And He Blogs

No sooner did Alan Levine have a bone to pick with Flickr, TechSmith’s SnagIt! comes along and (as far as I can see innocently) makes available a plugin to upload screenshots to the Flickr service. I think this is wild, because while Flickr is playing hardball with Alan (and certainly SecondLife screenshots are much more “photographic”), a major software company is taking advantage of the Flickr API to supposedly violate the user agreement. Another crazy angle to this story is the screencast that TechSmith does has the demonstrator capture a photo with the SnagIt! software. Did they plan this because they know something? The consipiracy theorists are lining up as we speak!

Here’s another screenshot on the Flickr service that’s I “took” that I find interesting. It’s the screen you see to accept the “permissions” for the SnagIt plugin!

UPDATE: Eric Rice and 3pointD have assisted in getting out the word about Flickr’s controversial policy.

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Of the many things that I am envious about Canada, the number one thing is their national anthem, “O Canada”. I’ve gone to many hockey games and sung along with the Canadian anthem. I’ll refrain from commenting on the U.S. anthem. This was a stirring video to watch, and makes me wonder whether I should have lived in Canada. There is Canadian blood in my veins, but there is a reason I moved from Central New York to Virginia. It’s cold up there!

By the way, Go Oilers!

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wind-up brain

Originally uploaded by jilldavis.

My brain has been fried since March. I felt like everything I did required waiting a long time for a response from my convoluted grey matter, it was like walking through molasses. Eventually, I got through planning and execution of Faculty Academy, and then it blew my mind. Everything about it was terrific, and the post-Academy high is still there. My brain is now responding nicely, thanks to some well needed days off. I am inspired by Gardner’s “paws for station identification“. I think all of us in DTLT are ready for some big things, just not so ready to put our things in the blogosphere (we’ve all had a lull in blogging, which makes me fell better). So this is MY “prepare for great things to come” post.

UPDATE: So after the Faculty Academy we were all wishing that Jon Udell would somehow work his visit to us into a column. You know, maybe just a brief mention. Well we’re humbled that Jon did more than just mention us!

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Just like the students who are shouting with glee about finishing their exams, I want to celebrate being done with the editing and posting of the 19 videos in the Great Lives Series Webcasts. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the editing, however, I was a bit rushed in trying to get them done. And I’ll just say that I’ve got some workflow issues to work out still. What I can say is that the Adobe Video Bundle is a wonderful example of good workflow in software. I used Premiere Pro 2, Photoshop CS2, and Audition 2. Taking advantage of “Dynamic Link” I was able to use these three programs rather seemlessly. The bottleneck is my relatively slow computer. Truth is, it’s normally a fast computer (Dell Workstation Pentium 4 HT 2.8GHz, 1 GB RAM), but it’s now bogged down in program bloat, and the Adobe Bundle really pushes the limits of even the fastest computers. But I like the workflow - edit in Premiere, but tweak the audio in Audition and automatically update the title slides in Photoshop.

So here’s the part where I put in my wish list for a Dual Core or Dual Xeon workstation . . . oh, and lots of hard disk space, RAID 0 preferably. Gardner, be quick about it

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From Viruses to Networking, Apple is back promoting the differences between PCs and Macs. Starring “The Daily Show” correspondent John Hodgman, and Justin Long (”Warren” from NBC’s “Ed”), Apple has no problem showing how confident they are about their computers being trouble free. The spots are cute, funny, and effective, but I just can’t help feeling like this stuff will come back to bite them some day. Aren’t we tired yet of people telling us they don’t make mistakes? Cocky S.O.B.’s

Update: Dave Winer says basically the same thing!

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