When I think of Casio, I think mainly of the dorky calculator watches which kept all women a safe distance from me during my teenage years. “Kryptomack” watches are what we call them now.
So when I first heard about the Casio EX-Z750 digital camera, I naturally assumed it was some low-end throwaway device trying to fill the void between the VGA cameraphone and the high-end digital SLR.
Oh my was I wrong. Casio is back, baby. In a big way.
I picked up one of these babies for $379 about a week ago after reading reviews here, here, and here, and I have to say that in my opinion, this is the best all-around camera on the market. I won’t go over every single aspect of the camera since the reviews above are quite comprehensive in that regard, but allow me to spell out my top five raves:
Talk is cheap, so I’ll close with a photo sample and a video sample, taken yesterday on a bike ride to Pike Place Market. Pardon the shaky hands on the video please… I just had a mocha and was holding the camera with one hand.
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Did you know Bigfoot carried an iPod Shuffle? I didn’t. But thanks to Craig “Trailhead” Grunemeyer of Sparta, New Jersey, we now have video evidence to the contrary. Craig’s Bigfoot video is the winner of the Mike Industries “Great iPods in History” competition, overtaking the rest of the field with a combination of original concept and fitting execution. I will be shipping Craig his iPod Shuffle this week, and thanks to the generosity of Dennis Lloyd and iPodLounge.com, Craig will also receive a pair of top-of-the-line $150 Etymotic ER-6i earbuds and a sport case for his new Shuffle.
With almost 300 entries in this month’s competition, judging was particularly difficult, but in the end, the combination of Craig’s Bigfoot video along with his Iwo Jima photo (pictured below as the first piece in the honor roll slideshow) was enough to set him above the rest. The Iwo Jima photo itself was arguably the best photo entry submitted as well.
If I could award multiple Shuffles, I would, but I can’t, so the best I can do for everyone else is include what I believe to be the top 75 entries in the honor roll slideshow below. The first 15 are my top 15, ranked accordingly, and the last 60 appear in order of submission.
I also want to give special mention to a few of the entries that I think deserve special praise:
For the better part of the contest (and before Craig’s entries came in), I had almost already decided who the winner would be. Entry #111, submitted by Tommy Perez, hung on my screen for days. It was a depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but the subtle introduction of an iPod Shuffle into the scene in a non-obvious location transformed it from a statement about the way things were 2000 years ago to the way things are today. Here Jesus is, bleeding to death in one of the most important events in world history while detached warrior guy just sits there on the steps listening to Styx. If that’s not a statement about the effect iPods are having on our society, I don’t know what is. * Note: I’m not at all religious, so please no comments about how I’m belittling the plight of Jesus.
The second bit of kudos goes to Tomasz “Jarv” Dobrowolski of Poland who gets the award for best Photoshop skills. Tomasz’s Beethoven, Einstein, and JFK entries were all top-of-class in terms of execution and deserve special praise for their composition.
And finally, the “outside the box” award goes to Matthew Joiner for his “iPod Shuffleography” featuring the likes of Norman Rockwell, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry David Thoreau. Matthew’s mini site, created especially for this competition, is an exercise in creativity and deserves a heaping portion of compliments for its originality.
So anyway, enjoy the slideshow, and stay tuned for the next competition which will begin around the middle of this month (and every month until the end of the year). And remember, of course, that the submission pool for iPod Giveaway ideas is also open until the end of the year. If your idea is chosen, you win an iPod Shuffle.
And last but not least, thanks to Victor Paru of Intel for coming up with this month’s competition.
Possibly useful thoughts collected throughout May:
Sorry about the point release, but we had a tiny regression bug between RC4 and 2.0 which was only noticeable under rare circumstances in old versions of Mozilla. It is now fixed, and the update, as usual, requires only the swapping of your sifr.js file. Head over to the Official sIFR Landing Page for the download.
I’ve always loved Mike Doughty’s lyrics and vocals but could never figure out what I didn’t quite like about his former group Soul Coughing. Now I know. The rest of the band. I went to Doughty’s show in Seattle earlier this month, and it blew me away. Usually when singers leave bands to go solo, they get worse, but Doughty has not only gotten better as a singer, he’s a better songwriter as well. More soul, less coughing, as one magazine puts it. The guy loves touring too. Before the Seattle show, he stood on the streetcorner outside the club with his acoustic guitar taking requests from fans and cracking John Curley jokes. I’ve never seen anything like it. Oh, and not only does the man play for free on streetcorners, but he’s a Movable Type user as well. How can you not love that? *Note to Doughty’s IT guy: The man gives you music. Please get him onto MT 3 or WordPress already.
Their latest album “Picaresque” is my Album of the Year so far. The band’s previous release “Her Majesty the Decemberists” never did a lot for me, but this effort is epic. Long live folksy pirate music.
