140 characters isn't always enough.

This morning I “un-friended” 67 of you. Sorry, but really — don’t take it personally. Its all part of a process that I have devised to make social media more useful to me.

Most of the 67 people I un-friended were people I either barely knew — perhaps they were colleagues that I rarely interacted with. Some were people who were just on facebook to be there, and really didn’t share or interact too much. A very small percentage of people I removed, well, it shouldn’t be a surprise to you and you know who you are. ’nuff said.

When I say I want things like Facebook to be more useful to me, what I mean is that I want it to be a list of people who I either know well, have a history with, are relatives or are people I generally admire and would not mind sharing things with on a regular basis. If you don’t quite fall into that category that’s no big deal since you very likely fit into the “professional contact” category, and are probably connected to me at LinkedIn so we’ll hopefully keep in touch.

Besides… isn’t it weird to have hundreds of “friends” on facebook, but you perhaps only spend time or talk to a handful of them? Feels that way to me.

Update: Check out this link — Burger King was running a program where you get a free whopper for every 10 friends you drop on Facebook. It seems they wanted to market their product by making you fat and friendless.

Just a quick review while I wait to board my flight…

Living in Ottawa I often find it better to fly out of Montreal (YUL), and if I have an early morning flight staying at one of the airport hotels is a no brainer.

Generally I go to the Hilton…but this time I tried Aloft which is next door to the Hilton and is kind of like a mini W hotel.

The checkin experience itself was great, they just swiped my credit card and handed me the room key — no signing, etc. The room was small but VERY trendy and functional complete with a big wall mounted plasma. Another neat feature is a desk mounted connection station so you can connect your HDMI, VGA or standard component video/audio right into the TV. Wireless internet is free and works well.

There is a lounge area, which is very comfortable with good music playing but beware… drinks are W style…that’s to say… $$$. The 24 hour snack store in the lobby is a nice touch…nicer so if it was stocked with fresh food consistently

The only negative I can really point out is that the shuttle service to YUL is nowhere near as frequent as the one from the Hilton next door.

All in all, I give the place an 8.5/10 for an Airport hotel.

I just got a new Zune 120, and discovered that the following settings work pretty well for converting/ripping videos for viewing on the Zune 120. These setting may also work on the Zune 80 and earlier because I am not using the h.264 codec.

I am primarily converting Xvid content, but as long as you have the K-lite codec pack, you should be fine with other content — in theory at least .

(This is for Handbrake 0.9.3)

• Output settings: M4V file, Large file size, web optimized are unchecked.
• Picture Settings: Crop=Automatic, Size=Don’t change, Anamorphic=Strict, Filters unchecked or none.
• Video: Codec=MPEG-4 (FFmpeg), Framerate=Same as source, 2-Pass=unchecked, Target Size=empty, Avg bitrate=1200
• Audio: source=Automatic (unless you know better…), codec=AAC, Mixdown=Stereo, Samplerate=48, Bitrate=160

Now, this works for me, and I have not done extensive testing. Your mileage may vary.

I created a preset that can go in the Handbrake installation directory, in the file “user_presets.xml”.

It looks like:

The above would have to be pasted under the root node of the user_presets.xml file along with any other custom presets you may have.

Good luck!

Hi everyone,

MixMatchMusic released a URL shortening service today that is oriented toward Music related content, called tra.kz. I decided to whip up a quick actionscript library for it, which you can all use for fun.

Download it here: Trakz.zip

Here is how you might use it:

import mx.controls.Alert;
import kz.tra.Shorten;
import kz.tra.events.TrakzEvent;

private function callTrakz():void
{
    var trakz:Shorten = new Shorten("myAPIKey");
    trakz.addEventListener("urlShortened", uS);
    trakz.shortenURL("http://adobe.com/go/foobar");
}

private function uS(event:TrakzEvent):void
{
    mx.controls.Alert.show(event.shortURL + " Failure: " + event.failed.toString());
}
]]>

Ping me if you need an API key…

I’m working a bit more on my media manager, and cooked up this useful code that others may benefit from. It uses the TRYNT Movie IMDB Web Service (v2) which, given a search term will return some IMDB URLs. Surprisingly, IMDB has no public API, so the TRYNT guys are using a data replica from IMDB on their own database I think… Here is the first pass code… I’m cleaning it up locally but it is good enough to see how this works…

private function openIMDB(aviName:String):void {
  var movieName:String = aviName.slice(0, aviName.indexOf("."));
  var svc:HTTPService = new HTTPService();
  var vars:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
  vars.t = movieName;
  svc.url = "http://www.trynt.com/movie-imdb-api/v2/?" + vars.toString();
  svc.resultFormat = "e4x";
  svc.addEventListener("result",handleIMDBQuery);
  svc.send();
}
private function handleIMDBQuery(event:ResultEvent):void {
  if (event.result['movie-imdb'].error == "true") {
    mx.controls.Alert.show("Unable to find this movie on IMDB.", "IMDB error");
  }
  else {
    var url:String = event.result['movie-imdb']['matched-url'];
    navigateToURL(new URLRequest(url), "_blank");
  }
}

Note to the TRYNT people… My application is for personal use, so I’ll put the attribution right here. If I ever publish the AIR app, I’ll include your icon and a link to it…

I have all of my DVDs backed up to XVid AVI files, and stored on a Drobo connected to my Vista Ultimate x64 machine. The two TVs in the house connect to this library using Linksys Media Extenders (one DMA2100, another DMA2200). After a while, the sheer number of videos I had started making the Extender’s UI sluggish, so I began organizing the movies alphabetically into folders. The problem with this is that its an extra step for me when importing a file, and it is very easy to forget what movies you have put in recently — so I made a “New Releases” folder and added shortcuts. Again, an extra step.

