Tuck your napkins into your collar and open wide, people of earth. The time to feast on a delectable blend of all kinds of scrumptious, wild goodness has come. SuperFeed has arrived.
From now on, you’ll never miss a witty comment, charming anecdote, frustrating question, or reality-altering photo from yours truly. Every blog, photo and video. Every random tale of woe, nerdy tech tip, and random feat of human ability. Now available in one mother-of-all RSS feed.
SuperFeed.
I’m really not all that conceited. I just wanted to try out combining the powers of Yahoo Pipes and feedburner to make one grand mashup of all things Wildman to be able to download and store for posterity’s sake. Your ability to stalk me in a silent, creepy way is just an extra bonus.
Shot with 5D MKII
Still have some things to learn, but a good experience.
Music: Stone Jack Jones, “Hey Love” Click here to watch on vimeo in HD
My first run at shooting still frame time lapses and experimenting with time lapse camera movement was a learning experience. Some lines from my shooter’s notebook:
Getting consistent exposure with the classic sunset shot is difficult. Next time, if the job requires going from full light to full darkness, I’ll choose exposure settings that split the difference between the light extremes and fine-tune in post.
A remote timer is essential. Don’t touch the camera, humans!
I set the timer to 10 second intervals, and was pleased with the speed of the cloud movement.
Shooting traffic at night was much easier. Once the exposure’s set, you’re good to go.
Shorter intervals are a must for fast-moving subjects. Any interval longer than 2 seconds results in jumps as cars fly by. In editing, I wasn’t initially happy with the fluidity of the cars’ movement. I wanted more light streak. So, I layered the video, used the add composition mode and offset the layers by a few frames. That worked well for fluidity.
Pans and zooms are very possible…UNLESS post will involve layering the video (as I did above). In that case, you’ll end up with some ghosting. And that can be ok, if you’re into that kind of thing. In this case, the imperfections add some charm.
All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the technique for the traffic shots, but I have a long way to go on the sunsets. And that is the intrigue of video — small successes tempered by greater challenges.
My brother makes fun of my love of Apple products. He’ll be like, “Hey nerd, wanna go get an iBurger? Put some iMustard on it? Maybe some iPickles?”
Har, har.
Well, now he has another reason to make fun of me. Thanks to an app called Thumbjam, I’m making CD quality “iloops” on my iphone.
With Thumbjam, you can use their extensive library of real instrument samples or record your own right to the app via external or on-board mic. Either way, once you select a sample, tap record and jam away. Layer multiple loops, play them back and add more layers.
What’s making this app really fun is the unique interface that lets your move your finger across the screen to play up to 5 notes at once. And, you can select from dozens of musical scales so that every note you tap on the screen sounds great.
Ideas are like mustangs. Anyone who attempts to capture an idea, harness it’s power, and hitch it to wagon of another mind knows how illusive and stubborn ideas can be. Those who take the challenge of communication lightly are rewarded with frustration.
A long-time pastor friend who has also been a long-time baseball coach is fond of a profound and simple saying that has helped hone my persepctive many, many times. It goes like this:
Success is doing the basics well and doing them consistently.
It’s an axiom that works for life, for sports, and for communication.
Let me make this plain. You might be smart. Your words might be clever. You might have an advanced degree or years of experience. But if you don’t put in the work required to do the basics of communication well, you and your ideas will be trapped inside your own head. You will be marooned on a lonely tropical islandof your own fumbling creation.
Not to mention being trampled by herds of wild horses.
Natural, unrefined giftedness is rarely enough to empower someone to communicate effectively. Because, as in sports, success in communication is doing the basics well and consistently.
So, how do you saddle up those horses instead of being dragged through the jungle by them? As I’m thinking about communicators I really admire for their skill, three simple basics they all employ come to mind:
Read widely. Books, magazines, and newspapers are a common well of shared information. This information forms hooks in the mind of your audience that can connect your new idea with ideas already embedded in the mind of the listener or viewer.Religious communicators are especially guilty of ignoring the “available means of persuasion” Aristotle loved to talk about. Most people are not intelligent enough or interested enough in what you have to say to process and internalize your ideas — regardless of the cleverness or usefulness of that idea. Connect what they know to what you want them to know.
Think deeply. Good communication takes time. Refine your ideas and your approach to delivering them for maximum impact. Reflect on your message from the listener’s or viewer’s point of view. Why should they care about what I have to say? How can I make my idea meaningful and memorable to my audience? Take the extra mental effort to provide a perspective that is unique to you and that takes audience needs and wants into account. This gives your message value. Anything less is a boring re-run.
