Audio

Boagworld
Good all around podcast for those in the web industry.

Games

World of Warcarft
For more hours than I care to admit.

Looking forward to Bayoneta, Bioshock 2 and Brutal Legend on the PS3.

Music

Luxury by Tiga

Memory Gospel by Moby

She’s Got Me Dancing by Tommy Sparks

Video

Hulu
Great for keeping up with various shows on my timetable. Yes, 3am showings of Inspector Gadget is exactly how I roll. Currently hopeful that Warehouse 13 and Defying Gravity will continue to be interesting.

Netflix
Love the Blu-ray and wide selection. Sci-fi and Comedy dominate the rental lists.

Pixel Perfect
Bert Monroy’s excellent show on Photoshop and related topics. Excellent for learning new techniques and reinforcing current skills.

TED
My late night sleep aid and all around mind stimulator. Love the fact that I can watch these on my iPhone from the comfort of bed.

Tekzilla
Patrick and Veronica do a great job of hosting this show about all things tech. The bloopers at the end of each episode are the perfect icing to an entertainly educational show.

Websites

Authentic Jobs
I visit a lot of job sites regularly but I really enjoy their layout and consistent quality of postings the best. Strong contenders include  Krop and the 37signals Job Board.

deviantART
Wonderful site for sampling a wide range of art, photography and design. I don’t think my mom would approve of some of the material but perhaps that is why I like it so much.  ;)

Twitter
I really enjoy the exercise of distilling an idea down to it’s essentials so it will remain true despite the 140 character limit. It’s a really great way to improve your writing skills.

Nice of Carsonified to post although their isn’t as much video content as I would like.

The following presentations were the best by far.

• Doing a Start Up in the Real World by David Heinemeier Hansson
  Great talk filled with real advice. No fluff. Watch it then formulate your own plan to make the world a better place.
• 14 Web App Survival Tips by Ryan Carson
  Lots of tips for the aspiring web app creator to help deal with promotion, finance and more.

I had the pleasure of attending Future of Web Apps – Miami 2009 earlier this year. It’s a wonderful experience that I highly recommend for anyone in the web industry.

The conferences are put together by nice folks at Carsonified who prove their good intentions by posting videos and slides from each show for anyone who couldn’t make it.

Here are some of my favorites from this year’s event.

• Order from Chaos: The Future of the Web by Aza Raskin
  Bit of technical problems accompany this great talk about mozilla, open source and how we are moving towards better interfaces for using the web.
• What is the Future of the Browser? by Dion Almaer & Ben Galbraith
  Great overview of the past, present and future of the web browsers. Very well paced and informative.
• Keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk
  Need motivation? Gary’s passion is infectious!
• Scaling your Tech Team by Joe Stump
  Very specific examples and advice for anyone who is interested in or already part of a growing team.

Learning is enjoyment with purpose.

Logically, the next step after perusing through the excellent FOWA London archive was to travel forward in time and view the Future of Web Design – New York 2008 videos.

At first I felt disappointed in the ammount of materials available. After a quick check it turns out that I liked 25% of the materials vs. the 10% of really excellent talks in the previous conference. Quality vs. quantity I guess. Each are good depending on your mood.

Of the New York talks, I found the following to be the most useful.

• Web Design Fundamentals: Learning from the past to better the future by Patrick Haney
• Educating clients to say yes by Paul Boag

Of course, Paul Boag really steals the show here and rightly so. His presentation is jam packed with a metric butt ton of valuable insight into dealing with and educating clients.

You would think this is one of those rare once in a conference speaches but honestly, he does an amazing job on almost every time he opens his mouth. I highly recommend you take a auditory gander at the Boagworld Web Design Podcast if  you work in the web industry. Always excellent education, insightful interviews and amusing banter too.

I’ve been pretty busy and productive in the last few months. New rental condo, furniture procurement, learning new tech, spending more time with family and very recently, purchasing a new (used) car.

Now that things are more in order I find I am able to choose were to spend my time. Frequently this involves thinking about previous initiatives that were placed on hold since they were not crucial either my wife or myself.

One such goal was to peruse all the free videos from last year’s Future of Web Apps – London 2008 conference.

Of all the London talks, I found the following to be the most useful.

• The Fear Factor by Tim Bray
• Technology & Psychology by Suw Charman-Anderson
• Future Mobile by Stefan Fountain (I recommend skipping the self advertising in the middle unless you really like Knight Rider)
• How to grow and nurture your community by Kathy Sierra
• How to build a desktop app from your web app by Jeremy Baines

I truly appreciate Carsonified for posting these materials. I am also proud to say I will be attending their upcoming FOWA Miami event on February 24th as a paying customer.

You see, in this clip a large frightened herd of Golfers has to make its way across a river in the deserts of Africa. A lounging group of porn stars resting of the river bank notices the herd and with deliberate, overly sensually movements, starts to close in on their prey.

I won’t go any farther but rest assured this is the most accurate portrayal of the natural violence that occurs when these two groups meet in the wild.

A very good and memorable ad. Just don’t show it to your mom ok?

Odn stands with his legs apart proudly making a V sign with his right hand toward the camera shouting VICTORY!

I don’t know how long or how many sleepless nights I’ve devoted to video conversion, editing and the holy grail of saving perfect digital copies from our PVR but I’ve finally done it and it feels great! It’s kinda like an RPG I kept dying right before gaining a level with various problems but now I’m level 2 in video conversion! Woohoo.

