I took several pictures on both my Canon 40D and my iPhone 4 while down at my grandparent's place in southern Virginia this past weekend. It was my grandfather's 85th birthday. While there, I walked out behind the house to snap a few photos on both the DSLR and iPhone. I was particularly pleased with how this specific photo, taken on my iPhone 4, turned out. I've not edited this photo in any way.
Click though to see a blown up version of this image.
Lets see your Blackberry/Droid/Windows Phone 7 do that.
For about 2 years now I've been using this 3rd party site, Twitterfeed, to auto tweet my blog posts to my Twitter account. On paper, the site looks great, but in practice, it works poorly and lacks certain features. It can only poll my blog every 30 minutes, at the most frequent setting, for new posts. Despite this setting, sometimes several hours go by after I post before it auto-Tweets the link. Additionally, sometimes it fails to do it at all.
When this happened today, around lunchtime, I finally decided to seek out an alternative. Little did I know that a far superior solution was sitting right in front of me this whole time, and I could have EASILY been using it.
Like many bloggers, I use Feedburner to re-host up my RSS feed for my site because of the greatly increased functionality and control it gives me over my RSS feed. You can do things such as insert code into each blog post (google ads, etc), get detailed analytics on your feed subscribers, and it gives you capabilities like PubSubHubBub.
A quick Google Search for "Twitterfeed Alternative" turned up this blog post from ThinkSplendid, which covered exactly what I was looking for. Apparently, and I did not know this, Feedburner has had the built-in capability of publishing blog post links/summaries to Twitter for some time now. You can find this functionality under the "Publicize" tab -> "Socialize" side-nav link. It does EXACTLY what Twitterfeed does, but with the added reliability of The Google™. What's even better: instead of polling my site every 30 minutes for new posts, it will post a Tweet whenever a new post shows up in my RSS feed - instantly - because my CMS, Squarespace, is PubHubSubBub compatible. Yes, I know this is a very first world problem to have, but it just made my Monday.
This past weekend my wife and I went to see The Social Network at our local movie threatre in our neighborhood. Being a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Sports Night & Studio 60) I had high hopes for this movie. I've loved all of Sorkin's previous work as someone who appreciates when a movie or tv show doesn't stoop to the lowest common denominator in order to try to get ratings. Sorkin is unapologetic in his use of witty dialog that forces the audience to pay attention to keep up with the film. I knew this wouldn't be an episode of The Jersey Shore (which, by the way, is clear evidence that the human race is doomed to idiocracy).
Now, before I go any further... Have you seen The Social Network yet? If not, go see it now. Do not read any further. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Okay, back now? Good. Let us continue.
As a movie, by itself, disconnected from reality? Fantastic. Amazing. Phenominally good. Aaron Sorkin at his best. I want to watch it again. I will buy this movie immediately when it comes out instead of ripping it from a DVD I got from Netflix in the mail. Oops, did I just type that out loud? Anyway, go see this movie. It is worth it.
Like any Sorkin screenplay, this film's dialogue was endlessly witty. As an asshole-in-training myself, I greatly appreciated the intellectual wit that Sorkin portrayed Zuckerberg's character as possessing throughout the film. In my opinion, the most hilarious, stand-out line of the film was when Zuckerberg's character refers to the two rich douchey Winklevoss twins as the "Winklevii". Yes, quirky geek humor, but I loved it.
I also loved how, throughout the film, the story would cut from the past to the future legal testimony of Zuckerberg and the two parties who were suing him. The back and forth time travel from the past events, as they were happening to the testimony served as a nice way to narrate certain parts of the film in order to tell the history as it was portrayed to happen over a several year period.
Now, all of that being said....the film was grossly inaccurate. I love Aaron Sorkin's work but major parts of the storyline were incorrect and most of the inaccuracies came about because of Sorkin's inherent biases. Rather than try to explain these inaccuracies and Sorkin's biases, I will let Lawrence Lessig someone else whom I greatly admire, do so for me:
...But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures-an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.”
