Fire-Wired Blog

Six years ago, when I graduated from Iowa State, I was done. Like all college students I lightly   considered  going to grad school but after 16 straight years of classrooms, I was done. Fast forward to January 2, 2012 and I'm un-done, and If we're being literal the title of this post is a lie, I'm telecommuting. First Question: What am I studying? In 18 months I hope to receive a "Masters of Applied Science in Information and Communications Technology" with an emphasis in Software Design and Programming. Back before my brain tuned out math, somewhere around 9th grade, I wanted to be a computer programmer. During college my tech interests started to comeback but never in the career path sense. Well now they have. I don't want to be a computer programmer, I dont want to be a web designer, I want to build programs. I get all these ideas in my head and I have some of the skills but not all. Well in 18 months I will have those missing skills. Second Quest...

Obviously I'm a  pretty big geek for web video , and relish every opportunity I get to produce a video for the web, but most of the video I upload is procedural for my job. CRI produces 5 shows and throughout the week there are various short clips to be uploaded. Still, about 3 or 4 times a month I produce a video that makes me excited for public release. Most recently that excitement came from a clip I produced for the travel show I co-produce, " One Day Getaway ." Of course I do have other passions and beliefs outside of my web video obsession, local food is one of them. A few months ago a local cooking show approached 1DG about teaming up for a special cooking/day-tripping episode. After a short brainstorm I proposed the winning idea of heading to the Des Moines Winter Farmers Market , check out a unique getaway opportunity, and find the goods one needs to cook up a delicious meal ( here's the cooking segment ). Fast forward to the episode being fi...

A couple weeks ago my wife Marieta and I traveled down to Kansas City for her 30th birthday. The best part about it was she knew we were going on a trip but didn't know where we were headed until the day of and even when she figured it out she didn't know any of our plans. The fun thing about going to Kansas City was neither of us much history with the city. My family went there a couple times when I was in grade school but I couldn't really remember any of the attractions, same thing for Marieta. So after booking our hotel room I burned up the keyboard searching for things to do . From my experience websites like Metromix and Citysearch are little help investigating our interests, and TripAdvisor is best used for hotels. For our purposes the KC Visitor Bureau, VisitKC.com , website was awesome. Everything's laid out for easy access, the site is really colorful and fun, you can find things based off your interests, there are little preview pictures and ma...

Buying an iPad still makes little sense. Two years ago when the iPad was introduced I was at work with a bunch of fellow Apple fans. We were on Apple.com in a matter of seconds to check it out. Everyone was in awe of it... except me. I get that it means a lot for multi-media presentations and sales people but for the average person it's just an expensive add-on. iPhones and Androids I get; a computer in your pocket that you can use at any time to play games, access information and it allows you to keep every virtual thing you own in one place. An iPad... sure you can game on it (kind of) and you can watch movies on it (awkwardly) but for me why do you have to have an iPad? The Kindle Fire I get. It doesn't cram every little Android feature onto it. You're gonna use it to watch read books, movies, and surf the web. So it doesn't have GPS or a camera, okay... Isn't that better suited for your phone? Do you want to pull out something the size of a text...

My most recent Tech Beat report for my day job explains the importance of backing up your digital information. Click here to read my "Around Osky Blog" post on my personal experiences with data loss .

It's over cable industry, I'm taking my money and going home. It may sound weird to read this considering the source , but I've had it. For the past 11 months I've been routinely forking over $120 to DirecTv for a product that goes out in a light rain, has far more channels than I would ever watch, and is completely overpriced. Yes it's a great product but my cable bill should not be greater than my cellphone bill. ESPECIALLY considering 65% of the cable industries content can be watched online. I don't care about on-demand movies. I don't care about the Golf Channel, the Game Show network, E!, Bravo, Reel, HSN, HLN, Spike, TRUtv, Lifetime, Oxygen... I don't care . Plus, their best content I can get over the air. CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS? You don't need a dish or a coax cable to get those, and Thanks to the digital conversion broadcast TV is finally bearable. And what I can't get over the air, I can find on Hulu, in the Redbox, or on TeamCo...

Mixed media is king. That is exactly what I've been saying for years and now there's research to back it up. AND OF COURSE! ... the info comes in fun video, behold: This past April when I attended the National Association of Broadcasters convention I sat in on a lot of social media seminars -not so much for the information, but for verification. Every sessions mentioned if you want eyeballs, and loyal web visitors, you need mixed media. What is the #1 media they recommended? Video. If web visitors only spend 48 seconds on your site  how are they gonna remember you? Not from your boring text. Video hooks em. They want to know what you're showcasing. If it's short, they want to rewatch it. If it's long, and interesting enough, they'll share it. And if you're consistent showcasing quality, they'll return over and over and over... These are the bedrock reasons for why when I shoot a video for an organization I push for them to put it on th...

