Tech humor not worth it...

An oddball conversation yesterday reminded me of this web comic...

More System Backup

Now that I have GoodSync running (see my last post) I was looking for cheap local storage. What I found at the local Best Buy was close out 320GB USB drives--good, small, cheap.

Now I wish I would have done my homework, because I found 320GB of firewire storage for $80 shipped at Amazon.

No doubt I will be using these as video editing drives.

GoodSync + Amazon S3 = Sweetness

I've been struggling with my home network all day. I had a 250GB drive in my FreeNAS server fail and it's made my whole Easter Sunday very depressing. Lucky for me I had dual drive setup that mirrored all my important data, but I hadn't been good at keeping it all that up to date.

I was a big fan of Microsoft SyncToy for backing files to my home network, but it's failed me in the past, and the new Sync 2.0 framework that seems to run constantly system is bothersome, so I ventured out for a new solution.

I've been using Siber System's RoboForm for years and I knew they had a sync solution, but I hadn't investigated. Oh, what I've been missing out on is file-syncing sweetness...



This bad boy will sync files between networks, FTP sites and (the kicker for me) my Amazon S3 storage account. Now I can have automated local backup to cheap USB drives or my FreeNAS (if I ever get it working again...) *and* I can backup to the Amazon cloud storage for mission critical files I can't afford to lose.

April is a good month to cracking, GoodSync is $19.55 until 4/15 (down form 30 bucks with coupon code 1040G) and “data transfer in” to Amazon S3 is only $0.03 per GB (vs. the standard $0.10) for 3 months, April through June.

Enjoy!

I’m going to post to my blog more!

April Fools!

Seriously, April 1st is a big day for me. It means 90 days in a new city, 60 days in a new house and the 30 day anniversary of discovering the location of my iron.

All in all, the move was quite a bit more intense that I ever would have imagined and the New York City pace is everything people say. I find that my days are a good two hours longer in Manhattan then they were in Cincinnati and the risk of being unproductive is much higher. I really have to focus on the task at hand to keep the day from slipping away.

I am enjoying the train commute (half of my Facebook updates originate there) and I’m getting back into listening to Podcasts and really using mobile internet sites. I can see how anyone who commutes into the city needs an iPhone or SmartPhone.

I am not enjoying the red tape that moving to a new city entails. My wife and I have made a collective five trips to the BMV to get the cars registered, countless reams of new job and insurance paperwork, and all new banking and utilities to deal with. You know you have to update the Netflix account or they’ll stop sending you movies :)

That leads me to an April Fools challenge for those of you who still bother to read this drivel. Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the low budget indie film April’s Fool?

This little gem of a film was released in 2001 and I was lucky enough to stumble upon one of the few theatrical showings at the Esquire Theater. It was shot mostly in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky and unlike Airborne I remember it being somewhat good. I’d love to rent it again to see if it has a shelf life.

Happy April’s Fool day!

Rebuilding my Home Server

I have a million pressing things to do this weekend, but I'm pushing it all aside to rebuild my home file server. I debated shelling out $500 for one of those fancy Drobo drives, but I thought I would update/upgrade my FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is a free NAS server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key.

When I get finished I should have a mirrored 250GB of space with 2GB of Flash memory for various server plugins. I hope to get it configured as a media server to play my musice over the XBOX 360, but we'll see.

Wilson tweets SXSW

Quick update from my mobile. You can follow me at SXSW on Twitter @stopwilson.

Have you met TED?

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration, and this year I was lucky enough to get the nod from my good friends at GREYnyc.

There will be so many people blogging and twitting about TED that you won't see any of that on this site, but I have been ask to shoot video of the event. So I will post that here after TED wraps.

Stay tuned.

Train Blogging

So this post is being written on the 6:42pm New Haven express train from Grand Central to South Norwalk, CT. Usually I keep my blog postings to techie things I find/make/covet, but I felt like posting on something the usefullness of those gadets.

I'm currently in the middle of moving with my company to the New York City area, and now I'm finding that all my tech toys are really more suited to the commuting life style I have now than the one I had in Cincinnati. (This post is a testament to what a free hour on the train and a bag full of gadgets will force you to do.)

So I'm sitting here, shoulder to shoulder with other commuters with my Acer Aspire One netbook in my lap. It's teathered to a Sprint Centro phone via a USB cable and I'm surfing the internets at oldskool dial-up speeds. It's enough to check email and write blog posts, so who knows--maybe I'll be a blogger again someday soon.

I'm also liking Pocket Tunes on my Palm based phone. I just found out that it not only will pause the music when an incoming call comes in, but it will play the callers audio over the ear buds and still let you speak into the phone like in hands-free mode. Of course I look like an idiot talking into my music player, but the sound on both ends is good.

Of course I've been loving GoogleMaps Mobile and 1-800-GOOG-411, they've both been a big help finding my way around a new city.

So from gadget collector to gadget user in only a few days. Who knew?

Cincinnati Digital Hub

I was a last minute add to the speaker roster at the Cincinnati Digital Hub Initiative Non-conference. It was a good time as well as being my 2nd un-conference of the year. Will I ever pine for the days of just a good old conference-conference?

Glenn Platt's AIMS blog for Miami University  has a round-up of what went down at the conference that's better than anything I could write. (It also doesn't hurt that e liked my talk on Consumer Behavior.)

So check it out.

