Blogging the Utah Blogger Dinner

So it's that time again. Utah Blogger Dinner. We always have a great time at the Blogger Dinner. Several of our regulars couldn't make it. Some are in CA at the Podcast and New Media Expo, and others are busy doing life stuff. That's what's great about this meet-up, come if you can and if not see you at the next one.

Today we had

• Tyler Whitaker
• Matthew Reinbold
• Clint Goudie-Nice
• Jake Spurlock and Wife
• Jesse Stay
• Ash Buckles
• Allen Young and Wife
• Rand Bateman

If you are a Facebook user find some pics here, if not check them on Flickr.

Are you a Utah blogger and in the Salt Lake City area? Come out and meet other bloggers. Subscribe to my blog, I always share when the next meet-up will take place.

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Utah Blogger dinner for September 2007

The pretty much monthly Blogger dinner for the Salt Lake City area is this Thursday, September 27th, at 6PM. Check out Ash Buckles site for all the details.

Why should you attend? Well, its a great way to meet other bloggers who you didn't know existed, or meet the ones you read in person. You don't have to be a techie or even be an extremely active blogger. Just come out and meet people. I did this a few months ago and have created some great friendships.

Where:
Applebees
123 E. 12300 S.
Draper Utah
(801) 495-4460

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Track of the day: Heaven (Live) by Los Lonely Boys

Los Lonely Boys
"Heaven" (mp3)
from "Live At Blue Cat Blues - Dallas Texas"
(Blue Cat Blues Records)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

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Just Jump Into Podcasting With These 5 Steps

I want to start off by saying this; you can Podcast, right now, with pretty much everything you have at your fingertips. This isn't a white paper on what a Podcast is, because if you didn't know what a Podcast was you probably wouldn't be reading this.

Why should you listen to me? Because I produce a Podcast and I know that you can do it with practically nothing.

1. You'll need a computer with some type of microphone, or a laptop with a built in mic. This is probably the only place where I would suggest using one of those gamer headsets with built in mic's, they rock, have good sound and are cheap. You may already have one so you can move down the list. If you don't, consider investing in one. Even if you decide a month from now that Podcasting isn't for you, you still have a cool headset. Personally, I use the Logitech USB 350. It has great sound quality.

2. You need a topic. Once you have a topic you can begin creating your Podcast. There are probably thousands of people out there who similar interests as you and can share them through your Podcast.

3. Decide how long your Podcast will be. The amount of time to spend Podcasting may be different for your topic. But personally, anything that runs over 45 minutes loses appeal and most of the time I never make it to the end. Now that's just me and I'm probably in the minority. For starters make it short. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes then build from there. You'll discover a lot of great ideas along the way and that will add to your shows length and quality.

4. You need host your Podcast somewhere so people can download it. There are so many directories out there I would try them all. It can't hurt to expose your Podcasts in multiple places. There are free services and there are pay services. Since you're just starting out and aren't sure if you will do this long term, try one of the free services I'll recommend at the end of my post.

5. Blog about your Podcast. Tell people about it. Create business cards with your Podcasts web address on it and hand them out. Comment on other people's Podcast posts and leave your Podcasts web address. It's that easy.

Sure, this sounds real simple and the simple fact of the matter is it can be. Podcasts, just like any other endeavor require work, research, dedication and consistency. It doesn't need to cost much if anything to create a Podcast. It does require that you work on improving it if you want to increase your listeners.

We're not going for the highest HD quality sound you can produce. We're talking quick to market. This will get you there.

Tools: Audacity is pretty much all you will need for either the PC or the Mac. If you have a Mac and have iLife '06 or '08, use GarageBand.

Hardware: Headset with mic. Stand alone mic. Built in laptop mic. Again the Logitech USB 350 is a great mic.

Services: Podcasting.net, Podcast Pickle, TalkShoe and Pod-O-Matic.

If you're in Salt Lake City on October 18th, I encourage you to attend the Utah New Media Conference to learn more about Podcasting and Videocasting.

What are your ideas to make Podcasting easier?

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How Flickr Did it Right

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of sites that will let you upload your photos and cerate online photos albums. But in my opinion, Flickr has done it right.

Several factors went into my decision to go with Flickr over say PicasaWeb or any of the others, and that was price and the API. The price for a Pro account is so cheap, something just above $2 a month, for unlimited uploads, is insane. No one comes close. The cheapest of PicasaWeb Pro accounts costs $20 a year for only 6GB of space. Some might ask, why would you need more than 6GB or even 10GB. My answer is because Flickr gives me UNLIMITED for $25 a year, and that's just better.

I've started uploading all my photos to Flickr, and creating Sets to distinguish photos for an event. Flickr also has Tagging down. You can have pretty much an unlimited number of tags for a photos or sets or groups. This makes it easy to search for one of your photos or any number of public photos.

