In true JibJab fashion, these folks have created another great animation. Hit play and get yourself a quick review of the last year.

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Tags: jib jab, politics, animation

For the last several years, my digital photography workflow has relied heavily upon a few Photoshop automation scripts from Fred Miranda. From unmatched sharpening to image scaling, these Photoshop automations are a must have. Both of these can be purchased from Fred's site and each cost less than US$25.00. To see samples of both, keep reading. Read More...

Tags: photography, photoshop, software

All my feeds are now live. In addition to subscribing to this blog, you can now subscribe to any (or all) of my photography galleries.

Photography Feeds
abstract photography
architecture photography
black and white photography
landscape photography
panoramas photography

Blog Feed
Ramblings from Mike

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I am in the midst of creating some need feeds for my photography. As a result, I need to change the feed url for this blog. Please update your readers and aggregators to point to: http://feeds.morper.net/morperblog. I will be doing the cut over sometime this week. Read More...

With reality TV shows ranking as the top five or six prime time slots, it was only a matter of time that someone created a "reality TV" commercial. And this one is priceless. I can only imagine how the client pitch went for the ad agency:

Agency: We'd like to remove your flagship product from the menu
Client: Um, why?
Agency: Yes, remove your flagship product and record the reaction of real customers

Huge kudos to Burger King for having the huevos and trust in their agency -- Crispin Porter + Bogusky -- to give this a try. I think they've done a great job with the creative on this one and to reactions of these real folks off the street could not have been scripted any better.

Click above to see the entire Whopper Freakout session. It will be 8 minutes well spent.

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Tags: marketing

Have you ever wanted to enlarge a picture really, really big and output it onto canvas. OK, maybe not. But I have always wanted to give it a go. Of course, you need to have the right place for a big print on canvas. So subject matter is everything. Read More...

Tags: photography

This is a very though provoking video. It's as much a brief lesson on Web 2.0 technologies -- among other things abstracting content from structure and repurposing content -- but it also is an interesting piece which gives you pause to the world we're creating with all of this information. Is copyright law relevant? Are we making too much information available? Not enough? What do you think?

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Tags: mashup, visualization

Adobe's Lightroom is my "comfort place" when it comes to managing, editing and publishing my photography. I've used many, many apps in my photo management life (some not so great) and hand's-down, Lightroom is the one for me. Of course, the first time I saw SlideShowPro from Dominey Design, well.... I really wished Lightroom would have support for it. It does now...

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Tags: photography, lightroom, software, adobe, photoshop

As I mentioned in my last post, I managed to get a few good shots while in Yosemite during the Thanksgiving week. Here is the second shot I have finished up. Please click the "Read More..." link below for a bit more information.

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Tags: photography, california, yosemite

Last week, we packed our car up and headed off to Yosemite for a long overdue vacation. I managed to get a couple of photographs taken while I was there that I am pretty happy with.

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Tags: photography, california, yosemite

There is something to be said about keeping a sense of humor through challenging times. And while the Daily Show writers certainly seem to have not lost their wit, they have put together a great clip explaining -- in true Daily Show style -- why they are on strike.



Learn more about the strike and how you can support the Writers. Read More...

Tags: screenwriters, daily show

There's nothing like playing with shapes. And over saturating the image, mirroring it a couple of times and you get something pretty cool. Ladies and gentlemen... I present to you, Chopper Monster.



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Tags: photography, photoshop

The punch line of Chris Anderson's blog posting is that he has become fed-up with PR folks blindly pitching him on non-relevant content for his book. Or worse, not knowing anything about his book and simply wasting his time. As a result, he has published a list of email addresses on his blog he now blocks all mail.
Is this appropriate? Hmmm, hard to tell. But nonetheless, it certainly would be a very bad list to find yourself on, that's for sure. If nothing else, this is the stuff that should speak volumes to fresh PR professionals; know your audience, know what their interests are, treat each correspondence as a silver bullet -- one that must be wisely used as opposed to a machine gun approach to coverage for your client. Read More...

Tags: pr, wired

Unfortunately, the following is not a joke:

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The U.S. government's main disaster-response agency apologized on Friday for having its employees pose as reporters in a hastily called news conference on California's wildfires that no news organizations attended.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still struggling to restore its image after the bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, issued the apology after The Washington Post published details of the Tuesday briefing.

"We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment," FEMA deputy administrator Harvey Johnson, who conducted the briefing, said in a statement. "Our intent was to provide useful information and be responsive to the many questions we have received."