I figured this morning…why not create a simple AIR app that will list all of my AVIs, allow me to maintain the “New Releases”, and respond to a Drop event by properly storing the AVI in the right directory (e.g. d:\Movies\A\Anger Management.avi).

So, I did it in a couple of hours and was it ever fun

Here is a picture:

Next I’d like to add a special tab for TV Shows… maybe I’ll do that now.

In building this, I did find a couple problems with AIR that I’m sure will get better over time:

• No system.exec style capability. I’d wanted to be able to inspect the video files to get some metadata from them, as well as capture a screen to make the display a bit nicer. To do so I’d hoped to call a command line program that could give me that. Not really an option.
• The File class can’t create symbolic links/shortcuts… it can only detect and handle them. This means my new releases are basically copies of the file. The media extenders read shortcuts, so having symlink creation capability would be very slick.

Last year I started noticing many of my friends were using Facebook messaging more than email itself. On average I’d have several messages from friends daily on Facebook, and the facebook statuses would tell me what I didn’t hear directly.

Now I’m beginning to notice that more and more people are becoming active on Twitter and checking their Facebook profile less often. I can’t help but think that it is in our nature to babble on about what we are doing/thinking and hold impromptu conversations.

Lately, I have even personally used Twitter as a replacement for email. I’m beginning to believe that the ultimate social medium on the internet will be extremely simple and be able to be mapped back to basic, ad hoc communication performed in the real world by humans all of the time. Using Twitter where email was used previously is a great example of this. When you have a conversation over email, you are choosing who can listen in. This is akin to holding a meeting. Sure, emails get forwarded to unintended recipients but the idea here is that email = private, limited audience. When you hold a conversation over Twitter, you have an audience in mind but in the back of your mind you realize that you are broadcasting your conversation to anyone who wishes to listen.

We seem to be moving into an era of transparency, where privacy is still a big concern but we are realizing that there are things we can easily share about ourselves on a continual basis that help other people to understand more about who we are, and as such allows them to interpret your more serious statements / blog posts, etc. This transparency is making online social networking really work. Facebook allows me to stay connected to people I know, while Twitter allows me to meet new people as well as stay connected with those I do know.

I wonder what the next progression will be?

In my tradition of writing a blog post whenever possible to expose Air Canada being nasty, and in some cases down right horrible to its customers, check out this CBC story:
Tribunal finds Air Canada discriminated against disabled man

Basically they were telling this deaf and partially blind man that he needed to have an attendant (and likely the expenses incurred in having one) in order to fly. Meanwhile, people who cannot walk are happily accomadated sans attendant.

Luckily they have to pay up for their ignorance, insensitivity and stupidity.

On a side note, this is probably my last year in Air Canada’s loyalty program unless I get some major work travel. I’ve been Elite or Super Elite since 2001, often based on personal travel alone, but am officially moving to a zero loyalty stance with the airline since they have made it harder for me to use my upgrade certificates and are seriously gouging customers on regional routes (often, I can get to Europe for the same price as getting to Moncton — a 2 hour flight.)

• @duanechaos not Japan? #
• Ok, I have to stop reading twitter — fricken Fedor fight spoilers! #
• MMA is so much better to watch than boxing. #
• wow… Fedor… tidy victory. #
• woo hoo, 100 followers. only about 20,000 to go to catch up to @bitpakkit! #
• @matzeller also, VisualHub is no longer under development. in reply to matzeller #
• @snoopdogg has over 6,000 followers and is following nobody. Now that’s marketing old skool style, y’all. #
• Reading “Good To Great” by Jim Collins. So far, lots of head nodding happening here. #
• @AlanKhalfin I tried sugar in my Pho…but I think the Pho broth was marginal so I didn’t get the effect. Will try again… I wanna believe #
• @duanechaos how long in T.O.? #
• @duanechaos transit? #
• @duanechaos cramped schedule. Probably better than ship deadlines though… Ugh. #
• @yojibee geez! I thought Europe was (among other things) known for fast trains. Busses? Yuuuuck! #
• Twitter: The Life Transparent. Good? Who cares. #
• @davejohnson now that’s an idea… Let me know what your impressions in win7 are… #
• @matzeller what audio encoding settings did you try? I always go xvid with mp3 160 and that seems to be perfect for my uses… #
• Going from iphone back to Blackberry has been interesting. RIM: do we need “save?” Confirmations everywhere? Really. #
• @yojibee my mistake. Ne’er been to Norway. #
• @yojibee I learned that much this evening thanks to you #
• @MossyBlog red robin? That’s disgusting. Shame. #
• @MossyBlog I dunno… I’ve only been to red robin in Vancouver and it has a negative lasting impression. Ymmv. #
• Watching Clerks for the thousanth time I think. Bravo Mr. Smith. #