The interface on Flickr is easy and clean. It's not cluttered by crazy ads, and that's surprising seeing how it's a Yahoo! property and I don't think Yahoo! knows how to keep in your face ads at bay. It's the reason I hate their web based email client, too many in your face ads. But the navigation on Flickr is clean and easy, and you can modify it to look anyway your want. I hope Yahoo! keeps their hands off Flickr.

If you don't use Flickr I would encourage you to look at it. They have a free account and a Pro account. I have the Pro account and its been worth every penny. Flickr is stable, has an API and several options for managing photos from your desktop. The only thing I wish Flickr had was a better mobile management tool.

Thanks Chris.

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Props to my Peeps

This weeks prop goes out to my Son J. I've had a car in the shop for some repairs and he acted as chauffeur several times over the past week. He just had surgery on his hand, and  hasn't been feeling very well but has helped when he could. Thanks J for all you have done.

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BlogRush is pushing the envelope

Whether or not you use or even like BlogRush, I'm getting a noticeable increase in the amount of traffic my blog has been getting ever since I signed up. There have been some problems with cheaters, as happens with services like this, but it seems to be drawing readers to my blog which I really like. BlogRush is attempting to improve the service and minimize abusers.

In order to use BlogRush you have to install a plug-in on your blog. At first I didn't like that, and pretty much I still don't, but that's what's required so its on my blog. I hope they come up with something not as obtrusive as this large graphic box they have now. It would be cool to just have the headlines. It would fit into my blog a lot nicer than this big huge monstrosity, and probably load much faster.

At the moment it seem to be living up to the hype. I'm not into all the backlash that has taken place. If I can increase the number of reader by a few hundred I'm all good.

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Facebook application development and living in Utah

Jesse Stay asked if he was the only Facebook developer in Utah. And one of the comments he got on his blog asked "why is that important?" The statement was framed around the notion that anyone anywhere can develop applications, why is geographical locations important.

From my perspective its mostly for support and networking. When I am looking to refer work to someone I naturally look to my close local associates first. It's just natural. If no one there can help then I look to my extended network. I've just always done this. I hope my network in return does that for me.

But after having a short conversation with Jesse about writing Facebook application it appears the number of people actually doing it is small. Sure there are a lot of applications available on Facebook, but honestly, there are a lot of duplicate "I can do better" applications.

So yeah Jesse, I live Utah and I develop Facebook applications.

If you're looking for someone to write an application that integrates with Facebook, you can contact me here.

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Technology That Empowers Me

I'm around technology all day. I have a laptop, a PDA, several desktops, cameras and so on. But there are a few pieces of technology that empower me. My T-Mobile MDA empowers me the most. It gives me the ability to be connected just about anywhere.

1. I have mobile Internet. This allows me to check my email account via GMail, track my calendar with GCal, read my RSS feeds with Google Reader, visit web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. However a majority of web sites are not PDA friendly and are useless to view. This is also true for video. Trying to stream video is nearly impossible. Great services such as vTap are starting to change this.

2. My MDA has a built in MP3 player, Windows Media Player, that allows me to listen to all the music I want, and because I have a large storage card I can have dozens of songs available at all times. I can even watch videos, but I can't watch many because of quality issues. But this isn't really an issue for me because I don't watch a lot of video on my MDA.

3. The ability to stay in touch with my teenagers via SMS is invaluable.

4. View PDF and Office documents. One of the reasons I decided to go with an MDA instead of the Dash is the ability to edit Office documents. I spend a lot of time writing Word documents and tracking projects in Excel. It's nice to be able to use the file on my MDA and on my Laptop.

5. I've recently started storing more photos on my MDA. I used to have a whole bunch of pictures in my wallet, but it didn't seem as cool as being able to show more recent photos of the Family, events and just plain cool pics. So I took the photos out of my wallet and put them on the MDA.

There are more reasons my MDA empowers me. One I hope will give me even more utility is Skype. It's shaky on my MDA, but I know the technology will get better. This opens up a whole new world including mobile podcasting. Now if there was a mobile version of Audacity I wouldn't really need a computer any more.

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The Jazz Show #32

Listen to my latest podcast, The Jazz Show.

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Track of the day: Opportunity by You Say Party! We Say Die!

You Say Party! We Say Die!
"Opportunity" (mp3)
from "Lose All Time"
(Paper Bag Records)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

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Please come to the October CodeAway

If you live in the Salt Lake area and are into coding, or gaming, or just hanging out with those that are, CodeAway is for you. The next event will be on October 6th. See more about it here.