Speak simply. A good communicator knows that imparting ideas is not a beauty contest or a forum for flexing intellectual muscle. Loquacious and verdant profundities impede comprehension. Get it? Those who know their subject best can explain it most simply. If you enjoy hearing your voice fill a room, then break out the thesaurus and the semicolons. If successful germination of ideas in the minds of others is the aim? Plant small, powerful seeds of compact thought.
By doing these communication basics well and consistently, a talented writer or speaker becomes compelling, an average one becomes effective, and even a guy like me can expect to successfully saddle a wild horse or two.
Facebook rolled out a major update yesterday call Places. Places allows you to tell your friends and family your current location using your smartphone.
If you use the new feature, you can pinpoint where you are on a map so your facebook contacts can see where you’re hanging out. You can tag your friends who are standing around staring at their phones with you, and you can see other people near your location who are also staring at their phones waiting for something interesting to happen.
What exactly counts as “something interesting” is up for debate. Fans of this new feature say that it’s great for finding new restuarants and hangout spots and for helping you find nearby friends. Detractors argue that “something interesting” involves others being interested in muggings, murder, and the plundering of your worldly goods.
And admitting that you’re at the fabric store with your mom. (Talk about weekend fail.)
So, whether you’re wanting to take advantage of the new features…or vanish from the map, you’ll want to check your facebook privacy settings to make sure they reflect your desires. If you want to stay off the grid, here’s how to adjust your privacy settings to opt out of Facebook Places…. Click on the images to enlarge.
1. Locate your privacy settings
Sign in to Facebook. Click on the “account” tab and then click on the “privacy settings” link.
2. Access your privacy settings
From the privacy settings page, click “customize settings.”
3. Edit your privacy settings
To make sure your face doesn’t go places you’d rather not, change these three settings.
Change the “places I check in to” setting to friends only.
Make sure the “include me in ‘people here now’ after I check in” enable box is unchecked.
Set “friends can check me in to places” to disabled. If you don’t disable this feature, then your friends can put your location on the map without your knowledge.
There are two kinds of people in this word: (1) People who have no idea what the title of this post even means. (2) People who’ve purchased a domain name through Google and for the love of all that’s holy can’t figure out how to find and edit the domain settings. If you’re in the first category, you’ll be completely bored by this post. If you’re in the second, this post is your new best friend.
I was in the second category. Back in the day I had a couple of blogger blogs. I purchased a custom domain for one of them through Google and the implementation was flawless. Then….I migrated to wordpress and I wanted my custom domain name to join my internet wagon train to freedom.
Google threw up the following roadblocks:
Google doesn’t host the domain, godaddy.com does. I need to use godaddy’s tools to change your DNS info.
Google created a godaddy.com account for me — without telling me — for my custom domain.
Google burried my unknown godaddy account name and password deep inside Google Apps.
Google created a “special” Google Apps account for me without telling me with different login info than my regular Google account to house the unknown godaddy account info.
Simply charming. In order to edit the DNS info to direct my custom domain to my new wordpress blog I need to find out my Google Apps account info to access my godaddy account info to login to godaddy.com to change the DNS.
Free At Last
Well, here’s how I was finally able to go all Rawhide and spring my custom domain from the Google maze. I’ll save you the fun of searching with these hints:
Go to www.google.com/a. Your special Google Apps login info is your Google account username, minus the “@emailprovider.com” if you have one in your username. Your Google Apps password is the same as your Google password.
Now, go to this detailed blog post and follow the many steps that eventually lead to accessing your custom domain DNS info.
If you’re switching your custom domain to point to a wordpress blog, you’ll want to change the DNS name servers to “NS1.wordpress.com” “NS2.wordpress.com” “NS3.wordpress.com”
Consider this a warning from the Poison Ivy Awareness Association of America
Remember that famous (or infamous, depending on your political leanings) Shepherd Fairey Obama hope poster? For some reason, I got the itch to find out how to duplicate that look on my own. Sure, there are websites where you can upload a photo and have your face Obama-hope-posterized — “hopesterized” — but where’s the fun in that?
Fairey created his original using screen printing techniques, but withthis handy tutorialas a starting point, Photoshop and Illustrator save you the stencil and acrylic work.
A sad portrait of a friend who was attacked in the face by poison ivy served as my guinea pig for my first “hopesterize” attempt. My technique’s not yet worthy for a spot in the Smithsonian next to Fairey’s original.
But, it’s still a pretty convincing warning about the dangers of poisonous foliage.
Tuck your napkins into your collar and open wide, people of earth. The time to feast on a delectable blend of all kinds of scrumptious, wild goodness has come. SuperFeed has arrived.
