20 posts tagged “tech”
Yesterday was a busy day at the Trade Show. After a busy night out with the FriendFeeders, I was looking forward to a relaxed day and to spread the word about Blellow and get us some traffic.
We received a lot of positive responses and around 5pm TechCrunch posted a glowing review of our site:
To paraphrase Cracker, what the world needs now is another web-based Interactive micro-content production community like I need a hole in the head. But strangely enough, I think the world needs Blellow
Since the article was posted we received over 1000 new users joining up to the site and a lot of great feedback and positive comments. Our heads were spinning and we were excited to get featured on such an influential blog.
After the show closed I decided to take a night off from the festivities and give my liver a chance to recover, so I headed back to my cousin’s house in Round Rock and enjoyed the night sitting on my duff and watching TV. I actually managed to stay off the computer for a whole hour before I broke down and borrowed they laptop to check the new user numbers. Around 11pm we broke 2000 users!
Today is the last day of the Trade Show with the Mashable Mash Bash tonight at 9:30pm, where Blellow is a sponsor. It’s going to be a very late night for me, as we also have to tear down the booth and pack everything back up. Tomorrow I’m going to try to sit in some of the seminars before making the trek back to San Antonio.
Related posts:
- Sharp’s 3-D Monitor — No Glasses Required!
- You’ve Got A Dead Dell, Dude
- SxSWi Day 2: Attempted Karaoke
Day two in Austin was the first full day of the South by Southwest Interactive Trade Show, and I stood on my feet and talked for 6 hours straight!
We got a really good response to the site and everyone seemed to enjoy what we were trying to do. I’ve never talked to so many strangers (and new friends) in my life, and I enjoyed it quite a bit!
After the Trade Show closed, I went over to the Mexican Cultural Arts Center for the SxSW Opening Ceremony and had a few drinks and mingle a bit. Around 9pm I decided to head over to the Karaoke event on 4th and Navasota to meet up with Erin Koteki Vest, Mark Krynsky, Marco, Aaron Brazell and Derrick for our unofficial FriendFeed meetup.
We watched the Karaoke contest and cheered on Aaron as he performed Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and rocked the house, then headed over to Ego’s via Bike Rickshaw for more karaoke, but unfortunately we showed up after they had already cut the sign up for singing. I met back up with my friend Henry and Dustin Rowles with the Pajiba crew as well and watched Henry sing Adele’s “Syrup and Honey.”
I big the fine folks from FriendFeed farewell and goodnight, and shared a cab with Henry back to the Convention Center. I barely made my way to the Blellow rent house due to my iPod dying (which had the map to get there and the keycode for the door) but somehow managed to squeeze another 30 seconds out of the battery long enough to memorize the address.
Another fine night in Austin with another two days ahead of me. This has been a great experience so far and I’m looking forward to seeing what the last two days have in store.
Related posts:
Today was my very first day at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Most of the afternoon was spent working with Blellow setting up the booth and trying to get a SxSXi badge, all of which happened within hours of each other.
Unfortunately my boss was feeling under the weather, so they all retired to the rent house leaving me alone to terrorize the streets of Austin. I just happened to run into my friend Henry (or Smokin, as he’s known on this very blog) while he was going up the escalator to pick up his badge, so I was able to hook up with him later on. I got a chance to meet the fine folks at Pajiba, Dustin Rowles, Frank, and Seth, all of who are not only great people, and ended up buying me many drinks later in the night (more on this later).
After hanging out at the convention center, (and meeting Derrick from FriendFeed), I decided to break outside my shell and mingle a bit in the growing number of tech and film enthusiasts in Austin.
I started the night by walking about 10-12 blocks down to the Belmont for the Techset meets the Ratpack party. I arrived a little early, so I killed time at the bar and had a lovely discussion with a representative of uStream.com.
Once the party started it got pretty wild fast. As I was standing in the midst of the crowd talking to two interesting guys from Vancouver, Canada, lo and behold Jeffery Tambor (George Sr. From Arrested Devlepment) makes his way through the crowd.
The conversation I had with him was something like this:
Jeffery: “Wow, this is pretty wild, huh?”
Me: “Yeah no kidding! I’m a huge fan of yours, I’m so happy to meet you!” (shakes hand)
Jeffery: “Thanks! I like your hat.”
Me: (Flabbergasted and speechless)
Erica O’Grady introduced me to Hugh McLoud, aka Gaping Void of “Cartoons on the back of business cards.” He even drew me a special card that said “Fuck You, I’m at SxSW 2009!” I was pleased to get a custom card form him, as I’ve been following his work for several years now and was quite a fan.
