So I’ve been following the tron legacy viral marketing stuff and i love it! Ive always loved the idea of viral marketing, I’ve done similar posts but this one is going to be my favorite!
So the first thing that happened was the Comic Con reveal. they had a bunch of people meet at a recreation of Flynns arcade, i didn’t get a chance to go but it looked awesome!

Now here’s the part you can follow along with! Flynnlives.com launches, its an underground group of people convinced the protagonist from the original movie is alive somewhere. He apparently vanished after the events of the original Tron movie. a few months later they send out Bits to various scifi bloggers with the link to Zero Hour. This was a binary countdown to the page you can see now, at the end of the countdown was a list of greyed out cities lighting up a few at a time, when your city is up you could click it and get the location to a meet, here you would be given a wallet, containing various items (see video below) and a cell phone which the coordinators of this marketing event use to contact the “envoys”.

Next a few other related sires cropped up. like the Encom website and this strange website. When you visit the second website you see 0 2 3 and RPG. each of these sections is something of a quiz. 0 is the Fibonacci sequence, 2 is prime numbers, 3 is Conway’s sequence, and RPG is the levels in the original Tron arcade game. This was truly badass doing it while everyone else was trying to find out what the hell you were supposed to do. anyway at the end of it you are given a link to the trailer for tron legacy! if you haven’t seen it, check it out!

Next up was the launch of Arcade Aid. a collage of 56 game references. if you name then all then you have proven your worth and will be able to create a Encom badge! which you are supposed to use to infiltrate the company. here’s mine:

Scanning the QR code on the badge will lead you to an Encom internal site using your employee ID and password you can login and access your encom email. all the emails are pretty standard corporate stuff sofar. but there is an announcement about a press conference in less than 3 weeks.

Alittle unrelated, but heres an interview with the Encom CEO Allen Bradley:

Update: Looks like the next phase of this campaign will be at WonderCon! Here is a press release from Encom:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ALAN BRADLEY TO HEADLINE MAJOR ENCOM PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT

March 24th, 2010

Newly-minted Executive Consultant Alan Bradley will introduce the latest addition to the Encom International product library on April 2 in San Francisco.

Software giant Encom ushered in the digital age with an unrivaled library of gaming titles. Now, Encom International circles the globe with advanced software systems that include communications, sports, entertainment, navigation, agricultural, health care, construction, weather, military and governmental applications on every continent.

Bradley began his career with Encom as a security systems engineer and rose through the ranks to be named CEO in the early 1990s. When he exited the executive suite, he took on a far greater role. His visionary research turned Encom into the industry leader in sustainable production and distribution methods — methods which are now the best practices for technology companies around the world. “Whether the challenge is to establish communications in a national disaster, or keep kids engaged as they battle Recognizers, I love what I do. Encom will always be my home. ”

CEO Kurt Hardington sums it up this way: “Alan’s new title and role reflect his unique position as part of the Encom story. He keeps us grounded, yet he’s the first to move forward when technology takes us in a new direction. That’s why he’s perfect to present our newest product – it’s where we’ve come from and where we’re going.”

Alan Bradley will take the stage at 8pm in Justin Herman Plaza on April 2 to unveil the next generation in Encom innovation.

Press Inquires:
Celia Melardin
Encom International
pr@EncomInternational.com

Update: the “Encom press conference” looked like fun! things didn’t go off without a hitch though! heres the first part of the conference, with an announcement from Alan Bradly.

The following video was supposed to happen During Alan Bradly’s talk, but due to high winds the helicopter wasn’t able to take off until too late. so they improvised by grabbing a bunch of FlynnLives folk and getting them to storm the stage.

So badass!

So that’s all we have sofar. but as more comes ill update this post!

So i finally got my Fitbit in Monday after pre-ordering it a year and 2 months ago. and its well worth the wait! If your not familiar with the fitbit its a tiny device that helps you track your fitness, here’s how they describe it:

The Fitbit accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality. The Fitbit contains a 3D motion sensor like the one found in the Nintendo Wii. The Fitbit tracks your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities.

