Wayne D's Blog

I'm not going to list the artists because it's more than that, so much the richness of the event comes from the tapestry of experinces. The frantic drive to Macs to get cash because the phone line for the credit card authorization isn't installed yet.
Toby Walker played his classic steel guitar as we waited in line to enter the amphitheatre, the rain came and the tarps came out, Toby who just happened to be on stage puts down his guitar, removes his hat and leaves the protection of the stage for a few moments to join us in the downpour. The music continues, the rain stops and a rainbow appears. The sun sets and the dark cool night is still, filled with sound from the three stages. We shuttle between the main stage and the beer tent sampling the offered experiences and stories.

I've changed my mind about mentioning artists. The singers who I haven't heard before who particularly caught my ear were Mike Ford, Kim & Reggie Harris and the aformentioned Toby Walker.

This morning we rise before the sun to join the line. Now we wait as the sun rises over 6 foot wildflower and grass wall that grows beside the line area for the volunteers to distribute the line holder numbers. Two women cut the line in front of us, it isn't worth making a scene. I recognize them from previous years. It makes no difference to us, we will be in the first group of twenty into the amphitheatre to set up our chairs for tonight's performance when we will again overlap our experiences with the performers, fellow spectators and volunteers. Before that we have an afternoon of workshops to browse. What musical explorations and awakenings will we experience today?

Why all the talk about experience? The expansion of that thought will have to wait for another time those ideas can't be expressed with characters poked out one by one with my thumbs.

Shot with my EEEPC 701 using 12seconds.tv

in my backyard on 12seconds.tv

There has been much written about Rogers hijacking the dns not found errors and putting up an ad laden page as a "customer service". The ads are bad enough but it also turns out that the search results are bad, and by bad I mean really, really bad. As a test I entered wdawe.org in my browser bar to see what they came up with. First result is wbdawe.com. Who coded this thing? Wouldn't it make sense to try a .com or a .net result?

OK, let's try something a little easier, I entered wdawe.com into the search box and got.....

If I was Yahoo I'd be ashamed to have my name on these results.

Click on page two to see me pummel them some more.

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Whilst hanging in the Twitterverse Wednesday night I received a tweet telling me about another one of Geoff Smith's ustream concerts. Geoff set up his gear in the backyard. Ignore the interrogation room lighting, Cali Lewis offered to send Geoff a better light for the next concert because the sound is great. Geoff sang for over 2 hours, a mix of his original material and viewer requests.

The road trip referenced in the title? Geoff let slip that he was planning a Geek Brief Christmas party in Nashville on December on Monday December 15th at the Big Bang Piano Bar. I checked on Google Maps and it says I should be able to drive there in 12 hours. If I could recruit one or two other Toronto Geek Brief/ Geoff Smith fans to share the driving with it isn't that crazy. The other alternative is a $200 flight from Buffalo. Hmmm it doesn't seem that crazy after all.

Want to check out Geoff's concert then click below? His newest video can be found here. The song, Ones and 0's is about how mean people online can be at times.
If you want to share driving to Nashville let me know.

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I had been planning on writing a blog post about my July 2008 canoe trip to Killarney Provincial Park to go along with the route map I posted last month but wanted to do something a little bit different.
(updated November 2010) Flowgram ceased operation in June 2009. They offered an export tool but unfortunately in my case it didn't export the video properly. I finally got around to recreating my slideshow using the audio track and cinelerra to create a video which I uploaded to Youtube and embedded below.

I was thinking of some sort of narrated slide show and looking around for a tool to do it I remembered that I had signed up for a beta with the Flowgram service back at the beginning of July. After a few false starts and poking around a bit I realized that Flowgram could import my Flickr set and all I had to do was add the narration. After struggling with getting a mike that didn't pick up the TV or the kids watching TV or chatting in the room behind me I managed to get the background noise down to a dull roar. My first problem was Flash kept freezing on me, I think it's more of a Flash than Flowgram problem. I can't wait for the release of Flash 10 for Linux. I know this version of Flash for Linux has some significant issues that need to be fixed. My second problem was when I went in to lower the default display time on the pictures without audio from 10 seconds I managed to get one slide set to 13:30 and two others set to 5:00. My 4:52 slide show now timed out at 27:35 and the only way I could fix it was to delete the pictures and reimport them. I have reported my problem to the flowgram guys, I know they have been working on a revamped version which I expect has fixed this issue. Until they tell me how to do it right you get to look at unnarrated pictures for 10 seconds, Flowgram is a closed beta so I am not expecting perfection. Updated Aug 09, I sent my bug report to the Flowgram team at 7:52 p.m. their time on a Friday night and received a response at 11:06 p.m. confirming that it was a known problem and would be fixed in the upcoming release. Once it's released I'll change the timing. That's phenominal customer service. If you want to try Flowgram out yourself let me know, I have 10 invites to the beta available. What I have done in my little slide show doesn't use it's capabilities to include and highlight web pages. Support for importing Powerpoint presentations was also recently added.

Now I invite you to sit back, turn up your speakers, click below and spend four minutes and fifty two eight seconds in Killarney Provincial Park as we travel through Bell Lake, Three Mile Lake, Balsam Lake and David Lake, climb Silver Peak and return with a side trip to Little Bell Lake.