A futuristic view of the Internet from 1969

I picked up on this video from the Apple Gazette today and found it fascinating. It was a view of what computer networks, and the Internet, would be like in the future, all in that lovable style of informational movies from that era.

The best part is the way the husband looks when he has to deal with the bills that the wife is spending money on. Obviously they saw the future of the Internet, but there was a lack of innovation for gender roles.

Not too bad. The technology is off a little bit, but the concept is there.

One of the best things about summer

I know that it’s only sugar, water, lemons, and ice, and they cost $4, sometimes even more depending on the money swindling location and/or event that you are at. Still, there is nothing better than a lemonade like this on a hot, sunny, summer day.

Playing photographer at the Vancouver Dragon Boat Festival 2008

Entrance to the Vancouver Dragonboat Festival 2008

About a week and a half ago, I had the extreme pleasure of joining Rebecca on a really cool experience of covering the Rio Tinto Alcan Dragon Boat Festival for the festivities of 2008.

Cycling teams through

People come from all over to compete in this event, not to mention watch and enjoy the festivities.

The Festival was created to show off Vancouver’s growing cultural diversity and to promote racial harmony among Canadians – new and old. Vancouverites were invited to the festival to experience spectacular food, entertainment, arts and children’s programming reflecting Vancouver’s cultural diversity. At the same time, interest in paddling was taking off and more and more teams formed and registered each year.

Twenty years later the Festival still fulfills its mandate to promote cultural harmony among Canadians. It has developed into one of Vancouver’s most anticipated summer family events. [dragonboatbc]

Throw ring, win tinfoil!

This was just a little bit more than the run of the mill walking around, shooting pictures, and seeing the sights. Thanks to Anita, we had media passes to the event.

Pretending to be in the boat

Rogers team stretches before racing

Probably the best thing about the media access for this event was being able to ride in the media boat and follow the racers as they went from start to finish, paddling along until their bodies couldn’t give anymore.

Warming up

Smile

Keeping guard

Good game

With my trusty camera, I decided to try something a little different and shoot some video with it of an actual heat or two.

The Dragon Boat Festival is a real passion for some of these racers. There’s a community that comes from the numerous teams, and the action is just as intense. This is something that you don’t really get a sense of until you get away from all of the tents and vendors on dry land. When you get down to the water level, it’s a whole other experience that I’m really glad I had the opportunity to see.

Fenway Park cameraman shows off his expensive toy of a day job

This is pretty wicked. Found this via Robert Scoble who found it via Jakob Lodwick, and what we have here is an incredible video that was put together by Tom Guilmette who is not only an avid video enthusiast, but his day job is being a camera man in the outfield at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox.

This short video is a small tour of the camera he uses to do his job, and the camera he used to make this video blog of sorts isn’t anything to sneeze at as well.


Fenway HD Camera – Sony HDC-910 – Canon 75x from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

I would love to be able to do something like this with my day job, but in all honestly, radio is not as pretty and it sounds. No seriously, it sounds way better than what it technically takes to make radio happen.

Doves – black and white town / there goes the fear

To continue with my efforts in sharing what I’m into, I’m digging Doves a lot these days. I can’t exactly tell you why, but these next couple of tunes are worth the effort of tracking down on your Thursday and throwing into a mix for the commute to or from work on Friday. That’s just what someone like me would do if I were you, and you should do that because you’re you. And you like this music. No, trust me, you do.

You can always try to hit the iTunes Music Store and grab “The Last Broadcast”[itunes] or “Some Cities”[itunes].

What tornado damage looks like from the inside, as it happens

The Des Moines Register posted this video on their site of the security cameras from inside of a bank that was destroyed during the tornado in Parkersburg, Iowa over the recent Memorial Day weekend. The video is astounding. You can see what the wind can do as the windows are blown out, and then the tornado hits the building dead on, eventually taking out the cameras.

Update: The Des Moines Register also posted this video footage from the same storm that destroyed much of Parkersburg, Iowa. It’s truly shocking.

DVD player from RCA that keeps on giving

Last Christmas, I decided to help upgrade Rebecca’s aged DVD player by getting something that would help us enjoy home time together. Her old player would get picky about what it would or would not play from time to time, especially any burned media that we would throw into it. So this is what I ended up getting her.

RCA DRC285 DVD Player The RCA DRC285. Our hope is to do the HD upgrade in the future, so that was my main reason for choosing this model due to the HDMI[wiki] outputs. That way when we make that jump, she can watch her “Sex in the City” DVD’s in all their 1080p glory. Plus there is the ongoing education of sharing movies with each other form respective “must see” libraries. The price for this was a great buy, so it was a good situation.

Now here’s the kicker. This little puppy has a USB 2.0 port on the front of it. On a whim, I took a 350MB AVI and put it on a 1GB thumb drive. The remote has a “DVD/USB” button on it, so after plugging it into the USB port, I hit the button, the little LED flickered like it would when being accessed by a computer, and there was the file listed on the screen. I selected it, hit the “OK” button, and the video file loaded.

What we normally did before this was run about a twelve foot A/V cable with RCA connectors[wiki] from the back of the TV to our iMac. The TV then became a second monitor with audio running to it from the computer, giving us the option of watching downloaded video files on our TV. None of that sitting in front of the computer monitor for us.

So with this USB discovery, it was an amazing moment. The video looks superb compared to the output generated from the iMac to standard NTSC video quality. There was a lot of pixelation from fast video movement, but that has changed since we’ve gone to viewing programs off of the thumb drives. I say drives because you can put about two episodes of a program per one, 1GB thumb drive. With two, we cycle through the pair.

Additionally, the DVD player flows right through the list of files. Start with the first one and it plays the next one in order. Oh, and you can also pause and fast forward like a standard DVD.

With our hectic lives, it’s safe to say that this has been a very cool addition to our arsenal of things to disconnect with.

Electric Six – dance commander

It’s been a while since we’ve had a good rock song from YouTube. Walking across the bridge on the way home from work the other day, this popped up on random, and everything seemed better.

Check out more Electric Six if you dig it. We had the extreme pleasure of seeing these guys when we interviewed Aberdeen City for RadioZoom #116