A few weeks ago I was in Austin, TX for the South By Southwest Interactive conference. While there, through word of mouth I heard about FourSquare.

FourSquare is a new service for smartphone users from the creators of Dodgeball, a startup purchased and then shelved by Google. FourSquare utilizes your phone’s GPS to “Check in” to different places you go, see where your friends are and allows you to “Shout” status updates to your friends. On the surface it seems similar to other “location status” services such as Brightkite or Loopt. However FourSquare goes a different route than it’s competitors, it emphasizes the social potential of location status by turning it into a game.

I was, at one point a big promoter of Brightkite. While there are functions of the service I did like, I’ve started to question more and more why I used it. I started to qeustion: “Who cares that I’ve checked in to my apartment?” “Do I really want people knowing where my apartment is?” If I am going to restrict visibility of my location – why am I even using this service to begin with?” The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a really useful way for someone to stalk me and not much more.

FourSquare takes a different approach, it focuses on bars, clubs and restaurants rather than just arbitrary check ins to every location. It’s intention is to connect you and your friends in a nightlife setting.

Although I’ve been using it since SXSW it wasn’t until this weekend, on a trip visiting NYC, that I really saw the potential of FourSquare. The service awards your “check ins” a variety of ways. For each check in you earn points, and you get bonus points for doing things like hitting multiple locations in one night. You can also unlock badges, (yes, like in Boy / Girl Scouts) for accomplishing an objective, similar to many video games. Lastly, by checking into a location on multiple occasions you can become it’s “Mayor” if you’re there more often then someone else. Each city has it’s own set of badges and Mayors (There are currently 12 supported US cities.)

My FourSquare activity tells an amusing story about my trip to NY. According to Foursquare: I got “Crunked” on Thursday night bar hopping through Brooklyn, earned extra points meeting up with my friend Tom (who saw where I was via FourSquare and proposed we meet up) and went on a 4 day “Bender” which culminated in me becoming the “Mayor” of the Coyote Ugly Saloon Saturday night. Hopefully you can see why I’m enjoying this.

Something I’m really enjoying is the ability to build to-do lists of things / places you want to hit and view local to-dos that other users have posted. This allows for someone to craft their own adventures and come up with creative experiences. There is also a weekly leader board that lets you see who in your area is really partying it up and where you rank.

The end result is a service that feels like a giant mobile web scavenger hunt that encourages users to challenge each-other and compete.

The service is not without flaws though: Many bars and restaurants don’t show up in the listings, the there are many quirks to the website and application itself. IT’s creators have acknowledged that he service is still very much in development and honestly, it sometimes feels like a very public beta. They’ve reportedly set themselves a June 1st deadline to iron out the kinks and get it working the way they want. Even taking all that into consideration, the service is very functional and ver impressive.

Some things I’d like to see in future revisions:

• More visibility to user profiles and todo lists: I’d really like to discover new people to connect to, right now there are few days to do this. I wish profiles listed a clearer stream of what I did, when I did it and what rewards my actions earned me.  In 6 months I’d like to know which 4 bars I went to to unlock the “Crunked” badge.
• Less walls between cities. It’s strange that on the website I need to switch a drop down to see different sets of information for different cities. I’d like the ability to see everything at once and also see my local updates. The walls are weird. They discourage people from being friends cross-city. My friend Frank has an account but I’ll likely never see what he’s up to unless I switch my location to where he is. Sure local users should be prioritized, but just because I can’t get to Washington to meet up with Frank tonight doesn’t mean I don’t care.
• Badges also suffer due to these walls. I like the idea of having different goals in different cities but it seems silly that I’ve now earned the “Newbie” badge a few times and that I have to go our 4 nights in a row again to earn the “Bender” badge in Chicago because the one I earned was in NY. Perhaps there should be global badges and specialized local badges?

These are just my .02 cents. I’m excited to continue using FourSquare and to see where the service goes in the future, it’s genuinely a lot of fun. I recommend checking it out via their website: playfoursquare.com. There is an iPhone application available via the App Store and a mobile browser optimized version of the site available for Android and Blackberry users for now.

My friends, submitted for your approval on this fine New Years Day is a pamphlet found in the attic of my parent’s house.

What you see is just part of a piece of 1950′s Cold War propaganda in the vein of such nonsense as “Duck and Cover,” This particular piece was produced by New York state in association with Time Inc.’s Life Magazine as a civil service and is bound by no copyright. A pamphlet like this one would have been distributed to help individuals prepare for “The Bomb” which at that point many felt was inevitable. Nevermind the fact that in an actual atomic blast these methods would do very little, if anything, to save one’s life. They both created and eased fear among the populous while fostering dependency and loyalty to the government.

