Author: Jason Dunn

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

wolverine-legends

I’ve been a big fan of the X-Men since I was in my early teens, collecting several variations of the X-Men comics for about a decade. I no longer actively follow the comic books, but I remain a big kid at heart where comic book super heroes are concerned. On May 1st, X-Men Origins: Wolverine comes out, and they’ve just released the trailer for it. One word: awesome! I’m tempted to go to the IMDB listing and see who’s in the movie – the characters I mean – but I want to be surprised. Gambit is in the trailer, but beyond that I was unable to identify the other heroes and villans (I think that big guy is supposed to be The Blob). May can’t come soon enough!

A Whole New Jason Dunn I Was Mistaken For

Normally, the only Jason Dunn I’m mistaken for in the online world is this singer guy. Well, last night I had an all-new case of mistaken identity: I was watching The Ultimate Fighter Ultimate Finale with a friend, which we were watching on the Xbox 360 via the Windows Media Center UI (man I love that!) and I received an invitation to a “photo party” from a contact that I had approved earlier that day via the Zune software. Confused yet? Yeah, it’s kind of messy. The Xbox 360 and Zune avatar/handle system does such a good job of protecting user identify, I usually have no clue who I’m adding to my buddy list – I always assume it’s someone that I know, and eventually I’ll discover who.

I ignored the “party” request from this person, and after we finished watching the show I noticed I had a new message. I listened to it, and laughed: it was a message from someone I didn’t know, who was complimenting me on my great tattoo work. Now while I do like my one and only tattoo, it’s not particularly impressive from a design standpoint (and in fact needs filling in because it has some gaps), so I was kind of confused. I listened to the message again, and realized that he was talking about tattoos, as in plural.

Then the pieces fell together: he thought I was this Jason Dunn, a very talented tattoo artist. Jason Clay Dunn also happens to have a particular talented for Japanese-themed tattoos, which I find interesting considering my own passion for certain aspects of Japanese culture. I’m still pondering my next tattoos – the Kanji on my back was just a test – but wouldn’t it be cool to be tattooed by my namesake? There’s a certain synergy there that I find appealing.

At any rate, I wish people would grasp the concept that in our vastly interconnected world, there’s nothing particularly unique about a name. Everyone’s identity is multi-faceted, and just because you find the person with the name you’re looking for doesn’t mean you’ve found the right person. What’s really amusing about this whole thing is that Jason Clay Dunn is more connected with social media than I am: he’s on Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and two ink Web sites.

And so the world of Jason Dunn’s continue to broaden – I used to think all I had to do was out-last the career of a NFL player and a rock singer, but I doubt this pottery guy and this artist guy are going anywhere soon. 😉

A Sobering Video About the US Economy

I don’t pretend to know much about the policies of Ron Paul – I’ve heard both good and bad things about him – but when it comes to the economy, his words ring true to me. This video, which liberally quotes his words, seems almost prophetic when you look at where things are at right now.

Finally Home For a While

What a whirlwind the past couple of weeks have been! While in Mexico on vacation for a week (photos still being processed, sorry Rafe!) I managed to catch a cold, likely from someone on the airplane. I had three days of enjoyable vacation followed by four days of a chest cold that brought with it a lot of coughing and hacking. The cold quickly moved into my head of course, then I became that guy you see in warm paradise locations blowing his nose as if he were in a freezing climate. Let me tell you, that sucked. Of course, it did mean that I wasn’t up for much more than sitting by the pool and relaxing, which was the whole point of this vacation, so it wasn’t all bad. But it was mostly bad when I then caught some sort of a stomach flu bug from Ashley in the latter part of our week-long vacation.

After getting back from Mexico and being with with a cold and minor flu, I spent most of the weekend holed up watching movies. Then last Monday I had to get on a plane again and fly down to Seattle for the fall Mobius 2008 event, cold and flu still in full effect. I had lots of fun there, but definitely wasn’t on my game – not eating anything but dinners will do that to you. I’d eat dinner each night to see if my stomach was back to normal, but it never was, and we all know how that goes. Mobius ended on Wednesday night, and that night I was coughing so hard I had trouble breathing (with thoughts of the expensive American health care system running through my head), so I got in a cab at midnight and went to the nearest 24/7 pharmacy to get some meds. I managed to make it home, where I promptly collapsed into the fetal position and tried to coax my immune system into functioning. The combination of a cold and flu is frustrating, because when I’m not eating on account of my stomach, my immune system is being starved of the fuel it needs to fight the cold. It was just ugly.