After much searching and Twitter DM’ing, I finally tracked down my FriendFeed friend Mark Krynsky, and we decided to head down to Emo’s for the “Pastries and Pasties” Burlesque show, only to turn away at the $15 cover charge at the door. We ended up at the Rio Grande a few blocks away and met back up with my friend Henry. After a few drinks the restaurant was closing, so as Mark left to Chugging Monkey to track down Kevin Rose, I left with Henry and the Pajiba crew for many more beers and some interesting discussion of the movie Bridges of Madison County.
Tomorrow is day two, and if it’s at all like today then I have nothing but good conversation and meeting a lot of wonderful and exciting new people to look forward to. So far this has been the start of the best week of my life.
If you would like to connect with me at SxSW Interactive, I’ll be in the Blellow booth for most of the weekend, and after hours terrorizing the streets of Austin. Link up with me through Twitter!
Related posts:
To celebrate our favorite FriendFeeder and just an overall great guy, myself and several members of FriendFeed got together and recorded a video saying our favorite catch phrase: “DAMN YOU STEVEN PEREZ!”
Happy DAMN YOU STEVEN PEREZ Day, Steven!
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No, it has not been four months since I last posted. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Moving on…
Continuing with the series of “10 Things I Love” we reach the next item on the list, something that without which you would not be reading these very words:
THE INTERWEBS.
Yes, as lame as it sounds, I love the Internet. It’s completely changed my life and managed to make things both more efficient AND take away hours of free time at the same time.
Where did it all begin? Where did this fascination of wanting to be online and interacting with complete strangers come from?
Follow me as we take a short detour to my teenage years.
My first exposure to the open publicity of the Internet was before it was even widely available outside of college campuses. I was an avid user of Dial-Up chat boards, back in the days of the BBS - Bulletin Board System. For those who have no idea what that is, it was basically either a single person or a small company who allowed people to call into their computers via the phone lines. Once connected, it was a small site that had message boards or text games.
The larger systems had multiple phone lines so that you could chat with other users, and the chat boards were born. In Houston we had a few that I would regularly call and stay online with until the wee hours of the summer mornings. Off the top of my head the ones I visited most were: Houston After Dark, Houston Teen Beat (once we were all kicked off HAD), and later on Colors of Chat. There was also Matchmaker, but it was not only expensive but also was a haven for the dark side of the scene (there always is one).
Once dial-up Internet hit the world, and I’m not talking about America On-Line, I had a whole new world to explore. At the time there wasn’t much but E-Mail, Usenet, and IRC, but then Netscape Navigator debuted and gave us the World Wide Web and it was a whole new game.
Over the years I’ve found new obsessions birthed by the Internet: Napster, Blogs (since 2002!), YouTube, MySpace / Facebook, Social Networking, MMORPG’s, and much much more.
Here’s a few of the things that I primarily do because the internet allows me to better than ever before, and the tools I use:
Balance My Bank Account & Pay Bills
Online Banking? Whatever. I need more than just my bank balance. I need to be able to enter in manual transactions, see how I’m doing on my budget, set saving goals, and reoccurring transactions. And I also need this available wherever I am going.
Enter Yodlee Moneycenter and Mint, both really good applications that are taking online banking to the next level. I’ve been testing Mint for about eight months now and it’s pretty great in its beta stages, but lately I’ve been gravitating over to Yodlee simply because it offers much more.
Mint and Yodlee both allow you to set budgets, see your spending habits, and set budget/account alerts, but Yodlee allows you to import not only your bank account but also Loans, Electricity and Utility bills, and even reward systems like the Best Buy Reward Center.
If you have doubts about security, then fear not: Yodlee is the major engine behind almost all of the bank’s online banking. The security to login is almost annoying but understood; this is my money we’re dealing with.
Keep My Life in Order
Remember the Milk
I am a complete scatterbrain. If I don’t write something down, typically I’ve forgotten it by the time it’s crossed my — ooh look, a bunny!
Uh.. nevermind. The moral of the story is, I need something to help me. Not just remember things like my friends and families birthdays, but also things like thinking I need ketchup, only to discover the two other bottles in the pantry upon return from the grocery store.
Enter Remember The Milk. This simple task service allows you to make any list you wish, whether its just a simple grocery list (with priorities), birthdays, bill payment due dates, or simply adding upcoming events.
While opening Notepad and writing a list is easy enough, RTM allows interfacing through several methods: through a plugin for Firefox/gMail/Google Apps, text messaging services, Twitter direct messages, and even a Google Talk account.
Find Old Friends
Facebook/MySpace
I check my E-Mail about ten million times a day, and probably check Facebook and MySpace about half that. When I joined MySpace I was suddenly being contacted with people I hadn’t spoken to in 5-10 years, sometimes more. The list only grew once Facebook opened up for more than just college students.
