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We’re huge fans of animation at my house. This short is remarkable for its detail and beautiful renderings, but is even more fantastic because it’s made by a guy who simply loves animation as a hobby, not by a huge house like Pixar. Its’ also very funny.

I’m noticing a growing number of sites giving play to cell phone photography (there’s even awards for this now). Obviously, the quality is less than that of a good digital camera, but you might be surprised to see what a good eye can do with an inferior lens.

I’ve been playing with this on my iPhone a lot lately, and also have discovered some tools to make image calibration right on the phone easier. The photos below were taken on my phone and then worked with Photoshop.com which provides a very friendly interface for filters, cropping, and even uploading. In some these photos I’m also experimenting with some tilt-shift effects (to varying degrees of success).

Here are some cool links:

http://iphonephoto.us/
http://www.ippawards.com/
http://www.philcoffman.com/blog/photography/iphone-photography/

And some cool tools:

Camera Bag
Best Camera
TiltShift Generator

From BoingBoing.net:

This is an outstanding cartoon (by Chris Ware) depicting a This American Life story about kids who started a fake TV camera craze at their elementary school. As Graham says, “It’s so amazing. Why can’t there be more of this? I could watch HOURS of this.”

Last night my oldest daughter, Mia, did what I think took a lot of courage. She got up in front of  about 100 people (parents, kids, grandparents) and sang the song Hey There Delilah. If you know the song, you know there’s lots of words that go by pretty fast and the melody itself requires a fairly wide vocal range. While slightly more timid than usual, she sang with her usual grace and sweetness. She is my favorite singer.

Mia is no stranger to the stage. This summer, she’ll be attending another season of her theater camp and will be performing in her tenth play. Last night was a less formal setting (part of a 70s themed  end-of-the-year celebration at her after school program), but she still brought her game. I’m very, very proud of her. It was such a delight to have parents tell me after the fact how wonderfully she sang and how brave she was to do it.

The glow of yesterday’s customer support triumph with Samsung has worn off. I sit here in the “business office” of my local Honda dealership awaiting the completion of my 2007 Odyssey Touring minivan’s 60,000-mile checkup. The cost for the basic service was going to be roughly $400.

But the attendant has just visited and informed me that I need new tires. My vehicle will not pass inspection because the tires are worn from poor alignment. But that’s just the beginning of the story.

This car has what are known as PAX tires. Some people know them as run-flat tires. Their claim is that even without air, these tires maintain their shape and their ability to be driven on for many miles. It’s the special frames that allow this. The vehicle also has an impressive monitoring system for these tires. As you might imagine, these tires are very expensive.

But here’s where the fun starts. There’s a class action suit against Honda and Michelin because of these tires. People buying cars with them have been misinformed about their life expectancy. The tires themselves, while excessively priced, are also very hard to replace because there are very few dealerships with the equipment to do so. I got a notice in the mail a few weeks back from a law firm in the Midwest offering me to join in the suit. I have to fill out some paperwork and send it back to them. I imagine, like most lawsuits, I may get fifty cents or so while the lawyers themselves take in millions.

So, my $400 service call now is $1300 (tires and parts, installation, rotation, balancing, blah blah blah). There’s no lawyer here helping me to bargain or talk the dealers down. I will likely have to do this again in 20,000 miles or so (not the advertised 35,000 miles).

I’ve been a very loyal customer of Honda cars for years. In fact, since the junky Subaru I drove after college, all my cars have been Hondas. But this is the end of the road. I’m done with them. I’ll need another car next year when my other Honda finally times out. But it’ll be something else. Something without proprietary equipment that hoses me for years to come.

I apologize for the screaming headline to this post, but I use all caps to emphasize the most amazing thing that happened to me.

I have three monitors on my computer. I do lots of design and testing on browsers, I write a lot, I work with imaging. So all this extra real estate works for me. I use all Samsung monitors because I have always loved their clarity, crispness, and reliability. The two to the sides are widescreen and the center one is more standard. They all are flat-screen at extremely high resolutions.

All this said, the center one has been giving me trouble lately. When booting up, it flashes on, then just as quickly goes black. By hitting the On/Off switch (or the Source button) repeatedly it eventually comes back to a working state. But this situation has degraded and it now takes many more times to get the thing working each day. I tried everything I could think of: installing new drivers, attaching new cables, checking and testing the graphics card. Nothing. So, I finally decide to call Samsung directly for advice (advice, because I’ve had the monitor for two years and my expectation is that that is about all I’ll get).

I call Samsung and within seconds am talking to a monitor expert. Right there, you got me excited. No long hold times, no uninformed “technician.” I describe my situation in detail, tell him all the solutions I tried. He then asks me, would I prefer a service call or an exchange? I am silent. I tell him I don’t understand the question. He repeats it. I say that, sure, I’d love an exchange. He takes down my address, phone number, and email. He then tells me that in about seven days a new monitor will arrive at the UPS store just a mile or so from here. Bring my old monitor there, they will give me the new monitor, repack the old one, and ship it back. Free.

Let that roll around in your head for a moment. Two year-old monitor, exchanged and replaced for free. Within in days. Transaction complete within five minutes. I don’t know, if you’ve had a better customer support experience, I’d like to hear it. You only hear the horror stories about flight check crews and mobile phone vendors. I don’t care what happens over the next 14 hours, I’m having a damn good day.

Oh, and Sprint, Overstock.com, ATI, Charter, First Data: Please call Samsung and beg them to let you know how they do it.

Update: Monitor arrived yesterday, but couldn’t pick it up until today. That’s three days from when Samsung promised to send it. It is a newer model and the picture is remarkably crisp and clear, definitely an upgrade.

