So I figured tonight I would try to get some great images of the city at night, including some of the beautiful bridges. My cousin Steve was nice enough to drive around with me to find the perfect locations. Around midnight we find a nice park overlooking the city and I take some photos and panoramic images. Then I decide we should try to find an even better spot, and we find one at about 1am. After fending off a bunch of rats in another park, I get my camera and tripod setup and begin taking my first few images to determine proper settings for a beautiful panoramic. Just for kicks, I take a quick set of slightly defocused photos in a pano series, because I like the way the lights look out of focus... Then I start taking the real pano shots from this amazing, pretty much perfect location. At 1:17am, there's an audible click off in the distance, and the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension cable lights turned off... Annnnd, that's a wrap. Will have to try to make it back there tomorrow, unfortunately. Here's a teaser of the view I got thanks to the defocused set:

Given the type of photography I'm doing here in NYC, I think this is appropriate:

In case you're not keeping up with all the important me-related news... I'm uploading shots from each day of my NYC trip to a flickr set, so check 'em out if you haven't already. Please feel free to comment on the photos on flickr or email me with any questions.

Today I headed over to Times Square in mid-town to get a few of the typical shots and to try to get some creative new takes on probably one of the biggest tourist spots. I spent much of my time shooting for a series idea I had involving [relatively] long exposures in daylight (1 second), to de-emphasize the actual persons in the shot and give greater weight to the movement of said persons. For me it's sort of like capturing the soul of the city, as it breathes. The original idea was to take 60-second exposures, but it became a little more abstract at that point than what I was really aiming for. Half my time shooting today was probably spent in the subway system. At day's end, I'd recorded a bit more than 600 images and I narrowed those down to about 115. Here are some of my favorites from the day:

// day five

As I mentioned before, I'm uploading shots each day to a flickr set, so check 'em out if you haven't already. Please feel free to comment on the photos on flickr or email me with any questions.

Today I strolled through Central Park for a bit again, mainly around the 'mall' area and Bethesda fountain... Then I headed back downtown towards NYU and the SoHo area... And then I took the a train back uptown to Rockefeller center, hoping to get to the 'Top of The Rock' to catch the sunset over NYC, but I was a bit late to that party so I hung out for a bit around the skating rink. I shot over 500 images today and narrowed those down to about 100, which I'll further narrow down when I get back home. Here are some of my favorites from the day:

// day four

I just thought I'd make a quick post to mention that I'm in NYC through October 28th (I got here on the 18th) to take photos in the city. Some of you already know I'm a photographer at heart, and I decided it's time to start pursuing the craft aggressivly in my spare time. I'm uploading shots each day to a flickr set, so check 'em out. There's a lot already, and I still have 5 days of shooting left!

[As a side note... Before I left for NYC I installed a 500GB laptop drive in my Macbook Pro, which only had 20GB of free space left on a 320GB I'd installed shortly after I bought it. Well, it's a good thing I came prepared, because I've already eaten up 25GB of the new drive with photos from the trip just so far. I'll end up with at least twice that. It's not hard to do when you're filling up 8GB CF cards.]

I'll definitely have to narrow things down a lot when I get back home. When it's all said and done, I'll be putting some series' of prints together, along with some coffee table books, etc... Please feel free to comment on the photos on flickr or email me with any questions. Here are a handful of my favorites so far - I'll post a couple new ones each day [on TheTechLounge; I'll post a ton on flickr], but I have some catching up to do:

// day one


// day two


//day three

For a long time now, we've had the Hot Deals link at the top of the page. There was a time when it was full of really amazing deals - I purchased several Dell displays and computer systems over the years with huge discounts, and I even bought some lenses and then sold them for a profit thanks to the deals. Unfortunately, the quality of the deals has been going downhill for the last year or so... That's about to change.

We've struck up a partnership with DealNews.com so that we can provide better deals than ever before, with improved functionality and helpful Hotness ratings to help you spot the best deals. And this is only the beginning. We'll be working closely with DealNews to create some features that will make the Hot Deals more useful than ever. Check it out, let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more!

