Community Involvment & a BIG Thank you!
Last week I spent the entire week helping to renovate the Big Brothers and Big Sisters office here in town. I wanted to write a post about it for a number of reasons but first some background on why and how I got involved. My Mom has been a supporter of the organization through her work at the TDBank and this past year she was invited to join the board of directors, which she did. As a result the rest of the family gets roped into helping or participating in their events, so through BBQ’s and bowling I have gotten to know the people who work so very hard to make the organization a success.
Money is always an issue for charities and when they needed to move to a new office they found a place that had cheap rent on the main drag here in Fort Erie. The place, was in pretty rough shape. It was dirty with moldy carpets and walls and a bathroom that was so dingy that I wouldn’t have been happy having to use it. This upset my mother a great deal, “How do we present ourselves as a professional organization when the office looks like this, it’s embarrassing!”. After some discussion they decided that something needed to be done. Being that I am currently out of work my mother asked if I would go have a look at the space to see if I had any ideas on how to spruce it up, which I did. I then decided that I should go and speak with some local businesses about helping us with the project, either with money or in-kind donations and to my surprise I got some great help. The biggest job was to get repainted to add some interest brighten and clean up the place, so I went to the local Benjamin Moore paint store called Fort Erie Paints owned by Steve & Lucy Brown. As luck would have it Steve was there and I told him what I was up too and he said that they could help with some paint donations. I got all the dimensions and brought them back to Lucy and they proceeded to organize what we needed. To my wonderful surprise when I went to get the paint I found the between Fort Erie Paints and Benjamin Moore there was no charge, they donated it all, over five hundred dollars worth of paint and materials. So this post is really for them, it’s my personal thank you for being great people and a great company and for giving to the community and supporting a great cause. The office looks fantastic, it’s clean and bright and the staff is prouder than ever to be working there!
Hippo Love @ Zooz
I love going to the zoo, some people say it’s cruel to keep animals in captivity, I say it may not be the best situation for the animals in all cases but in some they are actually better off. We need zoos in order to educate people about habitat loss and extinction. The impact of seeing these majestic animals in the flesh is far greater than hearing about it on TV.
I am fortunate enough to live near a zoo, it’s small but it is really a great place with lots of fun things to do and a fair number of animals from around the world. It’s called Zooz, and its located in Stevensville, Ontario.
Here are some pictures of my favorite part of Zooz the Hippopotamus.
It’s well worth a visit if your are in the Niagara region.
Woot! The Big Lebowski 10th Anniversary DVD
The Big Lebowski has been a favorite of mine since I first saw it the day it came out. The 10th Anniversary DVD edition is being released on September 9th and you can bet I will be stopping by my local video store to get my copy. The Packaging is just too cool to pass up.
So you know where I’ll be on the evening of September 9th if your looking for me.
The best Wordpress mobile Phone plugin!
I am always on the lookout for plugins that make your Wordpress blog look good on a mobile phone or PDA browser. Well did I ever find a good one today. I am not sure how long this has been around or why in my many searches that it never turned up before. It’s called Wordpress PDA & iPhone Plugin it really makes your blog look good in IE mobile.
I found this plugin while browsing TechTreak.com’s list of 35 Most Popular Wordpress plugins, it’s a great list!
My New Zune – The Experiment and The Review
Yup that’s right I got a Zune. As part of a research project being conducted by Matchstick.ca and ChatThreads.com I was lucky enough to be nominated to receive an Black 8GB Zune, by my friend at Outspoken Therapy. According to the paperwork that came with my Zune, ChatThreads is a word of mouth research company that is tracking the conversations that people have had about their Zune to see just how word of mouth travels and Matchstick is the marketing agency that has implemented the program. Part of the package is a set of cards with my unique conversation ID on it that I can hand out whenever I have a verbal discussion about the Zune, the idea here is that the people I talked to take the card home and go online and fill in a questionnaire. If I have any other discussions online via IM, social network, email or blog, I just submit the links or copies to ChatThreads. ChatThreads offers some nice incentives for people to participate in the converstions by offering to donate 5$ to charity after you fill in the questionnare or you can have a chance to win 500$ from a draw, before I got my Zune I participated in conversations and I will say that ChatThreads will not spam you after you have given them your email and in fact they will only ever contact you again if you give them permission to by opting to participate further. It’s a very interesting experiment and I hope that I can see some of the results when it is finished.