It’s been a little easier and less time-consuming with great tools like Digsby, which allow me to update my status and check on friend updates without making me go to the websites. Facebook I don’t mind so much, but MySpace — new design or not — looks like ass, so I avoid it as much as possible these days.
Watch TV
Hulu / Windows Media Center / iTunes Store
Remember the days when if you happened to miss an episode of your favorite show, you had to wait until summer to watch the rerun? I do, and it was terrible. Luckily there were a lot more non-linear shows around back then, but it was still a hassle to deal with.
With the internet, if I miss a show I can pop on one of the network websites and watch it the next day, sometimes hours after the original broadcast. Miss an episode of LOST? Pop on ABC.com and watch it in HD. Want to take it with me? Go on iTunes and download the episode for $1.99 and I can watch it on my iPod anywhere.
Not only does this apply to new shows, but older shows are finding new life on the internet. Recently several networks joined together and created hulu, which catalogs both new and old series ranging from fan (and personal) favorite Arrested Development to classic television like Buck Rogers.
Also available on Windows Vista and Windows Media Center Edition is the Media Center application from Microsoft. The Vista version has direct links to several online providers of television and film content, as well as full-length movies.
Play Video Games
World of Warcraft / Halo 2
As I spoke about in the first “10 Things I Love” list, I do so love video games. Even more than playing them by myself, I love to play them with friends even more. The social aspect of playing games always makes them that much more fun, whether you are fighting against each other, or helping to achieve a shared goal.
MMORPG’s are the ultimate in shared experience games. I’ve made several friends among those in my World of Warcraft guild, many of which live hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away.
Video game consoles have also benefited from online multiplay. Halo is a fun game, sure, but it’s so much more fun when you can play with four of your friends online from the comfort of their own couch, and you don’t even have to share the screen with your opponents. It’s even brought the “trash talk” element to the console with voice chat.
Discover New Music
Last.fm
Music, which is going to be the feature of its own “10 Things” article, is something else that is very important to me. There is hardly a time in the day where I don’t have music playing, either in concentration or just simply background noise.
I’m pretty good about discovering new artists and new songs on my own, but there have been times when I’ve used the aid of one of my favorite social networks, Last.fm. What started out as Audioscrobbler, a tool for sending your music listening statistics to show how much you listen to what, eventually became Last.fm, a full social network for people who love music and want more of it.
It started with recommendations. A click on the artist profile you are listening to shows you “Similar artists” based on the listening habits of other users who listen to the same band or song. Then came the playlists and user radio, which played back streaming songs picked right out of your own tracks and other artists like them. Last.fm’s latest allows paid subscribers access to full-length tracks and videos by several recording artists out there.
I’ve so firmly immersed my life with the Internet it’s difficult to imagine a world where it doesn’t exist. The one thing I haven’t decided on though, is if my life would be more or less productive. While I’ve been good about listing productive services (not counting Facebook/Myspace) I use, I also spend an equal amount of time on sites like Fark, Twitter, and my Google Reader RSS feeds.
Regardless of productivity or not, the Internet continues to shape and change the way I do ordinary tasks. I don’t want to be part of a world that isn’t connected.
I’ve been beta testing Trillian Astra, the next version of the already popular multi-Instant Messaging client Trillian. The new version adds seperate gTalk/gMail login, as well as MySpace and a slew of other Instant Messaging connections along with the standard Windows Live/MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber, and IRC.
Below is a new feature they’ve been testing that generates a “signature” with info on it, called the Trillian Mini:
Fun stuff!
Oh happy day!
I installed Google’s AdSense banners on this site back in February 2006, but took them down for a while while I was still in the midst of theme-switching. By that time I had accrued less than $20, so I really wasn’t concerned. I eventually added one back around November, and immediately I was making at least few dollars a month.
Around February of this year, the AdSense dollars per month was averaging out to be around $10 which is also coincidentally the same price of my web host. Basically The Daily Haggis was paying for itself, which pleased me to no end.
With the last redesign I added the additional ad banner on the sidebar and now it’s actually pushed the monthly earnings closer to $15-18. I’m actually making a profit off this silly website! (Roars with laughter)
Anyway, now that I’ve caught my breath, I’m excited today because I finally reached the $100 mark which is when Google will actually send you a check or (in my case) direct deposit right into your bank account. After the month of processing and such, today I noticed a $115 increase in my bank account.
Hooray! Now I’m going to go party on Google’s dime!
GearLog has an excellent interview with They Might Be Giants‘ John Flansburg about the process they go through while recording an album, what technology they have used in the past as compared to today, and what their thoughts on the current music trends and gadgets.
