Boxee, TiVo, Hulu and The Future of Television
I stopped watching TV a while ago. It was all pretty awful, and while for the most of my life I stuck to the History Channel or the Discovery Channel, even these leaders in smart folk entertainment seemed to be offering up a buffet with wicked noodles but awkwardly soupy mac and cheese. So much so that I gave up on the buffet all together. For a while, absolutely nothing took its place. Some radio shows, a lot of music, but nothing really to fill my plate, to continue this terrible metaphor. But then, things in the world of media started to change. After iTunes got their act together people started to realize that online content distribution is the future, and everyone and their mother started one. Its been a rough start, but as an alpha user of Boxee, I think I can finally say there’s a bright future in
online TV, and a dim one for cable.
Economic what? Commentary on the tech-crunch.
As we all begin to ‘hunker down’ in the advent of one of the worst economic positions the United States has managed to wedge itself into, the technology sector is standing back in the corner chewing on every nail they’ve got at the same time. According to the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker at the time of this posting there had been 24,507 employee layoffs throughout the world. But is this really going to be as bad as you think it is? Sure the money might not be there for big companies, but when it comes down to it, boredom is what will save the momentum of technological advancement as we know it.
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Let’s talk about Vista.
I’ve been saying the same things for the last year and a half, but now that I feel Vista has matured to a robust vintage, while Microsoft bumbles their way through a half-hearted attempt at a product revitalizing marketing campaign, I’d like to return to the points I’ve always fought for. Vista is the absolute best operating system to ever come out of Redmond, and as much as you’ve heard bad things about it, that’s all based on misconception and a general lack of understanding that’s been spread like a plague through the home PC market.
Getting rid of your junk brings you closer to nirvana. Fact.
Since I’m moving to Pittsburgh in early fall, or trying to at least, I have to come to terms with all of my possessions. I’m just one person moving 400 miles to the northwest so it would be impractical to get a trailer, and my newly purchased Impreza has 11.3 cubic feet of cargo space. I’ve been a pack rat all of my life, and this sudden prioritizing means I’ve got to cut the fat, and in turn, re-think my sense of value.
Or.. How I learned to stop worrying and love the fail whale? Not so much.
Twitter is a Web 2.0 service which has seen quite a bit of hatred, admiration, addiction, and downtime. I was one of the people who didn’t see the point until someone opened my eyes with a chosen bit of words, and I’d like to do the same for you, because information is a great thing, and that is exactly why Twitter is so important.
Free Books
Over my lifetime I’ve collected quite a few books of which I have no or very little need for. They’re worth pennies on amazon, so instead of tossing them or immediately shipping them off to the local charity center, I figured I’d try to spread them a little further. Let me know if anything strikes your fancy, we’ll work out a way to get them to you.
Leave a comment, send me an email, smoke signals, myspace, facebook, etc.
Photographic evolution, and why I have so many untouched old photos.
I have an obsession with doing everything I do to the best of my abilities. Maybe it comes from being a boyscout, “On my honor I will do my best.” When I put my mind to something with this philosophy behind it, it usually means I’ll exceed whatever expectations there were for the final product. But with photography, its becoming a massive headache that can leave me disappointed when I look at the photos I’ve taken years, months, even just weeks ago.
The root of my frustration is that whatever I choose to create while I have my camera in my hands, in garnered by what I know at that time. I have an idea, and I use everything I know to try and get that idea to the image sensor of my camera. But when I learn something new every day, things that can have massive impacts on the images I achieve, it discourages me from post processing old images.
For example, for the longest time I only used the histogram as an afterthought, as in, after the image was shot. I never did the proper research, I never asked about it, it was just something I vaguely paid attention to in post processing. A couple weeks ago I started to realise that all of the landscape shots I took with my Tamron 17-50 2.8 lens resulted in an overexposed sky, and it was time to figure out why. I asked a friend of mine, as well as watching a video from the lovely folks over at This Week in Photography about the importance of the histogram as a “while you’re shooting” tool. The short story of it is that the tiny lcd on the back of my camera cant tell me much, pixel-wise, about exposure. It can however, give me a diagnostic readout of exposure, that being the histogram. So instead of using the full image preview, I should have the histogram up so I can check to see if I’m exposing properly, and adjust accordingly. No guess work.
So now all of the images I’m shooting are being exposed more accurately, and I’m faced with the task of catching up on the processing work of hundreds of photos from my road trip, most of which have overexposed skys, all because I hadn’t paid more attention to the histogram.
I suppose the lesson, as ever repeated as it may be, is that you never stop learning. But moreso, its that everything you learn will hopefully make you better at what you do. So now all of the photos I take in the future will benefit, and the photos I’ve shot in the past, well, I suppose now would be a good time to learn more about post processing, because the sky over Chattanooga isn’t supposed to be that white.