This summer I have spent a considerable amount of time doing research and designing for a new project… Soft Sircuit Apparel.

The concept is incorporating electronics into various pieces of apparel. My amazing and wonderful friend Kate is the apparel genius behind the project. Our creative ingenious friend Lee is full of inspiration and design ideas. And I bring the electronics and technology background to the project.

So far we have started small with lighting up broaches, a stripe of white and blue LEDs down the sleeves of a hooded sweatshirt, and a small ice cream themed art piece with LEDs that turn on and off in sequence.

Our research and design ideas include LEDs, EL wire, various sensors and programming. Expect to here more about this as the project grows!

I am looking for your feedback here….

My love of photography has grown exponentially over the last few years, and with it so has the size of my hard drives and backup storage drives. And that is fine for when I am here at home, processing them, editing them, posting them to blogs, and sending them off to people.

But what to do when on the road? When I get excited about something I can easily fill up 20GB within a few hours of shooting. So if I plan to go away for a week at a time.. how do a handle all of that data? Where do I put it all so I can keep shooting?
Read more of Traveling with GB of Photos

For the last 3 months now I have been a 100% remote employee. Most of my colleagues, including my entire immediate team, are locate 800 miles south and about 500 miles west of my current location. It has been an interesting adjustment.
Read more of Working Remote

Between Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Email, Instant Message and Skype I can pretty much keep up with almost every person I have every met in each of the 4 states I’ve lived in. And many of them I do choose to keep up with.

I spend many an hour on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Email, Instant Message and Skype in order to keep track of people that I’ve met and grown to care about in each of the different places I’ve lived.
But some nights I’m forced to stop and question myself and ask – is it time well spent? Is it more important for me to spend an hour reading random fleeting tweets from people I lived with years ago – or would it be better to spend that time trying to get to know someone in the state I currently live in?
Read more of Tech Hurting Relational Growth?

I’ve recently made the plunge and canceled my cable TV and made the swap over to watching TV online. I just could no longer justify the expense of cable TV in light of all the excellent free content that is available.

Hulu is my newest friend. Check out what I’ve been watching.

Recently during my research I came across this company doing some really cool stuff with monitoring technology. Zephyr has put out these monitoring belts. They are wide straps that you wear around your chest.. not all that unlike the standard runners heart monitor. Except these have special fabric that is actually part of the sensing system.
Their BioHarness BT actually can record Heart Rate, Respiration Rate, Skin Temperature, and Angle of Posture both instantaneously and trending over time including full EKG. Read more of Zephyr Bio Monitoring

Have you heard of this new service called Odiogo? Effectively – if every blog out there were to implement this, then you could basically put away your RSS feed reader and just listed to all your favorite postings on your iPod on the commute in every morning.

And it’s currently free to WordPress users. This has a lot of potential, especially for folks that take mass transit. Man would this have come in handy one my hour long commutes via subway and commuter trains in Boston and Chicago.

I have to say I truly do love the way technology is advancing to make it easier and easier for me to consume mass amounts of content – and now even via multiple senses. Just think all you auditory learners out there – have RSS feeds of all sorts of interesting topics taught to you becaue the post reads itself to you.

On one hand this probably seems to many like a pretty simple concept – but I am just constantly exicited about the different ways that we are expanding how much information individuals can get their hands on and the different mediums by which they can do so.

Do you know of any blogs that are using this?
Do you have any RSS feeds via odiogo on your podcast list?
Let me know what you think.

I tend to be a pretty darn practical person. So when it comes to cell phones, I’ve always carried just that… a phone. My phone has not played music, nor given me driving directions, nor surfed the web, nor any other random thing. It was a phone, with a few stored phone numbers in it, some speed dials, and the occasional text message.

Back in high school I carried around one of these guys, a Motorola MicroTAC

Then in college I carried a Motorola StarTAC. I had that guy for a long time.

More recently I was carrying a RAZOR for a few years.

And then on moving to Texas I acquired a MOTORIZR


So I have to admit.. my new phone I acquired this month is quite a jump for me.
That’s right folks, I have made the jump to the new BlackBerry Storm


Man oh man this thing does everything.
I have it synced with my outlook both at home and at work. So all my contacts with names, address, phones, emails, and even a pic of each is now on both home and work computers as well as on my phone. It’s receiving all email to the inboxes of all my personal and work accounts (and does NOT receive email that i’ve filtered to go to other folders which is really sweet).
It has my full work calendar synced to it when I get to the office each morning.
The other day I used it to browser the web to get the address of a location and then put that into VZNavigator which gave me turn my turn directions to my location.
It is my alarm clock.
I can get and make facebook updates on it from anywhere.
I can use it to update my blog from anywhere I’m at.
It works everywhere I get cell service, even up at the farm where there is no high speed internet.
I stored an entire 2 hour movie into a file less than 3MB and was able to watch it right on my blackberry.
It paired beautifully with my Bluetooth headset making taking client calls on the headset, while taking notes on the phones keyboard a totally easy process.
It has a app called VLingo which i hit the convenience button on the phone and just tell it what I want to do such as “Call Nathan Mobile” or “Text Jeana I’m on my way” and it reads it back to me and then i just press send. Talk about making it easy and safer to communicate while behind the wheel.
Thanks to Documents to Go which came with the phone it can open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files as well as PDFs so I can actually read attachments that get sent to me in emails.
It takes photos and video quite nicely
I’ve got the Olive Tree application on there, so I’m able to read the bible anywhere and follow along in church even when I don’t remember to bring my paper bible with me.
It has a built in GPS, and so I installed Google Maps and it can track my location and give my directions to locations. So it seems like I’ll be able to do all my geocaching with just my phone.
And it came with an 8GB memory card, so if I just want one or two playlists for a trip, that will totally fit on there.

So, this one item is now carried in place of my
phone
GPS
iPod
PDA

And I have more access to everything much more efficiently. I’m totally loving the jump to Blackberry!

Well in the process of creating this site I’ve learned quite a bit. It’s been awhile since I made a foray into a new language or application outside of my worklife. It has been a fun and exciting adventure to explore WordPress and see how far it has come. You can, and I plan to, completely run a site via WordPress.
WordPress is like a blogging tool, a CMS, a feedreader, and a template driven system all wrapped up in one. What I thought I would have to do with custom php feed-reading code and caching rss feed pages and all such things… in actuality is as easy as dropping a couple of lines of php within my HTML template and making it the WordPress theme that I’m using. Talk about awesome. Maintain your template in one place and it affects everything. Add pages to your site with ease. I’m definitly excited.
So far for each hurdle I’ve come across there has been a WordPress plug in to meet my needs.

Maybe some of you know WordPress well and can suggest some others, but here is a list of the PlugIns that I’ve found most useful so far:

Akismet – this plugin will check your comments and form posts to ensure they are not spam before it allows the submit

Contact Form 7 – this plugin will let you create a custom form with all sorts of fields on it, and then from those form fields design an email that is set to the owner of the WordPress.

EmbedIt – Is a handy little tool for anytime you want to include content in your posts or pages that use the embed tag. Such as flash slideshows on my photography page, or youtube videos or all sorts of other such things.

jQuery Lightbox – Is a neat little plugin that lets you view photos within your blog in “lightbox” mode where it greys out the rest of the screen and makes the image large on top of everything.

WP-SmugMug – is an excellent plugin that you will see me use alot in my Photography posts. This will let me grab photos direct from my smugmug galleries and put them on display in my posts. No double uploading! I’m a fan.