Beyond the Blogosphere

This is a quick recap of the Beyond the Blolgosphere panel at SXSW Monday March 10, 2008. This recap mainly covers conversations after the panel ended. Bottom line: Great two way communication. Great information. Panelists were awesome!Gary Vaynerchuck is the man. Great speaker, to the point, truthfull awesome! It was a wonderful session, one of the best I atteneded.After the session ended, I spoke with Nicole Lapin, an anchor at CNN.com, in fact she is the youngest anchor in CNN history, at age 22? Lapin anchors "Now in the News," a fast-paced hourly Web- and wireless-exclusive news update, and provides briefings on CNN/U.S. news. My initial question was what she thought of the current state of broadcast news. Then I told her I thought the 3-letter news broadcast was dying.Probably not the best way to introduce myself. She stated what she is doing at CNN.com/Live and told me to give them a chance and watch more. She also said, it's not dead, things are changing she told me. She was also evangelising CNN's iReport. One gentleman from Current was grilling her on iReports practice of not compensating the user for a picked submission.Anywho, I told her I submitted videos to iReport. She told me each video is reviewed. I told her that I mentioned the death of the 3-letter news broadcast in my submissions and she hinted that may have a small thing to do with them not being approved. She then brought in a guy standing to my left into the conversation, and introduced him as someone who works on iReport and told me to keep submitting my videos. Then then this dude told me, mutiple times, to keep submitting, submiting, submitting and then throws in, "repeatedly click on the ad's". Uhhhh, ok?I then talked to a gentleman from Revision3. I told him they have to to do a news show. Considering the distribution they possess, they could do get tons of people informed and interested in the news again. He asked me if I had any ideas what the show would look like? I said I had it right here and proceeded to show him a few clips from openSermo on my iPod nano. He liked it, from what I could tell, and asked to see more, gave me his card and told me to contact him to talk more in depth and to share more clips.

(Update: After the Scaling panel, I approached Kevin Rose and told him I met this guy from Rev3 and asked Kevin if he could give me his opinion on openSermo. On a side note, Kevin is awesome, real chill and willing to talk. Honestly, I cant imagine how many times he gets approached regularly, and to still be this chill, mad props Kevin.)

SXSWi 2008 a few thoughts

SXSWi 2008 has been awesome. Total sensory overload is actually a better description. I meant to write more and post pictures and video over @ blog.opensermo.com. But, it's been such a fast ride, haven't really had the time to do anything but meet people, talk, drink and eat. Just to see the crowd harass Sarah Lacey, during the Mark Zuckerberg interview, was worth the price of admission. Mark was great for Mark, other then the countless repetition of the 2 key words: communication and empathy. However, I'm not going blather on about the details of this interview, I think Nick O'Neil does a fine job here.Breifly covered my favorite panel here. About to head out and grab some barbecue. Then another night out in Austin. Man this city rocks!

LOLWUT?

So far, out of all the panels at SXSWi 2008, LOLWUT? has been the best. A panel with the creator (Eric Nakagawa) and CEO (Ben Huh ) of icanhascheezburger.com.

Enteratining. Informative. Inspiring. These 2 guys rocked.Take away quote: "The good solutions are the simple solutions."

It's back: Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares

Quick 3.5 hour life recap. If your not interested in old school (12 years old, I'm only 22) strategy games, don't bother reading, just pretend this wasn't posted.So, I used to be a huge fan of Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares. Unfortunately once I upgraded my machine back in 2003 (my pre-mac era), Moo2 stopped running, or better yet it ran, but was quite grainy, crashy, and frankly unplayable (the game was designed for DOS and Win '95). So I gave up on one of my favorite games of all time. Since then I would occasionally try it, thinking maybe something changed and I'd get lucky. But unfortunately no dice.Then tonight happened, and for some reason I had an inclination to give it another go. But this time I was thinking. In the past, I never did search to see if there were work arounds, duh. Never did search to see what other people were doing (keeping old boxes around or what). The place I discovered hope: Wikipedia. This entry specifically.People are using an open source Dos emulator, DOSbox, to play the game; brilliant! You may be well aware of all this, but I definitely wasn't.My actual install steps after the break.3 and a half hours later and this game still rocks. You know how sometimes you'll play a older game you haven't player in years, that you used to love, only to become quickly bored and disappointed? Well that definitely didn't happen for me, I still love this game, hands down.By now your may be wondering, wow Ethan, it's Friday night: First off, what the heck are you doing trying to get a 12 year old, strategy, turn based game working? Second off, what the heck are you doing playing a 12 year old, strategy, turn based game? Well that's just who I am. Why not tonight? Furthermore. I'm trying to conserve every dollar right now, for SXSW. My whole mind is currently occupied by SXSW. I've been planning, strategizing and investigating. More on all that later.