+  + I am all about convergence. I love that my phone can act almost as a secondary computer. While I tend to write about all the nifty gadgets I find for it, it actually has become a huge part of running my business. But here again, I’m gonna write about the fun stuff.

I’ve been spending more time with Facebook lately, posting some inane things, but mostly writing about experiences from my work. And I’ve really enjoyed finding all the applications you can add to Facebook to make it more useful and more integrated with other services. This morning, I found an app that grabs all the photos (in their galleries, no less) from Picasa and displays them to a tab in my profile page. Because I use Photoshop Lightroom 2 to process my images and then directly export them to my Picasa web, I now am able to update Picasa while also updating FB with my photos.

But wait … now there’s more. It turns out this plugin I found doesn’t work so well, and also, only displays the photos and galleries in a tab in my profile, with no announcement on my wall that there are new pictures. And now I find something that is already built into FB that will accomplish this for me, without an additional application. Do this:

Go to your Profile page in FB
Click on the Settings button just below the What’s on your mind box
Here you’ll see a bunch of options for connecting to services like Picasa and Flickr
Just click on the service you want and enter the username used in that service
Done!

To further my aspirations for convergence of everything I hold dear, I even added my deli.cio.us bookmarks to my twitter feed so they also now will end up on my FB page. I am at one with the cyberverse.

This is cool for two reasons: I love the TED talks, and I can now watch them on the iPhone.

For those unaware of TED, it is basically an online archive of lectures/talks by thought leaders and other fascinating people.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

One of my favorites was Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and educator at the New England Conservatory. I met him a couple times while a student there, but this venue really brings out his passion and joyous personality.

I mentioned in a previous post my need for a computing platform to support a home recording studio. After some investigation, I decided to purchase from eBay a custom PC (rather than buy an expensive brand name or build one myself). Well, the machine arrived last week and I could not be happier.

The idea here is rather than buying a single, standalone recording appliance (for example, a TASCAM 16-track hard disk recorder), I would go the way of the studios and use a software-based solution on some decent computer hardware.

I use Sonar Producer 4, which is one the very best software packages available for both consumer and professional musicians. It supports full audio and MIDI recording scenarios (64 audio and unlimited MIDI tracks), has built in software synthesizers (some of which emulate the vintage synths like Korgs and Moogs), tons of effects (things like echo and delay and compression … eliminating the need for racks of outboard equipment and wiring), and provides very detailed views for recording parameters as well as a mix mode that looks like a real studio mixing board. It even can be used for mixing and editing music and video. Here is a mashup of some of the screens:

Here are the specs of my rig (much of this equipment, outside the PC, I already owned):

• Intel Pentium 3.2GHz Custom Workstation (2G RAM, 160GB Hard-drive, CD/DVD RW)
• Creative Audigy 4 Soundcard supporting 24-bit sound and soundfonts
• Samsung 17-inch Flat-panel Monitor
• Altec-Lansing Speakers with Subwoofer (need to replace these)
• Rhodes MK-80 Electric Piano/MIDI Controller/Tone Generator (88 weighted keys … really sweet)
• Roland M-120 12-channel Line Mixer (supports MIDI, 1/4-inch, and XLR inputs, effects sends/returns)
• M-Audio Fast Track Pro 4×4 USB Audio/MIDI Interface (preamps and phantom power)
• Alesis SR-16 24-Bit Stereo Drum Machine
• Sonar Producer 4 Studio Software

My daughter Mia and I got the rig hooked up this past week and within twenty minutes had recorded our first multi-tracked song together. I’m practically giddy with excitement to dig in and start playing and recording again.

As a side note, I should mention that the whole eBay experience was very efficient and pleasant. The vendor, eCollegePC, kept in constant contact with status updates, shipped the machine on time, and once received, I found the machine exactly to specs and ready for installing the OS. I would definitely buy from them again and even recommend them to others.

I also want to thank my dear friend Rodger for all his advice on platforms, standards, and practices in the industry. His insights were key for me being able to pull this together.

I dearly wanted my next PC to be a Mac. I have serious Mac-envy. My Windows PC, in fact, is tricked out to appear like a Mac, as is my Ubuntu desktop. But alas, the cost of admission still is too steep. (Although it amazes me, the twists of logic one can produce to convince oneself–and perhaps one’s spouse–that a purchase is truly required and justifiable.)

Now that school for me is close to complete, I intend to use my time otherwise spent studying and writing papers to delve back into making music. My mission is to gather some of my old equipment now stored in a closet (mixing board and some outboard effects) and combine them with a PC-based recording system. I looked at a lot of stand-alone recording systems, but the prices are high and I already own really great recording software. This also seems to be the way studios are going, software based systems on very high-end computing platforms.

So, I began looking around at PCs that were up to the task. I thought first of building my own PC. I’d heard that you can buy all the components and a case and build a new PC for significantly less than a major brand. While that is true, the system I configured and priced would still have cost near a thousand dollars.

I spoke with my brother Keith, who has made many purchases from eBay. I looked around on eBay and found some really kicking systems for astonishingly good prices (I kept thinking of the Crazy Eddie commercials of my youth: ‘Noooobody Beats Crazy Eddie!’). I wrote to several of the vendors to ask how they could sell these things so cheap and the answer, predictably, was that they make so many of them that they get their parts at discount rates. Another reason for the low cost is because most of them come with no OS installed, like Windows or Mac OSX. (I have a Windows XP Pro disk so this is not an issue).

So I took the plunge and ordered a custom system with the following specs, all for around $400 (I already have the monitor, mouse, and keyboard):