Bnpositive's Blog

Earlier this week I went to a grand opening reception for The Marriott Place hotel complex in downtown Indianapolis. As part of the blog posts I wrote about the event (for I Choose Indy and Positively Indy), there were photos I wanted to share that really showcased the new and contemporary design of the various guest rooms at the properties.

I’ve been using Picasa 3 for awhile now, but took the time to play around with the movie creation feature available in the software product now. The movie feature allows you to create a slideshow of a collection of images with audio track, caption display and transitions as needed.

Encoding and uploading the video to YouTube is as simple as entering your login information, editing the details about the video and sending it to their servers right from within Picasa.

Below is the video I created in just a couple of minutes.

A couple of things to keep in my that I learned from this quick project:

• Provide more time between each transition for the photo to be seen
• The compression of the video to size really pixilated the images during transitions, perhaps use another transition besides dissolve

For the post I wrote on my Positively Indy site, I ended up using Picasa Web Albums to share the photos, which also provides an embeddable slideshow feature.

I twittered some news awhile back that was something great but I couldn’t say anything about it quite yet. Well, since he was on Entertainment Tonight last night, I think it’s safe that I can mention it now.

My old roommate from college and dear friend, Dana Baker, has been selected to be on a new ABC tv show that will follow the efforts of a few individuals as they SUCCEED in losing weight and improving their health.

What’s different about this show from shows like The Biggest Loser, is that camera crew and trainer will follow each individual for an entire year and chronicle their efforts. I’m not sure when the show will air, but stay tuned, you can bet I’ll let you know.

So the madness of March has started and everyone is worrying about their brackets and if they’re going to win the office pool. My boss and I have a Catalina league we do each March, which resembled more of a fantasy team draft as we each pick players, not just teams.

You get the total amount of points your selected player makes through the entire tournament. This forces you to balance picking high-scoring players with teams that will make it through the tournament as far as possible.  What this means is that a player that averages 10 points a game, but will be in for 5 games (50 pts) is more valuable to you than a player who scores 20+ but probably won’t make it past the 2nd round.

My boss developed a database application that allows us all to draft onto our team and see all the players available through the process. We have a big draft night in his basement and all have a good time. Here’s my team after the 1st round of games:

I already lost a few players, but right now out of the league of 10 teams, I’m hanging out in the middle of the pack.

I’ve also got a couple of different brackets I’ve been working on through the ESPN website. I’m not doing very well on those. I even did a mascot bracket this year, and sadly I’m doing about as well in that bracket as I am on the ones I tried to actually plan and strategize on.

Looking forward to the Final Four heading to Indianapolis in a couple of weeks. If you’re team is on the road to make it to the Final Four and your need parking for the games, I’ve got the best parking in Indianapolis for you! It’s located in the Hurst Bean lot just south of the Lucas Oil Stadium. We have parking available for Saturday’s games and the final championship game on Monday.

A couple of weeks ago when all the news about b5media terminating the remainder of their blogger contracts, John Fox with IndyGeek.net contacted me and wanted to ask me a few questions about my time at b5media.

Recently I decided to dig a little deeper into the impact the termination is having locally.  Jason Bean, a long time blogger for the company, was one of the terminated bloggers.  Having first been published in December 2005, Jason started writing for b5media shortly after their initial launch.  Through-out the years, he’s contributed to several of the company’s web properties, focusing mainly on technology, but also authoring pieces about American Idol and CSI.

John also followed up with Elaine Kunda, current b5 CEO, and asked her some questions as well.

His post "b5media Releases Remaining Bloggers From Staff" is now available on the IndyGeek.net website if you’d like to read it.

The last couple of weeks I’ve decided to take a break from updating everyone with my location status through Brightkite and Foursquare. If you keep up with me at all on Twitter I’m sure you’ve noticed the overall reduction in related tweets.

It wasn’t due to the recent concerns posted on sites like www.pleaserobme.com that made me back off, it was really more of a question of was it really a worthwhile endeavor?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept of randomly having a meet-up with someone if they were close by, but in reality, my ability to just jump-up and go meet someone isn’t very likely.

So, now that I’ve significantly reduced my check-ins. I used to check-in just about everywhere I went, now I only really check-in if it someplace unusual, or if my schedule might actually allow a random meeting.

Have you been using these services for awhile? Have you seen your usage drop-off significantly? Have you gotten bored with the service, or are you concerned about the risks and privacy issues of telling people where you are and are not?

There’s lots of discussion about the use of waterboarding to extract information from terrorists or other enemy combatants. Through all of the discussion, do you know what it is? What actually occurs when you’re being waterboarded?

Here’s a video I found in a post at Huffington Post about the controversial act. Mike Guy, a journalist for Playboy, decided to see for himself what all the hubbub was about. He guessed he could last 15 seconds without any problems.

