Parasailing

So in addition to a whale cruise today I also went parasailing for the first time. What a blast! That's a lot of fun. Give it a try if you can...

Dolphins up close and highly personal!

We went on a 5pm "cocktail" cruise with a whale watching company. We did see a couple different whales way off in the distance (and I got one mediocre picture of a whale tale that I'll try to post later), but the highlight was a visit from some bottlenose dolphins. They actually aren't known for being quite this friendly, but apparently we got a rare treat.

OpenID and image and video tagging

For those of you who use Facebook (and I'd guess MySpace and others), you know about image tagging. For those that don't, well, let me explain it briefly. If you post a picture to your Facebook account that has people in it also on Facebook, you can opt to "tag" the image. A simple editor opens and lets you click an area around their face and then you select them from your Facebook friend list. Then Facebook keeps that data in a database and if you want to look for pictures of your friends, you can find them easily. It's very cool.

But it's also very Facebook specific. Why? Well, because Facebook has no other way to do it. Generally, people don't have any kind of Internet-wide identity (other than your email address, which is not something you want to "tag" based on since it gives your email address to anyone who can view said picture). OpenID has been formed to let people have Internet-wide identities, but it is gaining momentum VERY slowly. Google is moving to support it, as is Yahoo, but even those guys have been slow to do it (though if you have a Blogger account, you do already have an OpenID!).

I'm not going to explain it other than to say basically your "ID" gets tied to a web address. It can be one you own or you can sign up for one (like your blogger web page) and you can then use that as your "ID" to create forum accounts in other places, etc. They simply authenticate you against the Blogger ID instead of you having to create YET ANOTHER stupid forum identity. (You can still create a handle type identity on the forum for people to call you by, rather than them calling you by your web address.)

Okay, great. I'm not just Donnie Barnes, I'm also www.carefreeway.com. Nice. But until more sites support OpenID, it doesn't get me much. Hopefully soon more forum administrators will add support for it. If you want it, ask your administrators politely.

But what I want to talk about now is another way to put acceptance of OpenID, and that's to get support directly into image and video files to "tag" people with their OpenID. Then YouTube and the like could let you search for videos containing certain people. I'd also love to see support in video files (and video editing software like iMovie) so that you could "export" any of the text you add via text overlay (think titles, credits, subtitles, etc) as keywords that could be searched by search engines. Currently you can only do that by hand depending on the video hosting site. This should be IN the video/image file, not some proprietary attachment.

I think we're headed in this direction, but people need to start asking their software providers for these things!

More fun with iMovie and The Flip!

So here's a video I put together of snorkeling in Maui. Only a couple minutes long.



This one is getting published with YouTube instead of Blogger because Blogger won't let you make it bigger. It'll probably be lower quality, though. Tell me which you like better in the Comment section.

It oughtta be a law!

There really ought to be a law that hotels must advertise the height of their shower head. I'm really sick of hotels that have shower heads at 5'6" or so when I'm 6'2". It's a serious pain to use those, and I really think it could be a safety issue. While we can't really mandate what height hotels put them at, I think having to advertise the height would cause more hotels to fix their low shower heads for fear of losing business, and if they don't at least people like me could choose their hotels accordingly.

Sea Life Park video

So here's my quick video from Sea Life Park, shot with the Flip MinoHD. It's edited with iMovie on the MacBook Pro and is just over ten minutes long. It took me less than thirty minutes to put this together.

Video camera in your pocket?

Think it's too good to be true? A decent camcorder in your pocket? Think again. I just got a new Flip MinoHD and I love it. It's so easy you can't imagine. Hit the power button and hit record. No muss, no fuss. Hit the play button to go back and view your recorded videos. Want to watch them on a TV? No problem...the included cable has normal RCA video and audio plugs that work with almost any TV with spare inputs. But best of all, the ease of which you can send them to your PC is incredible. Pop out the included USB plug and just plug the entire camcorder into your PC or Mac. Copy the files over. You can upload straight to Youtube or your favorite video editor easily.

The video in this blog entry was shot with the Flip MinoHD and I should have more videos uploaded shortly. The zoom works, but I will say it's really just a digital zoom and thus when you zoom in you do lose some resolution. But it's simplicity and ease of use and size make up for this minor difficiency, in my opionion. It recharges from your computer's USB port and has one hour of storage built in (and probably not much more than that in battery life, but that's all you need!). It does take some time to offload the video to the PC...fifteen minutes worth took about ten minutes to copy over, so it's not terribly fast in that department. But that's WAY better than trying to send video tapes to a PC as that can generally only be done in real time.

Real camcorders with good optical zooms and other nice features do still have a place, but this thing is smaller than many cellphones people carry and thus you're likely to have it on you when you need it. That's worth a LOT right there, especially if you have kids. Oh, and the price is pretty good, too. At the time I got mine the HD was $230 with the normal resolution one at $170. Well worth it, I think. The video recording in any cellphone I've ever tried was pretty horrible. This is way better.