Monday of this week was the first day I felt like I had any energy, so I’m now in the process of digging myself out of two weeks of backed-up email and work. The thing I hate most about going away on holiday is the work that piles up when I’m gone. There’s so much to do, and we all know how productive the week leading up to Christmas is (as in, not very). But I’m on the mend, and so glad to be home – even if home is a cold, frozen wasteland at the moment.

Star Trek Trailer: Sweet Mother of Gorn!

I don’t know how I managed to miss this, but the new, and first real movie trailer, for the new Star Trek movie is up over on Apple.com. I just watched the 720p version a couple of times, and it looks freakin’ amazing! I still have some lingering fears over this movie, and what it means for the Star Trek franchise as a whole, but if the movie is as entertaining as the trailer, it should be a great movie (boy, have I said that a lot of times in the past!). I’ve never watched Lost, but I think Fringe is mighty good, so I have hopes that ol’ JJ Abrams can pull this off…we’ll see.

People Like Us Who Don’t Yet Have Children Take Pictures Like This Of Their Pets

Japan 2008: Japan Day 13 & 14

It was almost time to go home by the time we were on day 13 in Japan, so we wanted to make this a special day by going to an aquarium we had read was world-class. We spent a bit of time in the morning walking around the area, which included an animal petting zoo of sorts. After that, we walked over to the Okinawa Kaigan Quasi-National Park, which didn’t seem like much of a park, but it did have a lighthouse that we climbed to the top of. We spent the afternoon at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, where I enjoyed shooting some amazing sea creatures. This was our last day in Japan…then we went home. Quite the adventure!

Calgary City Police: Out For Lunch?

On Thursday I spent a good portion of my day driving around getting estimates to fix my car, and because the damage was over $1000 (when isn’t it?), I have to get a police damage sticker before any auto body shop can repair it for me. Looks like it’s going to cost me about $1500 for the repair, which isn’t as bad as I’d feared. Since I was out and about I figured I’d get the damage sticker thing finished as well – and the above photo is what I saw when I went to my local police station. Out for lunch. Really? If my local dentist has enough staff to work over lunch, why can’t the police? Or maybe this is a way of indicating they need more funding? Either way, it’s kind of ridiculous when essential services like the police shut down over lunch…

MSNBC Article on “Facebook Friends”

“Andrea Smith recently received a Facebook friend invitation from someone she went to junior high school with – 23 years ago. “I found it kind of baffling,” said Smith, 38, of Ypsilanti, Mich. “I knew who she was, but I don’t recall that we were ever friends. I don’t recall that we ever had a conversation.” Social networking sites such as Facebook have experienced phenomenal growth in the past year, according to market researcher comScore. Facebook is now the No. 1 social networking site, with more than 120 million active users, and its fastest growing demographic is those 25 and older.”

This is a great article because it touches on the radical way the term “friend” has been re-defined by social networking. Although I’m sure there are exceptions, where long-lost friends have re-connected after losing tough, I think the vast majority social networking promotes a distored view of what the term “friend” really means – and it forces to the surface social “facts of life” that are otherwise buried though seperation of time and physical space. In the real world (“meatspace”), if someone calls you one or two times, and you don’t call them back, that’s a social signal that they probably shouldn’t keep trying to communicate with you. Most people get that. Yet somehow on social networking sites, there are people that will make repeated friend requests, or re-invite you as a friend after you remove them.

Somehow the social norms we pick up over our lives get thrown out the window when it comes to social networking sites…I wonder why we think the rules don’t apply? Or maybe that’s not the issue – maybe it’s more an issue of distored views of importance. Maybe with social networking sites making it so easy to be “friends” with people, we assume that everyone we want to be friends with wants to be friends with us? I find this topic endlessly fascinating, and I haven’t even mentioned ex-girlfriends yet… 😉

MotionBox Video Tests

I signed up for an premium account with MotionBox, a video hosting service, because I finally got fed up with YouTube’s very lame 4:3 aspect ratio video player – it just really sucks for 16:9 video. This is a test post I’m doing so I can compare a few different versions of the same video to check out how to best optimize the content I’m creating. You can probably ignore this post unless you’re keen on video encoding and embedding. 😉

First up, here’s what my uploaded h.264 1920 x 1080i 9mbps video looks like (yeah, it was a big upload, 617 MB, but they accepted it without a glitch) with their standard HD embed code:

This is the same source video, only with their standard definition (SD) embed code:

Continue reading MotionBox Video Tests