I heard about Tagxedo.com on Net@Night from the twit.tv network and figured I had to try it.  It is actually pretty neat.  You can plug in different websites, twitter ID's and search terms to create a neat tag cloud of the words you use.  Here's an example of mine.  I uploaded a graphic and adjusted the fonts, colors and layout until I set it how I liked it.

I've been waiting over a year to get an Android phone and today was such a fun day that it made it worth the wait.  I kinda wanted the G1 since it came out, but didn't want to consider going to T-Mobile to get it.  Then at MWC 2009 the Hero was announced and I thought it was going to go to at least Sprint if not Verizon and I thought I would get it as soon as it came out.  Then as it got closer and closer I'd see something else that I wanted, but wasn't quite ready to pull the trigger for one reason or another.  The Sprint Hero was a little ugly in my opinion and I read about something else.  Then it was the Droid, then the Eris, but during that time there was the "Passion". I decided that was the perfect phone, it was fast, big, looked nice and was rumored to be on Verizon.  The months went by, yes months and we heard about the Nexus One that all the Google employees were showing off, then it came to light and mentioned Verizon as a future carrier.  I thought well that's nice, but still months away.  What was weird was the Passion rumors continued, they started to change to a Bravo, then an Incredible was mentioned, then a Desire was annouced at this years' MWC.  It is getting hard to tell them all apart.  I have finally decided now, that i believe the Incredible is coming to Verizon, hopefully in the end of March, otherwise early April.  That is going to be my phone, for sure this time.  I've dealt with Windows Mobile for far to long.  My first smart phone was a Moto Q, the day it released in June-ish 2006, then the Verizon vx6800 (HTC Titan) and just recently a HTC Touch Pro to get me by until this Incredible release.

So now to the fun part you've been waiting to hear.  Everyone gets that "rush" when they do something exciting.  I used to always get them in sports, but didn't notice it anywhere else until I got my PS3 before the first Christmas before they came out.  Then it was getting my Wii, when they first came out as well as picking up another 3 over time for friends.  Something about getting/finding things before other people seems to give me that exhilarating feeling.  So today I was reading one of the forums I've been keeping up on for a few months waiting to find out more info about the Incredible.  it's kinda fun hearing other people's opinions on what is going to happen and every once in a while find a gem.  Things seem to come up there, before I read about them anywhere else.  Well today it was my turn.  I was looking through some picture found on Flickr that were taken with a weird model of HTC phone.  I took the dimensions of the picture and multiplied them to find that the camera was about an 8MP camera.  Way bigger than any other HTC phone so far.  People were already assuming it was either the Bravo, Desire, Supersonic, or Incredible.  I first starting trying to figure out their location from the pictures, then looked a little closer at the user names.  I put them after Twitter accounts until I found a match.  That Twitter account linked to a couple twitgoo pictures and a couple YouTube videos.  I put 2+2 together and found a video they had posted of this rumored "Incredible".  I couldn't believe that I was the first viewer of the video.  It caught me off guard.  The video had been posted 8 hours earlier, so I figured I must've been the first person to stumble upon it.  I posted the link to the forum and things just took off from there.  So far I've seen 3 pretty popular blogs it's been posted on and many other small ones have reblogged it.  The person that tipped my post, was gracious enough to comment on the blog to make sure that I received credit.  I couldn't believe it, my name mentioned for credit to a post.  The post was also pretty nice, acting like I did some research project to find the info.  There were a ton of tweets and retweets, mentioning the story.  Here's the first 3 blog posts.

http://phandroid.com/2010/02/25/htc-incredible-on-video/

http://www.androidcentral.com/video-shows-htc-somethings-camera-action-may-be-supersonic-or-incredible

http://androidandme.com/2010/02/news/verizon-htc-incredible-nearing-release/

It got me wanting to blog more and tweet more often, to try to help out the community.  I loved that feeling and it really made me realize why so many people enjoy following technology.  So I guess I had my 15 minutes and I'll turn it back over to everyone else for now, but I can't wait to find something else out someday and hopefully next time, I'll be doing it from my HTC Incredible.