Here is the rest of the Reuter's press release. But to really enjoy this stupidity in action, check out the actual "press conference" below.

Yeah, this is the stuff that keeps Jon Stewart and the Daily Show stuff fully employed.

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Tags: politics, fema, pr, jon stewart

Last night was lots of fun. Thanks to everyone who showed up.

Check out the rest of the pictures from the Second Annual Morperhaus Halloween Party here.

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Tags: photography, backyard theater

Tonight's the night. The second annual Morperhaus Theater Halloween Show. And this year, the geek factor has been cranked up a notch. This year, the event will have pictures from the event posted real-time to this website. So, if you have nothing better to do tonight, drop by and see what's happening! Oingo Boingo starts at 6:30 PDT, Nightmare Before Christmas at 7:30 PDT. And of course, if you do make it by, please leave a comment below indicating what time and where in the world you are when you visited the site.

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Tags: photography, backyard theater

Another outstanding source of information. This time for the San Diego fires. This map comes courtesy of KPBS in San Diego. Click on the link below the map for a larger view of the map.


View Larger Map

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Tags: fire, google, mashup, visualization, california, san diego county

One of the fires currently out of control in Southern California is about 5 miles directly north from our home. Called the Santiago Fire, it was started by an arsonist. The Orange County Register is maintaining an outstanding Google Map of the fire's progress. What's more, each of the points denoted on the map provides a wealth of information.


View Larger Map

Many thanks to the OC Register for maintaining this great source of information.

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Tags: fire, orange county, google, mashup, california

As a Southern California native, I have seen my share of fires, but this year is different. Every year it is the same week -- the week before Halloween. As of this writing, there are 16 major fires burning in Southern California, all fueled by some of the driest weather I can remember, coupled by 90+ degree temperatures and of course, very strong Santa Ana winds (in excess of 80 mph gusts in some areas).
The closest fire to us, the Santiago fire, is about 10 miles due north from us and was started yesterday early evening by an arsonist.

Below is a Google Map maintained by the Orange County of all the active fires.


View Larger Map

And after the jump (click "read more..." below), you can see an amazing image captured by a NASA satellite today of Southern California. Read More...

Tags: fire, google, mashup, visualization, nasa, california, orange county

So a bunch of aerospace guys got together to build a half-scale X-Wing fighter. Not happy with just making a model, they decided to make the wings open and close remotely. Oh yeah, and they stuck for solid rocket engines in it.



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Tags: star wars, entertainment

Today, the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) held their annual Open House. With two boys that eat, drink and think all things fire fighting, today was all about visiting stations and of course the main training facility of the OCFA. While there, we saw a couple of demonstrations -- a car extrication and a fast attack. The photograph below was shot during the car extrication demonstration conducted by the crew from Truck 9.



To see a version of this panorama you can pan around within, head over to my full screen panorama page.

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Tags: qtvr, photography, panoramic, fire, orange county

I love these guys. Great satirical stuff for you and your cubical swelling colleagues. From calendars to great inspirational videos, you owe it to yourself to at least visit their website. And with the holiday season nearly upon us, there are many gems here for you to purchase for that special boss in your life. I did.

Here's a $5.00 off coupon for this shirt above.

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Tags: humor

For the 15th time, the folks at the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley (with the help of a few others) hosted this VR photography event. What began in March 2004 has become an ongoing series of events. Photography takes place on the solstices (longest and shortest days of the year) and equinoxes (day and night of equal length). Photographers from all over the world participate.

This time, over 200 photographers from all over the world contributed images (all shot between 19-23 September 2007) related to the theme of Sustenance.


One of the contributor's to the "Sustenance" VR photography event

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Tags: panoramic, photography, qtvr, world wide panoramic

Ummm, what were they thinking. Watch this one if you're trying to find a reason to skip lunch today.


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Tags: marketing

A Forrester researcher has just published an interesting paper. Well, I should say the abstract is interesting:

"Corporate employees are beginning to use Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, RSS, and social networking in their daily lives. The adoption, however, is uneven, with some employees willing to go to great lengths to use these tools, while others steadfastly refuse to adopt. On the surface it looks like technology marketers have their work cut out for them and will need to convince prospective customers that mass adoption is both possible and valuable. In reality, this situation presents more opportunity than threat, as smart tech marketers will appeal to employees, IT, and line-of-business sponsors each in turn. A well-crafted marketing plan will target each constituency and use its interests to drive value and revenues — regardless of the firm's initial Web 2.0 adoption level."