Many months ago I purchased my first HDTV, and I wanted to take full advantage of its capabilities so I ended up purchasing both an Xbox 360 + HD DVD add-on and a Playstation 3. The format war didn't seem like it was coming to an end anytime soon, and I was impatient. It didn't some as much of a surprise when Toshiba officially announced the death of HD DVD, but what did come as a surprise is the email I received from Best Buy shorty thereafter.

The email basically said how they were sorry for my poor choice in techno-gadgetry, but that they were dedicated to my satisfaction (that's what she said) and would be sending me a gift card, no strings attached. This is really where I was surprised. I wouldn't have thought it particularly unusual had they only offered a trade-in, but to just offer a gift card for nothing in return is a really nice gesture. Today I received my $50 gift card from Best Buy along with a short letter - so I guess they weren't just kidding. Here are some choice excerpts from the FAQs on the back side of the letter:

Is my HD DVD player still useful?
Absolutely. It will continue to play HD DVD movies and continues to be an excellent player for your regular DVDs, improving the picture to near-HD quality.

I bought an HD DVD player as a gift. Can I still use the gift card? As the purchaser of the HD DVD player, you've received the gift card. You can choose to use the gift card yourself or pass it on to the gift recipient. But you'll be a total douche if you keep it for yourself.

Okay, so they didn't really say that last little bit. Image above the result of "HD DVD for teh win" on Google Image Search.

Last week I bought an Xbox 360. I've been thinking of getting an HDTV recently, and I was bored, so I figured i'd get the console and it would be even more fun when I do take a dip in the HD pool. My experience up until now has been positive. And by "up until now" I mean now I'm not so happy with it.

I was minding my own business, playing Forza Motorsport 2, when I suddenly realized that in horizontal orientation, the green player indicator light on the front of the Xbox was oriented differently than I'd remembered. Then I suddenly thought to myself... Ooo, I bet it re-orients itself when placed horizontally or vertically. So, making sure to pause my game so as not to lose my current race, I walked toward the console. The child inside of me beckoned, Make it vertical, you know you wanna... And so I did. KCCCHT EEEEK. WTFOMG!!1!!one! I feared the worst. And I was right. El disco scratcho fantastico.

So the rhetorical question of the day is... Who makes a re-orientable consumer electronics device that doesn't play nice when you re-orient it while it is on? Obviously, the answer is Microsoft.

A quick search on Google brought up plenty of results, showing me that I was not alone. Some might call me an idiot for moving my Xbox 360 while a drive was spinning. I'd like to point out that, while such claims may be valid, this is not a universal problem for any optical drive. I can shake my laptop around while a drive is spinning and not have a problem. I can lay my computer on its side while a drive is spinning and have no problem. So what genius decided to put a drive in the Xbox 360 that will etch such a horrible scratch into your disc that it can no longer be read, by simply moving it when it's on? And taking that question a step further, why does the pretty green ring on the front re-orient itself? That's why I moved the damn thing, because I saw that it had re-oriented and I wanted to see it in action. So yeah, that might make me an idiot, but that's why companies are supposed to idiot-proof their products, and not create pointless tantalizing features that queue such "idiotic" behavior.

So, that ended my night of gaming... Hopefully tomorrow Best Buy will replace the disc for me, but I really don't know what to expect from that. I didn't buy the replacement plan for the disc (I mean, who screws up a disc?), though I did buy it for the Xbox 360 in light of all the overheating issues etc. that have plagued it since launch.

For the curious, here's a link to a site I came across on google when searching "xbox 360 scratch disc" - they talk about how it happens and even show a video of it happening.

The image above the result of searching for "the child inside of me beckoned" on Google Image Search.

Bit of an upgrade from the Camaro. Me so happy. :)

Tonight I decided to try my hand at something that I've always wanted to do... take photos of water, you know, in drippy-drop form. When I feel like I'm a bit more experienced at it, I'll write up a thorough guide on how to take drippy-drop photos, but for now I'll just show you some of my experimental results thus far, and continue practicing. =)

I was checking my mail just as I normally do in Outlook, when I noticed this...