UPDATE:

Before I could even post my first edit, I saw that Engadget ran the story.  I tried to send them a tip as soon as I posted the video and 6 hours later they reposted the Phandroid blog post.  Oh well, atleast that one mentoins my name.  Don't get me wrong, it's still really awesome.  I can still say I was mentioned on Engadget.  By the way, the original video and pictures were pulled, I really hope that no one got in trouble, that wasn't the purpose.  I did make my own copy of the video just in case.  Also Engadget, it's the Incredible, you should read the forum where we proved it.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/25/htc-supersonic-spotted-on-video/

I'm just starting to play with Posterous and getting it setup for my blog.  I love the idea and can't wait to get started.  They have an iPhone app, work with about every social network and they guys there are smart and easy to work with.  So it's time I get more into "micro-blogging" and back into updating my regular blog again.

Posted via email from oneniner's posterous

There's so much buzz going on about Twitter right now, especially with Ashton Kutcher beating CNN to 1,000,000 followers. I think I joined about a year ago, but hadn't really heard much about it being applicable to me until RAGBRAI posted any tweets with the hashtag #RAGBRAI in them to the Des Moines Register's website.  I thought this was a creative way to share with everyone, basically from your phone while on RAGBRAI.  Then like everybody else, I made a couple "tweets" that said, "Just trying to figure this out". I didn't really understand it, but liked to follow a local band and see what they were up to and where they were performing. Once I had followed them for a while, I started to learn how it works and some of the lingo. I felt pretty dumb trying to Google "RT" and what the "@" or "#" meant. For those friends of mine that aren't on twitter, which you must not be, I only know about 10 people on there compared to the hundreds on facebook or myspace, "RT" stands for retweet. Which means, when someone in your network says something you like, then you retweet it to your network, trying to spread the word or show gratitude to the person that originally posted it. And it's abbreviated to obviously save characters since you can only use 140. So back to the showing graditude and giving credit, when retweeting be sure to put a "@" before the person that orginally posted the tweet. You also use the "@" to reply to someone. So if you're answering their question, or just saying something to them publicly then use the @. Next the "#" which is to note a subject or event that you want to point out. With search.twitter.com parsing every tweet this isn't as important anymore until you are trying to point out something with a common name as something else less unique. I can't think of a good example right now, so that's not much help. Also if you're going to use a hashtag, be sure to use the same one that everyone else is using so the tweets can be grouped. Often an event will have an abrieviated tag so that it's shorter, those can be found on hashtags.org.  Which brings me to one of the cooler features of Twitter. Twitter Search, which was acquired by Twitter from Summize, will show the most popular words mentioned in all tweets. Then it shows the top 10 "trends", this will usually tell you what's going on at the time, like earthquakes in California, who got kicked off of American Idol, or bombings in Mumbai. If your timing is right you will find out about stuff before it's in the news. Here's a twitpic from the plane that landed in the Hudson twitpic.com/135xa, it was a first hand picture taken among the many that made it to twitter before the news was on TV. Twitpic is an easy way to send pictures from your phone or computer and have them resize the pic, then automatically post a link to your twitter account with a note about it. The one from this link is probably the most popular twitpic ever, although I perfer this one from Ashton twitpic.com/2bj58. There are tons of other applications built by people outside of twitter that aggregate similar tweets, or messages from the same geographical area.

It's a fun service, that has been popular in the tech area, but just went crazy when celebrities starting using opening up a whole new level of communication between celebs and their fans. There are a few things that bug me about twitter. For 1, I hate that some people make it out to be a big popularity contest. To be honest, who cares if Ashton has more followers than CNN or me as far as that goes. I think you get more out of it if you actually interact and read your feed instead of just trying to get the most people to follow you. I guess it's kind of a cool feeling to be listed as a top for some catagory (http://wefollow.com/tag/omaha), but that's not really my goal. This also leads me to how people try to use it to market themselves. Once again, it has been amazing the traffic that it has brought to my site, but I'm not out there saying how cool I am, and how good I am at stuff and how I can make you money. I just don't get that, I guess maybe it's cause I don't have to rely on it for an income, but I just want to use it as a socializing tool, and yes find out about some new cool blogs and people along the way. The marketing part is real annoying people will follow you to get you to follow them back, then they will remove you from their list and just spam you with "how to make millions" messages. I'm pretty generous, I'll follow anybody that looks like they are following me, because they are interested. I also go back and check to make sure that the people I'm following are following me back (http://friendorfollow.com/). There are quite a few people I will still follow if they're not following me, but mostly it's the people that added me first then removed me. There are a few tools that make it easy to follow as many people as you want and sort through them. I use Tweetdeck the most, but Seesmic or Twirl are other good ones. They allow you to create groups and follow a small number of people more closely. I like to follow people from the Omaha & Des Moines areas just to see what's going on in the area. I've found out about some pretty cool startups and interesting entrepenuers. They also annouce local Tweetups, to get a chance to meet people in the area and network in person.  I also have groups for celebrities, musicians, and "tech celebs", I think they are the ones that really have brought twitter to where it is and have the most interesting ideas on how to use it.

