So I felt like flexing my brain a bit tonight. Everyone has been going rather stir crazy over Flickr video, so tonight I uploaded a few and played around. Two things I really like:
The quality is really good
They let you use whatever aspect ratio you want
Those are two big wins in my eyes. Anyways, I reverse engineered their RSS feed a bit, and modified the Crossroads plugin to handle video. The end result is now on my website, and you can play with it my clicking on the videos listed in the sidebar.
Have fun! ...
Yes, sports fans, it’s been twelve days since I decided to move my hosting back onto my living room floor. So far, it’s been 12 days of pure bliss, of heavenly visions filled with bunny rabbits and endless fields of sunshine and happiness, where kids run forever.
But seriously, things have been going rather great. I haven’t had a single hiccup, and get complete SQL backups emailed to me twice a day, just in case something were to ever go wrong. All my data is backed up with RAID 5 storage (and will email me whenever a drive starts to get old, thanks to hourly SMART diagnostics), so unless ...
Back at it again. Now that the Junos are over, I’m basically full swing back into the daily grind. I have an interesting optimization problem at work that I’ll write about at some point (from the perspective of how to speed up compilation of a project), but other than that, it’s just business as usual.
I started getting a tickle in my throat yesterday which has somehow exploded into a full-on sore throat today. So, while I’m at work, I feel like I’m on the verge of getting sick. It’s most likely related to being on a few crowded planes and shaking hands with tons of new people last ...
Well, I am officially 31, and I feel old. Tonight, Keira, Amy, John and Rebecca came by and spent the night eating nachos and watching Apple TV with me. I easily had over 100 messages between email and Facebook related to my birthday, which considering where I was last year, is totally amazing and completely appreciated. You guys are all awesome.
On the plane today I ran into my old high school friend, Laura Street, and we spent the flight chatting about old times. I think there’s a camping trip in Banff on the horizon for all of us. But until then, thanks so much.
Tomorrow I’ll write about ...
I’m sitting in a hotel room, in Calgary, lying in bed in my boxers, eating some nachos that were delivered via room service. That, people, is how I rang in my 31st birthday tonight. There were lots of parties going on in Calgary, but truth is I just wanted to relax, watch some TV, and reflect on another year.
I actually had the perfect photo to put up here for this entry. It was a shot of me with a bunch of other photographers at the Junos, all hanging out with Russell Peters after the awards. I thought it would be a fun shot, and would sort of sum up this weekend for me in a photo. But when ...
So, I really don’t know how to describe the last few hours. It was pretty amazing.
The thing is, I was invited to shoot photos on the red carpet for some all inclusive event. Unfortunately, even though it was sponsored by a company and they wanted lots of publicity, as a photographer most of us weren’t allowed inside. So after about 20 minutes of taking photographs in the cold, I figured I had better uses for my time, and headed down to this other party downtown (thanks to a girl we met during the night).
Anyways, despite not being on the guest list, we all somehow get ourselves into the hotel. ...
First, the Penthouse Party at the Fairmont in Calgary. It was awesome. I put my camera down the entire time and just enjoyed myself, which was cool because almost every Juno nominee at the Juno Fan Fare came and hung out. I sat down and put myself next to this really cute girl (Nadine) from a Toronto Media Company. While chatting with her, the guys from State Of Shock swung by and I chatted with them for a while (great guys). There were Juno nominees everywhere, but I was too busy mingling and drinking free beer to notice.
I just got back from a full behind-the-scenes look at the Junos setup for ...
Well, in exactly 12 hours I’ll be getting on a plane and heading to Calgary for the 2008 Canadian Juno Awards. I haven’t really had time to get excited or to even think about what I’m going to do for three days in Calgary.
I picked up a few new clothes today, including that fun black shirt I’m wearing in the photo. All my camera equipment is charging in the other room, and I’m slowly adding stuff to a suitcase (and having a hard time deciding how big of a suitcase to bring).
I’m heading over to Miss604’s house in a sec for some quick Thai food, and to borrow some podcasting equipment ...
Here’s another video I took when the lights were going wild on the stage. A couple of questions were fielded with regards to the Saddledome.
[blipit id=799870] ...
Here’s a quick video from over at Rebecca and John’s house. As you can see, I’ve been mucking with my theme a bit for the Junos. We’ll see if it’s still up in the morning. I’ll probably be promoting my Juno posts to the front page in the morning as well.
[blipit id=797982]
** no beers were hurt making this broadcast ...
So I’m pretty stoked on blip.tv. Here’s a short video from my patio that I uploaded. The conversion was done is less than 60 seconds. Plus, using my blip.tv plugin, this video should render properly on the iPhone or iPod Touch as well (so try it if you have one).
Here’s the video I shot the other day:
[blipit id=789757]
And another one I just converted:
[blipit id=795411] ...
I met my friend Keira-Anne for a quick lunch down at Pacific Center a while ago, and then hit the mall hard on a quest to buy some clothes. I rarely shop for clothes, not because I don’t like buying clothes, but because I’m really picky and always end up leaving frustrated.
Since I only had 45 minutes, I decided to be less picky and just go with the flow. I ended up buying two pairs of nice jeans, and a few cool shirts for the weekend. Pretty much everything I bought was on sale, but it still ended up being around $400 after tax. Not bad for 45 minutes of work.
I have so much to do tonight ...
At this time tomorrow, I’ll be bouncing around Calgary trying to get my media pass before the press conference at noon. Which means I get to spend most of tonight getting my camera gear ready and packing some clothes.
Photo from Russell Peter’s WebsiteMy flight is at 7am in the morning, and I hope to have a few minutes in the airport relaxing with a coffee and an eggs benedict. I’m pretty excited about going to the Junos, and really have no idea what to expect. Russell Peters will be at the press conference tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll get to chat with him a bit — I’m a big fan of some ...
So I’m not one to gloat, especially considering I recommended Media Temple to a few friends. But Media Temple just went down again, two days after I moved my blog back to a server in my house. Thankfully, my Linux box is chugging along nicely, and I didn’t experience an outage.
Rebecca was Twittering how lame it was that web hosting companies struggle to keep a simple blog up, and I totally understand her frustration. It’s one thing to pay $6 a month for hosting and have the odd outage, but it’s another when you’re paying $20 a month and expecting three to five nines worth of service. ...
I live in this weird apartment complex with a bunch of dictators who seem to enjoy flexing their muscles and causing trouble every few weeks. The entire building is managed by some local company, and there’s a strata council which presumably some of the people in the building are part of. The thing is, our building isn’t very ship-shape: the elevators haven’t been working for nearly two years now, the security guards spend more time collecting bottles from the recycling area than they do securing the building, and there’s always someone giving you flack for something.
The one thing I hate ...