About a year ago I was wondering how I could use the web to make myself be more productave, I decided that I wanted an easy to make to-do lists, share them with friends and visa versa. In July I spent a few days with my good friend Chrys and we began designing and programming the site (I did most of the designing and Chrys did most of the programming that PHP magic elludes me). Now almost six months later we have gotten the website known as “twodoit.com” to a stage where we can launch a beta version for feedback and bug testing.
I’ve embedded a demo below, if you are intrested give it a try: http://twodoit.com.
Today is Blog Action Day, I am proud to be participating in this for the third year in a row. For those of you just joining us now, Blog Action Day is when thousands of bloggers around the world dedicate a post to one specific topic or threat (2007 was the Environment then 2008 was Poverty) this year it’s Climate Change. The 10,403 blogs participating this year include but are not limited too: whitehouse.gov, The Google Blog, Mashable and Greenpeace USA (no surprise there).
I don’t really consider this blog a forum for serious topics such as climate change or global poverty, mostly I like to talk about films I’ve seen and occasionally dabble in some new technology or website that intrigues me. However I try and post every year on blog action day because these issues are quite important to me, and this years theme effects everybody in one way or another.
Back in 2007 I dedicated my blog post to climate change and I was thinking of being lazy and just reposting that. However instead I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on the state of things purely opinion.
The good news is that in the past five years we’ve seen a major trend in the direction of more climate friendly products from cars to washing machines consumers are telling corporations that they want environmentally friendly products. Hybrids and fuel efficient cars rule the roads and many products boast a high environmental rating on the tag. Good news certainly however it’s not enough and there is still a lot to be done, there are tons of things you can do to decrease carbon emissions you know them inflating tires, washing in cold water; all that fun stuff. One of the best things you can do is shop smart, climate change or not there is one thing that every corporation responds to: money. Buy environmentally friendly products boycott the polluters, personally you’ll be emitting less and saving money but you’ll also be sending a powerfully message. Lets hope that this trend of green capitalism not only continues but increases exponentially over the next five years and into the future, but it’s really up to consumers to make the decision weather we’ll be living in a greener world or not.
In closing I thought I’d share a neat blog from everybody’s favorite search engine talking about what they do to make the world a little greener: Google Blog.
That is all for now, back to my usual trivial nonsense next week.
This post is a continuation of Saturday’s which can be found here I recommend reading it first.
Ok so continuing where I left off Saturday night (Sunday morning technically)..
Twitter has a few neat ways to contact people, if you are “Friends” with someone (meaning you are both following each other) you can send that person a “Direct Message” which will only be visible to them. You can mention somebody by typing the @ sign and then their name (like @tfantina), this tweet will be visible to everybody who follows you and the person you mention will also be notified even if they don’t follow you. The highest complement you can give on Twitter is a re-tweet. If you like somebody’s tweet and want to show it to your followers just type “RT” then mention the person and paste their tweet ( “RT @tfantina ‘Some how I always cross the border during rush hour.’”).
So far I’ve covered the basics of Twitter, however it’s much more fun once you start checking the amazing apps that have sprung up around Twitter.
Some people will tell you to download a desktop app for Twitter like
“Tweetie” or “TweetDeck” however I don’t use either of these, however if you are tweeting from a smart phone or an iPod Touch I recommend getting an app for it. When it comes to apps here is a list of ones that I could not live without (this is relative we are talking about a micro blogging service);
Brizzley is a fun app that displays pictures and video in tweets (usually you have to click a link to see them), among other things it also allows you to organize people you follow into lists. I highly recommend it, it’s currently in beta however if you want an invite just drop a line in the comments and I’ll hook you up first come first serve.
Tinyurl is good when you have a super long URL that you have to fit into 140 characters or less (they usually shorten any URL to about 30 characters).
Twitpic allows you to post photos to Twitter from you cell phone or the web.
