So if you buy one of these at the airport is there any music on it? Is it even fully charged?

They should come with a sampler? or an audiobook! That’d make for a good impulse buy…

‘iPod vending machine…‘ uploaded by garylapointe

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Okay, so this woman got hit by lightening while taking video of the storm.
Read the caption (and watch the original) at direct link.

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I really hope I can make it to TequilaCon 2009….

I’m sad I couldn’t go (again).

While I’m just home relaxing this weekend, last week was cRaZy, next week will be semi-crazy and I just went on vacation and I go again in June.

‘TQ08 Schwag‘ uploaded by Blogography

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It’s the little things like this that brighten my day

That and the fact it’s still running

‘88888‘ uploaded by garylapointe

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Unfortunately, they were closed. But I thought it was a funny name. This location isin East Lansing, Michigan.

They’re on-line at InsomniaCookies.com

‘Insomnia Cookies‘ uploaded by garylapointe

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I thought this was really interesting looking but I don’t know where it actually is. Does anyone have an idea? And I thought the photo came out pretty good too!

It’s along the path from Charlotte, NC, USA to San Jose, Costa Rica. It’s about 2 hours from landing time and at 500 miles/hour, and factoring in landing and disembarkation, I’m guessing it’s about 700-800 miles north(ish) from San Jose.

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So I just downloaded the AppleTV update called Take 2 (or is it Take2?). I wasn’t thrilled with the changes that I saw in the preview because I thought the interface was pretty great. But I’ll agree that some changes for the new interface was necessary.

Since you now can shop the whole iTunes store via the AppleTV something to surf around a larger library was necessary. They new sections fill up the cover art at a more than acceptable speed (my cable modem is 6000 down and 384 up) and it flowed pretty nicely. But a lot of the old interface is still around for the sub menus and it they really clash with each other. But I like the shopping on-line option, I’ll try it later just so I can see how well it works. I would have purchased last night’s Kyle XY episode but it wasn’t ready for download yet for some reason…

The amount of movies and music and TV is just a little overwhelming. There’s just so many options and you can scroll in so many directions! And all the album art just looks fantastic in large high quality images!!! They need a all you can watch or listen to with the music videos, pay a flat rate and go cRaZy for a few hours.

The podcasts are interesting, You can browse very nicely and you can view/stream but if the site is slow, you’re gonna wait a while for that hi-def video. You can select download and it’ll be there later for you. It’s strange that you can favorite a podcast, not to be confused with subscribing, but you can’t actually subscribe; this would be inconvenient if you don’t actually have a computer.

The new Flickr photo viewing works great, but I wish there was a way to view the descriptions or titles of the photos. And I wish there was a way to look at thumbnails; for example a person has 500 photos in a folder and there isn’t a way to jump around it just goes to slideshow mode. This never bothered me with my photos, but when looking at someone else’s it jumped right out at me….

Overall, it’s a great update in that it adds some great functionality. The new interface will grow on me (it’s not like I wouldn’t recommend it to someone). I just feel it’s missing some normal Apple consistency in the Human Interface Guidelines area…

I’m still missing a way to build a video playlist (or a video shuffle). I’ve got hours of video podcasts and I don’t have a way to string them together as my own private TV channel. I hadn’t heard about it or this release but it just seems like a natural outgrowth of the music playlist and/or shuffle.

The update took a while and had to reboot more than a few times installing all the features but seems like it worked just fine. I expect they’ll be a update soon to fix a few minor things, like the TV Genre of “Cops and Robberts”.

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Who cares!?! Unless you own stock in Yahoo, of course

Microsoft has nothing to offer Yahoo, IMHO, they’ve never been great with the internet (search, MSN, webTV, etc.) and that’s okay. Really, Bill, it’s okay. It really is.

I’m assuming Yahoo! will take the money and run, unless they’ve got a lot of debt, this is a nice chunk of change (and if they’ve got a lot of debt, this’ll pay it off).

I do worry about Flickr, Del.icio.us, the nice mobile web portals and whatever other sites that Yahoo owns. But at the end of the day, I think the ‘net will be okay and not have anything to worry about…I don’t really understand the concept of business at 44 billion dollars, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about but I promise I’d be a fast learner if anyone ever put me into into a situation where I would need to learn about it…

I just think about Guy Kawasaki and he must be really kicking himself for not taking Yahoo’s offer to be president way back in the day. Several years ago I saw him speak and he mentioned that tidbit after mentioning other people’s famous mistakes like “640k is all anyone will ever need”.

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I found this little project over at Hilly’s (SnackiePoo).

Let’s make a band:
1. The first article title HERE is the name of your band.
2. The last four words of the very last quote HERE Is the title of your album.
3. The third picture HERE, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Now take the pic, add the band name and title to it, then post it.
5. Be sure to leave a comment so that I can check out your album…

The title, “Asbestos Strike”, was not the first article I got, the first one was an actual music label but I decided not to use it in case that might upset them. The title of my album, “they had courage enough”, was from a quote by Thomas Fuller. And my photo came from here, I did square it up a little to make it fit.

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I’m SO excited!

I wasn’t expecting it for at least another week….

