It sure has been a while since my last real post. I sure do miss blogging on a regular basis, however it’s just been far too busy these past few months to even think about anything but work at Netgenetix. Where I left off in October we had just started ramping up for some Olympic projects at work. We ended up doing quite a bit of work considering the small size of our company (thus little resources). A summary of our work for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics:

• • 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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Facebook announced that they’ll be releasing a new tool called ‘Facebook Connect’ and it’s a way for web sites to ask users for their Facebook username and password and offer the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook, rather than other websites creating entirely new indentity verfication systems.

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 found this today:

I think it’s ingenious. Especially for those of us
who are computer maniacs. Yay for helping the
environment!!!

Peace.

Love Me:

I found this article today, it’s from a couple month’s ago but it’s the first I’ve heard of this new gadget. It’s called LucidTouch and it builds on Apple’s idea of multi-touch screens. Not surprising though that it’s being researched by Patrick Baudisch… a scientist working for Microsoft.

LucidTouch uses the idea of a transparent screen which utilizes four fingers on each hand for the back side part of the touch screen and the thumbs on the front. Personally I think I would find this slightly awkward. The dual touch screen that Apple has now is perfectly enough for me, I’m not sure what I would need ten fingers for on a touch screen and I honestly don’t think I CAN use all ten at once for one objective, or why I would want to. I guess you could use it as a keyboard from the back side, but it would definitely take some getting used to.

But onward with technology! This is still exciting! Please comment on what your thoughts are for this new gadget.

Peace.

Read the article.

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The latest Wordpress upgrade was released last weekend -all the waiting… and it’s here. From what I’ve seen so far it’s pretty slick. The new design is nice and everything still seems to work great, and Wordpress has also redesigned their entire website to mirror the new back-end of the 2.5 upgrade. There are only a couple problems I’ve encountered so far – 24hrs into my upgrade.

I have a plug-in I’m using for my forms called cforms and everything seems to still be working fine except the button to insert your forms into pages is no longer in the editor. This is not a 2.5 problem more likely an upgrade problem for cforms – but a problem still nonetheless.

The second problem I’ve encountered is that of adding images to posts and pages. When adding media it gives you an option to either type in the url or browse your computer and add it to your uploads. Whenever I try uploading this way it says there is an error and although it says there is one image in my gallery, only the error shows up – no images. However if you upload the image through your ftp client into your uploads folder and give the url it works fine that way. I’ve also found with the images that I cannot go to Manage Uploads and ‘manage’ anything because I cannot view any images and I get another error.

I think the error I’ve been getting is slightly different than others I have found people talking about in the Wordpress forums however if you are having a similar problem I suggest checking out Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s blog as she seems to have found a solution to the problem she was having with the media uploader.

On a side note tomorrow I’ll be attending the Massive Technology Show in Vancouver for a few hours. It should be interesting and an excellent opportunity to meet some new people. I’ll be posting about it later in the week. Stay tuned.

Peace.

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