Tweetstats is cool if your geeky like me and want to know the statistics of your tweets (time of day you tweet the most, day of week you tweet the most, where most of your tweets come from, ect.).
There are hundreds of cool apps for Twitter, a good place to start looking is Oneforty.com they have organized most of the major apps for you to try, rate and review.
Sorry it took so long, Twitter’s a bit of a hard sell at first but I take it with a grain of salt and appreciate all the neat apps and trends.
What is Twitter? It’s stupid! Why do you use it? Are you by any chance stupid? These are a few of the question’s I’m faced with when I tell people that I use Twitter. My goal with this post is to hopefully educate and enlighten readers about the wonderful world of Twitter.
What is it? Twitter a micro-bloging service, it allows users to convey short amounts of information (called ‘tweets’), in no more then 140 characters; this makes it compatible with SMS messaging from cell phones.
Once you join start following people. I know it sounds stalkerish but one has to assume that people aren’t going to post something on the public web that they don’t want everybody on Earth to see, if not why post it. This is not always the case but it’s there problem not yours. Twitter makes it very easy to find people; you can search by username, first name, last name, business or brand. In addition to my friends, I follow several people who’s tweets I find particularly interesting. With famous folk (like KevinSpacey and Oprah to name two) people like to create fake accounts in their names and post stuff, recently Twitter introduced verified accounts so you can tell if your really following Oprah or 14 year old in Santa Monica. As you start to follow more and more people you will get a feel for what tweeting style you like, some people tweet fifteen or twenty times a day others only once or twice a day. Some people’s tweets are more interesting then others, which brings me to my next point…
Don’t tweet useless junk!
One of the major stigmas surrounding Twitter is that it’s all really useless junk, people tweet stuff like “Eating breakfast”, “Going for a jog”, “Going to the bathroom”, “Washing my hands” and “Gross I touched my phone before washing my hands!”. True, all these tweets are under 140 characters, however that does not mean they should be posted. A quick and easy way to become a Twitter outcast is to post lots of useless jargon nobody reads or cares about. Twitter should be used to share stuff that you find funny, cool, interesting or enlightening. When I stumble across a neat blog or a funny video on Youtube that not to many people have seen, I tweet it. If I see something cool or something funny happens to me I tweet it. I don’t tweet boring junk that everybody already knows I do (like eating), and neither should you.
So, Twitter is a fun and quick way to share links, quick stories, and see what famous people are doing. However in my opinion the real genius of Twitter comes from two features, “Trending Topics” and “Search”. Trending Topics takes all recent tweets and arranges them looking for patterns; so lets say that the Yankees just won the World Series, a lot of people would be tweeting “Yankees” and “World Series” for instance. If enough people posted tweets with the words “Yankees” and “World Series” in them, they would both appear on the “Trending Topics” list. “Trending Topics” is a way to see what’s going on in the world as it happens. “Search” is also useful, but I don’t think you need that explained.
In today’s installment of ‘If I was head of a network’ I will take the seat of a cable network executive and choose four shows from the past decade that I would have made a bid for once they got the axe on broadcast.
With the exception of ‘Alias’ none of these shows ran for over three seasons and if you ask me a good chunk of the blame can be placed on the network.
So lets say I am the head of ‘The TF’ a channel that comes with your basic cable. (To spice it up we also have a deal with Hulu). These are my picks (arranged from, ‘I would jump in front of a train to get this show on my network’ to ‘I would like to have had a few more seasons but if not, it ended well as is’).
1) It would be hard to have a list of great shows canceled to soon and not have ‘Arrested Development’ on it. If you have never seen ‘Arrested’ stop reading this garbage, run to your local video store and rent all three seasons. It may take a three or four episodes to warm to however after that you’ll be hooked on what was, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, the funniest show to ever hit airwaves. I don’t want to judge but from what I can tell, the network messed this show up, throwing it in all sorts of crazy time slots, even airing an episode during an opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics! Creator Mitchell Hurwitz said he felt he had taken the show just about as far as he felt he could, however I still would have made a lucrative bid to bring ‘Arrested Development’ to my cable network.