To me it’s an amazing piece of American history both from a psychological and a design standpoint.  My grandfather was a chemist and member of the Nassau Country Civil Defense Commission and near as I can tell this was his, there may be more. If I come across anything else I’ll post it as well.

Enjoy.

Just under a month ago the fine folks at Canon hosted a hands on event at Calumet Chicago. Excited at the chance to possibly get to play with the new Canon EOS 5D Mark II I happily trotted down to check it out.

Unfortunately they didn’t have the new 5D, however I did get to play with the new Powershot G10.

This was something I was afraid would happen. While the 5DmkII is a bit out of my spur of the moment price range… I did have the $500 on me to drop on the G10. Holding it in my hands I was instantly in love.

For those unfamiliar, the G10 is a significant upgrade of the intensely popular G9 point-and-shoot camera. Now, if you’re seriously into photography or just getting into Digital SLRs, you might be wondering why you should care about a measly point-and-shoot.

Because this is no measly point-and-shoot.

The G10 offers full manual controls as well as the standard point and shoot settings, Canon’s new noise reducing Digic IV chip, a variable aperture of 2.8 – 4.5, a 14.7 megapixel sensor and the ability to shoot RAW. The G10 is, in short: everything you would want in a basic point-and-shoot, in a much smaller more compact body.

My normal day-to-day camera has been a Rebel XTi since it’s release.. I’m never without a camera. Since my purchase of the G10 I’ve been carrying it around almost exclusively and I have to say, I’m in love. I have to say my favorite part about it is the ability to utilize the ‘Live View’ feature that will let me see what my image will look like using manual controls via the LED on the back of the camera. I can dial up and down to allow me to shoot in different lights and judge before I shoot in a much more accurate way. This is great for me as someone who does a lot of low light shooting. While the ISO 1600 setting is near unusable, the Digic IV chip does a great job of reducing the noise and makes serious strides by making ISO 800 a viable option for someone like myself. The 2.8 aperture doesn’t hurt either.

In closing, while I’m still waiting on the 5DmkII for more professional use, the G10 has taken over the role my Rebel previously filled as a solid and powerful day to day camera and it’s made me rethink my impressions of point-and-shoot cameras.  I love using it and I can’t stop showing it off.

You can check out some unprocessed images from the G10 to get an idea of how it performs and for yourself on my Flickr account.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart Chicago, the conference for people who make websites. There I got the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people, hear some amazing lectures and learn more in two days than I have in a few years.

An Event Apart is a great way to refresh your thinking and get exposed to amazing new concepts in web design. I would recommend it to anyone who does any sort of web design or development work.

I’ve posted some shots of some of the presenters on my Flickr. Please feel free to check them out.

Many thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer for putting together a great group of speakers and an amazing event. I went last year and it was worth it, I’m glad I got the opportunity to go again this year.

Submitted for your approval (or disapproval) a music video I made for “Magnetic North” a Less Than Jake song in 2002 before YouTube and making your own video was all the rage. This was one of my first experiments with Final Cut Pro and video editing in general. Warning in advanced the whole thing is shot with a handheld camera and is very jerky. I just found this on my harddrive and figured I should post it for posterity’s sake. Unfortunately I appear to have lost the source project.

Enjoy and thanks for watching!

HDR or High Dynamic Range is a photography post production technique that seems to be very trendy these days. It’s known for yielding striking images full of color and detail not attainable through a single shot. I’ve been fascinated by the idea since I first heard about it a few years ago.

Basically, for those of you who are not photographers the idea is pretty simple. A digital image can only contain a certain amount of light / color information so tones above and below the acceptable range get clipped out, either appearing as pure black or pure white. What HDR seeks to do is to bring back that information by working with multiple exposures.

In short: you take three shots, one too dark, one too light and one even. Each one of those images will have information the others won’t. For example, one image might highlight the color in the sky and another might bring out the details in the shadows. By combining these three shots we can create one composite image with more color and detail than any of the originals.

For my first attempt I worked with a combination of tools from shot to upload. The first of which is my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and my trusty Canon 28mm f2.8 lens. I’m a big fan of this lens for it’s wide angle and relatively high aperture (the f2.8). The allows my camera to take in a lot of light very quickly with a lot of sharpness and crisp color. This is absolutely one of my favorite lenses.  Every Canon shooter should have something similar.