Everyone has their own methods to get their tweets out. The most popular is the web, but Twitter was originally intended for using your cell phone to send and receive text messages. I use both of those, then also Tweetie on my iPod touch, PockeTwit on my Windows Mobile phone, then Tweetdeck on my computer and Friendfeed from the web. I'm still playing with using other clients from my desktop at home. I'm also still customizing Friendfeed. It's actually a way to agregate many web services, but I use to to read my friends tweets, you can check out my web activities there at friendfeed.com/oneniner . I like to follow a lot of people and sort through their messages, but I don't get why not everybody will follow back. I have the hardest time getting half as many followers as the people I'd like to follow. For some reason most of the local people I follow don't follow back, I don't really care since it's not a contest, I just don't think it'd be that hard especially with some of the ways I mentioned to group your friends. Pretty soon, I'll reach the 2,000 cap and not have enough people following me to follow more people, but oh well, I guess we'll wait till I get there. I was pretty excited that I finally got to 500 followers and I did it in a fair way, I wasn't tricking people into adding me. It's especially good since I don't post as much as some people do. So if you like the status updates in Facebook, there's a ton more cool interesting things going on around twitter, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but try it out, follow me, I'll follow you back and just take your time getting comfortable, you'll catch on pretty fast. Then it'll be too late and you'll be addicted.

I've been a fan of all aspects of photography for a while.  I'm not a pro by any means, but I find it entertaining to take the perfect shot, then to edit the picture on your own and get it out to your friends and family to enjoy.  What little artistic ability I have, I got from my mom.  She is very artistic and loves to do everything by hand.  I wouldn't even be able to name all of the stuff she's worked on, but everything from drawing with pastels, oil paint, & charcoal to pottery, sculptures, and more recently a little tech related with editing photography on the computer.  That's the area that gets me excited, because I can use my tech experience to help.

I recently got more excited about this with the purchase of an iMac.  I've been wanting to learn more and dig more into the photo & video editing with a little web design on the side, so I figured, what better way.  I haven't gotten the chance to use iPhoto yet, but here's a few tools I like to use and would recommend.  I use Google's Picasa 3 to organize all my pictures.  It's a basic and easy to understand program that can actually be pretty powerful if you want it to be.  I also use Picasa's web galleries to display most of my pictures with my family and friends.  Picasa makes it easy to just make a few minor changes and easily upload them for free.  One of the advanced features are that it will let you make batch edits to multiple files.  This is nice when you took a lot of pictures inside in bad light, it will try to auto fix the whole folder to make them look nice in a hurry.  The web gallery has face recognition, which will organize all the pictures with similar looking faces to let you name who that person is.  This came in handy for me, when Amy and I went on a vaction and took probably a thousand pictures, but only wanted to send the ones of other people to them.  Then a few other good pictures that we marked with Picasa's star feature.  If you've had problems finding pictures like I have, you'd like Picasa's photo tagging.  It took a little work to get started, but I like to tag each picture with who's in it and what was going on, whether it was an event or a holiday or something significant.  It's necesary to take the people, location, or date if you use Picasa's other features, but it doesn't hurt.  Speaking of location Picasa will geotag your photos with the location they were taken, showing them on a simple google map, or even exporting them to Google Earth, espeically fun for people that travel a lot.  It also intergrates well with the other places you would like to use your photos, like uploading to blogs or even to a Facebook photo album.  I use this feature to upload a few of my favorites to Facebook to share with my friends.

As for editing pictures and giving them artistic effects, I usually turn to Picnik.com.  It is an awesome free site with some amazing features.  You upload your picture, then it shows all these options on how to change the photo and make it unique.  It's much easier than having the 500 page book & second job that Photoshop would require.  Just a few clicks and you're ready to save the picture back to your computer or share it to a web gallery.  I shouldn't knock Photoshop too much. They have a verynice site, photoshop.com, that also lets you edit pictures online.  I've used it a few times, but I like Picnik a lot more.  Picnik really lets you bring out that inner artist and you can be as dramatic as you'd like.  If you've seen those pictures around facebook that looks like a polaroid, then Picnik is probably what they used.  It's one of their options for borders.  They also have a facebook app, that works pretty smooth.  Most of the features are free, but there is an option to pay a little bit to get more features.  I think it lets you save more of your past photos and a few other things.