CodeAway is really cool. It's very casual. There is no agenda. Do what you want. You might even get TheDruidXpawX and Laura to bust out some karaoke.

Come by, show us your projects, work on your projects, talk shop, what ever. Bring some food to share if you can. We'll even be having arts and crafts time. See you there.

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Mobile video with vTap

I picked up a link today from Steve Rubel on a service called vTap from Veveo. I'm always looking for new technology for my T-Mobile MDA, especially video. vTap is a video service that basically streams from their server to your mobile device through their application. It's not web based its actually installed on the mobile device. I didn't really care for that, but if it made watching Video easier I was willing to try.

After downloading and installing the application I immediately started clicking on all the videos they had available. Problem; none of the videos would run. Some error kept popping up. I thought woah, this can't be good. First impressions in this game mean a lot. I could just as easily uninstalled the app and moved on.

Coincidentally there is a feedback link on the menu and I thought, cool, I'll email the problem and see what happens. It wasn't long before I got a response back from their Customer Support. The person asked me if I would be willing to help them figure this out and I said sure. After giving them the details of my device and the error, I received a message telling me they had discovered a problem with the T-Moble 3G network and they were working on a fix. I was told I could use WiFi in the mean time, and yes, the WiFi part worked fine.

The next morning when I checked my email I was excited to see an email from vTap telling me they had resolved the problem and would I mind downloading the latest version and giving it a go. No problem, I downloaded and installed. Clicked on a video from the list and it worked. Videos were streaming and it was great.

My first impressions of the video were not too good. The quality was so bad I couldn't make out any text on the screen and the whole frame was sorta blurry. So again I fired off an email to vTap to see if there was something I could do. This was my fault. I didn't spend enough time looking at all the settings and was directed by vTap to increase the quality of the video through the configuration screen. Once again, problem solved.

In the end, video isn't very fast on the 3G network. It wasn't bad, but there was a lot of buffering during preview. vTap said it was a good idea to maybe pause the video when first starting for a few seconds to let enough of it buffer before pressing play. That worked most of the time. But this isn't their problem, it's a problem with the network. And the higher the quality the worst it got.

vTap has some potential. I sure appreciated the quick response to my problem. I'm not real sure what the end game is for them. You can search for videos by key words but I'm not sure how large the database of videos is. I'm not sure if it just goes out to the web and uses your key words and sends back a list of videos? I need to find out more, Mostly because I may look at this service for delivering videos for PropertyVOX.com.

What are your thoughts on this type of technology? Check out vTap today.

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Giving Props to my Peeps

This weeks prop goes out to Laura Moncur over at Pick Me!

One of the really cool things about Laura is her easy going nature. She's accepting of everyone, and even takes a persons allergies to cats into consideration when they are at her home (um, me!).

Laura is an entrepreneur, running several businesses; Starling Fitness, Starling Travel, custom crocheted covers for your portable devices, and the webs oldest quotations site, The Quotations Page.

Laura loves to try all kinds of new things as is evident here and here. She's also a fantastic writer. I love reading her online novel Merriton. And one more cool thing about Laura, I think she's has a thing for video games.

Please take some time to read Laura's web sites and watch some of her videos. You'll be glad you did.

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Flags of Honor

The city of Sandy, Utah, put out flags around its city hall called the Utah Healing Field, in honor of the Americans who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. Each flag has the name of each person killed.

All of the pictures can be seen here.

News article here.

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Get my Tumblr theme

I use Tumblr as my Lifestream tool of choice. I'm making my theme available for download. You'll have to load the text into the Custom theme area. You will also want to update the location of the images and maybe add your own menu options.

Let me know if there are any problems with this, and I would also like to know if you use it. Thanks.

With background image: download
Without background image: download
With white background: download

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My blogging station

Darren Rowse asked his readers to send in their blogging stations after he revealed where he works. Actually, Darren's work space it quiet simple, and so are most of the other entries. That's what's cool about blogging, you can do it pretty much anywhere. I typically blog on my HP Notebook. Sometime I blog from my iMac, but only once in a while. I use my iMac for creating podcasts. Here is my blogging station entry. I'd really like to get something on my MDA that would let me blog, that would be nice.

I've asked this before, show us your blogging setup.

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In memory of lives lost on 9.11.2001

The Wall.

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My experience with the HeadBlade system

Several months ago Seth Godin was in Salt Lake City, Utah to promote his new book The Dip. One of the deals Phil Burns made with Seth if he would come to Utah is he and a few others would shave their heads bald. Of course Seth being the bald man that he is thought that was a great idea.

During the shaving session, Seth mentioned a company called HeadBlade that made shaving products. Fortunately Ash Buckles video taped the event and posted it on YouTube. I believe it was the head guy at HeadBlade asked Ash if he could send some head shaving products. Of course Ash said yes.

