That’s what we spent several hours watching yesterday – it was quite the spectacle! I have several hundred photos to process from yesterday (that’s culled down from over 900 photos), but I wanted to share a bit of what we’ve experienced thus far…
Author: Jason Dunn
What’s the First Thing a Geek Does When He Gets to Japan?
He tests the bandwidth at the place where he’s staying of course! Check this out…
17 mbps downstream? Wow – that’s fast. At home in Calgary I’m on a 10 mbps connection and it’s really more like 9 mbps. The upstream speed isn’t that impressive though – I have a solid 1 mbps at home – so this is probably DSL. Unfortunately, as fast as it is, the router seems to not like my laptop, I keep having to unplug it to get an IP address.
[OK, this post is mostly a joke, this is certainly not the first thing I did when we got here, but I haven’t had time to write about our adventures thus far…hopefully today on the train I’ll have a good two hours to process my photos and write.]
Off to the Land of the Rising Sun for a Vacation…Geek Style!
Tomorrow, I’m off to Japan for two weeks for a real, business-free vacation with Ashley. It’s going to be awesome! I tend not to get excited about vacations until right before they happen, so I’m just starting to get excited. I’m all geeked up, bringing:
- …the XPS M1330 laptop for photo and video processing (gotta’ have some grunt for processing those raw files)
- …the Fujitsu P7010D for watching movies on
- …my Proporta battery for keeping the Fujitsu lasting that 11 hour flight
- …the Nikon D300 + four lenses (including my new ultra-sharp 24-70 f/2.8) + 32 GB CF card + 3 x 8 GB CF cards
- …the Canon SD 850 IS (with 8 GB microSD) for snapping casual pics and for videos (damn I wish it did HD videos – I don’t want to bring my Canon HV20)
- …two Zunes 8’s (one for the wife, one for me)
- …one pair of Ultimate Ears super.fi 5 EB’s
- …a TomTom GPS (without maps, just for finding our way back to our starting point GPS coordinates – was going to bring the HP iPAQ GPS, but it crashed and that didn’t make me feel very confident)
- …iGo Juice with several adaptors, PPC Techs Lil Sync Cable, Lil Sync Mobile USB Power Pack for charging everything
- My T-Mobile Dash, not to use as a phone, but to look up our travel schedule
- …a few assorted adaptors and cables
Quick, I don’t leave until tomorrow AM – did I miss anything? đŸ˜€
Remember the “CD-ROM Business Card”?
Just when you thought no one could come up with a worse idea than having a business card that you need to put into your computer…now someone has come up with the idea of giving our small portable media players as a business communications tool. Really? Seriously? Who’s going to want to accept a media player as a pitch device – even if it’s a cheap device, there’s a perception there that you’d want to give it back to the person, and you’d probably just refuse it to begin with because most people wouldn’t want the responsibility of having to give it back when they were done with it. I don’t know how much these costs, but even if they’re “only” $99 each, you’re still not going to give them out like you would a business card or brochure…
TomTom to World: No Maps For You!
Know what’s bad for business? When a customer comes to your Web site three days in a row, looking to buy something you sell, and all three days he sees the same page saying that the online store is closed.
I’m heading to Japan in six days, and I wanted to find out if I could get a map for my TomTom GPS unit – and TomTom is giving me the finger. Ironically, I found torrent listings for the map – is that what it’s going to come down to? If the store isn’t open for the customer, he has to get a “hot” version of the product? Idiotic. TomTom, get it together!
Power on Airplanes: Why Isn’t There More of It?
Eight days from now, Ashley and I get on a plane and go to Japan. First we fly into Vancouver, then from there it’s an 11 hour flight to Osaka, Japan. And guess what? The Air Canada plane we’re flying on doesn’t have any power in the seats. AUGH! That drives me nuts – in this era, almost everyone has some sort of electronic device with them, and most of them do not last 11 hours. I ordered one of these today, which hopefully will help. The real solution is for Air Canada to get out of the ’70s and retro-fit their planes with things that airline passengers want. I really hate flying Air Canada – they suck. When I flew back from New York to Calgary, they wanted to charge me $2 to use a pillow. And even on a four (or was it five?) hour flight, they served one drink and didn’t even offer the standard bag of pretzels/chips/whatever.
High School/College A Capella: The Best Musical Style You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
Nearly a decade ago, in January 1999, I went to visit a friend from my childhood (Brock Harris) in Los Angeles. Brock was teaching a group of high school students something called “A Capella”. I knew that A Capella meant voices only, but it never occurred to me that someone could take modern pop songs and perform them purely with vocals (at age 24 my musical horizons were more limited then they are now). What I saw blew me away – a bunch of young adults, not that much younger than me (most were 18 or so), blending their voices into amazing sounds. The group was called No Strings Attached, and I still listen to their album to this day. Sadly, that seemed to be the only CD the group put out.
Fast forward nine years later, and I enjoy A Capella more than ever. I think it’s partially because it’s nothing but the human voice – no technology beyond a microphone, no vocal auto-tuning (listen to the before and after) for sloppy vocalists, no layering of the same vocalist over and over so they sound fuller…it’s pure vocals, pure music. I tend to gravitate toward college and high school A Capella because they pick cool songs, and have great energy. I recently stumbled across A Capella videos on YouTube, and not surprisingly, there are a lot of them (especially from this guy). This video caught my eye today, and spurred me to finally post about this topic. Check it out:
I tend to prefer all-female, or mixed groups (great female vocals = heaven), but that all-male group video was just too good to ignore – when the rather short, and somewhat rotund fellow steps up to the microphone, you expect a certain type of voice – not the powerful bass-heavy vocals that comes out of his mouth. And it gets even better when he kicks it up to his higher range…simply awesome! If you want to check out more college A Capella, the BOCA albums are a good place to start.
Windows Live Messenger: Great When It Works
I’ve been trying all day to get logged into Windows Live Messenger, and keep seeing this:
Instant Messaging is kind of like email: you shouldn’t offer it as a service unless you can provide virtually perfect reliability.
New Iron Man Trailer Released
I’m a comic book geek, and few things get my blood pumping faster than seeing characters bought to life that I’ve envisioned in my head for years. Iron Man, being released on May 2nd, looks amazing…I sure hope the movie lives up to the coolness factor that the trailer is generating!
The new trailer looks so cool! It’s under VIDEO > TRAILER. I dig the Chris Cornell tune they use in the trailer – hopefully it’s in the movie as well…
Calgary Weather: A Study in Extremes
People who live in Calgary have a saying: if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes, and it will change. Exaggerations aside, it is rather amusing (in a bi-polar kind of way) how quick the weather will change. On February 27th, the weather was clear, sunny, and quite warm (I think around 10 degrees Celsius). There was no snow on the ground in my back yard. The morning of February 28th, I woke up to this:
The above photo was taken at 10 AM. Eight hours later, at 6 PM, here’s what the same scene looked like:
The snow is nearly gone – the temperature was over 10 degrees Celsius and the day was beautiful. I love this city, but the weather is sure bizarre sometimes…