The one where Brian drives home and his face turns bright red so he listens to classical music in an attempt to keep his demons at bay.
Brian Alvey
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Floating Head Video Blog #2
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Floating Head Video Blog #1
I'm in L.A. for meetings right now and it's warm and sunny, but just a few days ago I was returning home from NYC on a cold and icy night and decided to share some thoughts with you all, floating head-style:
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Super Eco
Yesterday the wonderful Crowd Fusion team launched our second site: a green news site called Super Eco. Super Eco has been in the works for several weeks now and it showcases many of the platform features that you may have already seen on our consumer electronics news site Obsessable. You can follow Super Eco on Twitter, on FriendFeed and on Facebook.
Here are some of my favorite Super Eco links:
- Feature: What's in your underwear?
- Feature: What 'organic' means
- Topic: The greening of the White House
- Interview: Matthew Modine
- Profile: Al Gore
- Profile: World Wildlife Fund
- Comparator: Shampoos compared
C.K. created a brief video tour of Super Eco.
Super Eco's tagline is "This planet means the world to us." Here's a quick overview of Super Eco's mission from the about page:
Super Eco is the website for people who want to live a more environmentally conscious life but may not know where to begin, as well as for those tracking breaking news and trends. Super Eco is able to contextualize research and how-to's within stories and news so that information about dishwashers, or compost bins, or Al Gore, or global warming, or hybrid vehicles are presented in a radically fresh, exciting, high energy and helpful manner. Super Eco promotes less worry and more wonder.
Less worry. More wonder. And away we go!
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Robert Scoble, Steve Jobs and Diet Coke
Robert Scoble wrote a couple of interesting posts about having to give up Diet Coke and the end of health privacy last night. His health privacy post is especially timely with Steve Jobs' leave of absence and all of his recurring cancer and liver transplant speculation.
I used to drink a ton of regular Coke in high school and college, easily more than two liters a day. Years ago I made the switch to Diet Coke. Almost two years ago I gave up Diet Coke cold turkey and haven't had a soda since.
Scoble's posts made me reflect on my life with and without soda:
I drink really weak iced tea all day, plus orange juice and sparkling water. Sparkling water wasn't something I was ever into before, but now Pellegrino and Perrier give me that feeling like I'm drinking bubbly soda again, putting some action back in drinking.
Six weeks after I gave it up, I was tempted by people bringing Diet Coke into my house.
I even had dreams where I went back to drinking Diet Coke by mistake.
More than a year after I gave it up, I wrote about how important living without soda has been for me.
Still, if I know I was having my last meal ever, I would definitely have a Diet Coke with it.
I crave it almost every day.
I'm wishing Scoble lots of luck on this one.
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Batman: The Brave and the Bold
I had read some reviews of the new animated Batman team-up show, but I hadn't caught the show myself until last night. We were eating dinner and I turned it on in the middle of one with Green Arrow, Speedy and a hooded guy who was floating with a ghost Batman, Ebenezer Scrooge-style. My first guess was that he was the Phantom Stranger, but it turned out to be Deadman. It was a decent show that I'd definitely watch it again, even with the distraction of Batman sounding like a cross between Christian Bale's raspy Batman and Oswald from the Drew Carey show.
I just looked it up and it actually was Diedrich Bader as the voice of Batman. I've heard him in a bunch of other cartoons -- as Buzz Lightyear's foe Warp Darkmatter and in a Scooby Doo Halloween special -- so I'll get used to him. Michael Rosenbaum, Lex Luthor from Smallville (and the Flash from the animated Justice League show), was the voice of Deadman.
Next episode's preview was for a Batman and the Blue Beetle team up. I wasn't going to TiVo it until I saw today on ComicMix that Wil Wheaton is the voice of the Blue Beetle. Well that changes everything.
ComicMix has a Brave and the Bold preview video and pictures from the episode. Unlike the one I saw last night, the dialogue in this one is really interesting. In the clip on ComicMix, Batman and the Blue Beetle are breaking into some villain's fortress and sharing tips about the tools of their trade: lasers, stun guns, knockout gas pellets. I'm not going to transcribe it. It's a short clip that you should watch for yourself. Cool show.
