New(ish) 9/11 Pictures

I came across new images that were released from a Freedom of Information Act request on a random blog.  The images are interesting/scary.  Find them all here.

Video Trials with Phone

So there are a few options with my phone and I am trying to figure out what works best, so I can get everything in line for the first video project due this week.  I have started downloading Adobe Premiere and played a bit in Microsoft Expression Encode and Windows Movie Maker (2010 beta).

I thought for fun I could do a simple spoof of a MTV Cribs episode and air where I live as a practice project.  This is already looking to be an interesting problem.

I started by looking at the web for an episode to compare my visions of the project to and found this episode. I immediately had conflicts and learned the value of those second by second timelines we were doing in class.  I underestimated how important multiple shots of the same thing would be.  I also saw how the interviewee (is that the appropriate word) could be used as the voice over (and be better than the voice over I was imagining I’d do).  I shot some video and later decided it was not worth using.  I took one long shot which was a tour of my (dirty) apartment and found that it was really boring and a voice over to that would also be very boring.  What I needed was someone to take us from room to room and I couldn’t do that alone and didn’t feel that it was worth bothering my roommates to show us around.  I didn’t finish what I originally thought was cool, but I did learn a lot from just playing around with things.  BTW: You can never pan too slowly and it always looks shakier when you play it back than when you record it…

Here is some footage of a pan of my room in the various formats.  I was trying to figure out what worked best for motion, had highest FPS and quality.

(UPDATE: I know its hard to see a difference through YouTube… but I guess it is still good to have the evidence of what the different settings gave me.  Also, for those who are wondering, I did not have to convert any video files or worry about codecs, my phone produced .3gs files and apparently all the programs I used had no problem with them)

720p-MPEG4

WVGA–MPEG4

WVGA-H.264

Cool Volvo Technology

It is cool what technology has done for us and is capable to do.  Maybe if every car had the pedestrian avoidance systems that new Volvo's are going to have, we'd not need the crossing guards for Purdue's campus.  I also think CNET did really well at presenting the information... granted, they have a nice budget for it.

"You Lie!"

We have talked in class about how the mood/decorum in Washington has been changing over the recent years and one of the moments that I think about when talking about this change in when Representative Joe Wilson shouted "You Lie!" during a joint address of Congress from President Obama.  This clip is about Alex Isenstadt commenting on the event a week after it happened.

Personally, I find it more interesting what happened after this event and how similar it is to how the public has been responding to the Sex Position Exponent incident (to which I cannot comment about online).  Sure Wilson interrupted a speech.  It may or may not have been a good idea to do so.  But this became a national topic for the next week or two.  It is something that I feel the media inflated and that common American's don't really care too much about.  It is what I like to think of as a bias story, meaning that a news agency chooses to focus on this event just so they can be given some room to analyze and add their own bias to it.  The news should have been "Joe Wilson yelled 'you lie' in the middle of the President's speech" and thats it.  But it wasn't like this at all.  The media kept focusing on it and called on other Representatives to denounce him and demanded him to apologize, which all eventually happened.  When this happened and I watched the media make a small issue into a huge ongoing story, it made me think that they might be getting out of touch with what really matters.  But in the end, news stations need to make money, which is done by viewer numbers, and conflict does bring more people to watch the drama.

Playing with Video on my Phone

http://qik.com/video/10400284 [WARNING: CATS]

This is the first attempt I ever had at creating a video the day I got my phone.  It is sad the quality is bad using the Qik application, because the phone has a 8MP camera and is capable of much more.  I now use the built in camera application for more HD videos.

CS Job Fair

Flickr Album Here

So it's been a really busy week and it was compounded by this job fair I went to.  The computer science department puts on a CS-only career fair which is held one night before industrial roundtable.  Its really nice for us and it limits the time we have to wait in lines for IR.  I got to talk to a few companies, including Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Beckman Coulter and Aprimo.  All the companies sounded like great places to work and I got some really nice swag from the event.  I have a Cisco (really nice) bag, a Microsoft Frisbee, an Intel insulated cup, fun shish toys from Beckman and much more.  Hopefully I'll get a callback from someone wanting an interview, usually they pay a lot more attention to full time applicants.  Strangely I didn't see Garmin at the fair, nor at IR... I am wondering what happened and can only guess.  I am still waiting for a possible offer from them, but this doesn't make me feel any better about the situation.  Hopefully after the next few days of tests, papers and projects (yes, multiple of each), plus my applications for the companies and, of course, my Exponent work, I will get to relax and update this blog more often :-)

Class Today

[forewarning: overcaffeinated and underslept]

We talked about social networks and privacy today in class. I left feeling like people in general have animosity to electronics.  Many people talked about how they selectively choose what to put on their Facebook, how they destroy information about them and are genuinely afraid of companies knowing about them.  I have wondered and thought about this since then and come to a few thoughts related to the matter.

