Yes, I’m sorry to be so late getting this up (that’s what HE said!), but I’m incredibly old and incapable of staying up much past 9:00 in the evening. So obviously I had to wait ’til the following weekend to process the gawd-damn thing.

Download for iPod / iPhone
(Quicktime .mp4, 81.8 MB, 640×360, 24fps, 7 min 35 sec)

MOO.com is an online printing company that specializes in personalized custom business cards, post cards, greeting cards and more. They make incredibly high quality cards and their prices are very reasonable, considering what you get. You can mix and match from hundreds of their prebuilt designs, or you can design and upload your own right from their website with your own pictures and designs. I’ll say it again, the quality of their cards is amazing. Double-sided color printing on heavy 16 pt. card stock.

So, like I said, I probably don’t really “need” business cards, but I chose to try their Mini MOO cards anyway. For $20, you get 100 “mini-cards” in a stylish little box delivered right to your front door (or P.O. Box, in my case). Mini-MOO cards are roughly an inch wide and 2.75 inches long, with image(s) on front and contact info and picture (or logo) on the back. They’re not as large as conventional business cards, but they have plenty of room for your head-shot and your vital contact info. For an extra $5 you can also get a nice little plastic mini-card holder that holds around 15 or 20 cards. Pretty handy for whipping out in a coffee shop, bar or other tasteful venue.

For the front of my mini-cards I chose some really awesome “Duck” themed illustrations by an artist/designer named Michael Bedard – 27 of them, to be exact. For the back I juxtaposed my head-shot onto a photo of a red Blackberry Curve (identical to my own) and filled the rest of the space with my contact info. I was shickled tittless with the way they turned out. They arrived in really timely fashion, too. Ordered them on a Sunday, they arrived the following Saturday via USPS. You can pick your own shipping method though. (Here’s a few pictures of my fresh order of Mini Moo cards:)

So the next time you see me, don’t be surprised when I reach into my pocket, pull out my ultra-kewl Mini-MOO-Card holder, squeeze you out one of my one-of-a-kind mini-MOO-cards and say, “Text me, or gimme a call one of these days. I’d love to have sex with you get together for coffee”. That wouldn’t be too creepy would it? Nah.

As I am much too lazy to write out all the gory details of my recent stay in the hospital, I’m hoping this brief vlog entry will cover most of the big chunks (if you care). For once, brevity is my friend. Shot on my standard definition Flip Mino again, so please forgive the lack of theatrical quality. It ain’t about the video anyway, it’s about the message. Yes, I had me a wake-up call.

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(Quicktime .mov, 15.2 MB, 480×360, 24fps, 3 min 9 sec)

THE INTERNET

As I mentioned, the internet continues to evolve into something we couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago. But yet, so much of it has stayed the same. I’ve always contended its 4 main uses are 1) Information, 2) Communication, 3) Education, and 4) Masturbation. The four “shuns”, if you will. I doubt that will ever change. And all things considered, I think that’s a good thing.

HARDWARE

A trend I see that I find interesting is the way we consume our four shuns now. We don’t sit in front of huge, noisy, beige-box desktop computers for hours at a time anymore. Well, some of us don’t anyway, unless our jobs require us to do so. At work though, the four shuns don’t really come into play. In fact, I could add a fifth shun — “Content Creation”. We still have a huge need for the beige box with enough power to run the Adobe Creative Suite and a web browser. In my line of work, that will probably never change.

I’ve been using Apple notebooks as my main computers for several years now. Any laptop would probably do, but I prefer Macs. Putting the Mac versus Windows battle aside, I’d say that ANY laptop these days has enough computing power for the average power user. I do EVERYTHING on my old PowerBooks. Yes, I dream about having a new 27-inch iMac, but I’ve yet to see an absolute NEED for one (but who would argue it wouldn’t be the shit!).