I've also heard good things about GIMP & Paint.Net.  I haven't actually used either, but both are free programs used to edit pictures.  And if you're willing to pay a little, I've used Adobe Photoshop Elements and it's not too bad either.  I'm looking to have iPhoto fill this area for me to see what it can do.

The most fun part of photography for me is sharing the pictures with people.  Flickr has a great web community, I just haven't started using it as much as I'd like.  I used to use Yahoo photos and those albums got converted to Flickr, I just haven't done anything with it yet.  As I mentioned above Facebook has become the most popular place to share pictures among other social networking sites.  I use PicasaWeb for most of my pictures, then I put my favorites out on Facebook, and I just have a few of the main ones in MySpace.  Another fun way to share photos is using TwitPic and sending them through  Twitter.  Like  tweets, most of these pictures are from cell phones, when you just want a quick easy way to share them, not always the best quality.  I'd use TwitPic when I'm on the go and I see something cool, or when I just don't have a camera handy.

Next to the really fun part, bringing those still frames to life.  I used to use Windows Movie Maker or other slideshow tools, but one of the really cool web ones that I discovered is Animoto.  This site will upload about 10-15 pictures and put them to some of their music to make a 30 second music video.  I've shared my most recent one above.  I just threw some pictures in there to see what it could do, but this has some really cool posibilities.  Like Picnik, there is a paid premium version to make full length videos that cost something like $3 a video.  Which really isn't much when you think about it.  Then you can download them to your computer to play on your ipod or other media devices.  Animoto will also let you upload the videos to your YouTube account or embed them into a webpage.  I've used the embed feature above, the YouTube upload is nice again because of the community they have.  You get a lot of views on their site.  Speaking of video sites, I like use YouTube and Vimeo to upload my slideshows that I've made on my computer, because I think the HD quality is a little better than YouTubes.  I'll put one of those video's below (note to see the HD version, you have to click on it to go to the site).  Vimeo and Viddler are both YouTube competitors if you're looking for somewhere else to post videos.

I can't mention all the stuff I like without mentioning where I heard about some of it and some of my resources.  I enjoy listening to Scott Bourne on the MacBreak Weekly Podcast, then he also has his own blog/podcast called TWiPPhoto (This Week in Photography).  Another site of his I find interesting is Scottcritiques, basically you upload your pictures and he tells you how bad they are.  It's not really that harsh, but I haven't uploaded any of my own photos or it probably would be.  It's definately intersting though.  Lifehacker is also a good source for finding cheap, efficient tools to help you out, especially when you're wanting to find that free tool, that does a simple task.

Lastly, you can't spend so much time on your pictures and videos without backing them up.  Some people don't realize tell their hard drive crashes and it's too late.  My backup system isn't too extensive right now, anytime I work on stuff I run a manual backup to an external drive, then store the external drive in a firesafe box, but I'm really wanting to get a Drobo to replace my external drive, then I would have data redundancy similar to a RAID array and could backup more data than I do on my 300GB external drive.  Another service, I'd like to try out is to backup my important data to an Amazon S3 server.  You can use their storage in the cloud and pay for how much data you upload to them per month.  This way if you have a fire you can pull all your stuff back from the web.  This kinda takes backups to the next level, but I think it's important.  You can read more about "Managing Your Digital Life" from another Scott Bourne site.  I know another shameless plug, but I'm working on getting me a drobo and saving some money.

These are just a few things that have made my photo editing more fun, if I missed any please let me know, I'm always looking forward to try new things or save some time & money here and there.  I've also linked to a few of my sites that I use, feel free to add me or look around.

Jamaica from Nolan Carson on Vimeo.

I recently figured out Google Apps, and it has to be one of the coolest things. I've been a fan of Google since I first heard their name. I wish I would've bought some stock at the time. I'd love to have the opportunity to work for them. I'm sure you've heard about their bennies. They are in the top of the Fortune list. So anyways, back to this Google Apps stuff. I have recently added my Google blog, calendar, start page, docs and even GMail to my own domain, oneniner.com.

GMail is the coolest part of it all. By going to http://mail.oneniner.com I can log into my oneniner.com email addresses that I have created and named. The catch is GMail hosts them and it saves me the storage and work of having to host them myselves. And all this is FREE!!! I'm as google's mercy as far as makeing sure the servers are up, but I don't think that's a bad gamble.

What's next? I can't beleive the ideas they come up with and how well they pull them off.