Croftie may not like live music but I do. As a result, I’ve found myself downloading a ton of shows lately off of Archive.org. It’s a bit frustrating that most shows are only available in lossless (see: overkill) formats like SHN and FLAC, but you can convert these to MP3s with a program like xACT. Can someone please point me in the direction of an app which automatically tags your converted MP3 files from a playlist file or something? Manually entering song info for each track you download is a pain and a half. Is there an AppleScript perhaps (or Automator workflow maybe?) which will convert an entire folder of FLAC/SHN files to MP3 and then tag them? That would be of incredible use.
If anyone is in the market for a good city bike, I just picked up a Marin Fairfax and I love it. Hybrid bikes are usually either heavy, ugly, or both, but this thing is only slightly heavier than a road bike and made of brushed aluminum and carbon fiber. I got mine for $599 at a local shop, but you can get the 2004 model for $329 online at REI if you don’t mind different components and a few other details.
Thank god the end of good TV season coincides with the beginning of summer. This year, we had some great reality shows and some dud dramas. Survivor made a strong comeback from last year’s miserable season proving that it’s still the king of all reality shows. The Apprentice was entertaining, if not much better than the previous two seasons, and finally The Donald hired someone who isn’t a white male. Surreal Life was its normal entertaining self, making you embarrassed to be a human being, in a good way. And the newcomer, The Contender, proved to be a great addition to Mark Burnett’s lineup, despite Sylvester Stallone’s and Sugar Ray Leonard’s complete incompetence as hosts. On the flip side, I’m sad to say that the hitherto spectacular show 24 appears to be on its last legs. This season went south after about the 8th episode when the plot climaxed prematurely, the most interesting characters were killed off, and the least interesting (a.k.a. Tony Almeida) were brought back. The most pathetic episode saw mild-mannered Chloe O’Brien wielding a machine gun and shooting up a Jeep. Ummm, yeah. Time to put this show to rest. Quit while you’re ahead Fox. Somehow I don’t think they’ll listen to me, and somehow I’m sure I’ll still watch season five.
Haagen Dazs Crème Brûlée. I can’t believe it took this long to invent this flavor… or maybe it just took me this long to find out about it.
I’m not too concerned with getting off of coffee, but if you’re looking to kick your Coke and Pepsi habit instead, I highly recommend replacing your thirst for fizz with high quality mineral water. I didn’t drink mineral water for the first 20-something years of my life, but I’ve really taken a liking to it lately and have been virtually pop-free for about six months now. I recommend San Pellegrino especially if you’re new to the stuff. It’s a lot milder on the fizz than most other brands.
Just a quick note to let all Mike Industries readers know that the Walt Disney Internet Group is looking to fill over 80 positions in our North Hollywood and Seattle offices right now. These are mostly technical positions ranging from the creative side of things to the engineering side of things, and I can tell you from the over four years I’ve worked here that it’s a great place to get your groove on.
To list every position available in this blog entry would take quite some time, but just in the Seattle office, I know we’re looking for engineers, technical producers, designers, managers, Java people, SQL people, project managers, and a handful of other positions. The North Hollywood office has other openings as well.
If you’re a talented, motivated person who is interested in working for Disney, please check out the Walt Disney Internet Group job site and submit your information through there, or also feel free to send me your stuff through “disneyjobs at mikeindustries.com”. I’m not sure every opening is listed on the WDIG Jobs Site so if you’re a talented web professional, send us your stuff and we’ll try and see if there’s a fit.
UPDATE: If you’re interested in WDIG jobs out of the Orlando office, there are some openings there as well.
Picked up by the New York Times, Toronto Star, San Jose Mercury News, Kottke.org, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and Popular Mechanics among others, the first installment of the Mike Industries iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition was a bigger-than-expected hullaballoo. Thanks again to all who entered.
For the second installment, we’re going with a nostaglic theme: Great iPods in History. As is the case with all of these competitions, the person who suggested the theme will win one iPod Shuffle, and the person who wins the actual contest will take home the other (suggestion pool still open through the end of the year). Congratulations to “Getmeparu” for suggesting this contest… as soon as I figure out who you are, a Shuffle will be forthcoming.
As is illustrated by the slightly modified 1945 Alfred Eisenstadt photo to the left, the aim of this contest is to place an iPod Shuffle into notable historical context. You can modify famous photos, upload audio narratives, shoot video, or even design a mini-site. I expect most of the entries to be altered photos, which works well for this particular contest, but I just wanted to remind everyone that rules can always be broken. You are free to submit anything you like, as long as it’s yours and it was created specifically for this contest.
This contest, along with the remaining seven, will run for two weeks. The deadline for entries is midnight, May 31st.
Submission rules are as follows, and cannot be broken:
<img src="yourimage.jpg" />
tag to enter it into the comments section below. Please also keep your filesizes reasonable (as small as possible, but definitely under 80k or so).Good luck!
UPDATE #2: Maybe the big red exclamation mark will help here — all images must be EXACTLY 418 pixels tall by 418 pixels wide. Not 418×200. Not 500×500. It is not a “maximum width”. 418×418 please. The management thanks you.
