S. The comcast site does not show old statements and is generally limited
in functionality. I guess I should just be happy that my internet provider
even has a website...

Suffice to say that I am not expecting much. I long ago learned that these companies are parasitic and really never make me satisfied. In fact, the only time I ever felt good about a cable company was last week when comcastcares actually expressed interest in helping.

Library of Congress Partners with Flickr

There is a quite a hubub about this new partnership and its well worth it. Everyone needs to take a look for themselves. The Library of Congress (LoC) is not only releasing their photos on Flickr. They are also providing context about the photos, links to the full URL, blogging about this, and being honest about the copyright restrictions. Most of which so far say “no none copyright restrictions”.

Beyond the basics they are also tagging the heck out of each photo. Inviting the community to comment, tag, and add value to the photos. See a missing fact, add a comment about it, notice the location is wrong, comment it. Take a read about what Matt Raymond from the LoC had to say about this initiative:

“The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.”

This is like a breath of fresh air in an age of constant battles over sharing, transparency, and public data. Here is a group of folks that are trying something new, building closer relationships with their customers, and finding new ways to make themselves relevant. Thank you Library of Congress.

Now I’m off to see some amazing photos and join the worldwide community in this amazing experiment.

Legal full-length embeddable high-quality movies. Unreal

Yesterday, I was able to watch Master and Commander on hulu.com. What a strange experience…

Watching a “tv movie” on my laptop, except it is hooked up to my tv. I’m using a DVI cable to make the video connection and an audio jack to get the sound going. Streaming across a wireless connection I get a high-quality movie for free on my 40 inch LCD tv.

Weird, that some folks are critical of hulu for leaving you tube, but it is part of a growing trend. Personally, I don’t care. I watch content from tons of sites and whichever one can get it right is where I will go.

The interesting part is going to be how Hulu handles commercials going forward. In the movie embedded below there is one about every 10 minutes or so. The normal tv shows are still under 1 hour, coming in at about 45 minutes. Those episodes usually have 5-6 commercials total.

This is obviously a huge improvement from what cable and broadcast tv offers. Its free, on demand, and with less commercials. I just hope that Hulu doesn’t get greedy and start pumping up the amount of commercials…

If they do the internet is open enough that I can just move somewhere else!

Here is Master and Commander for your feature movie enjoyment:

The title of this blog is a quote pulled from the comments about the film, written by user, mos6507