After some time Ash decided it would be a great idea to give me the items from HeadBlade. And of course I accepted. So here is my experience.

I opened all the items included, which were various bottles of skin lotion, shave cream and razors. But the coolest thing was a razor shaped like a sports car including cool little wheels on one end. The razor is curved to glide on the head easier.

Once I had applied a gratuitous amount of shave cream on my head I started shaving. It was pretty easy at first. I was able to complete the top and sides of my head with no problems. Then came the back. That's a little more complicated because I can't see what I'm doing. That's when I started to run into problems.

By the time I got to the back of my head my hands were pretty slippery from water and shave cream. the razor kept slipping out of my hands. I managed to cut my self in several places. One of the cuts was pretty deep. They were caused by the razor sliding sideways or at an angle.

I can't really say it was the fault of the razor, but I have never cut my head in all the years I've been shaving my head. The HeadBlade razor is a great shape but it slips out to easy. It's a great idea, and in general worked, but I wasn't too happy that I cut my head.

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Giving Props to my Peeps

This weeks prop goes out to my Sister-in-Law V. She helped me rescue a stranded wife miles from where I was. Thanks V.

P.S. I still had to change the flat tire. Thank goodness it was still under warranty.

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Jott takes voice translation to the next level

I received an email from Jott.com today announcing several new services for their Voice recognition service. Some of these include translation and posting to Twitter, your own Wordpress blog and Jaiku.

Here are just a few of the really cool new features:

• Jott Folders (basically categories)
• Status alert, sort of like Twitter's "what are you doing?"
• Jott Express, a desktop application allowing you to send Jotts from the computer, using Adobe AIR technology

There are obviously some issues you may run into using Jott. It's not 100% accurate. Depending on how fast you talk or your accent, you may find what you spoke not exactly what Jott translated. This could be especially frustrating when posting your Jotts to Twitter.

I did a test post on my SciFi blog and it worked just as I expected. And the really cool thing was the audio link that was posted along with the translated text. Very cool. Can you say mobile podcasting?

I've used Jott for some time and found that it works about 90% reliable. I speak clearly and slowly, normal actually, and it seems to work fine. Give it a spin today.

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Holodeck style technology close to reality

Back in the late 1970's I had a neighbor who worked for a software company that developed 3D aircraft simulators to train pilots. One weekend he took me and another friend into the lab to take a sneak peak at what they were doing. Being a complete geek I jumped at the chance to see real computers at work.

When we entered the lab I was in heaven. There were large cabinet sized computer in long rows. The light was dim and the illumination of LED's gave you the sense you were entering a Star Trek episode. You could hear and feel the hum these big machines made. Cables as thick as baseball bats protruded from the back of each cabinet like octopus tentacles.

Near one wall was a large collection of CRT's, or monitors, all connected displaying  a computer rendered mountain terrain. An aircraft style seat was facing the monitors. It was black, with a tall head rest. There was a keyboard attached to one arm and a joystick control on the other.

I could hardly stand myself. I was like a little kid getting an ice cream cone. I couldn't take my eyes off of all the screens. I wanted to know how they did that. What did they do. How can I play? My neighbor walked us over to the control center and said jump in. I assumed he meant me and I jumped in the chair. He could have meant the other kid with us but I didn't care. I wanted in and I wanted in now.

The seat was hard plastic. It wasn't very comfortable. I reached over and swung the keyboard around so it was in front of me. I quickly looked over at the neighbor, hoping I hadn't just stepped over the line. He had a big smile on his face and I knew I was ok. He spent the next 10 minutes explaining the controls, the keyboard and what we could expect to see.

It was the coolest experience I had as a kid. Flying a military helicopter in what was the biggest most expensive video game I had ever seen. There were lots of bugs, like being able to fly through the ground, and flying straight up crashed the software. But all in all it was just very cool to be there.

I knew right then I was destined to be a computer guy. I didn't care what I had to do. I wanted to do this more than anything. I pestered this neighbor often to take me back, and he did, one other time. It was all worth it.

Yesterday I ran across this article about holodeck technology being used to train Marines. When I was a Marine it was all hard real ground action. No computers to simulate the enemy. How I wish there would have been something like this when I was active. Imagine how much better our soldiers will perform being able to participate in multiple types of  engagements in various terrains.

As technology gets better, faster and smaller, the military will rely heavily on its use. Instant feedback, communications and decisions can and are being delivered to troops on the ground during operations. This will hopefully reduce risk and the loss of life. See, Star Trek was the best show ever invented. We have been chasing it's technology for years. Too bad we just didn't have Gene Roddenberry built it all for us while he was still alive.

How do you think this type of technology should be used in the future?

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