Thursday, October 14, 2010

New site

I didn't have a direction I wanted to take this blog, so it has languished. My tech musings are now at a new site, Talk Tech Now. Check it out, I'll split the photography blogging off onto a different site in the future.

-Trent

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Launch successful

Yesterday I launched my online automotive magazine and despite a few hiccups getting it going, it has been a success and the response has been great. In one day I more than doubled the traffic to the website. It goes to show it's all about content, content, content. And fortunately the content is decent. I look forward to continuing this magazine for some time.

-Trent

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Cars and Modifications Online Auto Magazine

It's been a long time coming, I've been working on this with Yom for some time now, but tomorrow, our first issue hits. It's the launch of my own online car magazine called 'Cars And Modifications' or CAM for short. Take a look at it tomorrow where you can download a PDF of the first issue. Cars and Modifications online auto magazine

Friday, May 21, 2010

Wedding Photography update

Last week I told you about a wedding I had to shoot on short notice. Unfortunately time constraints means I haven't been able to edit them yet, but I thought I'd post up one un-edited photo(except for the copyright overlay). I'll get more posted soon.


-Trent

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Casualty


I've had this MacBook Pro for a few years and after getting my new 13" MacBook Pro, this computer went into semi-retirement. I had recently come up with a way to utilize this computer again as it's still a decent computer. After a couple days of cleaning it up and getting ready for some more use...the N key came off. Now I cannot get it back on. Looks like it's time to put this on desk duty with an external keyboard. It's been done before...

-Trent
Posted from my iPhone

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Technology Challenge Postponed

So thinking about it, I'm leaving town next week and will not be able to lug a heavy iMac G3 around. Also, I'll only have an air card or my iPad 3G where I'm at. So June 1st, the Technology Challenge begins!

-Trent
Posted from my iPad

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Technology Challenge

I was talking with Yom tonight about a challenge I wanted to present to myself. I want to only use my Tangerine G3 266MHz iMac for one week. It runs Mac OS 9, with no wi-fi, but does have Photoshop 5.5! I have two shoots I'm working on editing right now and I do need to finish those first.
Also, I do need a modern computer at work so this will be my only computer at home. No iPhone, no iPad, etc for anything other than texts/phone calls.
Why do this? Well, a PC of this vintage would not/could not function given the tasks I usually need to do. I want to see if the Mac is up to the challenge.
How do I plan to do this? Well, I can use the Twitter web interface, I have Photoshop to perform the most basic image manipulations, and I can design web pages the old fashioned way...with a text editor!
Starting next week I'll try to prove to anyone who will listen to me, that a G3 iMac can still fulfill basic computing needs because somehow my netbook freezes after opening two images in Microsoft Picture Viewer.


-Trent
Posted from my iPhone

Friday, May 14, 2010

Wedding

Something I haven't done in quite some time is going to happen tomorrow. I'm shooting a wedding. It's always interesting going into these things, but even more so this time. I was giving very little notice and am doing it as a favor to a friend. I'm up for challenges though! What has been your experience when thrown an assignment at the last minute?


-Trent
Posted from my iPhone

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Video rig




At my day job, we have been doing a lot of video lately and the majority has been done with my iPhone. Seriously. With plenty more video projects coming that will require sound better audio, we picked up a Canon Rebel T2i and a Rode microphone.
Playing with it so far, it's been great. We recorded some video over the weekend and with the exception of poor image stabilization, it's what we needed. So far it's provides pro level video without the pro price.
As far as the still picture quality, I'm loving the High ISO capabilities! No noticeable noise at ISO 800, something unheard of on my Canon 1D MK II.

-Trent
Posted from my iPhone

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Hack attack

Over the weekend I had the displeasure of dealing with two attacks on different sites, both Wordpress sites. I spent a good amount of time cleaning up the mess. Hoping Wordpress 3.0 fixes the vulnerability.


-Trent
Posted from my iPhone

Monday, May 3, 2010

Caved

I managed to get a 3G iPad recently and have been doing some light work with it, and despite my initial comments about my netbook being so much better...well, I haven't been using my netbook. For most of the reasons I use a netbook, it has been replaced by the iPad. You win this round Apple!

