• • Olympic and Paralympic Torch Relays
  • 8 Personal Video Message Terminals
• • BC Canada Pavilion
  • 3D Immersive Theatre in Green Room
  • 3 Glass Touchwalls in Green Room
  • 2 E-Postcard Terminals in Green Room
  • Introduction Touch Screen Content for Green Room
  • CIRS Building Touch Screen Content for Green Room
  • Project Management of the New Media Room (with interactive touch screen cubes)
• • Canada’s Northern House
  • 2 Personal Video Message Terminals
  • Green Screen Interactive Terminals
• • Robson Square
  • “Front Page News” Newspaper Kiosk

Personal Video Message Terminals are kiosks you walk up to and record a video on. The ones on the torch relay were used to record videos in each community on the relay that would be played in Robson Square during the Games. The e-postcard version used at the BC Pavilion took a snapshot of you in the Pavilion that you could add a message to and send to family and friends via email with a message. If you were there, you probably saw one – so, what did they look like? or, I have a close up sexy photo.

The 3D Immersive Theatre showcased the fun things you can do in BC as the viewer follows a family on their vacation in the province. The theatre included not only 3D visuals, but wind effects, rumbles, and scents.

The Glass Touchwalls showcased four energy efficient companies in BC in a fun game-like format. The touchwalls are approximately 8ft tall clear glass with the interactive space at about chest level (for touch usability).

The Introduction Touchscreen simply showed you the different areas of the Green Room and a little bit about each area. For example, it would tell you where the Glass Touchwalls and the 3D Immersive theatre was. We supplied the illustrated graphics and text content.

The CIRS Building Touch Screen simply allowed you to view videos on how the CIRS Building was conceptualized and how it would be environmentally friendly. We supplied the illustrated interface to navigate these videos.

The New Media Room is the area of the pavilion which featured 3 large multi-touch cubes which allowed the visitors to wipe away layers of animation for such products as the Need for Speed video game as well as watch behind the scenes clips from movies like District 9. We provided the project management for this room. Watch the video featuring “The Curious Tree” cube.

A Green Screen Interactive Terminal is a booth you can walk into and record fun videos in front of a green screen to send to friends and family. It’s great fun and the videos to choose from can be customized by the venue or client using it. Watch a video of someone using it.

The Newspaper Kiosk was a fun free way for people in Robson Square to have their photo taken on the zip line, with the Olympics mascots, or in front of the GE Ice Plaza. It uses the same green screen technology as the Green Screen Interactive Terminal except it takes a snapshot as opposed to a video and presents you with a print out of your picture on the front page of the news. See some cool people in the Vancouver Sun.

Needless to say, we were quite busy and there was a lot of overtime worked, however it was quite the experience and I wouldn’t take it back at all. I loved being involved and working on something that was for a bigger cause.

In December, we had our annual Christmas banquet for Toastmasters and I performed speech project #10 – “inspire your audience”. So, in case you missed it, you’ll find the text version on my Speeches page under “Attainable Dreams”.

Now that the Olympics are done and my year of being President at Burrard Toastmasters is coming to and end, it may be time to take a step back and look at what’s coming down the path next.

Until next time, adios.

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As for Toastmasters, my first month as Club President has been okay however since it is summer we have some difficulties filling all the roles every meeting since many members go on vacation or would probably rather be outside in the nice weather. Once September hits I think the club activity will pick up again, which will be nice – and then I can really start pushing our goal for President’s Distinguished Club.

If you live on the internet as I do most of the time, you may have heard that web developers and designers of all kinds are finally fed up and cannot stay quiet anymore on the subject of Internet Explorer 6. Enough is enough!!! If you agree I suggest you join the campaign by adding an anti-IE6 icon to your online profile pictures in the very least (I’ve used mine on my twitter account). Here is an anti-IE6 image for your convenience in a large size so that you can scale it down to the size needed for your image.

Also, see below my example:

– Rebekah

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That’s right. Club elections took place, and I will be the new Club President for Burrard Toastmasters. Because that’s just how I roll, and because I’m freakin’ awesome. I actually don’t officially become Club President until July as we go through a transitional period and a training session. The point is I’m progressing in my usual pace again, yay! That’s all I have to say about Toastmasters today.

This week’s handy links:

• • 10 useful tools for choosing the right color palette
• • 5 must know web design polishing techniques
• • 50 ways to become a better designer
• • 10 Wordpress plugins guaranteed to save you time
• • 22 CSS Button Styling Tutorials and Techniques
• • Designers predict web design trends for 2010

–Rebekah

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This week I did the word of the day and the language evaluation. I have to admit when I was trying to think of an uncommonly used word the first one that came to mind was  “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. Yes, its in the dictionary! However, that word is a bit silly, and as Justin mentioned, I didn’t want to make people hate me. So instead I chose the word “flabbergasted” cause its a fun word and its not often used. I have to say though, compared to previous meetings, everyone was good at attempting to use the word. Woot. 1 point Bekah.

