May 9th – All good things must come to an end.

As you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been posting everyday for the past little while. I think I’ve gotten a bit bored with the idea of writing about what I am doing every day, because let’s be serious, that isn’t very interesting to anyone (including myself).

I started this blog for two reasons, the first was simply to start blogging, to get myself into that world, though I knew I wasn’t creating an amazing blog. And the second reason was to record a small piece of what I do with my life, so I can look back at that in the future. But I am already getting that through Twitter, at least to some extent. So this blog is starting to feel more and more like just a hassle I am doing just because I said I would do it.

So, here’s my new plan. I’m going to stop updating this blog. I won’t delete it or anything, but I won’t be posting anything here on an even remotely regular basis (I still might post some stuff here, since I know my family looks at it). What I think I’m going to do instead is resurrect my old blog that I used for photography, davemmett.wordpress.com, and re-brand it into a place for me to share my thoughts on current internet culture, new tech stuff, social media stuff, and other things I find interesting. I don’t want to do just a link blog type thing (I already share enough links over on friendfeed), I want to express my views about what is going on out there.

So that is that. I started this blog on October 19th, 2008 – 203 days ago – and since then have posted 70 entries, including this one. That works out to an average of 1 post every 3 days, which I suppose is not too bad at all.

So, if you read this blog regularly, or even occasionally, stop over to davemmett.wordpress.com, subscribe to the feed, and keep getting your fix of my mildly interesting writing.

Filed under: Everyday, the end

April 28th – The Hub

After work today Jess and I went to the hub Halifax for the first time. They were holding a hub taster session, which meant anyone could come and visit without a membership. The place was really cool, nice and open, friendly people, and free coffee.

In a nutshell, the hub Halifax is a co-working space which offers an alternative to coffee shops or renting an office for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and others who can work wherever they want. You pay a membership every month (there are a few membership options), and get access to desk space and all the usual office-ey amenities. What makes the hub especially interesting is the focus on connecting with the other people in the space; they profile all their members on their website, and people are encouraged to seek out help from other members. Just from spending an hour there I could see that people were friendly and open to building connections with the other members. Neat.

I wish I had a real reason to go there more often, or purchase a membership. Right now they are only open until 6pm, which is when I get off work, so it doesn’t really work out. But if they open up later in the evenings I plan on going back instead of my frequent visits to Starbucks/Second Cup.

Also, I looked up places like this in Vancouver (where I am moving for September), and there is at least one similar space called Workspace which looks really nice, so I will have to visit it when I get to Vancouver.

Filed under: Everyday

April 25th – Photomotion

A couple of days ago, I randomly stumbled across a community of photographers on vimeo who have created videos similar to the one I did from my UK trip (to recap, here it is):

I had no idea that it was such a popular video form, but apparently it is, and the form seems to be called Photomotion, which is fitting. So I thought I would showcase a few of the videos I found on vimeo that are really good. I am also planning on making more of these, I might end up with one from archived photos, we’ll see how it turns out 🙂

This one seems to be the definitive example, photos from a vacation in Japan:

And here is one of London exclusively, with a very high production value (and a great song):

And how about Tel Aviv:

And here is one from last year’s South by Southwest conference:

We’ll close it off with this one, which is more of a traditional timelapse video, but it’s so ridiculously cool and well done it can’t be missed:

So there it is, enjoy.

Filed under: Everyday

April 23rd – Wings

This evening I went out for wings with my friends Mike and Erin at Bubba Rays, a local sports bar. As an aside, they have what could possibly be the most annoying website ever created.

Wings were good, and we had a few beers and a shot of absinthe and Red Bull. I don’t think that was the best idea I’ve ever had, but it wasn’t actually that bad. Watched some hilarious featherweight boxing and the start of a hockey game. All in all, good night.

Filed under: Everyday

April 22nd – Earth Day

I’ll be honest, beyond being aware that it was happening, I didn’t really celebrate Earth Day today. I also didn’t drive in a vehicle or throw any the trash on the ground, or do anything else excessively damaging to the environment, but that was just out of habit.

After work I went over to one of Jess’s coworkers apartments for sushi. Sweet, delicious sushi. I couldn’t stay there for too long though becuase I had to go over to Second Cup and meet up with Sarah to do some website work. She was showing me how to do some CSS stuff tonight which was awesome because I really want to learn how to do that, but I didn’t know what I was doing before. So now I have a bit better idea of how it all works.

Since I don’t really have anything else to write about today I’ll share a link to a cool site I learned about this morning called Polar Rose. It’s a site that lets you tag people from your flickr photos, and then it automatically scans the rest of the images to find matches. So, over time, it will automatically identify who is in each picture. I haven’t tagged too many photos yet, but you can check it out my page if you are interested. Which I know you are. Interestingly, I just checked the link that I added there and it doesn’t actually give out the names of people publically, which is a nice little security feature.

