10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop

Want to edit (or warp) your images? Want to avoid spending $1,000 on Photoshop? The fun and informative LifeClever blog has a great post about free online image editors. LifeClever offers design advice, productivity tips and life hacks for designers and non-designers.

Animoto Online Slideshow with Soundtrack

Animoto is a fun online tool for your pictures and audio. I uploaded some silly images I created and a song I recorded with friends a while back. The Animoto engine spit out the following video.



As they describe themselves, "Animoto Productions is a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out.

Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer."

Treemo 1.0

Seattle-based Treemo.com graduated to 1.0 status today. Right on, cats. Great new widgets and some slick interface enhancements.

The Redemption Room

Business travel often rewards the weary with unbridled surprises. My flight from Richmond (pictured at left) landed late so I missed my connection in Atlanta. They booked me on a flight scheduled to leave the next day and told me to go to the room where I could redeem my hotel and breakfast voucher. The Redemption Room. This is the room where you go if you are crying or angry or tired or cranky. A room full of the bleary-eyed, seeking a new itinerary. Good times.

Looking on the bright side, I did get a complimentary care package with a toothbrush and some toiletries. Plus I got to visit the McDonalds off Airport Road by my Red Roof Inn. Plus, Richmond was lovely.

Definition: Dogfooding

One of the terms I hear all the time in this industry (especially at Microsoft) is "dogfooding". It means to use your own product (eat your own dog food). You can't expect others to use your software if you don't use it yourself. The concept is said to have originated with actor Lorne Green who, in the Alpo dog food commercials of the 1970s, exclaimed that he fed it to his own dog. Yum!

Found Photos

Found Photos is still one of my favorite websites ever. The best ideas on the Internet are sometimes the simplest. This site celebrates the twisted spectacle of humanity, displayed with amateur snapshots for your voyeuristic pleasures.

As the creator describes it, "The Found Photos started in 2004 while searching for mp3's using a filesharing program. I was searching through someones shared file list and saw a folder named 'pictures'. I downloaded the folder and found 20 or more pictures from this persons life, photos of himself and his friends etc. It made me wonder what else was out there, and after searching for more photos I found hundreds, thousands of them publicly shared. The FoundPhotos Archives consist of my filtered view from hundreds of thousands of images downloaded via peer to peer filesharing networks, updated regularly."

October on the Microsoft Campus

After snapping these photos (egads, with my iPhone no less) during a few fall visits to Microsoft, I overheard a receptionist telling a group of shutter-happy Japanese visitors that there is no photography allowed on campus, inside or outside the buildings. I stopped. I promise.

Day Job

An aspect of consulting which I find fascinating is learning about what other people do for a living. Doing internet project work for different companies allows me to peer thru a temporary portal into the daily working life of someone from a different industry. Ultimately what we learn is that we are all facing the same archetypal challenges every day, whether we are a doctor, an electronics technician or a drug dealer. But every trade has it's own set of secrets.

I've recently devoured some media on this subject. Check out the stuff below to learn how to spy on other people's day jobs.

Online magazine The Morning News has a great article by Seattle writer Matthew Baldwin called Tricks of the Trade. "For every occupation, there is a catalog of secrets only its employees are aware of—such as how waiters with heavy platters know to look straight ahead, and never down."

I loved reading "Gig, Americans Talk About their Jobs" which is 650 pages worth of 3-page stories, each from a different profession. Learn the secrets of a Wal-Mart greeter, a bookie and a smokehouse pit cook, among many others.

Of course, Studs Terkel did an amazing job of chronicling people's work lives as a historian, writer and expert interviewer. Read his fabulous book, "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do". Listen to an NPR story about the 30th anniversary of the book, including some of the original recordings Studs made.

And remember, next time you see someone at work (no matter what they are doing) understand that they know something you don't. But maybe if you ask them nicely, they'll tell you.

SWAG Stories

"Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,
Under the shade of a Coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boil,
You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me."
- Waltzing Matilda by A.B. Paterson

What is SWAG exactly? Traditionally it referred to the cloth bundle a transient Australian vagabond might carry, filled with his clothing and belongings. For our purposes here, let's talk about a contemporary definition meaning the free stuff given away to those in (or near) the internet industry. I'm talking about promotional items, branded souvenirs, marketing giveaways and what we sometimes refer to as "tchotchkes" (Yiddish for "trinket").