Also, Jess did a last minute speech which she threw together in something like 20 minutes (or less!) for tonight’s meeting. She talked about interviews and what you can do to have a better shot at getting a job offer after leaving an interview and feeling good about any interviews you have – without feeling like you could have done better after you leave. And, of course, it was nothing short of amazing. I don’t think there will ever be a day when she doesn’t amaze me with her abilities and skills…

———

As for Netgenetix these days…

The boss is having me learn flash… that’s gonna be awesome. I know the basics and a decent amount of AS3 from school but I never got into it much at that time. So I got a book and have been doing some self-teaching but its a bit slow right now with how busy I’ve been… however I’ll hopefully be starting a class for it in the fall probably. I’m actually pretty excited… I’ve always had super good ideas for things that could happen in flash but obviously don’t have the patience for the design part of it (as usual)… but once I get good at it and I’ve got Justin to design stuff before hand, then that will be pretty sweet.

Also, I’ve been wanting to write a few more new blog entries for Citrus however haven’t had much of a chance lately. If anyone has any good ideas or things for me to write on regarding SEO please share! (Anything you’d like to know?)

Oh! And the NHL Playoffs started today! How exciting! Yay for the Canucks first win against the Blues! This means an overload of support emails on our free hockey pool website, PickupHockey.com. I’ve been helping out with these support emails a lot over the last couple days and I’m not sure what it is about them… but I’m ADDICTED! I dunno what it is, but I’m addicted to replying support emails and doing so as soon as humanly possible! It’s actually pretty exciting, Pickup Hockey is growing so much and it’s freaking awesome… I’m not sure what it is but I love watching the number of registrations and daily visits continue to climb. I’m proud to say I contribute to keeping one of the biggest hockey pool websites on the internet alive and well!!!

Anywho, that’s enough rambling for one night. Later!

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Google Trends allows you to view search trends by multiple terms and compare them. This allows you to see where the trends lie for your specific industry in terms of keywords and what your target market is looking for. This tool can be very powerful depending on what you use it for. It can allow you to see seasonal trends and steady traffic patterns that you otherwise may have missed. For example, you can search for yearly events like “xmas gifts” that you think may have seasonal trends:

It’s also possible to browse trends based on calendar dates rather than searching for them by viewing the Hot Trends. For example, by browsing the top 100 hot trends of November 4th, 2008 it’s obvious you’ll see the majority of results circle around the 44th presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain.

It is important to remember that just because a certain search term is a ‘hot trend’ does not mean that you should put into your keywords or website content if it doesn’t fit with your topic. If it isn’t already apparent to why it’s a bad idea to incorporate content that doesn’t fit your topic or audience I strongly suggest you revert back to either my post on copywriting for SEO or Jess’ post on building the right audience.

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This means that the navigation on your website can now have dropdowns and flashy effects without sacrificing SEO. A good example of this is the Monitronics website. About a month ago they launched a new site built with DotNetNuke and the Solpart version 1.7.2 menu system. DotNetNuke’s Solpart menu system relies on JavaScript to run. In the past, this would have been strongly discouraged as with scripting disabled no menu items are visible, which equals bad for SEO. However, now that Google has spidered the new JavaScript menus they will appear in the Google cache and count toward SEO value for the site.

Yahoo’s cache is a little different in this case though. The main menu text is visible however without the drop downs. Yahoo has successfully cached the text rendered by the JavaScript but failed to read the JavaScript code itself therefore failing to spider the drop down menus and the menu links.

Even though Google spiders can now index JavaScript, this level of accomplishment is yet to be seen for Yahoo. Considering Google is Yahoo’s closest competitor I don’t see this being the case for long. In July 2006 a study showed that 43.7% of web users search with Google versus Yahoo at 28.8% of web users. This means we aren’t home free with JavaScript and SEO quite yet but it does mean a very large step in the right direction and good start to 2009.

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Now those of you who may not be familiar with Adobe Illustrator, have no fear my friends, for if you like these icons just the way they are then here you go, in png format.

Note: I’ve provided them in 128×128 and 32×32, including the drop shadow.

Download AI file
Download images

Enjoy!

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Despite the annoyance and frustration this project brought me, I actually probably had the most fun working on it than I have in the past few months on other projects. I learned so many things working on this one project alone as well. From simple coding tricks and some design tips to dealing with difficult audio. I can’t even begin to list all the techniques I tried to make the audio for these demos usable. Everything from making home-made sponges for overtop of the mic to making full on tents around myself to keep the sound confined and adding blankets and material to absorb the sound in an extremely boomy and echo-ey conference room. I spent hours trying to make the audio usable for these demos.