I was surprised to see how well the small form-factor netbooks were received in the last couple years. They have just enough power to run a web browser and an email client (okay, maybe a little more than that), but yet every Starbucks you sit down in, you see at least a couple of them, if not more. Amazing. All of a sudden, a 13 or 15-inch laptop has become somewhat of a “dinosaur”. Except, of course, for me. I can’t imagine trying to open, much less run, Photoshop or Final Cut on a Dell Mini-10v. It’s painful enough on a machine with ENOUGH power. Hmm. Is there such a thing as “enough power” in a computer?

But now there’s the iPhone, Blackberry, and all the Android and Windows based smart-phones hot on its ass. For simple communication like email, chat, Facebook and Twitter, they are an obvious choice for the average person. Personally, I could care less about their ability to make voice calls. Who actually needs to “speak” on their mobile phone? Personally, I’d much rather text than talk, but maybe that’s just me. I think I’m that way because it royally irritates the shit out of me to be around people with a fucking cellphone glued to their ear in the line at the grocery store or gas station, yacking away loud enough for anyone within 50 feet to hear, when they should be paying attention to what the fuck they’re doing. Fucking ass-wipes — and don’t EVEN get me started on the douche-bags-on-the-phone in their cars. That’s a whole different story.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

First, I’ve never done Facebook. No reason, I just never saw the need. Twitter has been good to me and I like it. I’ve been a Twitter user since December of 2007. Certainly not the first to the platform, but earlier than lots of people. I gotta say, I like Twitter, but it was a lot more useful before Oprah, Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears found it. After them, the corporations trying to figure out how to monetize it sorta pissed me off. Because everyone knows, it’s no good if you can’t monetize it. Then the TV news reporters began using it as a replacement for feet-on-the-ground journalism. Not necessarily a bad thing, but pretty convenient for them. No matter, all things aside, I still like the Twitterz and will continue to use it.

That being said, I just joined a social network today called Fabulis that sounds interesting. It’s a social network for gay men — but not a hook-up thing — more of a “real” social thing. Nothing like the Grinder app for iPhone. According to the fabulis blog, it’s a place to find out about happenings in your area that your friends are talking about or going to.

“Founded in 2010, fabulis.com is the network that helps gay men and their friends discover where to go, what to do, and who to meet.
fabulis is headquarted in New York, NY and has development operations in Pune, India, and Deinze, Belgium.”

It sounds a little like UpComing.org, only for gays. Fabulis currently has 15,896+ users, counting me. Like UpComing, you can post events and comment on them with other users. I’m looking forward to finding something gay to do now that I’m a member. Wish me luck.

I guess I’m avoiding the main point. Currently you can only sign up for Fabulis if you have a Facebook account. My guess is that they are using parts of Facebook’s API to make this work, but I really dont know. So, dear friends, I am not only a new user on Fabulis, but after all these years I have finally broken down and created a Facebook account. I already have three friends. Which is odd, since I haven’t even uploaded a profile picture. Oh well, send me a request and I’ll friend you, too. I enjoy the attention.

Last, I must recommend you check out the Fabulis blog. They’ve done a great job of documenting this startup from the very beginning. Lots of video interviews, user submitted videos (telling “Why I’m Fabulis”), and lots of slide-shows. I spent a good two hours there and only got about 5 pages into it. Entertaining and educational. I really wanna see this project grow.

Okay, that is all for now. Hopefully it won’t take me another four months to post something here. Just in case it does, I apologize in advance.

Roughly a year later, the whole podcasting phenomenon really took off. In no time at all, my cavernous 20 gig iPod seemed somewhat lacking in the storage department as my growing collection of podcasts started pushing my storage limits. In the mean time, Apple had released the iPod Photo with a color display. I was getting the itch for a bigger ‘Pod in a big way. But I waited.

In mid-January of 2006, along came the 5th generation iPod that played video. It came in both 30-gigabyte and 60-gigabyte flavors, along with your choice of standard white or the new black. Considering the Apple product line at the time was either white or some flavor of metallic, black iPods seemed strange to me. Mac “purists” like myself would be much less likely to own a black Apple branded product. I’m guessing the whole black thing was aimed at the Mac-hating Windows users, who had just been introduced to iTunes for Windows. “Real geeks use Pee Cee’s” ya know. And Apple was all about selling more iPods. To anyone. Even PC users.