Not every account of a new world suffers like this. Alexis de Tocqueville showed the old world there was more here than there. But Sorkin is no Tocqueville. Indeed, he simply hasn’t a clue to the real secret sauce in the story he is trying to tell. And the ramifications of this misunderstanding go well beyond the multiplex....
I recommend you read the rest of his piece, in its entirety for the full rebuttal to the premise of The Social Network's story. That being said, please do see the movie too. Both the movie, and Lessig's article, are worth seeing and reading.
And finally, if you've gotten this far and still haven't went and seen the movie (despite my earlier advice) here is the trailer:
Several weeks ago, just after this launched, I had an idea for a site of my own. The idea brewed for a few days, and then one night after getting home from work, I spent a few hours coding and $10 to register a domain. I made http://howtouseanescalatorindc.com.
It was a Thursday or a Friday, and any web designer/developer worth his/her salt knows that you launch websites on a Monday or Tuesday, for those are the highest traffic days of the week. The next week came. I was busy, or not in the mood - I forget why exactly. The next week I was on vacation in San Francisco. The next week I was back at work, but similarly busy. But today...around 12 noon I thought. Why not? Why not today? At 1:00 pm I sent out a tweet to a few select DC Twitter friends.
As of 5:00 pm I've picked up 50 followers on twitter. This blog has seen an increase from 20 unique visitors today to 250+ with 560 pageviews. And http://howtouseanescalatorindc.com has blew through 5000+ uniques with 10,000 pageviews just now. The numbers were 1/2 this just an hour ago.
Hi Mom, I'm famous.
Update: As of 9:10 pm est, http://howtouseanescalatorindc.com has just topped 12,300 unique visitors with 30,000+ page views.
I periodically skim my Gmail spam folder for false positives. Once every 90 days or so, Google decides to start flagging the wrong type of automated message as spam (Twitter follower emails was the latest one). While doing this, I noticed the following type of email had started showing up recently. It appears spammers are now preying on the desire of WoW players who want to get an invite to the new World of Warcraft closed beta. Looking through my box there were 5 or 6 of them from just the past 24 hours, from multiple sources, each of them different. This particular one looked the most legitimate, despite that Google flagged it as malicious and its origin came from a Yahoo spoofed account. Nice try.
A blog post from Patrick Rhone is soliciting others to submit pictures of what they carry in their pockets on a daily basis. The idea started from Dave Caolo which was prompted by a tweet from Patrick. Patrick responded to Dave's post and solicited others to do so as well. These types of things interest me as well, so here's mine:
Before I got my iPhone I would have my Blackberry (work), iPod Classic, wallet & keys. That was 2008 & prior. Over the years my keychain has shrunk as well. Our most recent move in June allowed me to shed a security fob which was needed at my old apartment. My new apartment key has a fob included in it (that weird circular thing on my keychain - yes, that is both a key & fob).
I had the pleasure of accompanying my wife on a recent business trip to San Francisco where her organization, ASAE, had hired Merlin Mann to speak for one of their events. ZeFrank was to keynote the event, but at the last minute, we found out that he was ill and unable to attend. Merlin graciously stepped up and keynoted in his place doing an excellent job.
I've been a huge fan of Merlin for a long time. He is the reason my first DSLR lens was a 50mm, that I know what Thayers™ Original Witch Hazel is, and my yacht wax of choice is Monocle Pete's Magic Yacht Wax. If none of that makes sense to you, well....you're missing out.
Fortunately, I remembered to bring my Flip Ultra HD and Gorillapod with me to San Francisco. However, I want to apologize for the quality of video/audio as my thought to record this was last minute. The room wasn't very videographer friendly, but I managed to attach them to the back of a chair. It starts off a bit shaky a first but settles down after a few minutes. As several times the view is obstructed by some audience members but it shouldn't interfere too badly with your watching/listening to Merlin.
During the event and afterward I snapped a few pictures with both my iPhone 4 and Canon 40D. I event got a few pictures with Merlin and myself. He really is the nicest man on the internet folks.