BeeReader URL

A reader asked me to post the URL to BeeReader... http://beetagg.com/

BeeReader is a QR Code reader for Palm

BeeReader is a new QR Code (or Semacode) format that has alot going for it right now. It reads QR and DataMatrix codes and has it's own format that can scan from about 3 feet on a computer monitor. (BTW, that's impressive.)

It's internal format supports URLs, feeds and contact info from it's web builder, and has pretty tight integration (at least on the Palm OS) to the Web browser and contact tools.

The image above is my RSS feed.

Memes, Rats and such...

I seem to be pretty attracted to the idea of memes. A quick wiki-definition for those of you not familiar with the internets...

The word meme (pronounced /miːm/)^[1] is a popular neologism denoting any learned thought, feeling, or behavior. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene.

I stumbled across a interesting new meme that I think is incredibly funny. Take a look at GraphJam...

So my idea is to take the various memes out there and apply them to my meme-mock site LolRats.com. (Believe me, photoshopping rats gets old real quick.)

Enjoy!

OMG Force (48 hour film version)

Hello all,

I know I've been slacking on the posting lately, but I've been busy. The video below is Shooting Bridge's entry in the 2008 48 Hour Film Project. I had the pleasure of directing a cast and crew of around 25 people--mostly amateur--to deliver a pretty rocking idea in just 48 hours from start to finish.

Mad props to everybody who contributed, and check out www.omgforce.com soon for production photos, scripts, etc.

ZenBurger

This is an actual email I sent to my wife today about the "restaurant" ZenBurger

From: Wilson, Michael
Sent: Mon 4/7/2008 11:31 AM
To: stuntmom@???????.com
Subject: Ate a vegetarian breakfast today....


...by accident. I was walking around Lexington Ave and I saw this "burger" joint that has "breakfast" sandwiches...

http://www.zenburger.com/

Can you believe there was no line!?!? So I stepped up and ordered a "Sausage" and "Egg" sandwich on an Whole Wheat English muffin. It came back fast and I sat down and started eating. ($8 for a McMuffin and Coffee, I pondered? Well it is New York...)

So as I ate, I was like, "This thing is horrible, but I'm hungry." (Which says a lot about my personality that would continue to eat a bad breakfast as long as I thought there was some meat inside.) And it wasn't until my last bite that I saw a menu next to where I was sitting that said everything was vegetarian.

So can you guess if I ate that last bite?

RockBand Rock-a-thon for the Arts...

My work is doing a RockBand/GuitarHero "rock-a-thon" to support the Fine Arts Fund. We did some sweet shirts, posters and other nonsense to promo the event. The image below links to our blog that has the full rundown and info on how to donate.



Also, check out the Web Cast starting today at noon.

FindingMy.org

A good friend of mine has created a site to help him find a new career in the non-profit world. He's a smart person with the unique ability to get things done.

I want people who are already experienced in the not-for-profit world to show me how things work and I want/need their help in directing me towards the best possible position for me to chase. If you want to directly help me get there, thank you very much. If you want to just read-along that’s cool too.

via FindingMyDotOrg

On my way to the Game Developers Conference...

Yes, it's that time of year again. The GCD is in full effect in San Francisco and I'll be leaving in a few short hours to rub elbows (hopefully just elbows) with the best and brightest in the video game industry.

"Got plans," you ask?

Why yes I do. I'm hoping to meet the peeps from Qube and get a demo of their Q Middleware solution...

Q is a new middleware for games and other real-time 3D applications, the result of everything we've learned through our history, creating Reality Lab at RenderMorphics, and Direct3D at Microsoft, working with game developers and hardware vendors whilst integrating real-time 3D into the world's biggest selling operating system.

I also met the ScaleForm GFX crew last year, hopefully they have a Indie solution for me this year.

Last, but not least, I was really impressed with the TorqueX system from GarageGames and that coupled with the XBox 360 content creation account I expect to see some great stuff at the Independent Games Festival this year running native on 360s.

If Hollywood was a Person...

Wacky stuff going on in the on-line comics space. The "Funny Pages" might be the canary in the coal mine of what will eventually happen to TV/Music and radio.

Click around Subnormality and you can find a wealth of free (and paid) content that's as good (if not better) than the crap in your local paper.

Added ShareThis to the Site

I met a few of the principles from ShareThis at my work yesterday and decided to add their tool to my personal blog, just to try it out.

It's the green button below...

UPDATE: It looks like I messed something up that's keeping it from working with IE. I'll take a look at fixing it later this evening.

UPDATE: Working again. Looks like I had a case of RTFM.

UPDATE: Interesting Password Generator

You probably don't know, but I'm a password junkie. I have well over 100 sites that have user names and passwords.

To stay secure, I try to different passwords for each site I visit. That way if someone discovers my password on one site (like the OC fansite message board) they can’t use it on another site (like the Desparate Housewives fansite message board.)

So, I try to use a combination of a single password (awesomesauce) with the site that I’m on (ebay) into a new password (ebayawesomesauce). You can imagine how complicated that gets on hundreds of websites and how easy it would be to crack that code if you saw a few passwords.

Here comes the SuperGenPass to the rescue. It will generate new passwords based on the domain of the site you are using in conjunction with a “master password” encrypted to the point where no one can see the master password in the first place.

Confused yet? Check it out and keep your identity safe(r).