I have used a number of MP3/PMP players and the only one I ever really liked was the iPod, for form and functionality there was nothing better, and there still isn’t. That being said I really do like the Zune and it has some really great features it’s the desktop software that fails miserably.
What do I like about the Zune?
- Battery Life (seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-12 hrs of music playback)
- Video support (Apparently you can connect it to a TV with a A/V kit)
- Wireless sync (I like that you can drop stuff onto it without having to connect it to the computer)
- Wireless sharing (It’s kinda cool to be able to wirelessly trade stuff between Zunes)
- Built-in FM radio
What I don’t like about the Zune?
- The proprietary cable to connect the Zune to the computer. (What?..wait didn’t you say it could sync wirelessly? yes but it charges through USB port on your computer or travel adapter that you plug the cable into) Which means when you travel you have to bring yet another cable along. Yes I am aware that iPods also require a special cable and that is a flaw in the Apple design as well.
- The headphone port is on the bottom. I know this isn’t major, more of an ease of use thing.
- The Zune software is not good. My major problem is the view of what is on the device. The options for viewing what is already on the device are confusing and do not display all the information I need to make decisions about what I am removing. For example I am a big Alice Cooper fan and I have several Alice Cooper albums on my Zune, but Alice Cooper does not show up as an Artist on the Zune, only the albums titles do. Alternatively I also enjoy The Sisters Of Mercy of which I have 5 albums on my Zune but the only thing that shows in the device list is The Sisters of Mercy artist but not which albums are there. As I said earlier this is the single biggest downfall of the Zune, I know that I will be labeled a “fanboy” but iTunes is leaps and bounds ahead of the Zune software and if Microsoft could fix that they would have an amazing PMP.
Over all the user experience with the Zune is really good. I had some trouble setting up the Zune software initially, I think that it was a result of the Zune being connected while the software was installing. After removing and reinstalling everything went just fine. I had the opportunity to play with the wireless sharing while I was at the cottage with some friends last week and I was really impressed at the speed of the transfers but somewhat disappointed in the 3 days or 3 plays limitation but I understand the reasoning behind it so I am not calling it a fail (and I am not sure if that applies to pictures and podcasts as well or not).
Here is the link for my ChatThreads conversations, if you took the time to read this I would appreciate you letting them know. It will only take 5 minutes and you could win 500$.
digsby
digsby is an IM+E-mail+Social Networking client. So far I have not found anything that comes close to its capabilities. It handles instant messaging for MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, AIM, Facebook, ICQ & Jabber. It will work with e-mail from Hotmail, Google, Yahoo & AOL/AIM as well as any POP3 or IMAP mail service. It also plugs into 3 of the top social netowking sites Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. That’s a lot of stuff eh? The best part is that it does it all really really well. Have a look at their screenshots gallery to see some of the configurations and to get an idea of the features that I am discussing below.
My favorite feature of digsby by far is the little balloon that pops up on your main screen with the info you have asked digsby to provide, the best part of this is that if someone sends you an IM you can type your response right into the balloon, no switching to the IM client window, this is really handy if you just need to send a quick reply back to someone and is much less disruptive. The other most excellent feature is the ability to combine multiple contacts into one, if you have friends on more than one network you can group them into one contact on Digsby and they show up with whichever service they logged in under but you only have one contact entry. It also has a great chat widget for Facebook or that you can embed in a blog. What makes that cool is that when someone hits your page you see a guest show up under digsby chat in the Buddy List.