First off, why is it alarming that companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook store information about you.  Think about it.  If you visit a Chinese restaurant often, they might start to get to know you and know what you order.  The next time you visit, they might try to recommend something to you.  If this happens to me, I am usually grateful that they took the time to try and suggest something, leading me to a greater marginal utility for my money.  I was not compelled to buy anything and I could have ignored the request, but I couldn't help it that the worker at the store started getting a sense of his/her customer.  It is good business to know your customer.  How is this any different than Google?  Sure they might know I am a male, living in West Lafayette, around 22 years old and into electronics.... but why is that bad to have them know.  They use it to target ads towards me... things that might actually be relevant to my interests.  Would I rather see other ads?  I fail to see what harm there is in Google knowing some general information about you.  Even if you take the most extreme example of privacy concern, Facebook, I don't see what there is to fear in allowing Mark Zuckerberg to know I love eating the general tso's tofu at rice cafe.  Even if I could tell every person in world, ever possible enemy I have information like that... how could they possibly use that against me?  The only thing I can put together is that people have a fear of big and complicated machines, like Facebook.  Maybe we all have seen too many sci-fi horror style movies, like Terminator.  We have to remember that in the end, we are talking to people.  Is there really anyone in the world that could hurt you if you put [insert something] on Facebook.  Even if they could, is there any reason somebody would want to, out of everyone else on Facebook?  I think with Facebook being the 3rd largest country in the world, there would be more crime if a threat actually existed... people would have exploited it by now.  Even if this becomes a problem, it would be in Facebook's best interests to fix it or face possible losses of customers.  I think the threat of being struck by lightning is a greater threat to you than being exploited because of a privacy concern on Facebook.

The Exponent 2.0

@Zoë

Here are a few idea's about possible projects I would like to pursue with the new wave of technologies at the awesome Purdue Exponent.  They are just idea's and since I haven't been able to directly view the actual site yet or it's back end, I am not entirely sure how feasible some of these are, but I put down the most feasible ones in my best guesses to what we'll be able to do.

For starters, we need a rich and interactive experience with media on our website.  I would like to create a suite of silverlight (like flash, but better, works on windows and mac) components for our website that would allow us to create interactive graphs, charts, maps, statistics, photo galleries, etc... Instead of making a custom made flash component for each story, which is what I think people were thinking our web team might do (since it follows the graphics job model for stories), I was hoping to make reusable components.  I was hoping that we could just insert (for example) a graph control and have the web developers change some configuration file to include some numbers and the control would just render the live data without a need for a custom control for any piece of cool new media we want.  I hope this is a much more future proof and efficient manor to pursue, but it will carry a higher initial cost for development, an investment.

I would also like to see a start page, which our readers can make their home page.  Think about Firefox's quick start home page... I want it to include a google search, a few headlines, and a daily picture from the newspaper for a background.  Look at Bing.com and imagine the background picture to be our daily picture that we publish in the newspaper anyway.  We could have a small and simple news scroller at the bottom of the page with the latest headlines.  It needs to be simple, elegant and fast.  I want people to prefer it as their home page.  With this, we could really increase click through rate to our website and increase reader numbers (and ad revenue XD).

If the website allows for it, I would like to create plug ins to make our lives easier here at the Exponent.  I would like a direct plug in that updates our twitter feed at regular intervals with the most popular new headlines.  I want this scattered throughout the day, maybe 3 or 4 updates a day.

We should also look into creating a gadget/widget for windows and mac operating systems to show our latest headlines.  Any way to push our information to our users we should pursue.  It could just read off of our RSS feed.

I also have ideas for the website in particular, like comments from users, but I'll put those off until I actually know what I'm working with.

Restoring Honor Rally

It is interesting how this video is the 5th most viewed video on the C-SPAN video library ever.  Sarah Palin tweeted about it and within a few hours, over 150,000 views were added to the counter.  I was watching this as it occurred and ended up with a pretty okay connection, it would stutter once in a while, but all-in-all, it was usable.  This speaks well of the systems the achieves are using to publish their videos.

In terms of the actual content, it was a refreshing rally.  I think Dr. King and any American could appreciate what was talked about.  It was mostly non-political (content wise at least).  The event revolved around 3 American values and gave awards to people who lived those values (hope, charity, faith).  The entire event was a fundraiser for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.  It seemed like a fun time and a very nice thing to be a part of, no matter your political affiliation.