-Trent

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Props

I figure I need to give a little love to my friend's blog. If you're into car photography or skate photography, check out Michael Chandler Photography.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

New Blog...again

Starting yet another blog. I think this will be the most fun and I always, always have material for it. So check it out for yourself If Dogs Could Blog.

-Trent

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Domain Day

Every once in awhile I come across a bunch of domain names I want to register, today is one of those days. I managed to get a bunch registered, but each one of those is a new project idea. Let's hope I can tackle each one of those.


-Trent
Posted from my iPhone

Monday, April 12, 2010

Equipment change

Saturday my wife had a photo shoot and needed to use my camera. No problem, but as we were doing a pre-shoot check, my camera focused in all the wrong places and wasn't consistent despite setting it to one focus point. One shot it'd back-focus, the next it'd front focus. So not given much time, we ran to Best Buy and picked up the cheapest Canon camera they had. That happened to be the Canon Rebel XSi. It worked out great for the shoot and I have a vacation coming up, so it'll get it's legs stretched there as well. So far it's been a pretty good camera despite it's limitations. I'll keep you updated on how it continues to work.


-Trent
Posted from my iPhone

Monday, April 5, 2010

iPad Peek

In case you've been living under a rock the past week, the Apple iPad came out over the weekend. Roughly 300,000 iPad's were sold on Saturday. Pretty soon, you'll want to make sure your website looks good on the iPad. Fortunately a site has come out to show you how your website will look on the iPad. It's called iPad Peek. This site is worthwhile to developers and as you can see from the screen capture, this blog will need a little work. Not having an iPad myself, this is very helpful.

-Trent

Monday, March 29, 2010

Photo Shoot

Over the weekend, I drove up to North Salt Lake to take some pictures of a couple of Mustangs. One is a 2003 Mach 1 with some tasteful mods while the other is an ex-Champ Car pace car with a fuel cell, roll cage, radio communications, etc. A pretty cool combo. Here are a couple sample shots from that shoot. I'm working on editing them. Both shots were with the 85mm f/1.2L lens I recently rented.

-Trent

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Rush

Ideas happen fast...too fast sometimes. My basement as it sat yesterday, was a disaster. Not exaggerating in the slightest. Well, I am renting a Canon 85mm f/1.2L lens starting today for the next week. It's considered to be one of the best portrait lenses. My wife heard this and decided she wanted to use this lens in a studio setting. Only place we have for a studio in our house is...the basement. Time to start cleaning. Spent some time destroying what was at one-time going to be a home theater room and starting to turn it into a studio of sorts. It won't be traditional, it won't have backdrops, it'll look more like a living room. Today, it's time to paint and clean some more. I'll try and post some pics next week.


-Trent

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Ideas

My mind is always full of ideas. It's always running at full speed. Sometimes the ideas are good, sometimes...not so much. Turning ideas into projects is always more difficult than I remember so consequently some ideas sit on the back burner for awhile. Worst case scenario, the idea fails, life moves on. Two such ideas are starting to see daylight. One involves a website that I have in testing phase right now and the other involves actual product. It might actually go somewhere this time around, so keep reading.


-Trent

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Rusty

It's been awhile while since I've been taking a lot of pictures. It's really only been family pictures and vacation pictures I've been taking. Recently I got to borrow a Canon 5D so I went to my sister's studio and shot some pictures. I've now convinced myself I need a new flash as hers is much nicer than mine, but my pictures weren't where I wanted them to be. Granted I've spent very little time in a studio so that's a little different, but I definitely need to brush up on my photog 'skills'. It's always good to re-analyze how you do things every once in awhile though. More time behind the camera and less in front of the computer will be a good thing.

-Trent

Friday, March 5, 2010

Re-design wonder

I've been busy designing and re-designing sites and at my full time job I've been experimenting with how Content Management Systems can help that company. Between all this, I haven't been promoting things as hard as I usually do. Blogging has slacked a bit too. During this time though, my main site has had a huge surge in traffic. It's amazing what a little site re-design with better SEO tied in will do. How the sites have ranked for the last little while in total views is 1. Fail Hard 2. This Blog 3. FNM Site and so on. The FNM site has never been the most visited site since I started this blog or even back when Would You Rather was going. Now it sits at 1. FNM Site 2. This blog and Fail Hard(same amount of views oddly enough). A little SEO goes a long way apparently.

