trying to believe

Let the Viddler lovefest continue, I say! I’ve just incorporated Viddler video comments into my site, so if you’d like to respond visually instead of typing out a response, feel free. (Or you can do both.)

My son trips me out sometimes. Here he can be found “singing” along with “Flow Rida”. As a side note, this is my first time uploading something to Viddler. It’s a great service that’s really innovative! when it comes to video tagging, commenting, and more.

Adobe Photoshop Express is now available to the public. The browser-based RIA allows you to make basic edits/adjustments to your images. Either upload photos to the service, or hook it up with your Facebook, Photobucket and/or Picasa accounts.

Reznor vs. Radiohead: Innovation Smackdown

WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build. This is big news for one reason: the build is publicly available. Opera has an internal build available which passes the Acid test.

Amazon takes on Apple with DRM-free music.

I’ve used iTunes since it was first released in 2001. When music was first sold via iTunes, I bought into the idea right away and stopped buying CDs altogether. I didn’t care about DRM and I didn’t care about bit-rates. When they started selling TV shows, I didn’t hesitate to buy shows like Heroes, Lost, South Park and Lil’ Bush. When they started selling iTunes Plus tracks, I bought those too. The idea of paying a little more for better quality, unprotected music made sense to me.

Then Amazon started offering DRM-free tracks, and they started offering them for less than copy-protected, lower-quality tracks on iTunes were selling for. Initially, I resisted. I told myself that nothing could work as well as iTunes. But then I tried AmazonMP3. Yeah, there’s a couple of extra steps involved in buying and downloading a track, but it’s worth the extra quality and cost savings.

I haven’t bought from iTunes since. It’s still my player of choice, and I still get TV shows from it fairly often, but now that there’s a viable alternative for buying music, I’m not sure I can go back.

View Slideshow

Wyatt, Ian, Jenni and I made the trek to Atlanta, GA over the weekend to see Jonathan Coulton live at the Variety Playhouse. Paul and Storm were a great opening act, and Coulton did not disappoint. The show was three hours of geekiness, and I couldn’t be happier to have been in attendance. (Wyatt’s thoughts can be read here: Nerdfest 2008)

Prior to the show, we grabbed a quick dinner at Sweet Lime, a Thai and sushi restaurant located right down the street from the Variety Playhouse. I played it safe by getting Spicy Shrimp Rolls and California Rolls, but everyone seemed to enjoy what they ordered.

Wyatt, thanks for letting me tag along on your birthday outing. I had a fantastic time!

The 80-20 Business Rule - Absolutely brilliant video/idea. (Hat tip: GeekMommy)

One of the most moving speeches I’ve heard.

Safari 3.1 Released - new version has limited support for HTML5, embedded fonts via CSS and more. It’s a pretty solid release, but much more needs to be done to reduce the memory footprint of the app on Windows.