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Hello all. My latest article for ConnectedPhotographer is a review of the photo-sharing site Flickr. I’m definitely a fan, but the service is not without a few warts. Check out the full review here!

After the close call in my last blog entry, I drove to upper Michigan to join the girls on Saturday for my nephew Jacob’s birthday party. On Sunday, myself, the father-in-law, my brother-in-law and my other 10-year-old nephew Alex went skiing. Alex was doing wonderfully all day long, maybe fell once, and it was more of a losing balance while standing still type thing.

Well, we were going to meet all the rest of the family at a restaurant at the top of the slopes for lunch before we headed back to Chicago. We had time for one more run. We decided on a black diamond run that we had hit all day long. It was an S curve with banked sides through the middle of some trees. Alex had gone down this run probably 6-7 times during the course of 4 hours. Well, this final run, he didn’t fare so well.

Alex lost control and crashed into the trees, badly. He broke his leg in two places, broke his thumb, and hurt his knee bad enough that he had to have surgery to restore blood flow to the rest of his leg. He’ll be in a wheelchair for three weeks, and then could possibly be on crutches after that, if his thumb is healed enough that is. I feel so bad for him. It was the ‘one last run’ and it cost him a lot of pain and rehab. Keep him in your thoughts for a speedy recovery, and no permanent damage. Kids shouldn’t have to deal with this much pain…

My wife drove to upper Michigan with my daughters and mother-in-law today, and they had a very close call.

The weather kept changing, from sun, to ice storms, to whiteout conditions, back to sun, so it was treacherous. Well, at one point my wife hit a patch of ice, skidded to one side of the road, back over to the other side, spun the car around 360 degrees and ended up coming to a stop near the shoulder. No one was hurt, and they didn’t do any damage, they just scared the hell out of themselves.

Needless to say I was shaken up by the news, but everyone is okay. I can’t imagine what I would have done if anything happened to them. To whoever was looking out for them. Thank You.

It’s finally over. I’m one happy Miami Dolphin fan.

The way digital music is delivered took a step forward Sunday night. You see, during the Grammy broadcast, several artists banded together to cover the Beatles’ Across The Universe. It was a song to benefit the Tsunami relief efforts. Now, the song was pretty horrible, but that isn’t the point. The point is that they made the song available for purchase and download through the iTunes music store almost immediately following the Grammy broadcast. This is awesome and hopefully a pre-cursor of things to come.

I would love to see this sort of thing happen for EVERY performance in an awards show. For example, I would have loved to download the Alicia Keys performance of If I Can’t Have You, or the incredible Piece of My Heart covered by a post-cancer treatment Melissa Etheridge. Why couldn’t these tracks be made immediately available? If they were, I would have bought them.

Now I’m not legally bound to buy them. I could have very easily taken the audio from the TV broadcast and converted those performances to WAV or MP3 files. I have that legal right. It’s something I’ve been doing for years by saving the TV audio stream to Mini-Disc. So why would I buy them from iTunes? Simple, it’s convenience. If I could have those songs by clicking once, it would be far easier than transcoding the performance off of my DVR and to an MP3.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this happening soon. For example, every Grammy show, some RIAA rep comes out decries the evil of downloading music and how it’s destroying their industry. I just don’t buy it. It’s the industry that is shooting themselves in the foot.

Online music has multiple flavors (MP3, AAC, WMA) from different stores (Napster, iTunes, MSN Music) all of whom have two fatal flaws:

1. The quality isn’t as good as a CD.
2. The multiple formats are not compatible with each other.

So the tracks I buy on Napster cannot play in iTunes and vice-versa. Also, I can’t put tracks from Napster on my iPod. Likewise, I can’t play iTunes tracks on an iRiver player. I can play NEITHER format on My TiVo media center. And the music industry wants me to embrace this nonsense? I don’t think so…

Until there is a universally accepted format with DRM that works on all players and media centers, digital music distribution will ALWAYS lose out to illegal MP3 downloads. MP3’s play everywhere, and right now they are free if you know where to look. Free and unrestricted will win over the current system always.

If you don’t read Mark Cuban’s blog, you need to start. I’ll wait while you add him to your feed reader or bloglines or whatever aggregator is your favorite. Ready? Okay.

Basically, Mark Cuban became a gazillionaire when he sold broadcast.com. He was a pioneer and a visionary in online broadcasting. He’s now a pioneer in Hi-Definition television. Basically, if he thinks a trend is going to happen, I believe him.

Now, in this article he talks about how blogging is legitimate, and people should start treating high profile bloggers like traditional media.

Fortunately , there is a way to deal with the paparazzi. There is also a way for the gatekeepers to deal with the bloggers. A simple way.

Recognize them. Give them respect. Celebrities cant keep photographers out of their bushes no matter how hard they try. The gatekeepers wont be able to keep the bloggers out either. Instead they should invite them in.

Somehow, to me, it doesn’t seem like he agrees with Radicati and her proclamation that blogging will die this year. I especially like this quote:

Its payback time . The bloggers are here, and they are ready to knock down the gates and get their pound of flesh. The traditional media has no idea what is about to hit them.

Exactly. Blogging is here to stay. It’s legitimate, and it’s time for people like Sara to realize that.

Valentine’s Day that is… Geez, you’re all a bunch of pervs 🙂 Anyway Jen and I celebrated last night by buying her some jewelry, myself some headphones (Shure E3C’s) and going out for a nice dinner at Benihana. Then we came home and vegged while watching the Grammys.

It was a wonderful, relaxing, kick ass date. You see, while out with Jen, everything was perfect. After nearly 10 years of marriage we still enjoy each other’s company, have great conversation and simply have fun. There really is no one in this world I’d rather hang with. Like every couple we have ups and downs, little squabbles and such, but we really are soul mates. Happy Valentine’s Day Jen. I love you more each day!

Ed has a post that details many of the blogging comments about Lotusphere this year. This was something that Ambuj asked him to do, and it’s a pretty cool list that even includes quotes from yours truly. Check it out!

While I was at Lotusphere, I noticed a really interesting trend. In almost every session I was in, someone was taking notes about the session in Microsoft OneNote. These weren’t just Tablet PC folks either. So I’m wondering, do any of you use OneNote? Is it worth checking out? Was I just lucky enough to be sitting by Microsoft employees in every session? Enquiring minds want to know!

Regular and Starbucks. I posted the photo for you to see. I just LOVE working for a company that doesn’t have a Decaf pot. You got leaded and extra-leaded! Huzzah!