Jason Dunn

Facebook and Ex’s

Facebook, and indeed all social networking sites, are fascinating from a sociological standpoint. I bet psychology and sociology researchers are drooling in anticipation to study and data-mine everything that’s going on with those sites. One thing that I quickly realized when Facebook started to explode was the issue of the Ex’s. As in, ex-girlfriends. Life is all about cycles, and for a while you might date a woman (in my case), be involved with her circle of friends and family, and then that cycle either becomes permanent (marriage) or it ends and you begin a new cycle with someone new. I’m generalizing of course, but that’s usually how it works.

Sites like Facebook take those cycles, throw them in a super-blender, and make it messy! Ashley (my wife) and I had this discussion early on when the first ex-girlfriend invited me to be her friend on Facebook. First, it shocked the hell out of me to see her name and photo in my Facebook Inbox – I hadn’t seen her in about eight years, so it was bizarre to have her appear in my life again (even in only a virtual way). Ashley and I talked about what would happen, and what could happen, if we accepted our ex’s back into our lives. We talked about what good could come of it (not a whole lot) and the dangers of it to our marriage (a whole lot). Ultimately this isn’t about thinking our marriage isn’t strong enough to handle either of us chatting with ex’s (it is), it’s more about avoiding risks that we don’t have a good reason to take – we live in a divorce-prone society, so why tempt fate by introducing such factors? It’s all too easy to bring back memories and feelings from the past, and that’s not a healthy thing for a marriage.

In case this wasn’t already obvious, the reason I’m writing this today is that I finally got around to sending messages to the two ex-girlfriends that had sent me requests on Facebook. The first one I declined several months ago without a reason (I felt kind of bad about that), and the second one was more recent, which prompted me to craft a response that I’ll now send to any ex-girlfriend that contacts me. And, no, I haven’t had that many girlfriends in my life, so I don’t expect to be sending it out all that often. 😉

What about you? How does this issue impact you?

Hey Bob Parsons: Leave My Browser Alone!

Dear Bob Parsons,

I like GoDaddy. I have many domains there. I like the company you’ve built. I like the GoDaddy branding, advertising, and general attitude. But, Mr. Parsons, what I really hate is how when I visit your blog/podcasting site you decided to have some code run that hijacks my browser and makes it go full screen. I may like your company, but I don’t think so highly of you that I want to see your blog filling the 1920 x 1200 pixels of my monitor. I have my browser window just the way I like it, in the place where I like it. What possible reason is there for you to mess with that? Please leave my browser window alone Mr. Parsons.

Sincerely,
Jason R. Dunn

PS – I would have contacted you directly and said this to you, but I couldn’t find any way of contacting you via your site. No email address, no feedback form, nothing.

Why Can’t Outlook be Smarter?

I have a hosted Exchange account as my main Inbox in Outlook 2007, and I have five other IMAP accounts. If I open up a new email message, and it’s going to someone (say, my wife) and I always email that person from that email account, why can’t Outlook figure that out and automatically select the sending account? It would save me hundreds of clicks a day if I didn’t have to click the Account drop-down menu, select the account I want to send it from, then click send. This would have the side benefit of automatically changing the reply-to address on the email you’re sending, which I know people with multiple email accounts would like to have. Come on Outlook team, are you listening?

Xbox Live Gamertags: Too Much Privacy

Something has always bugged me about the way Xbox Live deals with Gamertags: I think there’s too much privacy. I may be the first one in the history of the Internet to accuse Microsoft of protecting my privacy, but hear me out: on Xbox Live my original Gamertag, registered way back when I got my original Xbox, was Kensai. The original Xbox Live wasn’t good for anything other than head to head gaming, which I didn’t do much of, so I let it lapse. Along the way my credit card number and expiration date changed, so when I got my Xbox 360 and tried to activate my original Live account the system wouldn’t let me. I called in, and they informed me that due to privacy restrictions they were unable to let me have my old Gamertag, regardless of how I could prove that I was the same Jason Dunn that registered it. Gee-whiz, thanks for protecting me right out of my Gamertag, I really appreciate that.

