Kelly and I just purchased Iron & Wine’s Passing Afternoon. Why? It was featured at the end of House M.D.’s season finale. I Google’d the lyrics, took the artist and song information and confirmed I had the right song by watching/listening to the YouTube video. The last step was actually purchasing: I checked iTunes, but their copy wasn’t restriction-free, so I headed over to Amazon. Bingo! No restrictions, $9 (for the whole album) heading Amazon’s way.

Granted, I’m also not the typical music consumer, but Kelly is. More and more, the songs she buys she discovers through commercials and TV/movie soundtracks. There are still songs that Kelly buys because she heard it on the radio, but even that’s XM, not FM. She may not care about the intricacies of why DRM is evil, but she does get annoyed when it’s hard to share music with her husband or sister. Fortunately, iTunes has made it easy to find restriction-free tracks. If iTunes doesn’t have it restriction-free, there’s a good chance Amazon will.

Questions to ponder:

• Does “advertising jingle” still carry the same stigma for musicians?
• As a follow-on, are all ads created equal? That is, is an advertising jingle always a jingle, or are there some ads that transcend crass marketing?
• How should independent musicians (and I’m not talking about the few with mainstream success, the “Death Cab for Cutie”s of the world) tackle this brave new world of distribution? What’s the best way to address the issue of piracy, especially if DRM is a dead end?
• Will record companies continue to use DRM, or will the DRM-free market develop into a strong enough force to bring them around?

After watching the movie, I flipped over to a “Behind the Scenes” video that highlighted the differences in footage between a traditional (though high-end and expensive) video camera and the EOS.  Unfortunately they don’t explicitly mark which scenes were shot with which camera, but with a little observation, the differences should become apparent.  A typical setup is to show a scene as shot from the traditional video camera (a Canon XH A1); it is apparent because the shot is typically a wider angle of the entire set, including the EOS.  They then cut to the same scene as shot by the EOS for the movie.  The differences in color saturation, detail, and exposure range (in addition to actually controlling depth of field) are remarkable.

If I get motivated, I may post screenshots from the “Behind the Scenes” video comparing the same scene in both cameras.

Updated: here are those screenshots; I apologize for the low res required to fit into the site’s layout.  If you click, it’ll take you to the high res version.

The Bridge

The black blob in XH-A1′s lower left corner is the head of a crew member.

The Actress

This compares video shot with the XH-A1 to a closeup of the same scene shot by the EOS.  The colors seem less washed-out in comparison.  For kicks, I threw in a third screenshot which shows a still photo of the same scene, though with different lighting (a spotlight on the actress instead of available light).

First up, the 2006 North American Wife Carrying Championship:

From there, we move on to MUTO, a graffiti-meets-stop-motion-animation monstrosity of oddness:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

* The subtle beauty of subversive humor and unexpected virtuosity on the daily commute.
* A skillful blending of the old and new in a tribute to classic cinema.
* Utilitarian structures finding new life as striking architecture.
* Yes We Can.

One final note on the last item: Obama may be the most liberal Senator of 2007, but boy does he go down smooth.

The house appears to be a trapezoidal shape, all open on the interior. The largest side is all windows to funnel the light in and provide a natural panorama. The siding looks like the cheap corrugated metal siding, like what you’d expect to see in a junkyard; combined with the wood, in this setting, it works. The only change I might make would be to the porch: I’d like one large enough to relax and watch a storm roll in. Photos after the jump.

Thanks to notcot.org for bringing to my attention and Kitsune Noir for getting it out on the web.

John Maeda is the author of the The Laws of Simplicity, which discusses thirteen rules for simple living and working. He recently gave a TED Talk in which he further simplified those thirteen rules down into one principle. Enjoy!

PicLens enables full-screen slideshows and photo browsing and supports integration with a number of popular photo sites:

• Flickr
• Facebook
• Google Images
• Yahoo Images
• Friendster
• Picasa Web Albums

h3. Introduction

BarCamp conferences typically do not cost any money. The conferences run very lean and can usually take advantage of corporate sponsorships to cover the minimal costs.

The only cost is that all attendees are asked to give at least one presentation. Consequently the content of the conference is determined by the attendees themselves, and the schedule created at the conference. After a welcoming session, all attendees are directed to a schedule wall where they can pick what time slot and room they want to post their presentation.

We started on Friday evening, after work. After several opening sessions we went out to Grand Rapids Brewing Company, courtesy of “Envoi Solutions”:http://www.envoisolutions.com/ and enjoyed several rounds of drinks (I had a Jones Soda). We ended up staying from 9 until midnight, as conversations ranged over a wide variety of tech topics. Five of us spent the night (“Calvin College”:http://www.calvin.edu generously provided us with the venue); the conference picked up again at 10 AM the next morning and ran until 5 PM.

My expectations for BarCamp were: to learn, to talk shop with others interested in technology, and to have fun.

h3. Learning

Something that worked really well for our BarCamp was the length of a session. Each session was about 1/2 hour, which was enough time to get an introduction to a topic but not enough time to bore. It kept things interesting and moving at a good pace. Since the conference crams everything into 24 hours, keeping things moving was crucial to capturing interest.

It also meant things were pretty intense–topics hopped from the latest in mapping (the potential for cameras with built-in GPS to add geographical data to your photos, making it easy to plot your photos on an online map) to e-commerce to fighting e-mail spam. I quite enjoyed the ride.

h3. Talking With Others

The social aspect of BarCamp was another surprise: it was like being in college again and participating in those late-night conversations than ran for hours and were thoroughly engaging.

We swapped our favorite tips, software, horror stories, and web sites. Many of those sites had social aspects: for example, discussions prompted several people to join “LinkedIn”:http://www.linkedin.com/ (a professional networking site) while existing members connected to each other. Real-world relationships were flipped to online relationships on sites such as “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ and “Meebo”:http://www.meebo.com/.

h3. Having Fun

I came home exhausted; the two cans of “Rockstar”:http://www.bevnet.com/reviews/rockstar/ were beginning to wear off. “Gordon Food Service”:http://www.gfs.com/ provided an outstanding smorgasboard of food to keep us fueled, so I had a stomach full of junk food. I met a number of new friends, got to hang out with some old ones, and learned a ton of interesting stuff. Yeah, I had fun.

h3. Further Reading

* Check “photos from the event”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/barcampgrandrapids/
* See “what others are blogging about the event”:http://technorati.com/tag/barcampgrandrapids
* Visit “sites that came up during discussions”:http://del.icio.us/tag/barcampgrandrapids