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Busy time has come. We are seriously polishing our product — the BlogBridge — for the rapidly coming BlogOn 2005 conference. We have lots of new features and fixes put into the latest builds. If I took the application as I knew it a week ago and compared it to what we have have today, most likely I would have been shocked and completely paralyzed till the end of my days, so big and significant those changes are.

New weekly build has just been deployed and it will be announced in a while on our official site. I won’t list the changes here as it’s a privilege of the main site. If you are reading these lines from within BlogBridge 2.3, my immediate suggestion is to restart it and get the updated version of weekly build right now.

What? Still reading? Don’t waste any more time — restart and enjoy!

Wow! I’ve been given a very interesting link several nanos ago and writing pretty fast to share it with you. It’s the link to a very unusual site — The Million Dollar Homepage — where the front page is a big advertisement board. The owner of the site sells each and every pixel on this board for $1. It all started Sep 25, 2005 and by this very moment the stats say that he has sold 320,300 pixels which generated him a pretty solid revenue.

I refuse to believe that someone could earn that much in such an easy way. Heh, the price of innovation, I guess.

Another cool-looking VJ’ing piece of software — NEUROMIXER AVmixer Pro. I’m not really sure about its characteristics, in fact, it even looks a bit simpler than VidVox applications. But anyway, it is usually whatever you make of it. I saw the guys who painted wonderful pictures pixel-by-pixel with Microsoft Paint application as well as I saw the others who were making crap with cutting-edge Adobe Photoshop. Give it a spin even if are only curious about “How do these VJ’s work?” and, who knows, maybe the world will get another Einstein of a light and motion.

Here’s the picture for your viewing pleasure:

A good friend of mine gave me an interesting link today — the link to a VJ’ing software he found on the net. Those guys — VJ’es — can drive you half crazy with impressive colorful video-performances they have on big parties. In most cases the software plus hardware costs like a middle-sized spaceship. Five years ago no one could even think of having installations of this kind at their disposal, but today we all have an opportunity to release our creativity in full swing. Of course, if you have no imagination or both of your hands grow from wrong places it’s not going to be of a real help to you. For the rest of us addicted to everything ground-breaking, I would recommend to have a look at Grid2/GridPro series of VidVox VJ’ing applications as they apparently reveal some chapters of Black Magic Bible. Beware!

You aren’t going to harm anyone, are you?

I’m taking a deep breath… It’s Sunday. Yesterday we were wandering around the city, looking for something to entertain ourselves with. It happened that we visited a book store and bought couple of wonderful books. I’ve chosen “NP” by Banana Yoshimoto and Kate some detective story, the title of which I can’t recall now.

The time wore off; we decided to visit my parents and have a dinner with them. It was the wonderful time: we exchanged news and laughed a lot. Everything was very usual as if we were still living as one big family under the same roof. What’s strange, I can’t remember what happened after that. Perhaps, I was reading the book or doing something else. The whole time from the moment of departing from the parents till today’s morning seems to be cut into thousands of stripes; some of them are still with me and others were taken away by someone. I can remember only several moments, like taking to Pito, reading the book, having my hair cut (or it was before talking to Pito?). Strange thing…

This morning I finished the book. Well, it was as pleasant as all other Japanese authors I have read before. A very soft, slow moving and evolving plot with several parallel lines, crossing in the end. The whole book has a wafer mystery cover, grabbing your attention entirely. I won’t tell you what it is about, but it’s worth every second spent on reading. What I have seen for the first time is how the author makes you feel being a very clever person. She doesn’t explain some turns of the plot, but intuitevely you understand the connection and get proud of yourself. The next moment you realize how clever the author is to write all of it exactly in this way. It’s spectacular!

Hey, there’s a big and tasty apple pie in front of me. Kate made it and it looks and smells terrific. How can I express that? No way. Just come and try some.

Well, that’s all for now. I have to think how to spend the rest of my weekend after the work on the pie is done.

Have a good rest! Another busy week is coming!

I’ve just finished uploading an updated version 2.3 to our Java Web Start deployment location. This fix pack incorporates one important fix which hit the users, who prefer to sort articles in ascending order where oldest come first.

The other patch is connected to a navigation. When you hit “go to next … article” command and there are some folded groups on your way, an invisible article will be selected instead of the next visible one.

And the last fix adds back (did you know about it?) “copy article text” functionality which was unintentionally lost. Now you can select a text of an article with mouse and use standard CTRL-C (or whatever analog on Mac) to copy the selected piece into the system clipboard.

Enjoy!

The world of graphics was always exciting. Who from us didn’t wish to create something really coverful and impressive some day? Most of the time I think that it’s not my business and I don’t have time for that, but once I see some really brilliant masterpice of modern art (which is also very simple technically), I start to think “ah, I could do that as well. OK, let me download some painting software and try myself in it once again (as I did it almost thousand of times before).” Yeah, the same thing with a video and video performances. It’s usually expected that when we grow bigger this childish approach to life activities disappears, but, in fact, sometimes it grows bigger following your new possibilities. To be honest, it happens to me very often.

That’s why I was really excited to learn that a friend of David Pescovitz has just released his new book called “The VJ Book: Inspirations and Practical Advice for Live Visuals Performance.” Well, I’m not sure that I will try myself as a VJ soon as I’m already sort of a DJ. But in any case, the book should be really exciting even for a quick scan. Thanks it still not too expesive. Check it out on Amazon!

Recently I’ve discovered a terrific tool for brainstorming and thoughts organizing — FreeMind — and it became one of my favorites in the blink of an eye. Everyone, or at least good deal of us, knows what brainstorming is — it’s a process of the exploration of some idea when you analyze its aspects and aspects of an aspects from all sides. Often, people use white- and blackboards to write down their thoughts or just a plain paper for the same purpose. Personally, I always wrote some kind of text, explaining the idea, digging deeper into it. The time wore off and what I found myself doing was dealing with proper statements, language structures, text formating, breaking things into lines and paragraphs and doing other time consuming actions distracting from the main goal — focusing on the topic. Can it be better? Absolutely.

(more…)

Wonderful things are happening all around us… We have just released another BlogBridge version (2.3) featuring shining new photo feeds display and lots of small yet dead necessary fixes. I have never seen in any other aggregator available nowadays with such a pleasant and useful feature, like an iPhoto-like view for photo blogs (feeds).

Our contacts are on the official product site. The application can be installed from Java Web Start starting point or from within a downloadable distribution.

Have a pleasant rest with BlogBridge and let us know if something doesn’t fit you!

By the way, if you still don’t know, we’ve been selected as one of thirteen most innovative products of the year 2005, deserving attention by an opinion of BlogOn 2005. We have exciting new plans for a future versions of the application and aren’t not going to stop even for a snack.

Eric Grohe demonstrates unbelieveable creativity. He paints unusual and extremely impressive pictures on the walls. His creations are supposed to bring more colors and space into our grayed out cubicle living, prolonging the space and time. I can swear he has much more works. Does anyone know some other locations on the net to enjoy his wonderful art?

Before:

After:

(click on the pictures to get them full-size)