Microsoft – The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

The Good
The press tends to echo and enhance stories that reflect the bad side of a company. Today I’d like to start this item with the good things that Microsoft is doing. This week Microsoft had TechFest 2008. Its purpose is to highlight the latest research out of Redmond’s labs.

In this video Microsoft shows [...]

Build A Great ATSC Antenna, TV Engineering Handbook, IPTV, Toronto Winter Storm Coverage Ratings, TV Graphics

Build Your Own Super ATSC Antenna
Many Ayromlou over at NerdLogger posted an interesting link to a site that tells one how to build their own super ATSC antenna. It’s based on Doyt R. Hoverman’s original design for a television antenna that was granted US patents in 1959 and in 1964. They expired in 1979 and [...]

Old and New In Mainstream Media

Film Screening: Helvetica
If you’re into typography, Richard Kegler will provide a brief history of P22 type foundry, a company that started as a prankster art collective. It will occur this Wednesday March 19 at 6:00 pm. in the Rogers Communications Centre at Ryerson University. The session will also include a screening of the [...]

Things I Learned About New Media This Week (Mar. 9 – 15, 2008)

Digital Bits Now Surpass the Number of Stars in the Universe
Data is currently growing by a factor of 10 every five years. More bizarre is that rate at which electronic containers for that data — files, images, packets, tag contents — is growing 50% faster than the data itself. By the year 2011 data will [...]

Technology Shows

A few notes on some upcoming technology shows and conferences;

The ICE conference is the exchange of ideas in interactive media. http://www.ice08.com/
CATAAlliance Innovation and Leadership Awards nominations are underway. There are a number of them such as the Product Achievement Award that recognizes excellence in the content and application mobility industry in Canada. http://www.cata.ca/Media_and_Events/Awards/NominProcess.html
Banff [...]

Random Thoughts on Second Life, a Brain Mouse, Powerful Laptops and HDMI Soundcards

Once again I’m slightly changing how I post to this blog. I’m going to break the stories up into different postings so the material can be found by search engines and links.
Second Life
Researchers at Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department are trying to find ways to create lifelike synthetic characters, which act just like humans and would [...]