Fast forward to today, and we have an over-done sense of privacy negatively impacting Xbox Live gameplay. How? By not allowing users to attach their real name to their Gamertags. Microsoft is so focused on the “cool” Gamertag experience where everyone uses a handle that they forget that Xbox Live is connecting real people, and sometimes real people like to use real names. On Xbox Live today my Gamertag is Tetsubo. What’s a Tetsubo (also known as a Kanabō) you might ask? It’s a big-ass iron-shod Japanese club meant for smacking people with, which is basically the way I play games (blunt force trauma). A quick look at my gamer score of 600 tells you that I don’t play game on the Xbox 360 that much, although I’ll point out that I think it’s lame that finishing a game like Gears of War on regular mode gets you a mere 110 points. That’s a rant for another day.

Back to the issue of privacy: because I’m unable to attach my real name to my Xbox Live profile, at least half the time when I add someone I know, I get a message back from them saying “Who’s this?”. My Tetsubo Gamertag doesn’t ring any bells with them, because it’s not attached to my real identity in any way. This was made especially evident when I installed the Xbox 360 update a couple of months ago and it integrated my Windows Messenger contact list, sending invites out to everyone on it that was also on Xbox Live. I received no less than six messages back from people asking who I was, and I had several people decline me outright – and these are people that I chat with online quite often, but they had no idea who this “Tetsubo” fellow was.

Why can’t Xbox Live allow people to attach their real names, making it optional of course, to allow people like myself who have no need to hide their identity behind a Gamertag? It’s great that the people behind Xbox Live want to protect my privacy by shielding my gaming identity from the world, but I should have the option of telling people who I am if I wish.

Guest Tech Internet Access: Surfing Like It’s 1989

[this is one of those posts I started writing months ago and never quite finished…whoops!]

See that upload speed? 14 kbps. That’s 14-friggin-kilobytes-per second. Let me put that into perspective for those that haven’t been on this earth long: people on dial-up modems generally connect at speeds around 50 kbps. The speed you’re seeing above, 14 kbps, is the kind of speed I saw with my 14,400 bps modem back in…well, it’s so far back I can’t recall. I’d have to guess and say around 1989 (give or take a year or two). And where did I discover such amazingly bad access speeds? Did I travel back in time to find a 14.4kbps modem? No, I stayed at a La Quinta hotel in Orlando, Florida. I was staying there on my own dime, and by myself, so I picked some place decent but cheap. They advertised free WiFi in all the rooms, and that combined with a clean bed is all I really need when I’m working (and I was down there for my CTIA 2007 gig).

The short version of this story is that the Internet access turned out to be a complete nightmare – when I could get connected it was at mostly pathetic speeds like you see above. I was on the phone with Guest Tech support at least once a day for each of the five days I was staying there for. Every time the technician would confirm my problem, try to fix it by remotely giving the hotel router a kick, and I’d usually get connected at a decent speed – at least for a while. You can imagine how frustrating it is to try and get work published online when you’re losing connectivity every few minutes. I don’t know whether it was the hotel not having a fast enough connection to support the number of hotel guests that were connected, or whether it was Guest Tech not providing a stable infrastructure, but whenever I see the name Guest Tech in my hotel room I shudder. The same thing happened when I was at the last MVP Summit – Guest Tech was providing Internet access at the hotel I was staying, and the Internet access was so slow it was useless…that’s if you were lucky enough to get an IP address. Guest Tech? You suck.

Live Action Iron Man Armour…Suuuweeeet!