Filed under: Everyday

April 21st – Tweeting up

Tonight’s tweetup (that’s a social gathering of people organized through twitter) was a lot of fun. Jess and I showed up a bit late and there was already like 20 people there at Durty Nelly’s when we arrived. Most of the people there I knew already from other events- podcamp, the twitter brunch, twitteroke- and there were a few people there that I followed on twitter but hadn’t met yet, including @quietrevolution (a co-founder of the hub Halifax) and @northerchick (Chris Brogan‘s assistant/intern. I didn’t even realize she lived in Halifax). It was a fun time. With so many people there, everyone had to shift around the table to chat with different people, which was fun but meant it was hard to talk to all the people I wanted to. I guess this is the curse of how successful these events are…

Being at events like this one always makes me think about how powerful a medium twitter is becoming. While all the focus these days is on how twitter can be used to connect business with clients and celebrities with fans, it’s always great to see how powerful it can be for connecting real people with other real people, who just want to hang out and share a few beers. Things like this are why I know twitter hasn’t jumped the shark with the arrival of Oprah. Whether there are 1 million or 100 million people on it, it will always enable people to connect with other people.

Filed under: Everyday, durty nellys, tuesday, tweetup, twitter

April 20th – Four Twenty Furniture

This blog post will have absoultely nothing to do with marijuana.

Over this weekend, Jess and I did a lot of planning for our move to Vancouver. Most of this was focused around deciding what to do with our stuff. Like most people, over the last 5 years of living in Nova Scotia (oh god has it been that long?), we’ve accumulated a lot of stuff, some of it nice, some of it $10 coffee tables. Stuff doesn’t travel well across country.

So we got a quote from a moving company to see how much it would cost to ship our furniture across; I’m not going to say the value, but suffice to say it’s a lot more than we paid for the stuff inside our 650 sq ft apartment, and a lot more than it will cost us to buy all new stuff when we get there (from IKEA!). So that is the option we are taking which means we will need to sell or otherwise get rid of all our furniture in the next few months. It will be sad to say goodbye to some of these things. But at the same time I think it’s healthy to just start fresh every once and awhile. It is just stuff after all.

After bringing this up at work today and having some of my coworkers express interest in a few items we have, I wanted to take a few photos so I could show them, and I figure I might as well post them here as well in the off chance anyone who sees this and lives in Halifax is in need of some nice new (to you) furniture. No this is not the extent of our marketing efforts, we’ll probably be selling most stuff on Kijiji soon. Maybe craigslist too, we’ll see.

Well, if you see anything you’re interested in, please let me know.

Filed under: Everyday, furniture, halifax, ikea, monday, moving, vancouver

April 18th – State of Play

Tonight Jess and I went to see State of Play at Park Lane. The movie was quite good, I hadn’t heard too much about it before seeing it, so I really didn’t know what to expect which is always exciting. I would highly recommend it to anyone else who enjoys political/journalistic thrillers (which I’m sure is everyone).

I spent some time today at Second Cup doing some website stuff, and we also did more planning for the move.

I need to work out a better schedule for posting on here; right now I’m doing it pretty much right before I go to bed everynight, but that means I’m just rushing to put something down everyday. I’ll get it sorted in time.

Filed under: Everyday, movie, park lane, second cup, state of play

April 17th – Just another day

Tonight after work we had a little bit of a dinner party with a few friends. Jess made a curry recipe we got from our friend Becky while we were in the UK, and it was delicious. The dinner party was lots of fun; some wine, some laughs, all that jazz.

That’s really all there is to say about today…I don’t really have any big plans for tomorrow either, probably going to spend all day in Second Cup doing some website work for Sarah.

Oh, and my video I posted yesterday seems to have been well received, my mom left a message on my phone doing the whole “oh your so creative, I can’t believe you know how to do things like this, great job” thing, and I’ve heard getting the mom vote is the first step to greatness.

I promise most posts will be more interesting than this.

Filed under: Everyday, dinner, mom, party, uk, video

April 16th – One project down, 1 million to go

I almost didn’t post tonight, but then I remembered I said I was going to post everyday and it would be pretty lame to fail on day 2.

But I do want to post up a video I’ve been working on since getting back from the UK:

Essentially, I took all 1600 photos I took while I was there, threw them in iMovie, cut the duration down to .25 secs each, added all of the really nice edited photos (the ones that are on flickr), added some music and away we go. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I originally was going to post it with a Coldplay song as the background, but then I decided that copyright infringement isn’t cool so I found some Creative Commons licensed music through ccmixer.org which I think fits the video quite well. I wish there was a way to sort CC music by track length, I think that would be very helpful.

I got the idea to do this from Chase Jarvis’ awesome video Chase Jarvis FRAMES, in which he took all the photos he took over 5 days and showed every single one, all the good and the bad, in a video like mine. I think it’s a neat idea, and it lends itself to the holiday photo very well because you get that sense of motion and travel through the shots (hopefully…).

Now that this is done, I still have one more project to do from these photos, but it’s more of a personal thing but I can’t say what it is because you never know who is reading this. I also have a ton of other stuff to work on, which is awesome.

Filed under: Everyday, CC, england, music, photos, thursday, uk, youtube