Basically its a hella accurate and awesome pedometer. the hardware is cool, but the software is where the fitbit really justifies its pricetag. the steps, calories burned, and miles traveled is Very accurate, like data from it, compared with data from my GPS were almost mirrors asfar as distance traveled. steps were easily determined to be accurate aswell. that’s all well and good, and will help people track their fitness and whatnot. An unusual but awesome part of it is the sleep tracking. your body behaves and moves in different ways when your in different stages of sleep. and how often you wake up at night and all that, so fitbit can measure your sleep patters by measuring the way you move when your asleep. it uploads this all to their website so you can track your sleep! its hella awesome, and id like to mention, i am a kick ass sleeper!

That brings me to the next selling point for the fitbit, which is their website! all the data collected by your fitbit is auto uploaded to their site every time you pass near your docking station, and translated into cool graphs and whatnot of your steps taken, calories burned, distance traveled and other spiffy things, so you can track your daily activity. You can also use the site to track your intentional workouts, like weight lifting, swimming, or other things the fitbit by its nature cannot track. It will calculate calories burned during those activities somehow using your BMI and all. so it can supposedly get a pretty accurate count of calories burned!

Ive only had the fitbit for 2 days, and haven’t been biking or swimming, but just wearing it and having it track my steps has made a pretty spiffy graph of my daily calorie burn.

You can also track your diet which is pretty awesome, put in what you eat and it will tell you how many calories it was and if your a net positive or negative for the day/week. Great way to keep on a reasonable diet and find out how your workouts/diet are paying off. you can do some other things like track weight and whatnot, but I’m not going to post screenshots of that, at least not till i get in better shape

So in short, the fitbit is awesome, i love it after only 2 days use. defiantly recommend it for anyone trying to get in shape. Especially recommend it to anyone trying to loose weight that had an affinity for spiffy gadgets. More pictures of the web interface after the break.

This is going to be another “Mike fucking loves Google!” post so brace yourselves for another Google fanboy moment.
i downloaded the new Picasa 3 desktop client after seeing it on Googles twitter feed. i am really amazed with the improvements! The software went form an easy way to look at pictures and manipulate them, to a social picture management application. adding the ability to Geo tag, face tag, keyword tag and multiple uploading. its hella spiffy.
What amazes me most, and what caused me to make this poorly thought out post was the built in image recondition of both the desktop software AND the web albums! It was able to go through my web album in less than 15 mins scanning faces and compiling lists of similar faces for tagging, one particular instance made me LOL

That is our good friend John Travolta whose face can be found in the Pulp Fiction poster that was in the background of 2 pictures, it will recognize any face it seems, and match it perfectly with other faces. but thats enough about that. the Geo-tagging will allow you to select multiple (or single) pictures, click the “Geo Tag” button, then just point to a place on the map. makes it wasy as hell, no more screwing with the long-lats. and from my understanding (although i havnt seen it yet) it makes the public photos viewable on google maps.
If your looking for a place to host pictures, or a software to manage pictures. I strongly recommend picasa web albums and picasa 3! beats the hell outta flickr any day!

Another quick tip for google chrome users. If you want themes for your google Chrome browser you will need to update to the new Beta 3 version. then go to the themes page and go wild! However when I and many others did this we would get the following error when trying to apply themes.

Invalid value for theme images – tints must be decimal numbers

A real pain in the ass. the way to fix it is just uninstall chrome and reinstall from the beta install. im told the next beta willnot have this issue, but this is a quick fix. Enjoy Chrome themes!!

Ive found some of the most amazing upcoming movies! So amazing i felt i had to share them.