I am a man who takes pride in his efficiency. In August when I edited my Farm Crawl video together, it took me about 7 hours. I sat down at 9 am and started picking out my soundbites, put it all together, wrote a couple songs for score music, and by the time I finalized it the clock said 4pm. This month the same thing deal happened when I put together my BfBl Harvest Party video , only it took me 5 hours. When I have a vision, and know my footage, I crush my projects.Yesterday I set my sights on a much loftier goal. Every morning when I'm eating breakfast and getting ready to start my day I think through what projects I'm working on. This week I've got two big projects to produce and a tight window to get them done. The travel show I co-produce, One Day Getaway , has an episode due on Nov 8, and the community interest show I occasionally produce, Oskaloosa Today , has an episode due on Nov 9. Well both projects have been shot and digitized, and all that remains is putt...

Next to being a tech geek my biggest passion is sustainability, mostly in food production and consumption. To that end my favorite event in Iowa is the " Farm Crawl ." Eight unique, sustainable family farms southeast of Des Moines that open their doors to the public to tour their operation and get to know their local farmers. When my wife, Marieta, and I moved back to Iowa the only way we could easily obtain organic food was by becoming CSA members and learning more about farmers in our immediate area. Thanks to social networking it's considerably easier then say 10 years ago but the Farm Crawl is really a blessing. Anyone can say they do things in a sustainable way but you can't really know for sure until you see their operation for yourself. Now the tech connection . The past two years I've taken a video camera on the Farm Crawl. 2009 it was my little Canon Elura (bogus handicam dealie) and put together a little preachy piece about sustainable farming . 2...

This past weekend I took part in an annual event I've been dying to do for years now; the 48 Hour Film Project . The premise is pretty simple. You form a team of filmmakers, Friday you pull a genre out of a hat, the 48 Hour organizers give you a line of dialogue, a character, and a prop and you have the next  48 hours to make your film.  I've been missing the boat on this deal for years and considering I have an unhealthy obsession with movies and multimedia... that's not cool. So the team I was so kindly invited to join, Team Mystery Box, pulled "Superhero" for our genre. Friday was sputtering brainstorm session and late night blitzkrieg writing session, Saturday was nonstop filming, and Sunday was putting it altogether. My roles were brainstorming , writing , music composition and minor production work and editing .  I don't want to spoil the film for you incase you see it but I will tell you it's called Side Effects  and it's about a guy...

Vacation. There are very few better words in the english language. One of those words higher on the pantheon of awesome is "free." Who doesn't like vacations? Who doesn't like free things? Well how about -brace yourselves- free things on vacation . Oh man, talk about Christmas in May. Well over Memorial day my wife and I were lucky enough to go on a TWO WEEK VACATION up and down the California coast. It was awesome. Saw some family, hit LA, Laguna Beach, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, Berkeley, Wine Country, and many more. Now unless you're going to a trade show you probably wouldn't put tech and vacation in the same thought, and my vacation would have been no different except for a pleasant little surprise I stumbled upon in the Russian River Valley portion of Wine Country; Foursquare Specials. Incase you aren't familiar with the platform, Foursquare is a location based review and reward network that uses your phone application. Kind of like a mix ...

It's time for my coworkers to sink or swim. The next two Fridays I won't be in the office to upload and form everyone's work so it's time to see who among them has been paying attention. This past February I install Joomla 1.5 on our webspace to manage our website. It's an outdated software but sadly we're locked into the space we use (bureaucracy...) so we can't use Wordpress. Joomla provides a CMS that almost anyone can pick up and contribute to. The problem is... some people don't want to play ball. Last month I attended the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas and heard a lot of speakers talk about multi-platform data delivery. The world of news has been segmented forever into Radio, Print, and TV. Well thanks to the omnipresence of social media they're all colliding and if you don't like it, basically you don't want to be a journalist.  Every GM, reporter, documentary producer, and journalism at NAB said the s...

Today my work packed up our stuff and closed up shop... BECAUSE WE MOVED INTO A BRAND NEW OFFICE! YEAH! Considering this is my second post, I haven't been able to talk about my job very much, but I work at a nonprofit television station in Oskaloosa, Iowa called the Communication Research Institute . WAY too fancy a name. Anyways, we moved from an old, rundown building on the square of Oskaloosa to a 4-year-old building on the local college campus. It is super nice and I'm really excited to get to work in there. Well moving into the new digs reminds me one of my pet peeves; people who are "stuck in their ways" and refuse to let go of their inefficiencies. Why stay in an old building that doesn't fit your needs correctly just because you are used to it? (You should know none of my co-workers wanted to stay at the old building.) Well as it turns out... I'm one of those people who likes his inefficiencies, and my hang up?   MiniDv tapes! This might seem ...

Whenever I tell people my family started using the internet in 1994 they think I'm a lying. The truth is my best friends Kevin and Jason McEwen moved from Iowa to Baltimore the summer after fourth grade and I figured that was the end. I didn't have the patience to write a letter and my family at that point had not vacationed once on the east coast. So I figured I'd never hear from them or see them again. Then my dad hooked our PC into a 1200 bps modem and fired up Prodigy and Compuserve. The only thing I remember about Compuserve is it looked like a giant chat room, and for all I know that is what it was. I think I logged into it once and left it alone. Prodigy was where the real action was. My Dad told me I could write my friends digital letters, send it off, and hear back from them in minutes, the only catch was I could only send 30 emails a month. I guess 31 emails would melt their servers or something. It was awesome. The McEwens and I emailed back and forth a coupl...