Archives for posts with tag: Technology

Sorry about that everyone. Sometimes I’m such a noob.

In my e-mail que this morning was an invite to reunion.com. It had been sent to me by an business associate. Being the Social Networking patsy that I am, I decided to go through the joining process. After registering, and avoiding the pay-to-play options, the website volunteered to search through it’s member database to see if any of my friends were already members. All I had to do was let it look at my g-mail address list. This seemed like a good idea at the time to my sleepy brain.

*sigh*

I unfortunately missed this little clause:

We’ll find your friends and family who are already members and also automatically invite any non-members to join (it’s free!).

I just failed the internet.

I also have a feeling that this “helpful feature” is going to create a lot of problems for reunion.com.

Update: as I expected the e-mails are beginning to flow into my inbox from folks who received the spam…

Play Money by Julian DibbellJulian Dibbell is going to be speaking at RIT this Wednesday. Julian, an associate editor at Wired, is an awesome guy and someone whose been involved in, and writing about, cyberculture for years. His latest work, Play Money, is an exploration of the various economic systems that have developed in various virtual spaces. At RIT he’ll be speaking on “Ludocapitalism – A few ways of making real money from a virtual economy, and what they mean.”

I first met while at the University of Chicago. Julian’s input was really helpful for me while writing my thesis. We touched base again late last year at the American Anthropological Association Conference. Again, I got a lot out of the conversation. So if you’ve got the chance, come out and hear him speak.

Here are the official details:

    Julian Dibbell

  • Topic: Ludocapitalism – A few ways of making real money from a virtual economy, and what they mean
  • Time: 7:30pm (the talk will be followed by open q&a time from 8:30-9)
  • Location: Liberal Arts (Bld 6), Room A205

I’ve been testing the new WordPress interface for a while and just think it’s da bombiest! The user interface is clean, the new functions rock, and the .php seems pretty optimized (everything running faster, even on my slow server).

It’s amazing to think that I’m already done with the first three weeks of my final quarter at RIT. It’s been intense — and the reason that I’ve not been blogging. By the end of this coming week, I’ll be able to premier all the stuff that I’ve been working on.

Following up on the PictLens posting, I have two other cool bits of photo tech (admittedly the photos that you’ll see are not the best). First I give you a snowy RIT night:

A test of GPS tagging of an image on a Titan PPC
What makes this unique is not what you can see, but what’s buried in the metadata:

Latitude: N 43° 5′ 16.844″
Longitude: W 77° 40′ 36.637″

This photo was take by my phone (which now has an active GPS chip in it thanks to the excellent work of others) and my coordinates were then encoded into it’s .EXIF file header and uploaded directly from the phone to Flickr. The only thing that currently stinks in this process is that Flickr didn’t recognize the GPS data when I attempted to place this picture on my map.

Here’s the second picture:

The most technologically advanced penguin on the web (Eye.Fi test 1)

Alberto here is noteworthy because of the workflow that got him to Flickr. This picture was shot using my Kodak V705 and uploaded directly to Flickr thanks to the Eye-Fi Smart Media (SD/SSHD) card inside of it. Function both as memory and as a wireless modem, the Eye-Fi card routed the picture, via our home WiFi network, to the Eye-Fi site, and then pushed copies both to Flickr and the hard drive of the laptop I’m presently working on.

Both of these technologies have some interesting implications and tie into things that I’m working on at RIT, but I can’t quite talk about just yet. Soon though. Real soon.

PicLens version of my flickr site

My office mate just introduced me to the PicLens web browser plug-in. It’s pretty incredible. This cross platform plug in can grab a collection of photos, like those in my flickr account above, and converts them into an interactive (Apple aesthetic) gallery. The resulting user experience is elegant and totally engaging. Give it a try!