Brian Shaler

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to Code And Beats. I could’ve worked on work work. I could’ve worked on non-work work. But I didn’t do either. Instead, I experimented with some visual effects in Flash — combining video, audio input, and tweets.

By 2am, here’s what I had come up with! (I’ll post the code soon eventually)

Code & Beats: Music Powered Twitter Wall from Brian Shaler on Vimeo.

Fun stuff! I’m interested in seeing this event come to Phoenix. We just need to get the organizer (+developer +designer +DJ) Avi to fly out and then round up a few local DJs with some good electro material. Un tiss un tiss un tiss…

Also, here’s a separate pic I snapped of the Twitter wall:

Code And Beats: Music Powered Twitter Wall

I should’ve put together a video showing more of the background dancing clips. Some of them were pretty excellent!

I found out yesterday that there’s going to be a rad event called “Code & Beats.” If it turns out to be as fun as it sounds, I’ll probably lobby to bring it to Phoenix.

Here’s the basic premise:

A party celebrating the art of programming through performance. A handful of hardcore coders from the city’s hottest startups will work in the center of a pounding dance floor to a musical journey of electro beats.

Some additional details: it sounds like the “hardcore coders” will be facing the dance floor, with external monitors mirroring their laptops and facing the dance floor. There may also be one or more projectors involved.

I’m going to experiment with some new visual Flash-based stuff, and will try to include the room’s music, a webcam, and/or tweets as inputs!

It should be exciting! Also, I’m probably going to open-source everything I write at the event and post it somewhere like GitHub.

An email went around the Engineering department at work discussing security and keyed hashes. We take security seriously, but that doesn’t mean we can’t joke around. A VP responded to the security email by suggesting we could prevent the vulnerability outlined in the referenced article by disabling logins for accounts that have more than 1 trillion login failures.

Being the contrarian that I am, I had to throw in my two cents about his proposed solution:

It’s frustrating when you try to log in a trillion times, can’t remember your password, get locked out, and then have to contact support to get your account unlocked.

The number of login attempts should definitely be set to a more reasonable number, like a googol. If I can’t guess my password in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts, I’ll probably break down and contact support.

I thought it was worth sharing because it’s not every day I get a chance to use googol in a sentence.

On October 15th, 2006, while a small group of amateur photographers were hiking at Papago Park in Phoenix, Arizona, something strange happened. A guy jumped. Well, actually, another guy jumped first, then his wife, and then the jumper jumped. At the time, he wasn’t the jumper. In fact, he very rarely jumped and nobody had ever remarked that his jumping was any different than anyone else’s.

A guy jumps

The strange thing which happened that afternoon was the jumper’s jump. It didn’t end when his feet returned to the ground. In fact, the jump didn’t even end in Phoenix.

At the time, nothing seemed special about the jump. The preview screen on the camera showed what appeared to be a well-captured photo of a good jump. Nothing spectacular. Just a good jump. The hike resumed.

Throughout the following months, the group met up at other locations around Phoenix. When the opportunity arose, the photographers enjoyed taking other jumping photos. The jumper, who was still not known as such, happily obliged.

At a conference in November of 2007, the jump that left the ground over a year earlier started to turn into something. The jumper was introduced to someone he had never met by someone he had never met as, “the guy that jumps.” The jump had somehow preceded the jumper.

Jumpers jump the jumper’s jump in NH

Fast forward another thirteen months to December of 2008.

A group of people in New Hampshire who had never been in direct contact with the jumper scheduled a local photography meet-up. The theme of the meet-up was to jump. More specifically, it was to emulate the jumper’s 2006 jump and those that followed.

How the jump traveled over 2,000 miles to the Northeast United States on its own is a testament to the strange power of the Internet.

Amazingly, the jump didn’t stop there.

The jump that left the ground in 2006 was seen again in 2009 on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Some 5,000 miles away, a German Flickr and Twitter user visiting Lake Garda in Italy decided to jump the jumper’s jump.

“trying a shalerjump @ lake garda” by vanse1980 on Flickr

That, to me, is a leap of unimaginable scale. One that started innocently enough during a hike in Phoenix, Arizona.

I got an email from the Ford Fiesta Movement campaign this morning:

Thanks for your interest in The Fiesta Movement! As you probably know by now, we received over 4,000 entries! We have been very busy culling through all of the submissions and the competition was stiff! We have finally chosen our 100 Fiesta Movement Agents and unfortunately we are not able to offer you one of the positions at this time.

In the end, Agents were chosen for a variety of reasons. In keeping with what we set out to do with the Movement, we wanted to make sure we did a thorough job of different kinds of Agents from across the US who spend time in a variety of social network channel. That being said, we had to spread our 100 Fiestas to everyone from bloggers, to YouTube stars, Twitterati, Flickr fiends and most importantly, some really engaging people who we thought would have a great story to tell if we let them. On top of that, we wanted our voice to stretch far and wide, so we made it a point to spread our Fiestas throughout as much of the country as possible.

However, there are still opportunities for you to get behind the wheel of a Ford Fiesta and let us know what you think. As part of the Movement, we will be taking global Fiestas across the US for the next several months, stopping at key events and everyday locations to allow people to connect with the Movement & test drive the vehicles for themselves. For more information you can find a calendar with our whereabouts on FiestaMovement.com (coming in early May), as well as the full content stream from the Movement.

Thanks again for your interest in the Fiesta Movement, we truly enjoyed and appreciated your submission.

- Fiesta Movement Mission Control

A few things to note:

“we received over 4,000 entries!”

They asked applicants to submit a YouTube video and tag it “fiestamovement.” They chose their 100 agents from these 600 entries (less, actually, because not all videos tagged “fiestamovement” are application videos). The fiestamovement YouTube account had 413 application videos in its favorites list.

“we had to spread our 100 Fiestas to everyone from bloggers, to YouTube stars, Twitterati, Flickr fiends and most importantly, some really engaging people who we thought would have a great story to tell if we let them.”

I know I don’t have much reach on YouTube, but I think I’ve got at least a little bit of credibility when it comes to blogging and Twittering. And Flickr? Have you seen my automotive photos?

As for telling an engaging story, it’s very subjective. However, I think a fair share of the people who have been following me on Twitter for 2 years would say they do so because they think (and I know this because they tell me) I’m interesting, exciting, and/or funny. I’m spontaneous and I travel a lot. I meet tons of people. I personally think my ongoing story is a great one to tune in to.

“we wanted our voice to stretch far and wide, so we made it a point to spread our Fiestas throughout as much of the country as possible.”

I didn’t see any agents from Arizona. It looked like there were 10-20 agents from Southern California, though. To be fair, there was a little bit of spread to more obscure areas like Midwestern states.

Mazda Movement

Brian, quit your whining. If you’re so freakin’ interesting, why don’t you just get out there and do it anyway?

I’ve got the three C’s required to be an agent: a Car, a Computer, and a Camera/Camcorder.

I like my car. It’s very fun to drive. I don’t have to be given a free Mazda MX-5 to be willing to tell that to people. I’ll do it for the car.