A friend of mine had a booth at this expo called CAPE! which stands for Comic and Pop-Culture Expo here in the Dallas area. It’s the 4th annual event and its the worlds largest free comic book event! It’s sponsored by Zeus Comics, one of the bigger comic book stores in the Dallas area.
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Video Links:

Seesmic Website

Seesmic WordPress Plugin

Dallas/Ft. Worth WordPress meetup

Cali Lewis’s Qik Video Stream of DFW WordPress Meetup

SpareKarma

Your Place in the World book info

Cape Day 2008

EDIT: If you saw the original video I posted earlier in the day. My apologies, that was a first run video and I copy and pasted the wrong link. Lesson learned. Always double check your work before posting. Here a is a link to the original video.

dol-drums(noun) : a state of inactivity or stagnation, as in business or art.

Yes, I have been in a state of stagnation when it comes to my blog. If you look at my last post, it’s more than a week old. I broke a promise to myself to always blog no more than a week apart and I was able to keep that up until now….well mostly. I still have a few posts left to finish like my conclusion to WordCamp 2008. I also have a blog about Twitter in the works, mostly for twitter virgins (i.e. my friends). I did purchase a pretty sweet webcam for cheap on ebay. Its a Logitech Quickcam UltraVision and I bought it for $45 when they usually retail for $100+. Not a bad find. I may write a review about it, once I get to play around with it a little more. This weekend, I seem to be nursing a cold this weekend as well. Mostly coughing and sneezing every other second. This does not stop my wife from asking me to do yardwork and fix our fence gate. After doing all of this work around the yard in my sickly condition, she says, “You should call in sick tomorrow.” I replied back with “Work will be a walk in the park compared with what I did today.” Let’s just say she wasn’t amused.

So all you bloggers out there, how do you find the time to blog and do you work on multiple blog posts at once?

Flickr has long been supreme (in my opinion) when it comes to hosting photos on the net to share with friends. Now it seems they want to be great at videos as well. There is only one catch, you can only upload 90 seconds worth of video and only 150MB file size. You must also be a Pro member to use this feature so everyone with free accounts, you are out of luck. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple weekends back, I went to a gathering referred to as WordCamp here in the Dallas Area. It’s called WordCamp Dallas but it was held in Frisco,Texas which is an affluent community North of Dallas. What is WordCamp you say? It’s a gathering of WordPress bloggers, podcasters, programmers,etc. In case you didn’t know, I use WordPress to power my site so I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn more about what I use almost everyday. I learned a lot more than I expected!
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Gary Vee is Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV which is a Wine Review Show on the internet. Gary owns a wine retail shop called Wine Library in Springfield,NJ. He is much more than that. Let’s see. He runs a retail business full time, records Wine Library TV everyday, records daily video blogs on his personal site, corresponds with fans via social sites like twitter, and the lists goes on. The message of his video speaks to me and drives me to want to make my own content to find my own voice on the net … someday.

Ohhh and he made a second video the same day with an even more powerful video proclaiming April 3rd “GOOD PEOPLE DAY!” Gary you rock!

I know I usually have a blog post by this time of the week already but it has been especially hectic at work and at home. I know its a lame excuse but I did learn alot of good ways to improve my blog from the WordCamp Dallas Conference that I went to this past weekend. I am trying to soak in all the information I have learned and I will be compiling it into a two-part posting which will go over the highlights of the two day conference. So look for some changes to the look and content of the site from here on out.

Animoto is a brand new video slideshow creation website created by techies and tv/film producers. The technology behind the site is based on “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence” that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film. The end result has the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

Animoto is still in beta so you have to signup to use the site. You basically select between a 30 second video or full length video. The 30 second videos are free. Full length videos cost $3 per video or you can pay $30/year unlimited videos. I chose the 30 second video.The site tells you that you need 12-15 pictures for a 30 second video. I chose a mixture of pictures from friends and family.

You then pick the music that plays with the slideshow and you have to the choice of their collection of Creative Commons license music or from your own collection. It does make you verify that you have permission from the artist to use the audio. I just chose from their library to make it easy.

The last step is to give your video a name and description. You then click create video and wait. It takes a few minutes to create so they give you want they call “distractions” which are basically trailers while you wait. It took about 5-10 minutes to complete the process. Once it is done processing, you are left with a slick video you can embed in your own website, email to friends and also post to YouTube all on the same screen. Here is a link to my finished product on YouTube. Here are some screenshots showing you the process I went through on the site:

Below is my embedded video as well:

Happy Easter you all! Here is a video to celebrate the holiday … Enjoy!

Link

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCrGnd3ljqA[/youtube]

Thanks Kent Nichols

Yes its true! My Xbox 360 speaks to me and it does so with vigor and humor. It even makes me sad when I don’t play it every day. This is made possible by a fun little website called 360Voice.com The site basically uses your gamertag on Xbox Live to create an automatic blog per day, based on your activity. The automated system is written very well you would swear someone is at the keyboard writing these each day. I have not seen a repeated phrase yet. These automated blogs are what the site creators call Blogjects, which are basically “objects that write “blogs” about their interactions with the world and other devices just like humans write about their interactions with the world and other people.”

Whenever you play a game on Xbox Live, at the end of the day 360 Voice will make an entry in your blog similar to this:

I thought curs0r just wanted to listen to music or watch a DVD. Turns out he was there to game. With a gamer score of 2,403, I should have known that was the case. He rallied Call of Duty 4, and then the lightweight went to bed. Freakin’ wuss.

When you don’t play any games that day 360Voice will say something like this and make you feel like you ripped out its soul:

curs0r, there are 86,400 seconds in a day and you couldn’t find a few to spend with me? Lame.

If you add some friends to your watchlist you can also get some entries like this added to your daily blog:

It is probably better that curs0r didn’t play yesterday… it gives BlexBox360 an opportunity to add to that 3,320 gamerscore and increase the lead… Booooo!

If you want to see more of my blog on 360Voice click here. Oh and when you see the entries about Tetris Splash and Uno, that’s my wife. I wouldn’t play that crap. :)