On April 23, 2007, the Vandigicam Flickr group and a Vancouver Photography Meetup group hosted a fantastic photo scavenger hunt. The premise was challenging. We had two hours in 5 different locations to shoot 24 photos. The trick was to shoot ONLY 24 photos. No post processing and no picking the best 24 shots. Even though I shoot digitally, I approached it with pure intentions and did just that -- only shot 24 shots!

It was challenging and fun and forced you to really think about your shots. Some I'm quite proud of and others didn't work out so well.

Check out the set on my Flickr page for the 24 shots with the subject being the clue we were given. Enjoy!

For those of you who know me, you'll know that I've never owned a PlayStation product, nor do I ever plan on it. Happily I can now get virtually every game that I ever wanted on my Xbox 360, or my Wii/DS (full disclosure: I work for Edelman who does PR for Xbox). I've never been much into the Grand Theft Auto series, but one series that has almost put me over the edge to get a PS2 has been the Guitar Hero series.

Thankfully, it's now available for the Xbox 360. I was excited about the game, and picked up a copy on Tuesday. I heard all kinds of great things about the game, but wondered if it would really hold me like many games never do with me. After firing it up last night, I must say, I'm surely becoming a hardcore fanboy for this game.

OMG, we played the game from about 6pm last night until close to 1am! After fighting with who's turn it was (Lila started really enjoying this game too), I finally decided enough was enough and put my foot down. I told her to leave! (LOL YEAH RIGHT!)...no..I did what every good husband would do, and I went out and bought a second guitar controller. ;)

We had such a blast playing coop, and especially face-off, comparing scores in a dueling-banjo-kind of way! What a great game, and I think it will only get better as I get better at playing it. Now, I need to stock up on some ice for the sore fingers and wrists. OUCH!

(Oh, and the blog post title, is in reference to my favorite song so far in the game!)

Spotted this very well-done video that illustrates what the real world would be like with "2.0" technology. Enlightening? Or just plain humourous?

http://www.glumbert.com/media/supermarket

I know it sounds like some parasitic insect that has infected me or something, but I guess it's really not far from the truth. You may have heard about it, but never really checked it out, but it's something that's kinda sweeping the geekdom right now, and spreading into the mainstream.

It's called Twitter.

What is it you may ask? Well Twitter defines it as:

Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives.  Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away.  Curious people can make friends.  Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Developers can use the API to make Twitter tools of their own. Possibilities are endless!

I call it a grand little social experiment that may take off into other areas. I think it also may have some cool little viral and community engagement applications -- hence why I'm investigating it and getting engaged myself.

I'm on Twitter now and have a few friends on there, so if you sign-up or are already on, feel free to add Vidguy there (here's my page).

Or possibly even the eagles have landed. Either way, we got lucky on our way back from Seattle today. As we got close to the Sumas border crossing, Lila spotted a few eagles in a tree alongside the road. So I stopped to look and maybe grab my camera, and there were 6 in one tree, 3 in another and maybe 20+ in about the equivalent of a 2 square block radius! WOW...I couldn't get my camera and tripod out of the truck fast enough!

So we snapped a bunch of photos, and I think I got four that I really liked. I posted them in my photostream on Flickr. Check 'em out!

We've had quite a bit of snow lately. Schools have been closed here in Mission all week (my son is loving it) and it's been cold, snowy and not quite much fun! Although it's been quite beautiful looking out my home office window! Here's a shot of the Skagit mountain range looking east from our window. Nice dusting!

Link to Skagit Range on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

OMG this is funny! Someone dubbed various voice clips from James Earl Jones (voice of Darth Vader, duh!) movies on top of Star Wars scenes. The results -- priceless! 

Link to Star Wars Remix - CollegeHumor video

Spotted this on a Canuck's blog. Great highlight reel on two of my newest favorite Canucks - The Sedin twins! 

Link to A Sedin Montage « The Chief Canuck

I saw with great delight that the CBC, Canada's national, government funded network will be broadcasting 30 games in High Definition this year. Awesome, I thought. High Def games! I can't wait to watch the Vancouver Canucks games in high def. Surely with six Canadian teams, I'll probably get to watch at least a half dozen games in HD!