Lessig '08

Robert ScobleI had heard of Mr. Lessig a couple of years back. But I never took it upon myself, to dive deeper, and truly discover the man behind the movement. Upon seeing the video posted at the bottom, I decided it was about time I got a better idea.Considering his broad based thinking and the influence he has had and continues to have on the world, I figured he had probably attended TED. So this was my first stop, Ted.com. And I was in luck, as there was one recorded Larry Lessig presentation, from last years TED '07. Which you can find here. This is a great introducing to his ideas and is basically a TED friendly / slimmed down version of his famous Free Culture presentations; which, after finishing the TED presentation, I went looking for.To the best of my knowledge, I found a full featured Free Culture presentation here.First off, this guy has a remarkable way to deliver his presentations. The combination of words, images, video and his personal delivery is like nothing I have experienced in a presentation, it really is awesome. I guess to some it coudl be annoying, but I am a total fan.Anyways, all I can say so far is, I believe, or I at least want to believe. Lessig has some simple but game changing ideas outlined in the video posted at the bottom. Check it all out for yourself, but Lessig could really be onto something here, in terms of changing the way in which our government works that is. Instead of relisting all of this, because it's 8:45 am and I've yet to hit the z's, a quick post with links to additional content on Lessig can be found at O'Reilly Radar.[blip.tv ?posts_id=686650&dest=-1]

Muhammad Ali...Recipe for Life

The "Sportsman of the Century", always well spoken, shares his philosophy on life; and doesn't disappoint.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebu0OBa1pus&rel=1]

openSermo updates and sxsw

A brief recap. I woke up on Feb. 5th to my 60 Second episode, Super Tuesday, on the homepage of YouTube, craziness! This drove a massive influx of visitors to my site and I was unprepared. But this definitely got me some great exposure. That episode now has over 26k views and I am thankful to everyone over at YouTube News & Politics for giving me the opportunity, especially David McMillian, who was kind enough to notify me of my homepage appearance.Fast forward. Since then I've been working double time. A few new episodes. Some not so happily received. Created a few openSermo shorts which are currently circulating the net; check em out here and here. Got a special tribute video in the works. More on that soon. And finally we have some set lighting, if you can call it that: 18" fluorescents taped to 7 ft metal shelving rods (check out the pic below). Thanks to Walter Graff @ Bluesky Production Group for the idea; however lacking tripods, we Macgyvered the hanging rods.And earlier today, I started pondering if I should attend SXSW. Yeah it's a bit late and unfortunately I'm gonna have to pay a heavy price due to this lateness; I'm still trying to work out the economics. However, this will be my first SXSW. If anyone has any tips, thoughts, or plans to attend, definitely let me know.

Back in business

Let's add some closure to the failing of my MacBook hard drive. I received the new drive the following day. It was waiting for me at my front door when I awoke, awesome. But wow, no signature required on a $400+ package? Brought the box inside, and before I ate breakfast I had my old drive out and the new drive it. Which was quite a pleasant replacement experience, proving that Apple defiantly intelligently engineers it's products. Then I plugged in my FireWire drive, booted from Leopard Cd, formatted drive and restored from back-up. Within 2 hours plus I was back up and running, and everything was just like it was the day my old drive had failed. This entire process was beautiful. Other then having to send my old hard drive back to apple, I am quite pleased and have never had a more pleasurable hard drive crash. Needled to say I have pre-ordered Apple's Time Capsule, just to have an additional backup layer.

Day 364: Hard Drive Failure

Today marks the 365th day of owning a MacBook. And yesterday, day 364, it started freezing uncontrollably. So naturally, I rebooted. And to my dismay was welcomed with the 4 language 'Please restart your mac' screen.

So I restarted again, and again, and again. The first tech support person I talked to was an idiot, and he was in a rush to get me off the phone. So once I started running a Disc Repair, by booting from the Leopard CD, he said "Here is your case ID, good luck, and goodnight." After 5 attempts, Disc Repair said 'Unable to repair Disc'. The Tech guy told me if this happened I should try and install a fresh copy of leopard. In fact the convo went something like this:

I said "I've been using time Machine can't I just restore from backup?"

He replies "First you have to install a fresh copy of Leopard, then run time machine in leopard and follow the instructions on how to restore from backup." This all seemed really counter-intuitive to me and he could sense my disbelief.

So he said, "I will send you links to instructions on how to do this."
Ok, Cool.

This is what he sent me. Wow, that's not helpful at all.

So I did my own research and ran a 'Restore from Time Machine Backup' off of the Leopard install Cd. This finished in about 2 hours. Now when I booted, it got stuck at the moving gear apple logo screen.

Shit. I rebooted in Verbose mode and was now greeted with this lovely repeating kernel message:

disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).

Ran a Google search on the message, and turned up this site. Looks like I got a hard drive failure. So today, I re-dialed Tech Support. This guy, was more intelligent. I told him what I had uncovered from the google search and that I had a hard drive failure. He told me to boot from the Leopard Cd, run Disk Utility, and see if the drive is still Smart Verified. Yes, it was. But I told him I had read online that this exact problem has happened to several other people and in their case, their drive was also Smart Verified. He told me to hold on for 3-5 minutes as he checked Apples Tech Support database. He returned, told me I needed a new hard-drive. Reeeeeeaaallllly. So, now I'm waiting for my new drive. Good thing I have AppleCare. On another note: It sucks you can't boot from a Time Machine backup. After this experience, I am thinking of buying a Time Capsule and using my current firewire drive for a nightly Caron Copy Cloner backup. Wow, even after this experience I want to spend $300 on a another Apple product. That's power. Anyway, I cant produce my Thursday episode of 60 Seconds because of this hiccup and that sucks. Just wanted to vent to the world. Peace out.

A day in technology

This is today's 60 Seconds. The entire episode focuses on advances in technology. Something I thought was rather cool and unusual, as I had never done a full tech episode. I'm sure you can tell I had a blast playing around with the sound effects and background music provided in iMovie. Kept me busy for awhile :p Let me know your thoughts in the comments or here. Thanks and enjoy![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdgb5dx6OlA&rel=1]