2) I guess the only way to describe what happened here was that ‘television was just not ready for Pushing Daisies’ seriously. This show from Brian Fuller (who left ‘Heroes’ for it), is amazing, it’s dark but upbeat, morbid but happy, and very, very colorful. A man who can touch dead people, bring them back to life just long enough to find out who killed them and collect the reward. When I think of this show one word springs to mind, ‘delightful’, it actually makes me happy watching it it’s TV’s anti-depressant.
3) From Joss Whedon creator of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ came ‘Firefly’, canceled after just 14 episodes. The premise was simple; a western in space. A bunch of soft hearted smugglers always just one step ahead of the Alliance, hoping from one quirky terraformed planet to the next always delivering cargo on time and undamaged. Think ‘Han Solo heads to the Ok Corral’. An elaborate pilot was written for the series which took time to carefully introduce each member of the large ensemble, but the network felt that it did not offer enough action and demanded Whedon write a faster paced first episode, that’s where things began to go array. Hungry for more action the network took the episodes they had shot, which in order told a coherent story, and aired the ones with the most action first. (Imagine watching ‘Lost’ or ‘Heroes’ in order of which episodes had the most action).
4) Of the four shows on this list, Alias is the least deserving. It got a great run of 5 terrific seasons fully supported by the network. I stuck it here because I love it so much and would have loved another season or two (a network exc. thinking with the heart not the head). Season 5 felt a bit rushed although they were a bit limited with Jennifer Gardner’s pregnancy and several other people leaving. I feel if we had gotten a sixth season it would have allowed a bit more exploration of Prophet 5.
There you have it, feel free to comment, argue, sympathize, weep, express your rage, (Browncoats go to town).
Finally, I was thinking about including Rob Thomas’s ‘Veronica Mars’ however I just started watching so I can’t really say for sure. I’ll give it an honorable mention.
In June I made a life changing decision, I decided to never again (never is a long time, but I’ll try my best) purchase music or movies on the iTunes store. I don’t have cable so I may still purchase a TV show or two just to keep up, but music and full movies are out.
Why? What is the method to my madness?
Well it all began a few years ago when iTunes started releasing movies. It was cool and novel but tragically iTunes could just not match the glory of a DVD or Blu-Ray case, a hard disc and all the special features that went along with them. Perhaps for some the movie is all they want, but I can’t bare to forego my making of, still gallery and director’s commentaries. So I decided I would not buy any movies with the iTunes store. (Back when they first added movies I got ‘Clue’ and ‘Rocky’ just to test it out).
However recently I have been thinking more and more about the music component of the iTunes store. I like it, but quite frankly it’s too easy, I just sit on my computer and get music, I feel like if I want music I should walk or drive (easier then walking not as easy as sitting on the computer) down to the local music shoppe and actually buy a CD which spins in my disc drive and scratches when I drop it. I guess you could say then that my main problem with iTunes is the lack of hard media, you know, CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs. That is one of two major issues that I have.
The other issue I have is something that I had been sitting in the back of my mind for a while but I really started thinking about after reading J.J. Abrams article in the May issue of Wired. It was an amazing issue and J.J. Abrams’s article was the crown jewel of the issue. Be sure to check it out. Basically J.J. basically stated that our lives are becoming too easy, you can get all the music you want without leaving your house and experiencing something new, you don’t hear music you haven’t heard before (maybe you don’t even like), you don’t see strangers flipping through CDs, you just sit at home and stare at your download’s progress. It’s easy, and the problem with that as the old saying goes “no pain no gain”. However that’s even becoming archaic because downloading music on your computer is just the opposite it’s “no pain all gain”, which is sort of a shame because if everything in life was free and easy people would become fat hermits who lived out of there beds (we’re not too far away from that). We have no social stimulus of any kind when we buy music online.