It's like a sign. I always knew I was different. No... special.

Today, an inbox. Tomorrow, the WORLD!

Its'a Niiiccceee...

I haven't really kept up with games for a while, simply because I don't have the time for them these days. Tonight I was doing a little random web browsing and stumbled upon a game called World in Conflict. Maybe you've already heard of it, but this isn't about you. Got it? =)

At first when I saw the trailer it looked exactly like BattleField 2. And then I realized I wasn't looking at rendered footage, this was actual gameplay. World in Conflict is an RTS with FPS-like graphics. Think Company of Heroes with a sprinkling of Hell Yes. If you haven't seen it already, check out the movies at GameTrailers. Now if only I had time to actually play it when it comes out in September...

Note: I also had never been to GameTrailers.com before... it's nice that they don't make you register to watch stuff like on GameSpot and the other big gaming sites. You have to watch an ad (only once per day it seems?), but if I don't have to register or pay, that's cool with me. I'm easily excited, huh?

So, this really has nothing to do with TheTechLounge, but such is the beauty of a blog, no? Since their first album, LP has always been one of my favorite bands (of which I have few), so it follows that I've eagerly awaited a new album from them since Meteora came out. Today it finally hit the stores so I swung by and picked it up.

I reserve any judgements until I have listened to the album at least a few times over and had time to let it sit. But, my first impressions follow:

This latest album is a big leap from anything LP has ever done before. They are quite clearly evolving, as artists. I haven't decided for myself yet whether this change is for the better or not. Either way, though, I appreciate the creative process and I know that as an artist you must continue to challenge yourself and step outside of your comfort zone. Otherwise you will quickly bore yourself and your audience.

So far I have listened to the album once over and am just beginning to listen to it again as I write this. My overall impression at this point is one of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am sort of mourning the death of LP as I knew it (yeah yeah, pour on the cheese). On the other hand, I truly am appreciative of their evolution as a band and I do think I would have been disappointed if the new album was just more of the same, especially after such a long wait.

I'm leanings towards a thumbs-up for their new direction; some of the songs are immediately catchy, while I think others will grow on me.

I'll post in a couple of weeks with my updated thoughts after I've had time to listen to it more.

I recently signed TheTechLounge up for ReviewMe, a site which allows companies to pay publishers a small fee to have their product or service reviewed. The fee is pretty insignificant, so I can't say I'm really doing it for the money. I just figured it would be an interesting new way of finding new (read: random) things to write about. This will be my first ReviewMe review, but you can expect more to be posted on my blog in the future.

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If you're anything like me, you probably spend hours researching products before you actually make a purchase. And much of that time is spent looking at all the various prices, sales, discounts, and rebates available for that product. When you do a little research, sometimes it really pays off, as it did with my Canon 24-70 2.8L purchase with huge discounts from Dell. I ended up selling that lens for a profit a couple of months later. You gotta love a good deal.

FuseDeals.com is a website which basically consolidates deals from all the major deal websites such as SlickDeals.net, FatWallet.com, TechBargains.com and more... There are 12 total feeds. The site is updated automatically throughout the day, so you don't have to worry about any lack of updates. This is a really great idea for the frequent deal hunter, and I can see myself using it in the future. With that said, the site isn't perfect, and I have a couple suggestions for improvement.

1) It would be nice if there was some sort of categorization of the deals, like there is on FatWallet, for example. I realize this may not be possible to do automatically, however, so it may not be doable.
2) A more realistic feature which I think should be implemented is a search function. It should be possible to parse all of the feeds in order to search for something specific, such as "Dell" or "iPod Nano." This alone would make the site much more useful.

