The Blue Angels: Universally Awesome
There’s no better place to be on the first weekend in August than Seattle. Not only is the weather a spectacular 80 degrees and breezy, but it’s also Seafair weekend… a city-wide celebration involving hydroplane races, thousands of boats on Lake Washington, and one of the greatest airshows you’ll ever see, courtesy of the Blue Angels.
This year I managed to stay coherent enough out on the Lake to snap some nice shots of the Boys in Blue and even shoot a bit of video. This little Casio EX-Z750 continues to amaze me. The video quality is stellar, especially for something that fits in your shirt pocket. As planes pass over your head at near Mach 1, you tend to shake a little bit, so some anti-shake technology would be nice, but hey, I can’t complain.
Below is a slideshow of 10 photos from the airshow:
And here’s a 4-minute chunk of video from the show. The video in its original form is about twice the pixel size and quite a bit higher quality, but I wanted to get the clip down to about 20 megs so I downsampled and converted to Flash:
Bad Blur Jobs
I just read this entry on Scott Fegette’s blog about a really nice new feature of Dreamweaver 8 called “Code Collapse”, but that’s not really what got my attention about the blog entry. Check out the blur job on the screenshot below:
You blur out two phone numbers that are already fake (415.XXX.XXXX) and then don’t even blur out your own e-mail address enough to keep people from guessing exactly what it is? I mean c’mon… it ends in macromedia.com, doesn’t it?
Anyway, sorry Scott… I’m sure someone else is the guilty blurrer here. I just felt like bringing it up. UPDATE: Guilty! :)
And hey, great job with Dreamweaver 8! I can’t wait to try it out.
iPod Giveaway #4: We Have a Winner
John Whittet (whose illustration is to the right) said it best when he clarified the purpose of the 4th Monthly Mike Industries iPod-A-Monthly Creativity Competition:
“This particular contest is about telling a story, not writing one.”
With 60-some entries to read through over the last week, I encountered a great many well-written ones, but none told the story of a lost iPod more creatively and convincingly than the audio-blog-umentary by Ohio State University’s very own Josh Schoenwald.
You see Josh bought a very special iPod Shuffle about a month ago; one that not only had a personality but was also smart enough to set up its own account on Blogger, keep an audio diary, and even fade U2 songs into the ends of its blog posts. “Flit”, as Josh calls him, is no ordinary Shuffle.
As of today, I’m happy to say that Flit is indeed in my possession and will be returned to Josh first thing tomorrow morning along with a pair of $150 Etymolic earbuds courtesy of iLounge.com (formerly iPodLounge). Congratulations Josh!
I also want to draw attention to a few other spectacular entries of note, the first one being John Whittet’s amazingly well illustrated animated docudrama entitled “Little White Cookbook”. John produced some amazing visual effects by overlaying his own hand drawn figures against a backdrop of photos pulled from Google Images and then Gaussian blurred. It’s a really cool effect and one I’d never seen before… you can read more about it here, and perhaps hire John for any illustration projects which require such awesomeness.
Another standout was Paul Santolaria’s take-off on one of my favorite films “A Shot in the Dark” starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Very creative and extremely well done.
My favorite two pure text entries (which each were worthy of first prize) were David Barrett’s account of his iPod-Shuffle-turned-pregnancy-test and Kat’s hilarious yet tragic home mugging.
There were five others I found very amusing as well, but I’ll leave those a mystery.
Thanks to everyone for entering, and the next contest will launch around the middle of this month!
The Mouse That Roared
True story
I was at the Seattle Apple Store just yesterday scooping up some iMacs, Powerbooks, and Cinema Displays for my new company, and as I was about to pay, Jason — the Apple Store Business Consultant — asked me if I wanted the “wireless versions” of my iMacs.
Me: “You mean with wireless mouse and keyboard?”
Apple Store Jason: “Yes. For $60 more, there is a version with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.”
Me: “Well if you guys would finally put out a mouse that was of any use to me, I’d probably take you up on that, but for now, I’ll stick with aftermarket mice.”
Apple Store Jason: You mean you want a multi-button mouse?
Me: Yeah. If you don’t want to give in on the whole “multi-button” thing, how about at least making a mouse that could sense where you push it and act accordingly?
Apple Store Jason: “Yeah, that would be nice.”
Later on that day…
After setting our Macs up at the new office, we were paid a visit from a personal friend of Steve Jobs (or PFOSJ)… a person who is also involved in the formation of our company. Here is the conversation which followed:
PFOSJ: “Alright! You guys are going all Apple!”
Me: “Yeah, totally.”
PFOSJ: “These iMacs are really nice machines, aren’t they?”
Me: “Yes. Can you tell Steve to kill this one-button mouse nonsense already though? It’s getting ridiculous.”
Great day in the mornin’!
Fast-forward about 16 hours to this morning and we now have news of the Mighty Mouse! A multi-function mouse which can sense where you press it and act accordingly! Not only that, but there’s an omni-directional scroll-wheel as well, and pressure-sensitive side buttons.
I know you PC people out there are going to laugh at how happy this makes us Mac people (being that you’ve had multi-button mice for years), but it really is a momentous occasion. The one-button mouse was the last indisputable disadvantage of Apple hardware, and also the last vestige of stubbornness left over from the pre OS X days.
The one-button mouse is dead. Long live the Mighty Mouse!
UPDATE: Jason, the Apple Store Business Consultant, just called to tell us the Mighty Mouse sold out in 30 minutes this morning, but he set aside three of them for us! Alright! Thanks Jason! You are the man!
UPDATE #2: The mouse is in the house! I was skeptical right up until the moment I plugged it in, but this thing is actually pretty nice. Contrary to a couple of comments above, there actually *is* tactile feedback upon clicks and scrolls and it feels really good. The scrollwheel is amongst the best I’ve used as well. My advice is: if you like the general shape and feel of the stock Apple mouse but just wish it had more functionality, you will love this mouse. If you just don’t like the Apple mouse much to begin with though, you probably won’t like this either. Head on down to your local Apple Store and give it a try.