Now, please dear reader, don’t take this hate for purchasing media from the iTunes store as hate for iTunes. In my opinion iTunes is possibly the best program of the last ten years. I know there are a lot of haters, but I am certainly not one of them. It is really the best program to organize and listen to your music collection. And if I had to buy a song from the iTunes music store a month to keep iTunes I guarantee I would.
So in the interest of actually working up a sweat, smelling nasty smells, being stuck in traffic and occasionally getting a headache, I now purchase all my music at Borders and The Beat Goes On (which is a great place for cheep used CDs in the Kitchener/Waterloo area). It’s obviously not as easy or as convenient but I get a hard disc with album artwork and personal credits, I get fresh air and a chance to experience something I otherwise would not have.
I understand that rebranding is important if your company has some bad stigma associated with it. Like if you manufactured a product that kills people like Altria that was a rebrand which was good for business.
However if your company has never done anything to demand public outrage why rebrand? There really is no point especially if your logo is a classic peace of Americana like Dairy Queen or Pepsi. Was it really necessary for DQ to italicize there logo and add two colored vector shapes to the top and bottom? (Image). And I don’t think anybody knows what’s going on with Pepsi’s 2008 rebrand.
It’s as if these companies said “well we have an internationally recognized logo, lets change it so people won’t recognize it and it will look like a cheep knock off.” “Yes sir we’ll get our best designers on that”.
Look maybe I’m being to harsh maybe there was something seriously wrong with DQ and Pepsi’s logos, maybe they did something to demand a rebrand which I am not aware of. If you know please let me know and I will blog a retraction.
For more specifically 2008 rebrands (the DQ logo was 2005) check out Brand New.
I‘m a bit late on this one. Just a reminder today is Earth Hour so between 8:30 PM and 9:30 PM turn your lights off get out a candle and read a book! It’s really amazing to see how many cities have gotten behind Earth Hour this year, I’m not sure of the exact number (2,700 maybe) but I know it’s way more then last year.
As I was doing my daily internet trawl I came across a very puzzling gem over at /film.
It’s a video that popped up online a few days back, check it out then I’ll explain.
Good yes? The question is, what is it? Apparently it has a bunch of Half-Life related stuff but it also uses music from Lost and if I’m not mistaken around the 5:40 mark there is music from ‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park’.
Many people have suspected that it’s a viral marketing campaign for a new Half-Life game but I tend to doubt this because of the music. I don’t think a game publisher would go to the trouble of acquiring rights for this music when they could just use songs from the game.
There are a few things we know, the description on Youtube reads: “This is a early temp version. Will be deleted soon” that may explain the mixed music sources. Also according to /film this video was shot in the Netherlands.
There is also a website now: www.whatsinthebox.nl which is just about as helpful as the film it’s self. But your welcome to check it out.
So what is this? My theory: it’s a student film or something made by some people who really just like to mess with our heads. Whoever made it knew what they were doing the effects are really amazing considering what it is. Whoever made this spent a lot of time and effort on it including making a website. I doubt it’s a company effort because of the copyright music issues.
But whatever it is I eagerly await the next installment. If you find anything interesting let me know.
Travis Fantina (website)...
About a year ago I was wondering how I could use the web to make myself be more productave, I decided that I wanted an easy to make to-do lists, share them with friends and visa versa. In July I spent a few days with my good friend Chrys and we began designing and programming the site (I did most of the designing and Chrys did most of the programming that PHP magic elludes me). Now almost six months later we have gotten the website known as “twodoit.com” to a stage where we can launch a beta version for feedback and bug testing.
‘m a bit late on this one. Just a reminder today is Earth Hour so between 8:30 PM and 9:30 PM turn your lights off get out a candle and read a book! It’s really amazing to see how many cities have gotten behind Earth Hour this year, I’m not sure of the exact number (2,700 maybe) but I know it’s way more then last year.
