educating eric

It's amazing how my life in Twitter has taken over all my blog-related tendencies; hard to believe that it's been almost four months since I posted anything here. Out of curiosity... is anyone still listening here? :)

Last Saturday, Candela and I got up at the crack of dawn in hopes that the Hudson Hot Air Affair would go off as planned... and it did! So Candela got to experience the same thing that Dad and I did nearly three decades ago (only once or twice, as I recall, because they were often cancelled).

For a long time we've been hunting for a good "throw a bunch of photos on the web" solution. Looks like Picasa Web Albums might be an option (thanks to a tool called Migratr, which helped move a bunch of photos that I had on Flickr). Here's an example of the embedding function; let's see how it turns out.

Years ago, Larry King was interviewed (on 60 Minutes or some such program) and noted that people don't pay attention when conducting interviews. There was a quote like, "Someone does a man-on-the-street interview, 'What brings you here today?'; "Oh, I'm here to [do some terrible thing]"; "Great! And are you planning to have lunch anywhere?" Fine... but I expect better from David Frost , of all people! Osama bin Laden - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : "November 2007 In an interview with political interviewer David Frost, taken on November 2, 2007, the recently assassinated Pakistani politician, and Pakistan Peoples Party chairwoman, Benazir Bhutto, claimed that bin Laden had been murdered by Omar Sheikh. During her answer to a question pertaining to the identities of those who had previously attempted her own assassination, Bhutto named Sheikh as a possible suspect while referring to him as 'the man who murdered Osama bin Laden.'...

Can competition (against your business -- not, like, running in track and field) be a good? Read Why Starbucks actually helps mom and pop coffeehouses. - By Taylor Clark - Slate Magazine : "Starbucks has been about as lethal a killer as a fluffy bunny rabbit." In a nutshell, if you have Starbucks around, that gets people thinking about spending $4 for a cup of coffee, and if that's the field you're playing in, it's good to have people thinking about that. So, I suppose it depends on what your business field is; if you're selling something that's really necessary and important, competition might hurt you... but if you're trying to sell snow to Minnesotans, the more people shouting "Snow is great! You need snow! Buy snow now!", the better off you'll be. Maybe? Thoughts?

I'm sitting here in my den, putting off going to bed, and thinking that I really should get out a podcast before we're in 2008. But Candela is literally three feet in front of my face, separated from me by only 1/2" of drywall, 3 1/2" of dead space, and another 1/2" of drywall. So, I don't think I'm going to try recording anything tonight. But that got me thinking about podcasting, and the fact that, at least for me, right now, insert other qualifier here, it's somewhat difficult to pop out a quick podcast. There's recording, then assembling the different sweepers and phone clips, then compressing, then normalizing, then saving, then uploading to the server, then writing and publishing the blog entry to populate the RSS feed... at which point I remember that I left out "update the ID3 tags" from the process and wonder whether I should even bother. There's got to be a better way, right? So, that got me thinking about what used to be c...

Thanks to a tip from a blog reader, I've now got a new interactive video site to add to the toolbelt: Asterpix Interactive Video . It seems to fall in that Click.TV or Mojiti or Viddler category, but also seems to feature a "tracking" function so your clickable "hotspots" will stick with objects as they move on the screen. Awesome for home movies or any long shot that has an object of interest; I'm not so sure it's a good fit for collaborative commenting on a produced video, but I'll have to play with it more to get a good handle on its strengths. Three cheers for the blogosphere and the answers it can provide! :)