From there I loaded my images into Apple’s Aperture 2.1 software where I picked my three shots and did some conservative adjustments to bring out more detail in the images. From there I went into Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Now anyone who knows my photography most likely knows that I do everything I can to avoid working in Photoshop. These days I try to accomplish everything I possibly can inside Aperture. However I have not been impressed by what I’ve seen from the Hydra HDR plugin that is available for Aperture, so I decided to give Photoshop’s built in one a chance.

Much to my delight the feature worked as advertised. By loading in the three images it was able to create one 32-bit image with a startling range of color. Unfortunately not many programs can handle a 32-bit file so I had to convert it back down to the 16-bit range of the previous files. However, the ultimate goal was still accomplished. My one 16-bit file now contained a lot more color and detail than any of the three. Still the image started to look a little flat so, from there I did some basic curves adjustments to restore some contrast and moved the image back to Aperture.

Inside Aperture I did a little more tweaking of saturation and sharpness to make the image punch some more and there we have it, my first real HDR image is a success. (At least I think so.)

The biggest challenge in this process to me was shooting the photographs themselves. I had to make sure that, without a tripod, I kept my shots steady and without interruption from cars or passers by.

As a whole I’m pleased by the process and the results. I will definitely play with HDR imaging a lot more in the future.

So tonight I upgraded my WordPress install from 2.2 to 2.6 and I am amazed at how easy it was, absolutely floored to be honest. Those guys have their stuff down, it’s kinda crazy.

Anyway, though you don’t (currently) see any visual differences, the back end ones are dramatic. Most notably for me.. It supports the WordPress iPhone App, from which I am posting this entry. The App too is mind-blowing.

Anyway this is the start of bigger things for Subism.com. I’m excited to say that what I thought was going to be one of the biggest technical hurdles was a breeze.

Now if only I could copy and paste….

For a long time I have been a big fan of AT&T’s cell phone service. I have been with AT&T (then Cingular) since 2002 and have been extremely pleased.

However I do not share the same opinion about AT&T’s DSL offerings.  Here in Chicago my broadband  options are more than what I had in Brooklyn several years back (Verizon DSL or nothing). When I moved to Chicago I was faced with three options: Comcast, RCN and AT&T. I loath Comcast… my opinions of them could really fuel a whole other entry by themselves, so I quickly dismissed them. I had never heard of RCN so I dismissed them as well and that left me with good ol’ AT&T.

Since signing with them I’ve had random outages, suspected a few incidents of bandwidth throttling and read a lot of stories about them sharing customer information. But, in truth I have not once have I needed to call customer support so my opinion has been neutral regardless. However last night my internet dropped out without warning when I really needed it. Quickly a friend on Twitter confirmed that the outage was seemingly city wide. The outage was short but it was enough to piss me off and screw up my plans.  This left a sour taste in my mouth when I awoke this morning. Then I read something while updating my Flickr profile.  One sentence changed my opinion of them:

 You have a Pro account, at no cost as long as you keep your AT&T Yahoo! service.    

 Okay, so like Flickr Pro is only around $20 a year (and probably the best deal on the planet) and it’s a small contribution when you boil it down. But that said…. it’s enough to make me smile, bring me back to the neutral ‘meh’ I was at before with them and almost turn me into a promoter.

They found my weak spot. Photography is the key to my heart.

mailserversettings.com

I figured by posting this I will be the hero of every Mac Genius, Creative and IT worker in the US.

Short term plan is simply to have a table list. Long term is to have a searchable database. Any and all submissions are welcome.

Keeping in my ‘seeking out inspiration’ kick, I just registered for the Seed conference with Jason Fried, Jim Coudal and Carlos Segura on October 29th. I’m looking forward to it, I hope to learn a lot. I’m also really enjoying networking as of late. I’ve been astounded by the people I’ve been meeting lately and it started with An Event Apart.

Coming out here to Chicago has been a huge opportunity for me, there is always something new and inspiring going on that fascinates me. So much to learn.

Last week I was lucky enough to attend a screening of Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier at the Apple Store. The screening was hosted by producer Roman Coppola. Afterwards Roman stuck around for Q&A. The crowd was excellent and his rapport with them was phenominal. While film is not my field of choice listening to Roman was really inspiring. He spoke about starting a project, from researching it and making compromises to achieve a vision. I’m really looking forward to The Darjeeling Limited.

It’s weird but I spent years in New York, the “cultural center of the world”, and somehow I missed opportunities like this. I think I’m just more in tune with the world around me now.

I’m excited.