TMBG is one of the few bands that will always have a place in my playlists. I was lucky enough to finally see them live a few years back in Houston during their tour for The Spine, and they put on one hell of a show. I’ve always been curious to see the steps they take to produce their music, and this article sheds a bit of light on that process.
On Technology and Electronic music:
Well, you know, two things can be happening at the same time in the world, and that doesn’t mean that they are in opposition to each other. We are very interested in technology. We’re very interested in experimenting with music, and one of the most exciting places to experiment with music is electronic music. But I think there’s kind of, even in the world of musical exploration, there can be a lot of orthodox thinking. It’s like your experiment has to be purely experimental–if you’re interested in pursuing electronic music, it should be purely electronic. An I guess we’re just… I’m loath to use the expression, but I think in some sense we are extremely post-modern in that case. We very freely mix up elements and don’t worry about it too much.
On overproducing songs:
The means to do anything in a slick way were so unavailable to us that it never really was an issue. We had very crude tools, for a very long time. We started out as a duo and used a drum machine. And something that I think we only became aware of, after we graduated to bigger studios and started working with live musicians, was how the sort of automatic, mad flava of the drum machines made our recordings exceptional-sounding.
Working with a drum machine, things come out sounding different, and less-familiar. Even when you’re just programming a simple drum pattern that’s familiar to everyone, there was this interval of time when it was the strangest way to do the simplest thing. And when we were working with drum machines, we thought is just sounded very immediate and normal. But listening to those recordings now, I realize that it’s sort of a more awkward sound than we fully understood.
On the evolution of their first electronically delivered music system, Dial-A-Song:
You’ve got to understand, we’ve been around for a long time. Dial-a-Song started as a piece of emerging technology. Dial-a-Song, when it started, was as odd as–maybe even more odd–than anything of the electronic gizmos that are coming out now. In the 70s, the only place where you encountered a tape recorder used with a telephone was with theaters, which had these devices that would give you the time of movies. There weren’t any places where you’d get a recording instead of busy signal. People didn’t have message machines of any kind on their phones. If they left the phone, it would just ring. The phone machine was really a late-70s/early-80s invention. The consumer phone machine was introduced then, and it was not very much after its introduction that we started Dial-a-Song. I think to a lot of people, it was as new-wave an idea as an asymmetrical haircut. It was definitely taking advantage of the emerging technology and using it for kind of a cross-purpose.
On their technology-savvy audience, Podcasting, and MySpace following:
Well, a percentage of them are technologically savvy. We have this podcast, which is extremely successful–it’s probably the most successful thing we’re involved in, simply because it’s free. We’re also managing this MySpace page.
What’s interesting about those things is how many people are doing it for the first time. A big problem we have with the podcast is that people don’t know how to do it. They don’t know the most essential parts of it. We’re introducing people to the applications that they need to do it, or simply to the idea that it’s not something that exists only if you have an iPod. Before you’ve done it, you don’t know anything about it, and that’s exactly where so many of these people are at.
The MySpace thing is interesting because of how many people are involved in that world but are completely outside of technology. They’re there for completely social reasons. It’s a brand new way to be social in the world, and their motivations for being there are entirely traditional. It gets back to what we were talking about before: You can use emerging technology, and it doesn’t have to be an expression of technology. In a way, that’s the best thing you can do with it: Find out how it’s good for you. Nobody knows what this stuff is good for until you actually use it.
Really an excellent interview with one of my very favorite bands. For the whole interview with They Might Be Giants click here for part one, and here for part two.
I think I’ve finally convinced myself that I am what John Dvorak refers to as a “joiner.”
I’ve successfully added myself to just about every blog, social bookmarking, digg, netscape, and whatever else is out there to offer. I found a particularly good one tonight, called BlogCatalog.
It’s a pretty nice community of fellow bloggers just looking for visitors, something this little blog is desperately in need of lately. My erratic posting habits don’t really help the visit count, but still for a site that used to get 500+ visitors a day average, it’s now down to about 200.
I know, it’s a Catch-22. Post more, get more visits. Lack of visits make me post less. The vicious cycle begins all over again.
I just spammed the hell out of the site hoping to get a little “link love” from my fellow bloggers. So far I’ve had a couple dozen, and I welcome you all to my not-so-daily ramblings. Hopefully you’ll add me to your RSS readers and stick around.
As you can tell, the site got a bit of a facelift tonight. Design is still basically the same as far as colors go, but the layout has been adjusted to allow more room on both the sidebar and the main content window. I’ve already added a few new features such as dynamic article rating (with no login required), and a few under-the-hood tweaks. I’ll go over the bigger list as soon as I get some sleep!
Expect more changes over the next few days as I fine tune the new layout and tweak the sidebar widgets.