Considering the majority of this project was done myself it was also an experience in project managing myself. I’ve never really done any freelance projects and building your own website doesn’t really have much of a deadline unless you want it to. In order to make this deadline I pulled my first all nighter since college – and it actually wasn’t too bad – I managed to stay awake and still be productive at work the next day. People say to me, “why? why are you doing extra work you don’t get paid for?”. And the answer is, because I want to. I guess I’m exceptionally dedicated and caring when it comes to work than most people – but I’m not about to let a project go out past deadline or looking like crap if I can help it – especially if its a project I did all myself. It’s about the pride in the work and the reputation you get from it. I want people to look back on it thinking “Rebekah did an amazing job on that project” not look back on it thinking “We can do this project well as long as Rebekah isn’t involved”. It’s about pride and dignity, dedication, and the feeling it brings you when it’s done.

As for those demos, well, two of them are password protected but you can see the sales demo if you want. However I’ll warn you its probably pretty boring – its a software demo. Those of you who want to provide tips or criticism feel free to do so.

Thanks!
Rebekah

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I love the city theme, I really do – however it may have to go. We’ll see how the design mockups go in the near future. If anyone has any suggestions or tips I’d be super grateful for them. Send them to rebekah at midnight lights dot com.

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There are some cool new features for sure but nothing that I think is worth paying the high adobe price for at this point, especially after it’s first launched. From what I understand Adobe alternates upgrades for Flash between developers and designers. Flash in CS3 was upgraded for developers – this one, for designers. So, of course, it would make sense that designers would be stoked for the cool new release of the Flash in CS4. However in my browsing of the new features I didn’t find much in the rest of the suite that really stood out at me (not for these prices anyway).

A friend of mine who is a software developer keeps telling me Adobe won’t last. At this rate – I’m starting to believe him, despite the industry standard.

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So… in the eyes of Telus, how would you attempt to regain your customer base? Well you COULD go about the hard but more rewarding way of regaining their trust and respect through many different facets. OR you could, say, just create a new service provider?

Some of you may have noticed in the recent year or so that a new mobile service provider has come out of THIN AIR with more ads in all mediums than is countable (seriously I can’t turn around or turn on the radio with seeing or hearing about it). It’s called Koodo.

And guess what. Koodo? Owned by none other than Telus.

Get your customers back the easy way by fooling them into something bigger and better that is really just you with a new hairstyle. Woohoo!

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CSS Mania

Most Inspired

Screenalicio.us

CSS Count

CSS Based

CSS Impress

CSS Leak

CSS Star

CSS Creme

CSS Brigit

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Check it out!

P.S. The design of the Citrus SEO website makes me feel so happy inside! Excellent job Justin!

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This means that certain companies, like the mobile service company Loopt, can use Facebook Connect so users do not have to re-enter their connections to friends when they want to track through Loopt’s service of finding friends and seeing what they are doing on a map with their mobile phone.

Facebook Connect goes two ways — information about a user’s activity on other web sites will go back and appear on the “news feed” on Facebook, where it is seen by that person’s friends on the service. However, learning from their previous mistake of Beacon advertising, Facebook is going to give users full control of what they share.

Mark Zuckerberg also mentioned that Facebook would be introducing a new “Great Apps” program as an incentive for developers to create more meaningful and useful tools or applications for Facebook. Certain applications such as Causes, a charitable giving tool, and iLike, a music sharing service, have already been given the priveledge of being part of the “Great Apps” program. As a result, applications given the designation of being in the “Great Apps” program will have better visibility and recieve a graphical “badge” to display their participation in the program.

Peronsally,  all this “Great Apps” talk makes me happy. I’m so tired of seeing stupid useless applications like ‘zombies’ and ‘buy your friends’ that clog up my profile or my requests pending channel. Some are fun yes, but I really don’t see the fun in either of the two above mentioned applications or any others like it.

And as for Facebook Connect – I wish Mark Zuckerberg luck for success with it, but we shall see how it works and if it’s accepted by users.

For now, Peace.

View the original article on Facebook Connect.

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I’ve only worked for Netgenetix Media for a week and a half and I already love it. The people are awesome, it’s work I love to do, and when I wake up in the morning (for the first time ever), I actually WANT to go to work. I’m so happy that I can say that. It’s a small company with great achievements and it sits on the entrance to Gastown in Vancouver.

Thanks to Leigh, Jess, Gerrod, Darius, Devin, Justin, Eric, and Paul for making it so easy to work for them. I even get to play softball with them and their friends on Thursdays in a beer league. It’s awesome.

And so, turning 20 and entering the industry, I can’t wait to see what I can accomplish and learn in the years to come.

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