This year, during Earth Hour, I played around with my camera and some tea lights on the floor. This photo is the result:
It was printed in The Herald-Gazette from Barnesville, Georgia on March 31st, 2009.
Someone at the newspaper found my photo on Flickr and sent me an email to ask permission to use it and said they would give me a photo credit. I usually give anyone permission to use my photos (they are almost all licensed under Creative Commons).
I’m always curious to see how my photos get used so I asked for a link to the article when/if it went online. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be (easily) accessible online so they offered to send me a print copy of the issue it appeared in which I thought was pretty cool:
It’s not every day I get a newspaper in the mail from a place I may not ever have visited or even known about. I think this is a great example of how Creative Commons can & should work.
As you may have noticed, I really like Crumpler’s products. I just found out that a store that sells nothing but Crumpler products just opened in downtown Vancouver (corner of Richards & Cordova).
Check them out in person or online if you’re looking for a cool new messenger bag or backpack – especially for your laptop or camera gear as they have shapes and colours to fit just about anything you’d want to carry. They also have cool, Crumpler branded shopping bags, purses, wallets and even camera straps.
Today, I had the pleasure of seeing Dr. Lawrence Lessig give the keynote for the Privacy & Security conference I’m attending in Victoria (albeit from the back of the room due to a huge coffee lineup). I’ve been aware of Dr. Lessig’s work for a long time now as he is one of the original ‘copyfighters’ and founder of Creative Commons among other things.
I almost got to see/meet him in person a number of years ago while I was in San Francisco. While visiting a friend, we made plans to be in the studio audience of “The Screensavers” on TechTV. I was excited to hear that the guest on the show the day of our taping was Dr. Lessig but unfortunately, it was a taped interview so I didn’t actually get to see him in person.
That changed today when I got to watch his keynote and also finally see the ‘Lessig method‘ of giving a presentation. He truly sets the bar high for giving a great, compelling presentation. Dick Hardt of SXIP (and fellow iPhone user) has also used the Lessig method to give a very engaging presentation (and a great topic in it’s own right).
In his presentation, he talked about privacy and how it’s similar to copyright. He started with a little bit of history, followed by a story (or two) and finished with an argument. I hope it’s made available in some form as I’m not even going to try to paraphrase it. It was that good and I couldn’t do it justice.
I decided to pick up his “The Future of Ideas” book after the presentation and he signed it for me which is pretty cool. Of course, I found out while gathering info for this post that the book is available for free to download now. At least mine is signed.
While today’s presentation isn’t online (yet) and I don’t think it was recorded on video, I was able to find a presentation he gave at TED that captures his style very well and is also a great topic:
It’s a 20 minute presentation so you may want to download it to watch later (plus you can get it for your iPod as well).
Another highlight of the keynote was Dr. Lessig playing the following mashup video to illustrate copyrights:
Imagine a room full of suits watching this. Yeah, it was awesome.
Is it weird for a guy to like gadget bags? I think I have a bag/pouch/container for just about everything gadget I own. I guess I like to protect my stuff. I especially like Crumpler bags.
The latest one I bought a few months back was the Crumpler Keystone which is a laptop and camera bag. It’s very light, small, heavily padded and perfect for running around taking pictures at geek events.
What else can I say, I love the bags that Crumpler makes and keep getting them anytime I see a new one (or get something that needs a bag). I wish there were more companies that cared this much about their products and had such a unique way of marketing them.
Sometimes they send me stuff too (I highly recommend you sign up for their newsletter):
Totally irreverent marketing (who else takes beer in trade for their products?), completely unusable but fun flash website and awesome containers/protectors for geek tech – what more could you want?
After picking up a new ginormous hard drive on boxing day (think Black Friday in the US, only much lamer), I went about adding it to my Powermac G5 tower (aka my server).
For some reason, Apple always does things different than other computer manufacturers and the process of upgrading the hard drive is no different. Fortunately, they tend to do amazingly beautiful documentation on everything so after opening up the tower, it was pretty easy to get down to business.
Small problem though – since this was an additional hard drive, I needed to use Apple’s little rubber coated screws as guides to hold it in place. Since this PowerMac was given to me by a client after upgrading, I didn’t have the original box or anything that might contain the screws needed to install the hard drive.
Of course, Apple thought about that and actually installed four extra screws inside the chassis (green arrow in the image above which I added), right where you’d see them when upgrading your hard drive.
