Miscellaneous Stuff

UM blogging 101 course

3 October, 2008 Posted by Alex de Carvalho As Miscellaneous Stuff (0) Comment

I’m giving a quick primer on blogging today at the University of Miami School of Communication.

BlogOrlando 2008 … third time’s the charm

29 September, 2008 Posted by Alex de Carvalho As Current Affairs, Miscellaneous Stuff (3) Comment

BlogOrlando gets better each year, I’m very glad I went. I of course enjoyed reconnecting with friends who flew in from across the country, seeing the Orlando tech community again, and meeting new people.

One of the highlights was getting firsthand case studies from the teams that manage(d) social media at major corporations: Jeff Rubenstein and Josh Hallett presented the Sony Playstation strategy; Paula Berg spoke about successes and learnings at SouthWest Airlines; and Jake McKee recapped his experiences at Lego.

The schedule was full of good topics, making it hard to choose which track to follow:

Leah Jones of Edelman Digital presented advanced search techniques, including the search engines and Boolean searches she makes. Here’s her presentation on Slideshare: “Going beyond Google“. 
 
 

Nik Wilets, aka @tiburon, explained the difference between a photographer and a photojournalist, and had great examples of his own and other’s work. He was later followed by Etan Horowitz from the Orlando Sentinel, who spoke about the use of Twitter in Journalism. 
 

Phil Gomes, also of Edelman, shared his experiences, tips, and techniques on giving internal education on social media within the large PR firm. 
 
 

Spike Jones and Geno Church gave excellent presentations on “WOM and social media” and “Movements, activism, and social media“, respectively. Most interestingly, Geno spoke about creating and building the Fiskateers community, for one of the oldest companies in the world, Finnish scissor maker Fiskars. Community is not about the scissors, it’s about the higher purpose. 
 

I’ve been going up to Orlando tech events, and each time it’s reassuring to see the tech community grow and organize itself. They’ve made great progress in the last few months since BarCampOrlando, which was the catalyst for many of the groups and initiatives. Pictured are Alex Rudloff, Ryan Price, and Gregg Pollack, who summarized the history and the many things going on. Here’s a video of their 30-minute preso. 

I also saw David Alston from Radian6 speak about brand monitoring (disclaimer: I co-founded StartPR), but unfortunately missed David Parmet’s session on education and Jake’s session on identity. 

Overall, it was great to meet up with such brilliant and engaged people, and best of all, it happened in Florida

Update: Some of the sessions are archived here on ustream.

Migrating to WordPress

24 May, 2008 Posted by Alex de Carvalho As Miscellaneous Stuff (3) Comment

Please bear with me while I migrate my blog at Tapio to WordPress.

On the surrender of a beloved Mac

13 May, 2008 Posted by Alex de Carvalho As Miscellaneous Stuff (2) Comment

surrender
originally uploaded by alexdecarvalho.

I’m giving back my Mac today.

The contract unequivocally requires property to be returned and so it is that I’m giving the Mac back at some point today. Mind you, about six months ago I’d never used a Mac before and the almost prohibitive price had always kept me at bay. I was the proverbial die-hard PC guy. So when I was offered the Mac — after I’d burned through one and a half of my own personal PCs at work — I gladly accepted it out of sheer curiosity.

In the six months since I’ve had this Mac, I’ve turned on my PC exactly two times; and both times, it was to try out PC-only software. Suffice it to say the MacBook Pro is sublime. What’s not to like? Once you get past the stuff that works differently, you won’t imagine how you ever worked on anything else. I think this applies to more than the creative professions: the Mac has not really improved my photography workflow. Rather, I feel like my productivity’s been boosted across the board. Maybe it’s the more logical OS and UI (and I prefer Tiger to Leopard). Maybe it’s because it crashes much less frequently. Maybe it’s because you can have close to a gazillion tabs open of Firefox and a bunch of other stuff running at the same time and everything still works. Maybe it’s the 3 hour battery life. And maybe it’s also “Spaces”. The combination of these things and more made it a pleasure to open up the Mac in the morning.

As a quick sidenote, I’ve often heard it said that Mac would convert most PC users if they gave 30-day trials.

Besides the obvious reluctance of going back to a Vista machine (ie, “Once you go Mac, you can’t go back”, etc.), I’m now also faced with the time-consuming hassle involved in setting up a workflow that had been perfected on the Mac. Some of it relates to the time it takes to find and install the right extensions for Firefox. Part of it has to do with giving up software that exists only for Mac, like the excellent Skitch. And the other part has to do with software that I had bought and installed, like OmniFocus, and will be unable to use until I get another Mac.

So when will I get another Mac? As soon as I can … and utimately, a brand new Mac trumps a depreciated one.

“… you’ve left me with nothing but I have worked with less.” -Ani Difranco.

Update: My PC laptop won’t start for some reason, I’ll have to get that fixed now and maybe reinstall Vista. I’ll lose a bunch of nice software I had installed, though.

Update 2: I got a new MacBook, which is performing better than the MacBook Pro I was using. Maybe it’s the clean install. I had considered getting a 20″ iMac — they’re amazing — but I really do need something mobile. The MacBook is even more convenient to carry around than the MacBook Pro.

Note: It’s worth clarifying that I’m not associated with Apple or any distributor. Also, I realize in the relative scheme of things, there are many worse things …

Free Burma Peaceful Movement

4 October, 2007 Posted by Alex de Carvalho As Miscellaneous Stuff (1) Comment

On Facebook? Join the Free Burma group

tag: free burma