• Jericho (2010)
• Robotech (2010)
• Voltron: Defender Of The Universe (2011)
• Iron sky – Posted about this before, Very excited!
• The Jetsons (2012) – This will likely be horrible.
• Conan (2010)
• Cowboy Bebop (2011)
• Dune (2010) – They use the word “adaptation” too much for me to be comfortable with this
• Ghost in the Shell (2011) – Live action, nuff said, it’ll be hard to screw this up!
• Judge Dredd (2012) – Not sure if its a reboot or a remake.
• Bioshock (2010) – Director is Gore Verbinski.. not sure how i feel about that yet.
• Surrogates (2009)
• District 9 (2009) – Ive been looking forward to this for a while!
• Gamer (2009) – Just watch the trailer,
• Total Recall (2011) - Hopefully more like the TV series, less like the old movie.
• Brave New World (2011) – Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio Directed by: Ridley Scott
• Forever War (2011) – Also Directed by Ridley Scott. Great book, will make a good movie!
• Short Circuit (2010) – Honestly don’t see how the original can be improved upon.
• Daybreakers (2010) – (I Am Legend – Will Smith) + Ethan Hawke + future setting = good? lets hope
• TRON 2.0 (2011) – nuff said.
• World War Z (2010) – Love this book, will make an awesome movie!
• Neuromancer (2011) – If its anything like the book, it will be great
• Foundation (2011) – Adaptation from Asimov’s book. Cant Wait!
• Deathlok (2011) – The first awesome killer cyborg, before terminator (but very similar)

So there are a few of the possible epic wins and disasters coming in the next few years (movie wise at least). Hope some of these are as awesome to you as they sounded to me!

Thia blog is quickly turning into a Google fanboy blog, and keeping in that spirit i wanted to help get the word out about Google Favorite Places! Google has approached Awesome people in all fields and asked them to create maps of their favorite places! you can see master chefs favorite restraints, to Al Gore’s favorite carbon offsets tax shelter! the really spiffy part is Google is dropping these place markers at the actual locations!

Looks like awesome free advertising for various locations, And incentive for businesses to list themselves in Google Maps! This is just another reason why i love Google!

[Google Maps: Favorite Places]

If you have an android phone, and are awesome, then you have already paid the measly $2.99 to get the Bartor app! if you haven’t you are missing out. it is the second app that I’ve considered worth the money (the first is open home) and it turned out to be worth way more than it costs

What it does: Bartor allows you to scan the barcode of a movie/cd/book/game, find the torrent for the product you want, and sends the torrent to your computer for downloading. I went to blockbuster the other day and almost filled my harddrive. i always see cool stuff that i want to download, but forget by the time i get home. the only qualm i have with the software is the lack luster help and setup documentation. most of the issue isn’t on the side of the software, but the side of setting up your home computer to receive the torrents. so im going to give a run though of how to set it up. ill be using utorrent in this example, but the same basic steps will be obvious (or ill post links or help to get other clients working aswell)

Step 1, the Utorrent setup: What we are going to do here is get utorrent installed, and the web interface configured. first step in this process will be grabbing utorrent from here. install it. After the install open up utorrent, click options, then preferences. go down to “Web UI” and check the box to “Enable Web UI”. Change the authentication UN/PW to something you can remember then check the “Alternative listening port” box and assign a reasonable port. (nothing that is already used by other stuff, like 8080,21,80 etc..) i chose port:666 (props to Id software) That’s pretty much it for utorrent config! next step is to make sure that you can access it from the outside. Find your outside ip address (You can find that Here), and type this in your browser “http:\\YourOutsideIpAddress:PortNumber/gui” if you don’t get a login prompt there is a problem. could be any number of things but most commonly your on a network, behind a router, and your router has no idea where to direct requests on that port! which leads us to the next step.

Configuring your router for port forwarding: Some of you may not need this step, if the previous instruction worked then skip this section. First off login to your router, if your using a linksys router with all defaults (your retarded) it will be 192.168.1.1 or some variation on the 192.168 network. the easiest way to find the ip address to login to your router is to use your gateway. now that your loged into your router click the “Applications And Gaming” tab. Type in the application name as bittorrent set the range as the port you chose in the Utorrent setup. put that port number in the beginning and end fields. Select protocol as both, and change the last octet of the IP address there to the IP address of the computer that is running utorrent. to do this, click start, run, type CMD and hit enter. this will being up a command prompt. then type “ipconfig” and hit enter. your ip address will be the 192.168.1.X number. type the X number into the blank. and check enable, then save settings. Congrats! you have successfully forwarded a port. Now the link in the last segment should work!

That link should be working now, and you should be able to access the utorrent web interface! now we are ready to configure the android app to send torrents to this interface! this is the easy part, just open BarTor, Hut the MENU button on your phone, hit settings, click the “Client Sites” tab, then click Add. Here you will type in your Outside IP address (again you can get that Here), The port number you chose when setting up the Utorrent web interface (the one we port forwarded) and the UN/PW that you chose in the Web UI setup. hit ok, then click the entry you just made to highlight it. that selects it as the default client site. just hit the back arrow key and your ready to start scanning! If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section, and have fun!

Scan this barcode with your G1 to install Bartor!

Update: just heard from the creator(s) of Bartor and they will be adding torrent montiring features soon!!! thats the only thing the free ones have over this tor client (that and the free ones are great at taking up system resources!)

I’m working to get torrent monitoring up and running in BarTor, but I want to make sure that I do it right and that it works well in all supported clients and not just uTorrent

Hurray!

Saw the new startrek movie lastnight.. it was aweosme! i want to share a few things with you to encourage you to see the movie wether your a geek or not. First off this movie was made for geeks and non geeks alike. they do ALOT in the movie to make sure the fans know that they are still loved. but most of the really cool(nerdy) stuff they took out and made into a comic book that came out before the movie “Startrek – Countdown“. This comic will inform you of all the stuff that was just too cool(nerdy) that came before the movie! so if your up for the really geeky experience read the comic and youll notice alot more.

However, if you just want to see a truly awesome movie full of awesome CG space battles, hnd to hand combat, the occational hot chick, and lots of explosions. definatly go see this!!! when we went to see it, we brought alot of non nerds(lame people) but they walked out loving the movie almost as much as we did!!! This movie definatly earned the Mike Seal Of Approval!

Go see it! enjoy!

Ok, if your name is “Mike Norman” please quit reading now…. totally not for you, this cannot help you in anyway.. also throw your computer away. the rest of you, this is a quick and easy way to make your Google profile a higher result on the profile search!

First off if you have not done so create your google profile. to do so login to your google account then click this link. then click “Create a profile“, and fill out all the info as best you can. link as many other accounts as you can so that people searching for you find those and vice versa. id also recommend clicking the allow people to contact you box and of course the box to have you listed in the search results.

the next one i had to do an odd way, they may have fixed it by the time you read this. Were going to verify your name! this will add the Verified tag to your profile and improve its standing amongst the results for your name. you’ll need either a cellphone or a credit card (i used cell phone). go to google knol and login. Click Preferences at the top right, then click the Name Verification tab and the “Verify name by phone” button, follow the simple instructions, reply to the text they send, and bam your name is verified!

If your a web admin or work for multiple companies you would like to be assosiated with your name(and vice versa) i would also recommend verifying all the domains you have! to do that go to your google profile and click “Verify another email address“. Type in the email address you want verified, hit add email, wait for the confirmation email and repeat for other domains you may have. Lastly change your profile URL to something that’s not just numbers.

That’s pretty much all you can do on the google profile side, but to help out i would recommend social networking the shit outta that link! tweet it, share it on google reader, facebook it, just go crazy! that should get you on the way to having the top result for your name on a google profile search! but at the end of the day its still a popularity contest, Good luck! (unless your name is Mike Norman…)

Looks like my test post worked! that is if you can read this… wpTOGO is the best (the only) wordpress app ive found. it does just what you think it should do. you can update your wordpress blog, add photos, and format postings all from your phone. and if you dont get the settings in there right its a force quit machine! make sure to put the “http://” infront of the address. definatly download it if you have a wordpress blog and a google phone!