short notes on technology by josue salazar

Tim Moxam playing at Late Night in the Bedroom

Tim is a good friend of some good friends, so we know each other. He’s in a band called ‘Hey Bear, Whoa Bear’ –which as far as I’m concerned is one of the best band names ever– and they’ve released one amazing album already. They have music on MySpace. Last night he was doing a solo performance for a fantastic online show produced by friends here in Toronto called Late Night In The Bedroom, and the setting for the show last night was Manifesto’s Chapter 3 Art Exhibit (which is one of the projects I’ve been putting a lot of time into, have you seen the new website we did?).

In any case.. and to make a long story somewhat short, Tim’s set took place in the middle of an art installation by the amazing Joshua Barndt, Adrian Dilena & Piotr Adas that I had to photograph:

Update: The Late Night In The Bedroom crew released Tim’s full set on video, so here it is, enjoy it:

Full Set – Tim Moxam from Late Night in the Bedroom on Vimeo.

The Rebel Way

As much as I have loved photography over the years, I’ve never owned a professional camera. The portability and capabilities of small point and shoots have always appealed to me, yet every “photographer” reaches a point where it is no longer possible to remain content and satisfied with the results achieved with one of these cameras and DSLR’s enter the picture.

I won’t go into much detail, but suffice to say I have had my eye on the Canon DSLR line up for a while, so, when the opportunity to own a Digital Rebel XT came up, I jumped on it.

Helped by the fact that I’m reading books on Canon DSLR’s and Apple’s Aperture, my need to shoot is growing exponentially. Luckily I’ve done a bit of traveling in the past month and have been pressed to shoot as much as I probably needed to learn a good amount about the entire process (playing with apertures and shutter speeds, etc).

In any case, and to wrap this up, here is a slideshow of my best pictures so far taken with my new Rebel:

Pride weekend / MJ tribute

Pride weekend has started, as you can see in the second picture attached, however due to the obvious circumstances given Michael Jackson’s untimely death it wouldn’t have been right not to pay some respects. Attached is a picture of a flashmob moonwalking in the middle of one of Toronto’s major intersections (Yonge/Dundas).

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Flickr Pro argument

I’ve been on Flickr for a few years now as a Pro user, paying each year (except for that year when Danny got me a gift membership) to host my photos and support the service. I’ve never doubted that it’s a great value for my money and I’ll continue to pay for it for as long as it continues to provide value to me.

However, there are others who feel differently about it, like Colin who wonders if it’s worth supporting the service now seeing as how Yahoo! is tanking. It’s an interesting argument for sure, and he’s asking for feedback via a video:


What do you think?

the submarines FAIL

Read from the bottom up:

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FAIL.

Incredible music video


There are no words to describe the awesomeness of this music video. With over 3000 pictures taken to make it work, it really is a damn well-executed concept.

Firefox Personas

I don’t usually try out Firefox themes. For ever i have used takebacktheweb.org‘s mac theme, but for some reason i decided to try out Personas. Perhaps because they aren’t themes as much as they are skins… this extension really customizes Firefox’s chrome, mostly by adding a background image to it, but im pretty happy with what it does, it goes well with my menubar.

the “persona” you’re looking at now is called Firefox Pipes.

Also, the website I have open is one of my latest designs.

Boxee

I have a long history of trying to use my computers as the sole entertainment center in my home (skipping a TV set completely) and I’m pretty happy with the way it’s worked out over the years, specially after FrontRow made it’s debut, but there’s still a lot of work to be done in this area. Ideally what I want is a rich full screen interface for my computer (kind of like the way game consoles let you do much more with TVs than simply watch a station), a piece of software allowing me to browse the web from my couch, to check my flickr contacts, watch streaming tv, you name it, I want to fully use my computer without sitting in front of a mouse and keyboard.Picture 73.png

Thankfully there is a very promising solution which already lets me do much of what I want, Boxee. A fork of what originally was XMBC (Xbox Media Center) has turned out to be pretty amazing. It’s a cross platform full screen interface for your computer (or tv via apple tv) which not only hooks up to the media stored in your hard drives but it connects to the cloud and let’s you access streaming video from torrents and television networks, music from last.fm, pictures from Flickr and basically anything you can find a feed for. It doesn’t do web browsing just yet, but I’m sure it will, soon enough.

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The software is free, there’s a great community around it and it keeps getting better every day. There’s not much else to say about it, it works great and is a dream come true for me and I’m sure many others.

Networking at events

Having attended interesting networking events recently, I completely agree with Vergel when he brings up the topic of how to properly network and shares some good tips everyone should follow if interested in really taking advantage of such meet ups.

It’s always hard knowing how to interact with people you don’t know but share common interests. I find it’s hard to really make long lasting impressions, which makes having memorable and useful business cards at hand really important.

I keep meeting people but it’s always so hard to stay in touch afterwards (except for when people are on twitter, which really should simply be a rule if you really want to build relationships and stay in touch).

I’m working on improving the way I handle myself amongst geeks like me, mostly because I really love it. The Toronto Twestival can’t come soon enough.

Polaroids

Poladroid is a great application for converting your digital photos into digital “polaroids” applying some filters and producing great results. I’ve fallen in love with the app and have used it on many of my photos, but there’s some which simply stand out because of what’s in the photo or the colours or what they represent for me as a whole; I’m sharing those with you:

Putting up wall decals:

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Some clutter:

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Downtown Toronto:

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Biking in august:

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Rocks, lake & volcano:

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Funny face:

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Panama city from Casco Viejo:

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This all makes me want to get an actual Polaroid camera.