I bit the bullet and dropped $400 on a new WHITE 60 gigabyte iPod. And let me tell you, it was (and still is) a thing of beauty. A glorious color screen for all my pictures and videos, and triple the storage of my beloved 4th generation iPod. Amazing battery life, too, except when I got carried away playing videos. The sticker on the box said something to the effect of “listen to 16 hours of music, or watch 2 hours of video on a single charge”. I guess the novelty of video playback on such a small device made up for that shortcoming. For awhile. I still use this iPod for at least 8 hours a day, and still love it. I’m amazed at the battery life it continues to give me.

In October of 2007 I became the proud owner of a 1st generation 16 gigabyte iPod Touch. It seems like Apple only makes the Touch better and more useful with every software and firmware update. At first, it could only run web apps (html, css & javascript stuff). Now it can run all kinds of awesome apps, games, and utilities and it’s nothing short of a very capable handheld computer. Almost more useful in some ways. While I’d love to get a new 3rd generation Touch, I really can’t justify spending the money when my 1st gen Touch still does everything I need it to, and then some. It’s a great little gadget. If I could afford to upgrade, the only reason would be to get more storage. 64 gigabytes would be nice. And maybe a camera, maybe.

Last Sunday, a couple days after Christmas, I added yet another iPod to my small collection — an incredibly sexy 5th generation iPod Nano. 8 gigabytes, Purple. I told myself awhile back that if I ever got a new Nano, it would be a Red 16 gig model. But being the impatient ass I am, last Sunday’s late afternoon trip to the Walmarts changed my mind. What can I say? The sheer tiny-ness of the thing sold me. But when you add the video camera, voice recorder, gorgeous color display and everything else, it becomes pretty overwhelming. A total impulse buy, granted, but I’m looking forward to playing with it and hopefully learning to enjoy it as much as I do my “Classic” and my Touch.

I’m not exactly sure what the attraction is to these shiny little audio playing gadgets, but there definitely IS an attraction. Maybe an obsession. I guess I’m officially a “hoarder” of iPods. 60 gig Classic for everyday use, but mostly in the car going to and from work (an hour each way). An iPod Touch for tweeting or killing time at Starbucks. And now, an awesome little purple Nano for listening to, posing with and, well, I haven’t figured the rest out yet. But I will. Maybe.

While looking though an old external hard drive today, I came across some amazing old videos that I have NO IDEA where they came from. Some of these videos were pretty amazing, some were pretty lame and ended up in the trash. This one, however, required sharing. It’s called Jugg Master. Like the name implies, it’s all about the boobies. It’s short, like a couple minutes, so click the image to make the jump. You’ll be glad you did. (Note: You probably guessed already, but this video is NSFW.)

Before you click “play”, I should warn you I shot this whole thing on a cheap little standard-def Flip Mino camcorder ($129 +tax from the Radio Shack in Lewiston, Idaho). The nice thing is, I think it shoots as good – or better – video than my little Canon Z-800 mini DV camcorder. Although neither are up to current video blogger standards, I think that with a little effort I could make the Flip my main vlogging device. If I could only figure out a decent way to keep from wiggling so much, that is. I hope to come up with a solution there soon.

Download for iPod / iPhone
(Quicktime .mov, 52.11 MB, 464×348, 24fps, 10 min 26 sec)

A couple quick notes here:
1) When using a green screen, make sure you have PLENTY of EVEN lighting on your subject.
2) If you’re using a cheap little Canon ZR800 to tape your green screen epic, make sure it’s in 4×3 mode, not “widescreen”. Your subject will look all squished.
3) Try to have something interesting and compelling to talk about.

I can honestly say I failed miserably on those three points here. I hope to do much better on my next cinematic effort.

Download for iPod / iPhone
(Quicktime .mov, 39.0 MB, 480×270, 24fps, 7 min 0 sec)

Download for iPod / iPhone
(Quicktime .mov, 26.2 MB, 480×360, 24fps, 5 min 4 sec)