Category: Internet & Technology

Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 Photos

On Saturday the 24th I attended the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 – I’d been to the event a few years ago, and back then it was much smaller. This time around, it was huge! It was also a little expensive – $25 at the door per person, and that didn’t get you anything more than in the door. It was a fun event, though it seems like they had too many people for the amount of space they had – it was crazy busy! It was really cool to see all the comics, action figures, graphic novels, famous people, and people dressed up as any number of different characters from comics, fantasy, and sci-fi. Lots of photographic opportunities if you were courageous enough to ask the people to stop so you could take their picture (sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t).

I took my Panasonic GF-1 to the event, but I really should have brought my Nikon D300. I thought I could get away with the nice and small GF-1 – especially after I stopped on the way to the show and purchased a 14-45mm lens (which is 28 to 90mm on the GF-1) – but ultimately I was really disappointed with the quality of the images from it. The GF-1’s images turn to crap noise-wise at anything past ISO 800, and I’m so used to shooting with the 20mm f/1.7 lens on the GF-1, it was an ugly transition for me to start shooting with an f/3.5 to f/5.6 lens. Picking up a new lens and having no practice with it is never a good idea, but at the time I thought I’d stand out too much if I brought my big iron (Nikon D300 + f/2.8 24-70mm lens)…there were plenty of others with big DSLRs there, so I should have just brought the damn thing.  The lighting was predictably awful, so more often than not my shots were ISO 1200 or ISO 1600 (since I abhor flash photography). Here are a few of the shots I took…

(Yeah, that’s Brent Spiner, AKA Mr. Data, above)

Clay Shirkey & Cognitive Surplus

A great talk by Clay Shirkey – a really interesting speaker and a deep thinker – about how watching TV absorbs the cognitive surpluses we have as human beings. I disagree with him to some extent; most people don’t want to stay in OUTPUT mode constantly. Part of the human experience is INPUT mode; listening to music, reading a book, and yes, even watching TV. Since I spend my day writing content, sending emails, editing photos, editing videos, etc., at the end of the day my brain is a little tired from output. I find watching TV or reading a book a nice rest for my brain, and more so, creative input helps me generate creative output down the road. What about you?

CES 2010 in Pictures

A few photos from CES 2010 below…you know, the event that was more or less a complete disaster. 😉

Is Social Networking Becoming Less Social?

During my hellish CES experience, I noticed something interesting: the point in time when I was hoping for some encouragement from my F&F (friends and followers), I didn’t get any. Being sick sucks, but being violently ill in a hotel room all by yourself sucks even worse. I felt quite alone and could have used some encouraging words to help get me through the day. I posted a message on Twitter about how sick I was, and I thought it also went to Facebook but didn’t. I was a bit surprised then when only one person sent me any words of encouragement – and this person happened to be someone I know only via Twitter. I imagine I would have gotten more of a response if TweetDeck had posted my message to Facebook – it didn’t make it due to a password glitch – but it still amazes me that with 530 followers on Twitter only one felt like wishing me well. Is there so much noise in the social networking space that being social with others is no longer part of the equation?

CES 2010: The Worst CES Experience I’ve Ever Had

CES: it’s the geek Mecca. This year, for me, it was a train-wrecka (har har!). Join me on my journey of unpacking the frustrations and tribulations of a CES I’d rather forget. I need some catharsis from the five days I spent in Vegas, so this is more for me than you, but perhaps you’ll find it entertaining in a “driving past a car wreck” sort of way.

When I went to CES 2009, I posted quite a few videos of what I saw there. Producing those videos in 1080p h.264 on my Dell XPS M1330 took a long time, so on December 9th I placed an order for a pimped-out Core i7-based Dell Studio 17. Plenty of time before CES, right? Wrong. Despite calling in a favour with a contact I have in Dell’s CTO office, as of December 30th I still didn’t have the laptop – the estimated ship date was January 8th, three days after I left for CES. Switching to plan “B”, I went out and purchased an HP dv7, a $2000 Core i7-based laptop with a 17.3″ screen and a weight of seven pounds. I was planning on bringing this beast of a laptop with me to CES to leave in my hotel room for video production, and I’d carry a netbook me me for day to day CES reporting. Then I started to hear about the security restrictions after the December 25th “underwear bomber” was foiled, and my already rocky start to CES prep got worse. Continue reading CES 2010: The Worst CES Experience I’ve Ever Had

Repeated Outlook 2007 Password Prompts with Hosted Exchange Account

A couple of weeks ago, I moved the remainder of my sites from 1&1 to Servage (that link will get you an extra 75 GB of storage) for my personal Web hosting, and among them was my wife’s domain. This domain is connected to a hosted Exchange account (4smartphone), and part of the move was setting up a the autodiscovery domain so Outlook can self-configure. After the DNS changes were made, something strange started happening with Outlook on both my wife’s desktop and netbook: it would repeatedly prompt for the password. No password changes were made, and strangely enough, she could send and receive email even though every few minutes it would prompt her for the password. 4smartphone tech support wasn’t very helpful; they claimed it was an Outlook problem. After some sleuthing around, convinced that it was related to the DNS changes I made, I realized my mistake: I had created the autodiscover CNAME entry pointing at the wrong server name (EXCH016 instead of EXCH015). After updating the DNS record, within a few hours the problem was fixed – no more repeated password prompts in Outlook. So if you happen to have the same sort of problem, double-check your DNS records…

Video Annotation Overload on YouTube

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I’ve talked about how awful some of the comments on YouTube can be, but sometimes the lack-of-brains can come from the content producers…check out the screenshot above, where someone named “FierceMightOMax” went berserk with the annotation tool. Yikes!

Dell’s Twitter Feeds on Overload…

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It’s amusing watching companies figure out how to use Twitter…the above screen is from my Twitter feed. I follow both Dell Canada’s consumer Twitter feed, and their Business user feed. They each have different offers and discounts…until they start copying each other and repeating everything twice, creating what amounts to Twitter spam in my feed. And then there’s their contest, which so far as resulted in 37 tweets in three days. Twitter is a great tool for businesses to reach out to their customers, but if you do it too often, you risk alienating those customers. After I post this I’m going to un-follow the Dell Canada Business feed, and possibly un-follow the Dell Consumer feed until this contest is over. If you’re a business, value the attention of your customers – don’t abuse it by being too “noisy”.

You’re Never Too Young to Love Star Trek

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Surfacescapes puts Dungeons & Dragons on Surface

Wow..this is just so incredibly geeky and cool. As an old-time D&D player, this strikes a chord with me. If only we had technology like this back in the day…actually, it might not have been quite as much fun now that I think about it. 😉