I didn’t even plan on doing this today it just kinda happened.

So how do you do it? Well I think I’ll write a tutorial one of these days (nothing too technical) to help others. Lets just say for now that TMPGEnc rocks!

After that fun and unexpected discovery I decided to look for a good DVD player since Parr’s mom has been wanting one. We’ll I want one too but it’s easier to justify when it’s for someone else. I started out my search looking for players that could handle the DIVX format. I figured I could save/reuse all my existing video on the computer without having to transcode anything.

We’ll a few hours later I had come to the horrible conclusion that yes, there are DVD players that can handle DIVX, OGG and even had hard drives and ethernet in them. The bad news? All of them currently act like a windows machine. Crashing, lock ups, finicky about media and worse. Bleah!

You know, I love computers. I really do. More that most people realize I think. I do not however want a big complex overkill of a machine for every task.

I do not want to troubleshoot my toasters micro operating system because it doesn’t like bagels. I don’t want my cars steering system freezing up on me and I certainly don’t want my automatic star trek doors to not open because I lost too much weight.

Some things are best done specialized. Like when you call a plumber, he may not be a good music teacher but he sure can stop that leak.

Specialization is a good thing.

Think I’ll go buy a regular DVD player tomorrow. Maybe with that nice Gift Certificate Dj Clawz gave me for the wedding.

Trigger Happy TV is 30 minutes of insane comedy. All jokes are carried out in public places with real people. For example, in London, an unsuspecting person enters the a public restroom in the middle of a busy street. As soon as their door closes, Dom Joly dressed in a fashionable suit runs up to the toilet along with a large group of people. Everyone proceeds to stand on either side of the public toilet readying themselves. Some of them carry musical instruments, another a mini-sound system, and another is a very pretty model escorting a very nice looking bottle of champagne. Some of the people outside the toilet erect a sign which reads, “Congratulations to our 1,000,000 Toilet User!”.

Time passes and finally the lady in the toilet starts to emerge from the doorway. Ba, da da, dum! “Congratulations, to our 1,000,000 Toilet User”, shouts Dom Joly beaming with game show host pride. A full band plays in the background as the model presents the bottle of champagne to our startled, yet smiling guest. The skit ends with our toilet user smiling and laughing as she walks away happily bewildered.

All this comedy and we are just 30 seconds into the show! My personal favorite bit is the Nokia Cell Phone guy who appears in restaurants, theatres, concerts, parks and other public places caring a huge cell phone which he has to yell into to use. Some other funny moments include a hedge maze with two people dressed as bushes strategically trapping a tourist, a car park attendant who keeps crashing cars, a person using a toilet in a lift, a guy who walks his stuffed dog and much much more!

If you have cable then check out Trigger Happy TV on Comedy Central, Mondays, 10:00pm. You’ll love it!

For a nice selection of Trigger Happy TV video clips and info, check out the Channel Four site or if your more textually inclined visit the the official Trigger Happy TV site for history, bios and more.

I have to say I’ve never been truly happy with Pierce as James Bond but this film is different, the movie starts out in with our hero surfing into the coast of North Korea. After looking cool, using a few gadgets and issuing a couple of suave hand signals, James meets up with a helicopter during an unscheduled stop and switches places with a bad guy inside. James gets in the helicopter which takes off and he goes on to conveniently place a package of C4 into a briefcase filled with diamonds. He adds some finishing touches to the explosives with a flashing LED peg stuck through it, making mandatory “beeping explosion in a later scene” noises of course.

After the Heli lands, James meets up with some unsavory North Korean military personnel. The deal is simple, trade a whole bunch of diamonds for a whole bunch of weapons. Should be a easy trade except Mr. Bond is discovered thanks to a henchman’s digital camera and probably someone doing a google image search in a back room. The situation gets worse when the main bad guy demonstrates a new weapon on the heli that originally dropped James Bond off. Ka-Booom! (Depleted Uranium shells are really effective BTW). The situation quickly turns into chaos as the bad guys father, the true general of the North Korean army, radios in wanting to know why there is fire and smoke eminating from his base. He informs his son that he was already enroute and that he will be there in five min to inspect the area.

Our main bad guy then orders the super cool hovercrafts to leave the area. (Quick everyone mom is coming, hide the comic books and pixie sticks). James of course, facing certain death, sets off his previous C4 laden briefcase, gets on a escaping hovercraft, knocks out the driver and proceeds to cause some major havoc.

In the escape and chase sequence that follows, hovercrafts are skirting over mines, vehicles are blowing up, chain guns are trimming down trees and flamethrowers are making everything extra crispy. The chase is technically well done and ends with James Bond slugging it out with the main bad guy. They eventurally crash through a temple gate with the entire hovercraft going over the side of a waterfall to certain doom. Our hero james of course survives by hanging onto a bell hammer (horizontal asian style) as the bell rings over and over with his momentum.

All this commotion attracts the real General of course. James, surrounded and blamed for the death of the generals son is sent to prison, the special “torture you kind” that are becoming so hard to find in our western civilization nowadays.

All this and we haven’t even got to the main credits yet!

Well, I don’t want to ruin the movie for you but lets just say if you have ever liked any of the Bond films in the past, do yourself a favor and go to the theatre right away. This latest film is an action packed, visually diverse, bad pun filled, love fest extravaganza! Plus, any movie with John Cleese as an excellent M should probably be a mandatory film to see anyway.