Well I should have known. Since the CBC and the Toronto Sports Network (TSN - The Sports Network) only appear to be interested in the "center of the Universe" (AKA Toronto), we get to see the Toronto Maple Leafs in HD TWENTY-EIGHT TIMES. Oh, and the Canucks...ONCE! What the hell?

I mean, I knew they were Toronto biased, but holy cow...that's a wee bit lopsided don't you think? And of course to top it all off, the one Canucks game we do get to see is against ... you guessed it -- Toronto.

So here's to you Toronto -- Kiss my ass!

Link to Digital Home Canada - Hockey Night in Canada to air 30 games in HD

Last night around 11:15 p.m. I spotted this fire from my office window. It was literally a block and a half away from our house. So I called 911 and then grabbed my camera and headed down the street. It was quite a house fire! I think the house will be totally gone by this morning. It was burning extremely hard!

Link to House fire in Mission on Flickr

Weird Al's best work in a long time! Instead of Ridin' Dirty, you owe it to yourself to watch the video for White and Nerdy. If you wanna follow along with the lyrics, you can find them here. 

Link to YouTube - White and Nerdy

I prefer the kitty to the phone, but both are new as of yesterday.

View from my home office window at 6:30 this morning. I love this place. :D

Link to Good Morning on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

The Microsoft Cafeteria Tour 2006 (MSCT2k6) has been going on since July of this year. What is it, you may ask? Well the title is pretty self explanatory. A handful of Microsoft employees decided to undertake the daunting task of visiting every cafeteria at Microsoft buildings in Redmond. They have pictures, descriptions of experiences, videos and even concert-like tour date listings. I'm sure these guys are celebrities over there!

These guys even got a Cafe Press section of stuff you can buy! Talk about going all out.

Tomorrow it's Millennium, where I've enjoyed quite a few lunches before. Looking forward to reading their report. Keep up the good work guys!

Link to Microsoft Cafeteria Tour 2006

How'd you like to whip out one of these babies on that long flight to Chicago (I'm heading there next week)?

Benjamin Heckendorn, a renowned case modder has created one of the coolest mods I've ever seen. An Xbox 360 Laptop! Who wouldn't want one of these? It's got a 17" screen, keyboard and all the outputs to allow it to also run on your HDTV and home theater system.

Oh wait, I bet they wouldn't let it on the plane because it's liquid cooled! No liquids on the plane.

Snap! 

Link to benheck.com

It's official! We're in! This is our new house. We'll be taking more pictures this week and uploading them to Flickr, but for now, check it out here:

Link to "Our House on Flickr - Photo Sharing!"

Well we made it. We're moved into our new house! What a wild weekend, though. Lila has strep throat. We spen't a few hours at the Emergency Ward of the hospital on Saturday night after the move. Been a wild an wooley ride, but we're here. I think my body hates me, but the place here is wonderful. We're so in love with our new house. Now we have to get it all set up. Oy-vey!

If you haven't seen what it looks like already, you can check out the pictures on my Flickr site. These we're taken when we bought the house, but we're going to replace all these later this week when we take photos with all OUR stuff inside! ;)

I stumbled upon the new blog that  purports to be "A collective of Vancouver photographers seeking out others to collaborate with on upcoming shows, share techniques and just see what happens." It's very young, but seems like a great place to help hone my new hobby a bit more, and be part of a cool community of great photographers ... an probably amateurs like me.

After talking with the creator of the blog, Matthew, I decided to throw my hat into the ring as a contributor. Watch for my first post over there later today.

Link to Vancouver Photobloggers

One of the cool things about Flickr is the fact that they have an "Explore" section. In this section, Flickr Labs groups photos that have a high "interestingness" to them. So each day they post a few hundred photos to this section that have been uploaded to Flickr.

It's really a delight to find out that one (or more) of your photos has made it's way to Flickr Explore. I've been fortunate to have 11 photos that have made it to explore since I started uploading here. I've put them in a specific set so that I can remember which ones made it there.

There's also a great little tool on the Flickr Toys site called Scout. You can enter a Flickr username and find out how many photos you have that are "active" within the Explore section. It's pretty cool. For instance, as of right now, I have 7 photos active, with the Orange Butterfly one being my most recent.

Oh..and props to my man, Chris Lye for the great find of the Flickr4Writer plugin for Live Writer. Check it out...it's sweet!