For more info, go to Laptop.org

‘I got my XO Laptop‘ uploaded by garylapointe

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So I’m always trying to adjust the date and time on my camera, making it fit the time zone I’m in / adjusting the time changes (DST) and it’s pretty much just turned into a pain to keep correct. I’m thinking of just using GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and then it’ll always be right and if I even need to know when I took a picture it’ll technically be right and I’ll be able to figure out the difference (if I need to).

I’ll have to test a few photos to Flickr and a few other places to see if they adjust or do anything to offset the time from where I say I am. Anyone who’s also been annoyed by this have any thoughts on the matter?

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Tori Amos was awesome! I really haven’t listened to her newer stuff very much but I really enjoyed the latest album when she played those songs. She played a lot of older songs, which is what I like.

I’ve seen Tori a few times, I’m guessing about a dozen times now, spaced out over the last 15 years. So by this time, not only do I know where to sit, my mother knows, she specifically asked me on the phone, “did you get a seat on the right-hand side?”, I’m surprised she remembered something like that. I did sit slightly to the right and before I went and I thought I needed to be a bit more to the right, but my seat was perfect! Plus, all the people sitting in my line of sight were short!

She’s always a little quirky, but she didn’t talk much so it was hard to tell. But after her first outfit change, she was halfway through the third song and she stopped, and asked the guys to continue to play, “I’ve gotta go take this corset off, it’s killing me”. They finished up the song as she came back out and she just went on to the next song

Yoav opened for her and her was great! Not sure how to describe him, but he was a good act, could have listened to him more. He had a short EP for $5, they really needed to have a seperate line for his CD at intermission (maybe a ca$h only line). Everyone ran out to get it and it was a disaster.

You can see more of my Tori Photos at flickr (they didn’t come out very well, but you can see the different stage setups). If you saw my photo of the ceiling of the theater, go back and look at it because I added some more info (and sort of link to some older photos).

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The ceiling of the beutiful Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan.

If you’d like some other images go to take a look at page 79 at Amazon (you must log in, sorry). And you can see a view of the chandelier from a different angle in 1928. And you can go back and forth around the surrounding pages to see more of the Fox.

I gotta say, my Treo 755p takes some great photos when there is enough light….

‘Fox Theater‘ uploaded by garylapointe

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This is just a test of a flickr format….

‘Brandi Carlile‘ uploaded by garylapointe

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I did get a chance to pose with Alison Sudol of A Fine Frenzy. I wish I had brought a real camera instead of just the phone

She was so nice to everyone and signed everything that was put in front of here. I was towards the end of the crowd and she was just wonderful to all of us!

I got a CD signed and some kind of booklet they were giving out. I got to shake her hand and of course I got the photo too!

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Brandi Carlile in Detroit

Originally uploaded by garylapointe

What an excellent show! You’re missing out if you’re a fan and didn’t make it!!

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A Fine Frenzy in Detroit

Originally uploaded by garylapointe

This is Alison Sudol from AFF at St. Andrews Hall.

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Touchdown! MSU Homecoming

Originally uploaded by garylapointe

So I drove up to MSU to meet some friends for homecoming and here we are at the game. It’s 7-0 right now…

Update: Final Score MSU wins 52-27!!

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My AppleTV is awesome! An “iPod for your TV” is a accurate description. I ran the software update (painless!) and it gave me YouTube videos and fixed “enhanced podcasts”.

It mirrors one of your computer’s iTunes just like an iPod does (and allows you exceptions) and will stream from any other computers running iTunes (platform independent) and I don’t think there is a limit. I can’t believe how fast it pulls hi-res movie previews from Apple down to the unit, it’s very very fast. It’s actually much faster than pulling down YouTube videos (many which are low-res).

It really streams full-scren video from other computers really efficiently. Very rarely does it need a moment to catch up. It has no problem with steaming audio. It almost makes no sense to download podcasts, I bet you could stream them live if you had a way to just get the RSS feeds onto the AppleTV.

With “enhanced podcasts” it now properly advances the embedded images to follow along with the audio. The problem is that it just shows them to the side like the album artwork, some images are much larger so it really cheats you by scaling them down. Since you don’t use the up/down keys on the remote during this process “up” would be a great way to enlarge the images.

I have the same image size concern when viewing slideshows with the “Ken Burns effect”, sometimes I want to view the whole image. Once again this would be another great use for the up button. The down button could be used for viewing filenames, date, time and other info about the images. Actually, this would be a good use for the down button while viewing videos or audio.

A few more features (like on the TiVo) like weather, movie listings and maybe Flickr photo viewing and it’d be even better…What I don’t like is that it only lets you sync with one computer. I’d like to sync music with one, videos with another and podcasts with another (not so sure if I care about the latter).

What I need:
1) A way to automatically convert videos and stick them into iTunes for me (so when I drop/download a file to a folder, it starts processing for me). I could probably do this via Mac or Windows….

2) A way to play other file formats on the AppleTV, such as AVI and DiVX files. I think I can hack it to do that but I’m not sure if I want to take it apart yet.

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Laura Veirs

Originally uploaded by garylapointe.

Laura Veirs at an excellent intimate show in Detroit at the Majic Stick. If you’re a fan and you didn’t come, you really missed out…

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