This news got me smiling today! I was heavy into comic book collection from age 11 until I was around 18, but even when I stopped actively collecting I’ve remained a big fan of comics and still buy a few graphic novels or compilations every year. Comic book movies are more accessible to me than comic books are (it’s such a pain to track down every issue of a series unless you’re buying them from the start), and Iron Man is one movie I’ve been looking forward to seeing come to the screen for a long time. I’m hoping it will be the calibre of Spider-man and X-Men, and not the calibre of Electra or Ghost Rider (hey, I still own all of them). Of course, if I was really geeky, I’d buy one of these as well.

When Digital Re-Touching Goes Too Far

It’s not often that I see true abuse of a digital technology – technology is amoral; the people who use it are the ones who decide to use it for good or bad. This site that my brother sent to me is probably the worst thing of it’s type I’ve seen, and I think it falls into the realm of technology abuse: it’s one thing to retouch an adult model (we live in an ugly, shallow world), but to do that to a child goes too far in my opinion. Most adults have self-esteem problems about how they look, but your average child under the age of ten is likely blissfully unaware of how the world works when it comes to physical beauty, and that’s a good thing. I know very little about the world of beauty pageants, although if I combine what I saw in Little Miss Sunshine with what I intuit from this Web site, I’d say that parents putting their children through beauty pageants probably don’t realize the damage they’re doing to their children. I suspect they’ll be paying for it later with therapy bills or bail money.

Back to the digital retouching: look at the image below. The “child” on the right doesn’t even look human any more. This isn’t digital re-touching, this is digital re-construction. Everything that makes the child cute has been ripped away and replaced by a horrible digital mockery of beauty. Click through the samples to see more (this one is particularly awful).

Ultimately the “artist” doing this re-touching work is providing a service (and some of the work is perfectly reasonable), though I openly question her/his morals for offering to do this in the first place. The real blame here lies with the parents of the children for thinking that anything could explain why they’d take a picture of their child and let some digital hack take the natural beauty away and replace it with a synthetic, digital façade that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie than real life. This is just sad.

Nickelback and Daughty in Concert

On Thursday night I went and saw Nickelback play live (thanks for bringing me along Nate!), with Daughtry as the opening band (along with Puddle of Mud and a band from southern Alberta called State of Shock). We missed the first band (State of Shock), and caught the last few Puddle of Mud songs – they were ok, but nothing special. I was really excited about seeing Daughtry live, because I’m a big fan of his debut CD. I never watched him on American Idol, I just heard the first single and thought it was great. He didn’t disappoint – his band played for about 45 minutes or so, and put on a great show. Chris’ voice was superb, and the band was insanely tight – it was like listening to the CD, only better. About the only complaint I had was that it was so incredibly loud it was hard to appreciate the nuances they were tossing into the songs. I’d definitely see Daughtry again if they came back on their own tour. Nickelback was excellent as well – I caught them last year, and they always put on a good show. It does get very tiresome though to hear them talk non-stop about smoking pot and drinking beer though – nothing changed from their last concert. Musically they were great, and I was especially impressed with Ryan Peake, the guitarist in the band. His vocals were super tight – I never quite realized how often I was hearing him sing on the CD until watching him live and seeing him back Chad Kroeger’s vocals. He also sang lead on the song “Saturday Night” and rocked it out good.

I gambled and took along my small camera (Canon SD800) because the past couple of concerts I’ve been to I’ve seen countless people taking photos and videos, so the old “no cameras” rule doesn’t seem to apply any more. The tickets said “No Cameras” but after watching people around me at the show take picture after picture, with flash, I figured I’d give it a try myself. Not surprisingly, shooting a stage that varies between dimly lit and freakishly bright with a point and shoot 3x optical zoom camera is somewhat of a challenge. Here’s the best photo I could manage:

Yeah, exactly. I thought I’d have better luck with videos, so I ended up taking quite a few – but it was mostly in vain, because the microphone on the Canon SD800 can’t cope with extremely loud noises and most of what I recorded ended up being distorted audio mixed with vaguely musical sounds. Here are three clips that turned out somewhat decently: 50 seconds of a drum solo, a clip of the crowd really getting into the song “Too Bad”, and the big-pyro-explosion ending of the concert.