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My new video podcast
I got a Flip Mino for CES -- one of Obsessable's Ten Best Gadgets of 2008. I didn't get the HD one, but if my fanbase cries out to see me in HD I will definitely upgrade.
C.K. does a great job of explaining what Flip cameras are and how they work, but he didn't tell people that the true value of these things -- no, not locker room spy videos, you have such a dirty mind -- is for doing "floating head" podcasts. I am even considering getting one of those Bob Dylan harmonica stands for my Flip camera so I don't have to hold it while I walk around recording my floating head shows.
Here is a preview of my new video podcast series:
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Powermat
Like I said earlier, I loved the Powermat demo at CES. Powermat was one of Barb's favorites in Obsessable's Best of CES 2009 editors' picks feature.
This cool power system isn't available for purchase for another nine months, but Obsessable has a great in-depth photo tour of Powermat's wireless charging devices you can check out while we all wait.
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Dancing With The Crows
Tonight I'm catching a redeye or two home after some great meals and meetings with my Crowd Fusion team and a generally successful CES. I didn't make it to dinner with the team last night, so I tried to make up for it today. What was I doing last night? I was hanging out with some Twitter friends at yet another Intel party. (They do throw good parties.) This one was a private Counting Crows concert at LAX, the nightclub inside of the Luxor.Brooke Burke was the party's host. I came close to getting my picture with her like Brian Solis did, but it wasn't meant to be. I was jammed right up against the stage for the whole show with Brian and Frank though, and I got photos of her welcoming us to her show and some great close-up shots of the Crows.
The band played a great thirteen song set including A Long December, Big Yellow Taxi, Mr. Jones, Omaha, Hanginaround and Color Blind. Pretty much everything I wanted to hear except for Accidentally In Love, Rain King and Mrs. Potter's Lullaby and a dozen more songs, but who's counting?
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What else happens in Vegas?
Last night I went to the Intel party, hosted by @sarahcuda, @somewhatfrank, @briansolis and @zappos, and got to introduce people like Maralyn from AOL (what, no Twitter name?) to @MCHammer and watch @juliaallison be as shy and cameraphobic as usual.
At the party, plenty of people had iPhones and plenty of other people (like me) were talking about how Palm had debuted their Palm Pre iPhone killer earlier that day. Maybe Bono's big investment wasn't a mistake after all.
No one played any Elvis songs, even though it was his 74th birthday.
I still have a list of people to meet up with at CES before I go and I'd like to handle some more gadgets like the Sony VAIO P netbook, but I got a lot done in a single day.
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What happens in Vegas?
I spent today at the CES 2009 convention center, checking out hot new products and meeting with a bunch of companies that want to know more about what Obsessable and Crowd Fusion are doing. It has been a fantastic trip so far on both fronts.
After a couple of morning meetings, Steve Friedman and walked across the street to the massive Engadget trailer. I wanted to pretend I was either a fanboy who needed to get his iPhone charged or a reader who had problems with a product he'd bought off of Engadget, but everyone was heads down and blogging away.
(We used to get people writing to complain about a product they had bought from us every now and then. Of course, Engadget doesn't sell any products. These people had just bought something online via one of our ads and assumed that meant Engadget was a store. Wonderful.)
I had a really short list of products to seek out. One was Powermat. It sounded cool in their press email and was even cooler in person. They have these little mats that recharge your gadgets by magnetic induction -- not using power cords. So you set your (adapted for Powermat) iPhone on the mat and it just charges. You can even spill water on the surfaces and no one is going to get shocked because there's no electricity running through them. Powermats won't be in retail stores until the fall, but I plan to get them ASAP.
The Palm Pre recharges using a similar wireless charging pad. I'll say more about the Pre later.
Now I'm back in the hotel room, catching up on email, hungry out of my mind and wondering how I'm going to stay awake for a 9pm party. I'm sure this CES trip is way easier for people from California who don't have to deal with a time change. I'm just thankful I didn't fly into Vegas from Europe.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance