Music (Original Score): Up, Michael Giacchino WON
Animated Feature Film: Up, Pete Docter WON
Costume Design: Nine, Colleen Atwood NO
Writing (Original Screenplay): The Hurt Locker, Written by Mark Boal WON
Actress in a Leading Role: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side WON
Visual Effects: Avatar, Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones WON
Cinematography: Avatar, Mauro Fiore WON
Film Editing: The Hurt Locker, Bob Murawski and Chris Innis WON
Sound Mixing: Avatar, Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson NO
Art Direction: Avatar, Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair WON
Best Picture: Avatar, James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers NO
Actor in a Leading Role: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart WON
Documentary (Feature): The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Fisher Stevens WON
Sound Editing: The Hurt Locker, Paul N.J. Ottosson WON
Makeup: The Young Victoria, Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore NO
Actress in a Supporting Role: Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air NO
Actor in a Supporting Role: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds WON
Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon, Germany NO
Documentary (Short Subject): China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill NO
Music (Original Song): The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart), from “Crazy Heart” Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett WON
Writing (Adapted Screenplay): In the Loop, Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche NO
Directing: Avatar, James Cameron NO

itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id354102052

It’s been 4 months since I have posted a fitness related activity. I haven’t really done anything fitness related and fell back into old habits. At the peak of my fitness activities back in October, I was one run short of finishing W4 of the Couch to 5K program. and was down to 180lbs. Fast forward 4 months. I am back up to 195lbs, and once again, not eating properly.

I’ve decided to start the C25K program again (for the third time) and this time run it to completion. To ensure that, I have set myself a goal and signed up for the Forest City Road Road Race (5K) on May 2nd.

This time around, I have a couple of new things in my arsenal.

Due to the winter weather, and that I will be running in the snow, I received a pair of traction aids for my shoes over the holidays from my wife.

I also purchased the internet scale from Withings.  A geeky purchase, but will allow me to track my progress.  It works with RunKeeper and Weightbot for my iPhone.  Withings also allows some great API access that I plan on using in the near future.

Week 1 Breakdown:

Starting weight: 195.0 lbs
Ending weight: 192.4 lbs
KMs run: 11.3KM

C25K – W1D1

C25K – W1D2

C25K – W1D3

Taking 4 weeks off has truly brought me back to Week 1. I found myself getting winded in the 60 second running portions. A far way off running 5 mins straight that I was doing last October.

What we did was, using a logitech quickcam, we took a picture of the live performance every 15 seconds, then uploaded the pic to our webserver and ran a javascript to refresh the image every 25 seconds.  For the audio, I had to contact a company in California to let us use their RealMedia streaming server.  This fed the webpage with the audiofeed that the user first had to download real player.

Here is our original blog post about the event:

February 14th: Johnny’s Rocket Room. Our live show on this web site. This show had a couple of new events for the band. The first being the debut of the newest song to the reel live set, “I hold crush” and the second being reel’s first live show on the internet. We would like to thank the following people who helped make the show happen: Nick Linedecker at Kern Internet Services in Bakersfied, CA, Copyland Systems for supplying the hardware to make the show be broadcast. We would also like to thank the following people who helped to promote the show: Chris Gordon and Karen Murray from 103.1fm “The Hawk” for having us the program “London Live”. Janice Zolf at BBS Communications for the spot on Entertainment Desk on TV-London. And last we would like to thank all the people who came out to the show and tuned in on the internet.

The blog post on WayBack Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/19970422164648/www.execulink.com/~reel/reelnews.htm

Here is the CFPL news coverage:

Sometimes, it is nice to walk down memory lane….

Tracey and I attended a great Q&A session with Kevin Smith @ Roy Thompson Hall last night.  Kevin was really on top of his game and had some great stories about about his experience directing Bruce Willis, and his fun take on Avatar.

While Kevin’s “wake and bake” attitude certainly hasn’t dulled his sharp wit, it certainly has effected his style of dress, i mean a bathrobe now?

We look forward to visiting Brantford again this year for the Walter Gretzky street hockey tournament!

The rest of my pictures from the even, are here.

After each post, I tagged my tweet with the hashtag #rolluptherim.  Turns out, I wasn’t the only one:

From the National Post:

“Each year, the waning of winter means many things to many Canadians: the NHL trade deadline, last-minute dashes to the slopes, and the crisp sound of rolling coffee cup rims.

It’s quite likely that over the past week, you or someone close to you, has participated in the nation’s favourite contest: Tim Horton’s Roll Up The Rim To Win.

In the old days, if your rolling turned up a winner, you’d simply just high-five your buddies, or do some sort of happy dance in the middle of your local Timmys.

However, in these modern times, aside from practicing your rolling skills online you can celebrate your winnings and vent your frustrations via Twitter.

Using the hashtag #rolluptherim, Twitter users across the nation are keeping a tally of their winnings and failures with the contest.”

With this years contest coming at the end of February, I decided that it would be a good opportunity for myself to learn the iPhone SDK and go through the app development process.  I was interested in doing a quick test project to learn some basic functions and social networking integration, as I am about to develop a full scale application that will be a very large iPhone/iPad app.

So, here it is.  RimRoller, my first iPhone/iTouch application.

