Today is Renee’s birthday, so, if you know her, IM her or email her and tell her to have a good one! A quick note to her from me, on my blog. Geeky I know but hey.

Many thanks to you on your birthday Renee. Thanks for loving me and being here. Thanks for being such a great friend and my true love. Thanks for being such an amazing Mom to Sophia and Liam. Truly I am thankful and lucky to have you in my life. Here is a pic of her (slightly manipulated) that I have always loved. It shows her compassion and love so well and so completely, when I see it, I can’t help but feeling so happy to know her.

In addition to my full-time job, I also teach 1 class per semester at Bradley Univeristy in the Multimedia Program there. We’re a dedicated bunch of people and we work hard to produce some VERY cool projects (The HD presentation of The Addng Machine and the installation Streaming being just a couple of them… All that said, August 29th is the big day.. the semester is starting back up. Welcome, welcome!

If you’re not a student of mine, sorry, but if you are… keep tuned here. I will be posting some relevant topics here from time to time. I should be worth your while to check this site out now and then. I recommend subscribing to the feed, actually.

This is just awesome. The people over at PodBrix are just great… look at this new Young Woz and Jobs playset. It’s perfect!

Can someone that likes me please buy me one at 9:00PM 8-29-2007? I guess their sets sell out pretty quickly, so sit by your Mighty Mice patiently and click those buttonless suckers!

So I guess I’m probably asking for it… but to demonstrate the cool new toy we got in the development toolbox at The Iona Group, we shot a quick video demonstrating HD video playing on a sweet 37″ touch screen. We’re using the Content Interface Corporation application “enVision”. Check it out… I can’t believe I let myself be recorded, but it’s done now… so go check out.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1QzoCewFgc]

In addition to HD video the tool really does a great job with super high-res still images and postscript type.

My designer geek side loves two things: Coffee and Information Design. This great blog post by Lokesh Dhakar combines the two of them quite beautifully. Especially since he included the Caffe Macchiato in his diagram. That is my favorite way to drink espresso. It vexes me when the Barista at hand doesn’t know what one is, or thinks it’s that Caramel Abomination from StarBucks.

I also frequently order a Caffe Americano if I am simply in the mood for regular coffee, but have no idea when the shop last brewed a pot. An Americano ensures I get a fresh cup. Lately, with the 90¬?+ weather, the Iced Americano has been very tasty in the long afternoons.

I have a DLink DSM-G600 WiFi enabled NAS. It allows you to put FAT32/NTFS disks in a USB2.0 case and make them available on your network. You can also put an ATA disk in the device and the little Linux box will reformat it in some EXT format. It works great, but with my house, primarily being a Mac house, it presents some issues. I would prefer a HFS+ file system as it can be repaired with DiskWarrior (the best software for fixing disk related maladies on your Mac). This simply won’t work with the DLink. NTFS¬† isn’t writable by Mac OSX so FAT is the only way to go… All you Windows users out there are snickering now. I can hear you.

My FAT32 disk drive’s partition map or something got completely hosed last week and now I’m in the middle of a data rescue mission, copying the files I can recover over to a HFS+ formatted drive.¬† I already have a backup of the disk from a couple months ago, but since then, there were about 40 CDs from my old colleciton that I had ripped. I’d like to not have to rip them again.

So that said, I’m going back to a journaled file system. Anyone want to buy my DLink NAS?

Came across this on Digg… didn’t watch it… got sent this by a friend. Watched. Blew me away. “Content-Aware Image Sizing”… unreal… Can I get this in a Photoshop plug-in to go, please….

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns]

This would save me so much time.

UPDATE: John Nack from Adobe has more on this topic at his blog:“Holy crap”-worthy imaging technology.

YouTube has already begun encoding video in H.264 for the iPhone and AppleTV. If the Flash Player 9 Update (codename Moviestar) supports HD video using H.264, why wouldn’t they just switch over completely? Seems like a cost saver to me. I know it wll be for us… no more two versions of every render, no more hit or miss FLV quality issues. Sounds great. I’m pretty sure we at The Iona Group will switch over as soon as we can… we likey the H.264 for most types of video deployments.

If Moviestar, (still wondering why this is a point/update release of Flash 9 why it’s not Flash 10) adoption rate is anything like 9′s was, by this time next year, the FLV format could be all but dead. (I’m sure that FLV will still be appropriate for some lower bandwidth applications, though).

From Mark Randall, Chief Strategist for Dynamic Media at Adobe:

1. The H.264 support means superior video quality; it is also an open standard.
2. High Efficiency Advanced Audio is, says Mark Randall, a “successor to MP3″. He said it is a higher quality audio, but at a lower bit rate.
3. It means “hardware acceleration” for Web video.

Wow! Hope the hardware acceleration is cross platform and extends to vector rendering, too! This post at kaourantin.net explains a lot.

My Flex based celebrity gossip aggregator MediaDinosaur.com got a little upgrade this week. I added a few new sites to the list of feeds currently parsed by the site. I now have the following sites in the list of feeds:

• Egotastic.com
• WWTD.com
• Gawker
• The Defamer
• The Superficial
• IDontLikeYouInThatWay
• People.com
• E!Online.com
• TMZ.com
• UsWeekly.com
• CelebSlam
• PerezHilton
• Pink Is The New Blog
• Digg.com Celebrity
• TVGasm
• House Of Gossip
• Hollywood Rag
• Drunken Stepfather
• Just Jared
• DListed
• Popoholic

Got any others I should add? I’d like to start adding some features, too… any ideas for functionality to put on this site? Let me know. Right now, I think I may start charting the popularity of feeds by clicks and views… I’m also thinking of charting celebrity names/popularity by number of mentions in the feeds, but I’ m having trouble thinking through how I should store that info in a MySQL table. Just want to leave plenty of flexibility for future additions, etc.

At work, we recently started developing using the enVision tool from Content Interface. You can do some pretty cool things with the software. It quickly loads and plays any number of video formats from VIDEO_TS folders to HD H.264 Mpegs at full native resolution. In addition you can load multi-megapixel images directly into the software for zooming into and detailed exploration. The tool doesn’t work that well with large external datasets or have much of a programming language, but for kiosks and tradeshows it really does the sexy trick.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=QaI64cHagrk]