"Invoking an existing fear". What do you think? I think I agree with the soldier, I’m not sure if it’s "torture", I’m sure it’s emotionally and mentally intense, but I agree that I think real "torture" involves physical wounds or pain.

Who’d have thought Playboy would deliver journalism like this, that no other major media outlet would have asked this question. At least not that I know of, do you?

I’m using Qdoba as an example, but this really goes out to all companies that start doing something that’s not really in their core business.

I got an email recently from Qdoba letting me know I could now visit their website and download a free music file and learn more about "our sound" at their website. Honestly the "sound" of Qdoba is something I’d probably prefer not to hear about if you know what I mean.

To me it’s not too much different than Pizza Hut and their Wing Street brand. Pizza Hut , you’re really not doing pizza that well anymore, how about you just focus on improving that before you start also offering less than average buffalo wings too.

This could be another reason why Ford is one of the only automobile companies that’s making profits without any assistance from the US government.

I know there were a number of people that wrote for b5media that have now been terminated. You’ve obviously had some great things to say and are a talented writer, but now you may not know where to do it.

Invest in yourself.

You should be able to request your past posts from b5media and get them as an WordPress export file that you can then use to setup your own WordPress site. Don’t know how to do that? Here’s my offer.

If you’d like to setup your own domain and setup WordPress but don’t know how, I’d like to help.

Just email me and let me know you’re interested. I’ll take care of the following for you:

1. Register and setup your domain
2. Setup web hosting
3. Install WordPress on your domain
4. Import your old b5 posts into your new site
5. Help you install a template of your choice

Then you can get back to doing what you love. Writing and blogging.

I’ll take care of all of this for you for $100, which will pay for my time, the domain name and hosting for the first year. After that you’ll just need to pay for the annual renewal of your domain name and hosting each year.

I’ll help you keep things updated with WordPress and try and take care of all the other tech stuff that b5media handled for you in the past.

Email me or leave a comment if you’re interested.

If you’d like to read more about my history with b5, just read my previous post, The End of My b5media Days.

It finally happened to me. I received my termination letter this morning from b5media President & CEO, Elaine Kunda. There’s been quite a bit of chaos around the b5media world the last few weeks as they continued to dump bloggers as part of their ongoing quest to re-focus and reconfigure themselves as a new media company.

I’ve been writing for b5 since the early days, and actually started when original CEO and founder Jeremy Wright invited me to the team back in December of 2004. Since that time I’ve written for a number of sites and on a variety of topics for the network.

As the company continued to grow and gain funding, I surfed the wave of bumps and bruises along the way and enjoyed the community around the network. It was a great time and I learned a ton about myself and the topics I wrote about.

I’ve always thought that the strength of b5media didn’t necessarily lie with the idea behind the network, but it was because of who was involved, both at the top, in tech support and all of the individual bloggers. It was a great community.

As things began to shake-up and shake-out, I avoided numerous rounds of cuts, pay contract changes and restructures. I wasn’t sure how long the ride was going to last, but I committed to continue writing and just "keep my head down" and see where I ended up.

I ended up at today.

My time with b5media is over.

I’ll miss the memories of b5, but I’m looking forward to taking a little bit of a breather and starting to write on my own sites again. They’ve been sorely ignored with everything else I’ve had going on.

If you enjoyed my writing on all of these topics, stayed tuned here to see what I’ll be doing next and be sure and follow me on twitter as I’ll continue to be active there.

So long to the past and here’s to the future with more of my investment and time going to my own deal with Bnpositive Communication & Design.

A few months ago I discovered a feature in one of my favorite graphics applications. The application is Picasa and the new feature is their facial recognition functions.

The Picasa application isn’t really a photo editing tool in my opinion, although it’s got some tools that are nice for the entry-level and home user. What I believe Picasa excels at is organizing and managing your photos and other graphics.

Part of that organization has now become their facial recognition tool. Picasa will start to recognize faces in your photos and then prompt you to tell you who it is. You then tag those photos, similar to how you would in Facebook, and Picasa begins to learn to recognize that same person in other photos.

I was very impressed with how quickly and accurately Picasa was able to accomplish this task. It doesn’t take long to train it, but the more you tweak and adjust, it gets better and better and more accurate.

Now, the next time you need to find a photo with someone in particular, you can go right to it and find exactly what you need.

I wish I could adjust the sensitivity to recognizing the faces though. It will start picking up faces on clothing, billboards and other displays. Perhaps the most frustrating part is when it prompts you to identify all the people in a crowd. That becomes a real big waste of time.

Overall though, I’m very impressed and really enjoying seeing all my photos in a different way now. Organized by person is really interesting.