UPDATE #3: iPodLounge.com has just offered to send a pair of $150 Etymotic ER-6i earbuds and a sportcase to the eventual winner. Thanks iPodLounge!
What is a musical baton?
I don’t know, but my beard idol Rob Weychert and my Google-juice idol Keith Robinson just passed me one. I will now waive it over my head and tell you all sorts of things you never asked about!
18.05 GB… Mostly from actual pressed CDs
“The Runaway Found” by The Veils
“Mojo Pin” by Jeff Buckley
* Honorable mention: Any of Inman’s favorites from the “Video Game Beeping” genre.
Have you noticed me bugging you a lot over Instant Messenger these days? If so, you’re not alone. Over the last two weeks, I’ve finally discovered something hundreds of thousands of Mac users already know about: Adium.
Adium is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client which lets you connect to all of your peeps on MSN, iChat, AOL, Yahoo, Jabber, and a few others. I’d tried Adium in the past but found it too riddled with bugs and incompatibilities for everyday use, but I’m happy to report that as of version 0.81 (can I get a 1.0 please? have some confidence in your product!), Adium is most clearly the best instant messaging client in existence, and dare I say, one of the nicest pieces of software I’ve ever used.
I tend to judge software on its details. Most programs these days can do the big tasks correctly, or else no one would use them, but the true test of a great app is how it handles the little things. How does it look on screen? How does it react to certain clicks and drags? How does it alert you? How customizable is it? These are the very things Adium excels at. Here are some particularly nice examples:
All in all, I only have two complaints about Adium:
If you’d like to give Adium a try, here are some links to get you going. Everything is free of course:
He entered early. He entered often. He is Davin Risk, master food sculptor and photographer from Toronto, Canada, and he is the winner of the Mike Industries “Make a Meatspace Shuffle” creativity competition.
Davin’s first entry, made entirely of goat butter, arrived only hours after the contest began and set the pace for a field of over 40 excellent “interpretations of iPod Shuffle as food”. Davin followed up his well received goat butter creation with a Parsnip Shuffle, a Tofu Shuffle, and the eventual winner: The Banana/Apple/Spaghetti Shuffle (shown above as the first piece in our honor roll slideshow).
Davin’s winning entry was both creatively assembled and brilliantly photographed, which helped it withstand the onslaught of entries throughout April. Stephen Lodefink’s Spam Shuffle garnered the most attention around the web and gave Davin a run for his money, but the toughest test came only 90 minutes before the contest closed when iPod case designer extraordinaire Nikki Sevcik submitted her tantalizing “Morning Shuffle”, consisting of a frothy espresso drink, chocolate covered strawberry, and exquisitely placed “Shuffle wafer”. Nikki’s entry is the second in the slideshow.
The Mike Industries staff (me) thought long and hard about how to pick the winner, but in the end, there was no perfect solution. At least 12 entries were award-worthy, but since Davin had four of them, his food sculpting prowess was the most clearly established of all the contestants.
I’ve provided an honor roll of 20 of the most worthy entries above and I thank everyone for participating in this first of 9 contests. Besides the first two slides, the honor roll is in no particular order. Enjoy.
Thanks also to Jason Anderson for concocting the first competition. His baby boy is already enjoying his Shuffle. Remember, the submission pool is open until the end of the year.
And finally, although I can’t award a second place prize, I’m happy to point readers in the direction of Nikki’s portfolio of custom iPod cases. They’re one of a kind.
So the New York Times is looking for a Design Director to lead the redesign of their flagship site, nytimes.com. Wow. Talk about a dream position.
If I didn’t love Seattle and what I’m doing right now so much, I’d be talking to them in a heartbeat. A chance to lead one of the world’s all-time most respected newspapers in an all-encompassing redesign and live in of one of the greatest cities on earth? What more could one ask for?
If you or anyone you know fits the bill, head on over to the Times job site (direct job link here) and check it out. We need more good people running more major news organizations’ web sites these days.
Hat Tip: Mark Hurst of Good Experience
It’s released! A long effort of several months is finally complete. sIFR 2.0 is here.
I’m all worn out from writing the official sIFR landing page so I’m going to keep this entry short, but I’ll just say that this release is the realization of everything we’ve always strived for in sIFR: rich, accessible typography for the masses with no pitfalls under any reasonable browsing conditions.
Release Candidate 4 was pretty solid, but this final release adds two improvements to the already rich feature set: the ability to show browser text while Flash text is loading (if desired) and graceful degradation to HTML text if users have FlashBlock installed. We’re particularly jazzed about working through the FlashBlock issue because it was the only circumstance where we felt sIFR wasn’t degrading perfectly, but thanks to the FlashBlock folks’ willingness to work with us and upgrade the FlashBlock extension, all is good in Flash-blocking land now. :)
I’d like to give a final thank you to the following people for the following reasons:
Alright, now go check it out already!
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