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Digital Blue has created the Tony Hawk HelmetCam, a $99 helmet-mountable camera capable of recording 45 minutes of video on a memory card.
I think they are marketing this to the wrong audience.
They should be selling this to city bike riders.
When I was in New York for the 9/11 bike ride, I met a cyclist who was hit by a car. She now wears a helmet-mounted camera and a recorder that straps to her waist. If she is hit again, or sees somebody get hit, she'll have video evidence of who was at fault. Her setup was far more bulky than what is being offered by Digital Blue, and I wonder if this device would be a more ideal solution.
Digital Blue's web site, while attractive and blue, has just the one picture you see here of device, and no technical information. There aren't even even any sample videos. Has anybody given this device a try?
It seems like something all city bikers should have.
I love this SkyMall parody, courtesy of gaming comic strip Penny Arcade.
The SkyMall catalog is the Gideon Bible of the airline industry.
Wow, in 30 days I'll be 30 - on October 30th. I certainly don't feel that old.
The big party is October 29th. If you didn't get the evite let me know.
Speaking of birthdays - tomorrow is my brother Jared's birthday. He'll be 19. He's a freshman at my alma mater, University of Maryland. He's got a DABU blog too, but not much on it yet.
Earlier tonight Scoble issued a Developer Challenge: I'll switch blogs to the first blogging service that supports OPML.
Hmmm.... that's not too hard. I created the OPML support tonight. It only took a few hours.
And... it worked on the first try!
- Posts and photo albums grouped by tag: http://www.DylanGreene.com/opml/tags.xml
- Posts and photo alums group by year: http://www.DylanGreene.com/opml/archive.xml
All DABU sites now have automatic OPML support.
The coolest part is that you can drill down from the list of posts and photos albums down to individual comments and photo captions using OPML tools like OPML Editor from Dave Winer (see the screen shot).
I don't know if Scoble will decide to use DABU, but I'm glad to have spent the couple hours to keep ahead of the ever-changing standards curve.
DABU is the free blogging service I created that I use for this site, and almost 100 other people are using for their sites. http://www.DABU.com
OPML is an outline format in XML. It is similar to RSS in that supporting it today will impress a small number of geeks but support for it in the future is going to be practically mandatory if you care about your users.
Here's Russel Beattie's portable gaming collection....
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I'm glad I'm not into portable gaming... my pockets aren't deep enough.
Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, isn't until next week (October 4th), but I saw this flash animation today and it made me laugh so I figured I'd share.
Flash: Tekiah! from ShamBot 6000
The weekend of September 11th, 2005, my dad and I drove up to New York City for a memorable weekend of sight seeing and biking.
The bike ride was the NYC Century Bike Tour, presented by Transportation Alternatives, an advocate for safety in bike riding. There were four tours available: 100 miles, 75 miles, 55 miles, and 35 miles. The tours all started in Central Park.
We did the 55 mile tour, which took us through New York City, over the Brooklyn Bridge, around Brooklyn, past Cony Island, up through Queens, over the Triborough Bridge, and back to Central Park.
This was my first time in most of these parts of New York. Riding over the Brooklyn Bridge was absolutely spectacular, especially with perfect weather and thousands of other bike riders on the bridge around us. My favorite part of the ride was through and around traffic in the city, passing familiar landmarks like the Lincoln Center, and cautiously zooming through traffic lights in packs of 15 or so riders.
My dad has a rule about going to New York - he can't leave without seeing a show. We saw two excellent shows - The Pillowman, staring Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldbum, and The Great American Trailer Park Musical.
We stayed in Jersey City and took the train in each day, which dropped us off at the makeshift World Trade Center station. On September 11th, it was powerful and emotional to be at the footsteps of the remains of the rubble as hundreds of people had gathered to lay flowers, cry, and pray for their missing loved ones.
Have you ever wondered if your political views match your political affliation?
Wonder no more with this simple anonymous test.
My results are what I expected:
| You are a Social Liberal (73% permissive) and an... Economic Moderate (50% permissive) You are best described as a:
|
Chris and I went to the Maryland Renassance Festival in Crownsvile, Maryland. It was my first time and Chris' first time in many years, and was a lot of fun.
RennFest is every weekend until the end of October.
More about the festival: http://www.rennfest.com/
The XBOX 360 is coming this holiday season, possibly a full year before the PS3 and next Nintendo.
From Major Nelson:
XBOX 360 Release Dates:
North America: Tuesday, November 22.
Europe: Friday, December 2
Japan: Saturday, December 10
If you haven't pre-ordered already then you're probably out of luck unless you don't mind waiting line line at a Best Buy or Target the night before as pre-orders have basically sold out for months.
Or you can try to win one - every 10 minutes until launch day Pepsi and Microsoft are giving away an XBOX 360 - over 9000 chances to win. Amazingly, I won one in the first week of the contest. In addition to saving $400, they're promising to send them out to winners before it's out in stores. According to Major Nelson, the version they are giving away includes the hard drive and wireless controller.
Some new XBOX 360 videos:
- Video: the new hardware
- Video: Ghost Recon: AW
- Video: Call of Duty 2
- Video: Gears of War
- Video: Dead Rising
- Video: Montage of games for Japanese market
Lots of changes for the next version of Office. One of the big ones is removal of the menu bar in favor of something called a ribbon.
Of course these new images might not reflect the final design.
More screens:
Like any big change, this is going to take some getting used to, but it's obvious a lot of usability research has gone into the new design. It's yet to be seen if Microsoft is going to reflect these UI changes across the rest of their product line.
From George Ou at ZDNet:
From March 2005 to September 2005 10 vulnerabilities were published for Microsoft Internet Explorer, 40 for Mozilla Firefox.
In April-September timespan there were 6 exploits for MSIE, 11 for Firefox.
Sidenote... I was an intern on the IE security team back in college. The security tab UI is still the same as what I designed back then for IE5.
From CNN Money:
President signs executive order allowing contractors to pay below prevailing wage in affected areas.
This seems like a recipe for further disaster as skilled workers now have less incentive to seek work in the affected areas.
In 2001 President Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh to head of FEMA.
Allbaugh's first hire was college roommate Michael Brown, who's previous job was the commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association. Brown was forced to resign after "numerous lawsuits were filed against the organization over disciplinary actions." (Source)
In 2003 Allbaugh leaves FEMA and starts a consulting firm for companies interested in reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
Even with a background that doesn't seem to qualify him for the job, President Bush appoints Brown to the new head of FEMA in 2003.
Today Allbaugh is the lobbyist for Halliburton responsible for getting disaster relief contracts in Louisiana.
Update at 5:40pm:
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that he has recalled Brown, the embattled director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, from his post as head of federal relief efforts on the ground in the Gulf Coast area and has replaced him with a senior Coast Guard officer.
Source: Washington Post
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" - President Bush last week.
From WashingtonPost.com
There have been other moments of tension. At a fire near the French Quarter, Williams noted in a posting on NBC's Web site, a police officer from out of town "raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media . . . obvious members of the media . . . armed only with notepads." He also noted that the National Guard is barring journalists from the city's convention center and Superdome, the very facilities that evacuees were barred from leaving last week.