The idea behind the application, is pretty simple:

Enter you twitter login info
Buy a Coffee
Roll up the Rim
Press either the win or lose button in the app

After this is done, it keeps a tally of your Win/Loss ratio, and posts an update to twitter stating if you won or lost and your current win/loss ratio.

This is a very 1.0 release with a very crappy UI.  I just wanted to get something out to market in time for the 2010 Roll up the Rim contest.  In future releases, I plan on including Facebook connect, and the ability to specify what exactly you won.

Sticking with a quote that i read recently, “If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough” The RimRoller app was conceived, programmed, and released on the App Store in 8 days time.

Download RimRoller here.

Resources i used during the app development:

Friday, January 15th, I had the great pleasure to attend the CD release of “no ghostless place” by Raised by Swans.  I have been a very big fan of the band since hearing “Violet Light” on the CBC Radio3 Podcast 4 years ago.  Their first CD “Codes & Secret Longing” has been a favourite of mine since the day it was purchased, and sits in my list of top albums of all time.

I have been eagerly awaiting to hear some new material, and after 4 years, the band has release their new CD. I ordered mine via online pre-order hoping to receive my copy the day before the show.  I can review this album with one word: AMAZING.  The new CD is on par if not better than Codes & Secret longing.  I cannot recommend enough to anybody reading this post, leave my site right now, and click on this link to buy this album right now!

I almost didn’t make the show as our babysitter fell through at the last minute, but my wife, Tracey decided to stay home with the kids so I wouldn’t miss the show.

Moving on now to my review of the show.  If it has not been made clear, I am a fan.  The band played a solid 14 song set, that featured heavily the new material of “No Ghostless Place”.   The new material played very well live, some songs like “Hail of Arrows” and “Secret Garden /S.C” sounding more rounded out and driven than the recorded versions.

Sound at Call the Office has always been a problem in my opinion, and there were times where the vocals did get lost in the wall of distorted mud that is Call the Office’s sound system.   According to interviews with the band, they are about to embark on a coast to coast tour of Canada, so it was nice to have them playing in front of a hometown audience before embarking cross country.

I managed to take quite a few pictures of the performance, you can view the entire set on my flickr page here.

Setlist from the show: (Show Highlights bolded)

We Were Never Young
Hail of Arrows
Relentless
Easier
Capable of Cruelty
Old Fires
Longer Shadows, Shorter Days
Sandcastles
The Waitings Over
Still Inside You
There’s Hope Yet
How do These Hearts Unfold
Violet Light

Band Website: www.raisedbyswans.com

Our time is running out…

Choosing my project for the National Photo Book Month. I originally chose to do the theme of long exposure photography.  Being that I could only take photos in certain lighting conditions, the idea became very difficult to finish, and I ran out of time.

This morning, November 30th, I was out of time, and could not finish the project.  Disappointed in myself for procrastinating, I gave up.  I was kicking myself for not choosing a theme that was easier to execute.  Then it came to me.  I am a big procrastinator, and time always seems to be against me, so I thought, what if I did the entire project in one day, documenting the time in between shots.  Using time as my theme now, I picked up an alarm clock and went out shooting.  The time that is displayed on the clock, it the actual time of the photo.

All Photos were taken on Monday, November 30th, 2009

I present to you my entry into NaPhoBoMoDay.  Download my book in PDF format here.

View the entire photoset here on Flickr.

What is NaPhoBoMo?

National Photo Book Month

A photographer’s take on NaNoWriMo, the goal is to produce a 50-picture photobook in a month, from start to finish. This includes taking the photos, creating layout, editing for content, post-processing, all of it. In 30 days.

Visit the NaPhoBoMo website, here.

]]> http://edwardplatero.com/2009/11/30/naphobomo/feed/ 1 http://edwardplatero.com/2009/11/30/naphobomo/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/eplatero/~3/CzbL5K5R8s8/ http://edwardplatero.com/2009/11/28/victoria-park-lighting-of-the-xmas-lights/#comments Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:39:25 +0000 Edward http://edwardplatero.com/?p=446

I haven’t been to this event since I was Brodie’s age. I have to admit, driving up to the park I though that this was going to be pretty weak, but in the end, we had a great time. I remember being Brodie’s age and being pulled on a sled through the park thinking that the lights were the greatest thing ever.

Tracey and the kids had a great time. As much as I hate the stuff,snow would have been a nice touch.

View all of the photos taken here.

I was happy that I was able to grab some more pictures for my National Photo Book Month (NaPhoBoMo) project.  It was nice becuase I have fallen a bit behind with my progress.

We finished our adventure together with a trip to Spaghetti Eddie’s downtown, a first for both of us.

To view all of our photos from the month’s photowalk, you can view our Flickr Set here.

I started shooting some video, but was losing light quickly so I abandoned the idea.

First Halloween at the new place.  Found out quickly that half the houses in the area don’t give out anything.

We did 3 runs, 1 with both, and then I took both kids out separately.

This is the first year that Brodie really chose his costume, and was very specific about what he wanted.  This year, he went as Darth Vader.  Being the geek dad, I hooked up portable speakers to an iPod nano that looped the Imperial March attached to his costume.

Kids had a great time, I ended up with major heartburn from eating too much candy.

More pictures from Halloween, can be found on my Flickr Page.