Check it out here: Daily Deals

I can imagine people going to the gaming store, picking up a copy of Super Paper Mario, and putting it back down in disgust. Many people are tired of Nintendo rehashing the same characters and concepts across their incremental system upgrades, and there is certainly an argument to be made there; with most Nintendo releases, you know what you're going to get before you open the shrink wrap.

A couple of months ago I decided to buy a Wii. Rumors were flying around the intarweb about availability one day so I figured what the heck, give it a shot. I certainly wasn't interested in an Xbox 360 or PS3, though they have a lot more muscle, I don't really care to play a shooter with a controller and most of the other games on those consoles don't interest me in the slightest. I wanted to play some games that were just plain fun, and I thought the Wii would be a nice change of pace.

The first game I got for the Wii was Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I was pretty pleased with this game, though I found the wolf thing to be a stupid addition which just didn't feel right, and didn't add any element of fun. Ocarina of Time was better, I think.

When Spring Break came recently, I decided to spend a few days with my little brother, just hanging out and playing video games. So I went to the store and bought some multiplayer games for the Wii which I thought we might enjoy (there weren't many to choose from). I ended up purchasing Excite Truck and Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam. Boy did I ever regret that... Excite Truck seemed like a decent enough game, if I wasn't forced to use the Wii remote to control the vehicle; clumsy doesn't even begin to describe it. Downhill Jam was really one of the crappiest thrown-together games I have ever played. It was blatantly obvious that the game was created to take advantage of the Wii remote, and the end result is that you are controlling your skater in a way that feels totally unnatural - that is, you're steering your board down a hill as if it was controlled by a steering wheel a la Excite Truck. Utter dissapointment. Tony Hawk games have always been about a relatively free-roaming level where you can do tricks on pipes, rails, ramps, trash cans, garbage trucks, whatever... Being forced to go downhill the entire time made it feel like I was playing a crappy arcade game from the 90's with a horrible control system. Tony Hawk could have been cool (maybe) if it was a game with a free-roaming world and if the controls made use of the Wii Remote and the Nunchuck. Did I mention I was disappointed?

Finally comes Super Paper Mario. Ah, a Mario game, just what I've been waiting for ever since I bought the Wii. It isn't Mario Galaxy, but it'll have to do for now, I thought. I hurriedly removed the disc from its packaging, turned on the Wii and got going. For about the first 10-15 minutes I was just reading a bunch of dialogue, hmm... Doubt begins creeping into my mind; surely this game has to be good, right? Then the action really starts. And then more dialogue a few minutes later. After playing for a couple of hours I got a few chapters in and my experience was much the same. The flipping to 3D and back is a cool idea, and it works well enough, but the problem is that it gets very tedious. I had to constantly be flipping back and forth to make sure I didn't miss hidden things that could only be seen in 3D. It didn't make the puzzles challenging, it made them annoying. And then there are the Pixls, the little fairy things that help you out along your way. Sometimes things would be hidden, like doors, which you can only see if you point the Wii remote at the screen. Holding the Wii remote sideways and then shifting it in my hands to point it at the screen constantly really started to grate on my nerves after a while. Actually, it annoyed me from the get-go if I'm being honest.

So yeah, in conclusion, I am selling my Wii along with 2 Wii Remotes, 2 Nunchucks, 2 Classic Controllers, Wii Sports, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Excite Truck, Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, Super Paper Mario, and even a couple of virtual console games (Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64) for about $500.. I really love it and I'm going to miss it and all the wonderful games I've got for it. Really.

You may have noticed things were pretty slow around here this past week, and contrary to popular belief, it is not because we were all killed by highly skilled ninja assassins. In fact, Brian and I are both full-time college students 'on the side' as we like to say, and we both really needed some downtime. Now that the wonderful week of schoolless bliss that is Spring Break has come to a tragic end, you can expect us to kick things back into gear.

P.S. Thanks for trying to pick up the slack, Max. =)

Because my memory stick was quite large (in dimensions, not in storage capacity) I had to create a 6x3 Lego brick. I chopped a 4x2 and a 2x2 brick in half using a pen knife and another brick as a guide, the pliers on the same penknife were then used to remove the inner bits of the bricks and then the knife was used once again to remove the sides. Another 4x2 and a 2x2 brick were then used to create the case. The four parts were stuck together using super glue and a steady hand.