EDIT: It’s really pathetic that the latest version of WordPress still maims embedded video code. Don’t the developers USE their own product? I added links above since embedded the videos broke the template.

High Resolution Album Art Page Updated

I’ve had this page linked on up my blog for quite a while, but I’ve never actually posted about it. After updating it with 50+ new album covers that I scanned (there are now over 800 album covers), I figured it was time to give it some publicity. Here’s the write-up about it for those that haven’t visited the page before, and a warning: only do so if you have a fast Internet connection, the page is NOT bandwidth friendly at all (it’s 13 MB in size with all the thumbnails):

“Below you’ll find all of of CD covers from our music collection, including a few generic photos used for singles or indy artists that have no CDs for sale. Why did I want to do this? I really enjoy seeing the album art for my CDs, but I found the 200 x 200 pixel low-resolution, overly compressed junk that Windows Media Player included by default to be completely inadequate (ditto for the equally lame Zune software). I also found the Microsoft method of placing the album art in the music folder to be very short-sighted. When I moved songs to another computer, the songs themselves had no album art. And because FolderShare (a Windows Live service) makes all hidden files un-hidden when it syncs folders, I ended up with thousands of JPEG images scattered through my music folders. Since I often access my music via Windows Explorer rather than the ultra-slow library of Windows Media Player 10 (11 is much better at this), when I’d drag and drop the folder of music the now un-hidden JPEGs would come along for the ride and show up in my playlist and stop the music as they’d display. It was a complete mess. Embedding the JPG album art inside the audio file itself is a much more elegant solution, and it’s one that Microsoft should have implemented by now.

This time consuming project took nearly four months of work, and I couldn’t have completed it without the help of my wonderful wife Ashley (who did the bulk of the scanning). After scanning them at 300 dpi, we cropped and adjusted each of the album covers one by one. This process helped re-introduce me to my CD collection, reminding me of albums so bad I wonder why I purchased them, to albums that are so good I wonder why I stopped listening to them. This project was like looking at my own personal history with music (though I’d have to go back to the remnants of my cassette collection to get true scope).

Because neither Windows Media Player 10 nor 11 will shrink album art to fit the preview window, using the 1500 x 1500 (or thereabouts) pixel original file is impractical. It also causes some media players problems because the header of the file (where the JPEG is stored) becomes too large to process, and the audio file will not play. Thus, these 640 x 640 (or so) versions were exported using Picasa. These covers are the copyright of the respective artists and should only be used in conjunction with music that you legally own. The easiest way to embed the art inside the song itself is to use a tool such as MediaMonkey. I hope you enjoy using these album covers.“

I’ll probably update the page a couple times a year when I’ve bought at least 20 new CDs, so feel free to check back now and then.

I Survived Being a Wedding Photographer

Despite the fact that I was nervous as all hell the day of the wedding, I managed to pull off some decent wedding photos. I say “decent” because everyone else seems to think they’re great, but this is the benchmark I’m comparing myself to (they go to my church), so they’re just “decent” to me. But hey, it’s good to have a goal to shoot for, right? Someday I’ll be as good as Dave and Quin. 🙂 I had a hard time with the lighting, trying to control my flash + LightSphere combination, and the fact that the Catholic priest told me I could only take photos at four opportunities during the service, and I couldn’t move anywhere other than a 180 degree arc behind the bride and groom. Here are a few random photos from the wedding ceremony (and just before it).

(this photo was taken by Ashley – mad photo skillz are inherent to the Dunn household!)

Funny thing is, the outdoor wedding I turned down shooting (I was recording the video, those pictures were taken mostly by Ashley) would have probably been a cakewalk compared to shooting inside the church. My confidence as a wedding photographer was boosted by this whole experience, that’s for sure.

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