I’ve been catching up on my Bloglines feeds lately, and came across this O’Reilly Radar post about threadless.com. Tim describes it as “…digg for t-shirt designs”, which I think is fairly accurate after browsing the site for few minutes. Basically, users register on the site in order to submit their own designs and slogans, rate existing submissions, and (of course) buy t-shirts. The site design is pretty slick, and there are some really excellent t-shirts designs. The reason Tim is making such a big deal about it, is because it’s a true marriage of Web 2.0 and business - or as he puts it - “this is a ‘crowd-sourced’ manufacturing business”.
December 22nd, 2006
Just wanted to get this out there before the show is off the air, but I’m really digging the new Sci-Fi miniseries called “The Lost Room”. Since the story and premise is far too complicated, I’ll let this TV Squad post do the talking. There’s also a great Wikipedia entry for more information and a list of objects and their properties. After watching the first part, I highly recommend it. The first hour starts off a little slow to set things up and explain what the objects mean, but the second hour has the payoff. I hope the ending of the series doesn’t disappoint, but right now I recommend watching it. Sci-Fi is rerunning the episodes until Sunday where they have all 3 back to back.
December 12th, 2006
Well, I finally got my face on television. Now, it’s only for a few seconds, but still, it’s there. Here’s the story of how it happened:
My good friend, Noel, has been running this blog called TexasBurgerGuy.com for over 2 years now. He takes it seriously and has a passion for good hamburgers, so his reviews are very well done. Apparently, a lot of people at the Food Network read his blog, so they contacted him about doing a segment of a new show with him in it. The new show is called The Hungry Detective, which features a Los Angeles police detective that goes from city to city to find good restaurants that people may not know about.
When Noel got the news that they were going to film him, he let me know. But when I found out that it was going to be during the week and at Bubba’s Texas Burger Shack, which is right down the street from where I work, I just had to ask if I could pop my head in during the shoot. I took my good friend, Trey, along for the ride as well. Noel described the experience on this blog post, so I won’t get too descriptive.
In short, it was very interesting and fun to watch a television show get filmed. We actually showed up around 11AM, which is our normal lunch time, and there was no one there except Noel and a couple of crew members. We were hungry, so I finally ordered Trey and I a burger. After we got about half way done with our burger, the producer told us to save some room for another one so he could film us. So, after digesting our first burger, the producer set up a shot of Trey and I ordering our 2nd burger from the counter. We actually had to do 2 takes because they wanted to get audio of the shot (which they didn’t end up using). Later, they had the cameraman film us eating, which made me feel quite self-conscious! After that, we signed some release forms and we went back to work. Noel, on the other hand, had to stay the rest of the day for his part.
Here’s the clip that Noel posted on YouTube. You can see my back (behind the line) at the 3:39 mark, Trey and I eating at the 4:15 mark, and Trey and I ordering at the 4:28 mark.
Thanks to TexasBurgerGuy.com and the Food Network for a neat experience!
December 6th, 2006
Several months ago, I found a great little app via a Lifehacker post called OpenPandora. The 2 main reasons I like using are:
- Since OpenPandora is a Windows application, I don’t have to hold my web browser hostage to play music with Pandora.com.
- It sends my listened tracks to Last.fm, where I can get more recommendations and my friends can see what I’ve listened to.
The author of OpenPandora is constantly updating the program to provide more features and fix bugs. To get a list of all the other many features OpenPandora provides, go to the download page.
I was browsing the author’s blog archives to see when he added Last.fm support, and found another site called PandoraFM that integrated Pandora and Last.fm before OpenPandora did. It actually seems to have better integration and more features than OpenPandora, but the problem is that you still have to use your web browser to play the music. However, if you don’t have Windows or are restricted from installing programs, this is the next best thing to having OpenPandora.
December 1st, 2006