While I haven't shelled out the US$279.00 for the report, I must say, this concept absolutely has truth in my professional career. For the last five plus years, I have chosen many "non-sanctioned" hosted applications to assist me as well as my teams in driving our daily tasks, education and communication.
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Tags: business, marketing, technology

This morning at exactly 4:30am, I awoke to find the house shaking. This is the second quake we've felt at our home in the last couple of weeks. It appears this morning's shake was a 3.7, while the last quake was a 4.7. As a Southern California native, earthquakes are nothing new. And to be honest, I find them interesting.



After being unable to get back to sleep, I figured I'd go check out the quake's epicenter and magnitude. The USGS has great map data for all quakes, including the "mashup" above.
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Tags: earthquake, mashup, google

Wow, who knew a little Javascript would garner so much attention. Yesterday, Ryan over at 37signals.com shared his lack of interest for Lightbox. For those of you not familiar with Lightbox, it is effectively a method to view a larger rendition of an image on a webpage where the background of the page becomes near black, while the image itself appears to be in a pop-up window. Ryan's post indicated that he believes that context is lost when this new image supersedes the page -- effectively all style, and context of the site is lost. Well, I disagree when it comes to presenting photography.



The screen shot above illustrates the Lightbox affect -- a near black background with the image enlarged and brought front and center.
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Tags: 37signals, user interface

In case you didn't read about it, a couple of months ago Google introduced a new capability to their Google Maps called Street View. In addition to viewing either satellite images, street map detail or street maps composited on top of the satellite images, now they have a view as though you are on street level. In the graphic below, you can see the corner of Park Avenue and PCH in Laguna Beach.



These Street View maps allow you to navigate down the street by clicking on the arrows in the photograph. What's more, you can pan around (left and right) within the image itself to gain a bit more immersive perspective on that particular location.
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Tags: panoramic, mashup

119 years ago today, George Eastman introduced point and shoot photography with the launch of his first camera -- the Original KODAK. His patent for his point and shoot camera was issued on this day as well.

While I don't have an original KODAK camera, I do have several Kodak cameras that date as early as 1899. Pictured above is the line drawing from the original patent issued. To see the complete patent, continue reading this posting below.

According to kodak.com, the word "Kodak" was also first registered as a trademark in 1888. There has been some fanciful speculation, from time to time, on how the name was originated. But the plain truth is that Eastman invented it out of thin air.

He explained: "I devised the name myself. The letter "K" had been a favorite with me -- it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with 'K.' The word 'Kodak' is the result." Kodak's distinctive yellow trade dress, which Eastman selected, is widely known throughout the world and is one of the company's more valued assets.

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Tags: marketing, business, kodak, cameras

Web 2.0 apps aren't the only mashups in town. In fact, DJs have been mixing songs together for years. This started off innocently enough back in the 80s when club DJs would match the beats of one song, transitioning it into another.

Fast forward to the days folllowing the dot com bubble burst of the late 90s and DJs began to move match beating to a new level. Instead of simply producing a continuous stream of foot-tapping tunes, DJs began to sample clips from one song, insert them in to other tracks and effectively "mash" the two songs together. To illustrate this idea, Check out this clip from Mark Vidler of Go Home Productions (GHP) called Rapture Riders:



Click play to listen to Rapture Riders by Go Home Productions

Who would think Rapture by Blondie and Riders on the Storm by the Doors could sound so good together. And this is just a taste of the talent of GHP. This week, GHP released a downloadable album of 20 of the such tracks, aptly called This Was Pop 2002-2007.
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Tags: mashup, dj, music

I find mindmaps to be a great way to represent ideas, thoughts, action items. Particularly when the end point of the effort isn't exactly understood. Meaning, you have a lot of data to capture and document, but you aren't absolutely certain the relative association for each datapoint. Without getting to hung up on structure, a mindmap provides a great way to get your thoughts down, then as time progresses, one will begin to see patterns, even a taxonomy.

Over the last few years, I have continued to be amazed by some very creative methods people have employed to visualize data. A couple of my favorites are captured here...

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Tags: visualization, mindmap, mashup

And now for your viewing pleasure, I give you Orange County, California. OK, not the whole place, but at least a few notable locations such as: San Clemente Pier, Seal Beach Pier, Balboa Fun Zone in Newport Beach, Greeter's Corner in Laguna Beach, Cook's Corner biker bar in Trabuco Canyon and last but not least, the hills around my neighborhood after a pretty good sized fire came through the area.


Click the picture above to view the Orange County, California picture map.

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Tags: google, panoramic, photography, qtvr, mashup, orange county