There is also a Mac OSX and a Linux client in the works. I am hoping that they will add other social networking sites in the future as well as a mobile client that way I could use digsby everywhere!
Not approved for comments?
I have been a lifehacker reader for quite some time, but I never bothered to get involved with the community. That was until a few weeks ago when I tried to get in on a discussion about Dropbox. At this point I didn’t have Dropbox and there where people in the comments offering invites. What better to get involved in the conversation than get an invite and try it out for myself, so I left a comment asking for one. That’s when I found out that the team at lifehacker moderates their comments, big deal right I mod mine to make sure they are real and relavant to the topic. It turns out that at lifehacker you have to be an approved commentor. How you become an approved commentor is a bit of a mystery to me, lifehacker Comments FAQ. Ok so it’s not that much of a mystery but who reads these things through right off the bat anyway. Well I guess I should have paid more attention becasue as a result of my asking for a Dropbox invite I have been banned from commenting, and there is no mechanism in place to change that either, no 2nd chance, no appeal, nothing. You can send an email but you won’t get a response, they make that quite clear with this disclaimer:
Please note that due to the amount of emails we receive, we may not be able to reply to every email.
lifehacker - posting comments denied
I know it says “may not” but it might as well say “don’t bother”. I have sent an email asking that my account be removed because I thought like other blogs they were trying to build a community but it turns out that they are just building a clique and I am not interested in that. So I will save my comments for other blogs that talk about the same things as they do and spend my time on them.
Oh and to make matters worse, they pointed out that I don’t have any friends… nice.
hurt my feelings too
20 Minutes To Tobago – Short Film
20 Minutes To Tobago from Todd Hodge on Vimeo.
This is a short film I co-produced and edited a couple years back. It was an interesting experiment. I might write about it someday but for now you will just have to settle for watching it. In case you hadn’t guessed it’s about 20 minutes long.
Old Media
I decided that since I am trying to break into new media production that I should get some of my old media production out and post it on the web. This is a demo reel from my editing days.
*NOTE: If any of the copyright owners object to their portion of content being included here please just send me a message and I will remove it. (All rights reserved)
The Social Networking Experiment
It’s a busy time on the internet these days. Since the inception of hugely popular Twitter in 2006 we have seen an explosion in micro-blogging. There are now several micro-blogging services available and they are also integrated into the popular social networking services like Facebook. The list is getting really long http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites sufficed to say that if you use more than one or two of the services on that list on a regular basis you are probably a social media junkie ( or are becoming one like I am ). The micro-blog is an extension of the traditional blog and there are a fair number of A-list bloggers out there that use these social networking services.
I have had a great time meeting people, discovering services and learning the jargon. It’s a fantastic world out there and services like Twitter, Plurk, Indent.ca, Tumbler and Pownce are full of great people that have something to share. Sometimes it’s about breakfast and sometimes its about the more serious things in life. There is a fantastic amount of information shared, and it is being used to motivate people, like this recent blood drive in Austin Texas. This is the aspect of the social network that I find so fascinating. The idea that as you build a group of followers, that you interact with, share stories with or just listen to, you can wield a great deal of internet clout. An a-list blogger who undoubtedly uses most if not all of the aforementioned micro-blogging services and has a following of several thousand people can drive traffic to a website for the purposes of promotion or because they don’t like something that is on a particular site.
The addition of easy video services like Seesmic and Stickam will also change the dynamic of the web in a large way. Adding a face takes away the safety of anonymity and provides for a different type of interaction. Leo Laporte is an excellent example of this. He has recently set himself up in his own studio with some cool gear on a reasonable budget (from traditional TV production studios) and is broadcasting 6 days a week at Twitlive.tv. He is usually recording one of his many podcasts with other Twits who are either in the studio or who join him via Skype. He also takes live video calls through Skype and ooVoo as well as from Stickam users in between recordings and just generally talks tech.
It’s going to be really amazing to watch this evolve further over the next few years, but I think we will see a lot more indpendant production making headway over the major traditional broadcasters.
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