While at CES a couple of months ago, we picked up quite a few USB drives from various companies containing their press releases. One of the USB drives I picked up wasn't constructed very well and started to fall apart after we got back. A few days later, I was bored and had some time to kill, so I decided to get a little creative with the USB drive and modify it to make it usable once again, and to give it a new look.

Electrical tape was just within my reach, so I decided to make a casing out of it. I didn't get any photos at the time, but basically I just wrapped a bunch of electrical tape around it in various directions. Then I printed out the capacity of the drive on a piece of paper and affixed it using more electrical tape. When I was done with that I decided to modify the cap as well and created a nice little flanged edge by cutting lots of skinny piece of electrical tape and wrapping it around the edges of the cap. As a finishing touch, I added a little extra tape around the body of it so that when I pick it up the contours feel nice in my hand.



When I saw the Lego USB Drive mod today, it got me thinking about other ways to modify USB drives, so I think Brian and I are going to see what we can come up with, and we may try to come up with an improved version of that Lego USB drive mod. If you've got a spare USB drive lying around, we encourage you to get crafty and make yourself a unique portable storage device and share it with us on our forums.

Anyone who has ever registered a website is probably all too familiar with cybersquatting. You've got this great idea for a domain name that's so clever you're positive nobody else has registered it. So you go to your registrar of choice and you plug in the URL as you grab your credit card, and you see a message on your screen saying that domain is unavailable. So then you try something similar, and it's taken as well. Upon visiting these taken URLs, you see a generic page that looks like nothing but fluff, and in fact it is nothing but PPC (pay per click) ads. This is the traditional form of cybersquatting we've all come to know and hate with such fiery passion.

There is a newer form of domain thievery, however, of which you may not be aware. It's not even really new, but I just found out about it a few months ago. My experience with domain tasting (also called domain kiting) came when Brian and I were starting up a new ad network and trying to decide on a name. Once we compiled a list of names, we headed over to Doster to see which were available. Luckily, one of our favorites, JustRelevant.com, was available. But we're perfectionists and we wanted to see if we could come up with something even better, so we didn't register just yet.

A couple of days later we came up with some more names and checked the status of those, but we still liked JustRelevant.com better... We decided to try and come up with some sort of logo that we liked for it before deciding for sure. The next day we had something drawn up which was nice (albeit simple) and so we decided to register the domain finally. But alas, the domain was no longer available! Who could have possibly thought of the same exact URL as us? It wasn't exactly an obvious domain to register, so we had a sneaking suspicion that somebody was spying on us. I was sure that my computer was secure, so it couldn't be that...

In another strange turn, our domain was available to register a few days later again. Weird, we thought. Perhaps it was some glitch in Dotster's system or something. So we registered the domain and got a site up and forgot about the odd domain disappearing act, until recently that is. A week or so ago I saw an article on the front page of Digg about domain tasting (which I hadn't heard of before) and it sounded interesting so I checked it out. What I learned was that registrars are keeping tabs on what people try to register, and they will sometimes snatch up a domain for themselves to test it out and see if it makes them money for a few days -- if it does they keep it, and if not they get a refund. They are also selling this registration data to big-time cybersquatters.

Now, one could argue for or against the practice of domain tasting; it's a topic that's bound to stir up controversy. Those who don't domain taste will be against it, and those who do will say it's just business in the 21st century. But I'm not here to argue on whether domain tasting is right or wrong. I just want you to know that this is one of the realities we face if we want to buy a domain name. The best thing you can do if you want to snatch up a domain name is purchase all the ones you're thinking of immediately if you see they are available. Then you can get a refund in a few days when you decide on which to keep. Otherwise you're putting your precious domain ideas in the grab bag for these domain hoarding nancies tasters.

Here's a little extra reading if you're interested.