There are many definitions and derivations, some of which are:
Marketing speak: Samples, Wearables And Gifts
On the industry floor: Stuff We All Get
Slang: Shit We All Git
Jaded veteran: Some Worthless Advertising Gimmick
Production studio: Scientific Wild Ass Guess

SWAG is one aspect of the internet industry that makes it all worthwhile. When a colleague shows me some new piece of SWAG they just received, it is usually because the gift is either really great or, alternatively, uniquely horrible and ill-conceived.

I've received these trinkets over the last 15 years and have kept many of them. T-shirts are probably the most common variety of SWAG, but the gifts are often of higher value. When we started MountainZone.com to broadcast content to the outdoor sporting industry, we hoped the gifts would begin to roll in. Oh, and roll they did. We received free condo stays and lift tickets from WhistlerBlackcomb resort, branded jackets from Warren Miller Entertainment, and free meals at local Seattle restaurants. Perhaps the greatest SWAG item I ever received was a limited edition K2 "Tricky Glow" snowboard (see photo). They made 750 of them and mine is stamped #666. And yes, it does glow in the dark. Because I need that.

We've all seen the bad gifts, too. What does it say about a company when you use their branded pen and it runs out of ink in a day? What about that key fob/flash drive that looses your data? A couple years ago I attended a medical technology conference and I was given a pen that barely wrote, but I kept it because of it's kitch value. It was promoting a collection agency and claimed they could, "get blood out of a stone." The ink was red.



I am constantly fascinated by how language and words mutate and develop. The term SWAG has a twisted history of spellings, derivations and origin stories. Explore for yourself and derive your own conclusions, I'm too busy playing with my branded plastic toys!

Wikipedia has a deep history of SWAG.

A similar spelling, Shwag, is often used to reference marijuana of questionable quality.

Another spelling is Schwag as used on the new website Start Up Schwag. This is the place to go to get branded T-shirts from the internet industry.

Some internet industry folks are taking photos of their loot and posting them for all the world to see. For example, Yahoo! employees have begun collecting SWAG from their company and photographing it all.

So, before you say, "I Survived the Dot Com Crash and All I Got Were These 3,000 Lousy T-shirts" remember that you are part of history! Join me in saving photos of these items for history to view. Send me photos and, if I get enough, I'll start an online SWAG museum.

A Good Day in Carkeek Park

Sun, beach, late summer Seattle.

Wilco Live

Just a short post about the soundtrack to my summer. Wilco has been playing over and over in my car, home and iPod. Great rock, well-made, rich and textured. Attached to this post are a couple photos and a short video clip from my old Treo phone which was laid to rest right after this show. They played outside in Marymoor Park, Redmond, Washington. Bill Frisell joined them for a few songs. A lovely night for humans and dozens of freshly-hatched dragonflies.

Joybubbles R.I.P.

Joybubbles
(May 25, 1949 – August 8, 2007)
AKA Josef Carl Engressia Jr.


As a young computer nerd in the mid 80s, with my first-generation Radio Shack TRS-80, I would hear the legend of phone phreak Josef Carl Engressia Jr. He was blind and possessed perfect pitch and could whistle 2600 hertz. This allowed him to fool AT&T phone systems, impersonate the early computer tones and hijack phone calls and conference lines for free for him and his buddies.

This early pioneer of virtual community used the only massive network widely available at the time, phone lines. He joyfully ran amok over long digital distances, exploring.

He died today. The history of the web and social networks originated with many of those early hackers and phreaks. Lest we forget!

Art Wolfe Travels To The Edge

I was on the team that just launched a new website for internationally known nature photographer Art Wolfe. The new site will support Mr. Wolfe’s new television series, Travels to the Edge and is located at http://www.travelstotheedge.com/.

We created the entire website, including design, development and unique hosting concerns related to management of such a highly trafficked site. We also created, wrote and edited all of the content, from interviews with Art Wolfe team members to the final copy edit. I acted as executive producer and art director.

For the multimedia sections of the site, we used Adobe Flash in a complex configuration to serve multiple video streams, utilizing XML.

Major sponsors for the program include Canon and Microsoft. The program is produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and distributed by American Public Television.