-Trent

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Site Re-Launch

Cereal 411 was a pet project for Spyder and I. Shortly after starting it, Spyder went on a partying spree and was rarely available so I devoted my time elsewhere and put it on the back burner. No big deal as it's more of a website for fun than anything. Well, today, it's re-launching. I'm testing more often with Spyder as well as guest judges. It's a fun site and can be very informative for your next cereal purchasing decision. Check it out.

-Trent

HDMI (2 meter) 6 foot cable HQ 1080P 1.3b

Friday, February 19, 2010

It happened

This is an actual un-edited screen capture(aside from clone-stamping the total views out) from Google Analytics showing that for FunnyNameMedia.Com, I get more traffic from Bing than from Google. Very interesting...

-Trent

Thursday, February 18, 2010

New Site!

Here it is folks, a site that's been on the drawing board for quite awhile, but just barely coming to fruition. You may/may not remember Yom's Random Stats. Well Yom and I decided to expand the site a little and do apology videos. Turns out the apology videos were more fun, so I introduce to you, YomApologizes.Com. We'll have a new video every week where Yom apologizes to someone or something. The videos are actually pretty funny and you should check them out at the site.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Site Re-Design

It's about time, but I finally redesigned the Funny Name Media website. I'm still tweaking the CSS because I think it needs just a little more color, but I like the simplistic design of it. Let me know what you think, check out the site here.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Finally testing

Last month I told you I was going to experiment with Opera's Web Server. Well being busy and all, I just got a site designed and uploaded, now it's time to experiment with this service and see how viable it is. Not to skew the results of the test, I won't provide a link here. I'll test it for a few weeks to get the bugs worked out, then launch it and see how it goes. I'll let you know the results in a month or two.

-Trent

Monday, February 15, 2010

Is Bing gaining traction?


The almighty Google dominates searches, we've known that for awhile, but I have seen an interesting trend in my site analytics across all my websites...Bing is becoming much more prevalent. Google usually accounted for about 75% of my search engine traffic, Bing/MSN was maybe 5%. That's changing...in a big way. Bing now accounts for as much as 30% of my search engine traffic on some sites and consistently 20%+. Google has suffered some as a result, but it seems most of it's traction is gained from the other search engines. Either way, this is a bit surprising and curious. Have you experienced the same on your sites?

-Trent

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Brand New

Pardon the pun in the title, but I'm actually involved now in launching an entire brand for an existing company. Everything from the marketing, SEO, web design, social media, etc. This is a huge opportunity and I'm very excited about it. The long hours will be worth it for experience alone. I'll post more details about it when I am able to.

-Trent

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Buzz

Yesterday Google announced a new project, and when Google moves, the world takes notice.
To sum up Google Buzz, it's their version of Twitter. You can post status updates and check in on what your friends are posting. It ties in with your GMail account. My question to you is, will you use it? Sure it's public and Wave is private, but why is it necessary to have multiple Google windows open to communicate? Only time will tell how this works out, but Google is definitely generating...er...Buzz with this one.


-Trent
Posted from my iPhone

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Competing against myself

     Since I started my new blog, I've been dedicating a little less time to blogging here. And I guess it shows. The amount of views I get here is dropping slightly while the amount of views I get at Fail Hard Blog are going up dramatically. Soon they will pass each other and Fail Hard will be my most viewed blog. It will happen any day now. Can I blame people, no? This is more behind the scenes stuff, and the other...well it's quite a bit more laugh-inducing.

-Trent

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Value

     That picture is my lunch bag that I take to work each day. It's going on a couple months of use so far and as you can see there's a couple holes and a tear at the top. Most people would throw this bag away and start using a new one. I'm getting my value out of this lunch bag. It might save me $1/year by only using my lunch bag a few times, but that's not the point. Customers demand value, and who's going to give it to them? Someone will, might as well make it you. Value does not mean low price, it's about the "bang for the buck". There is perceived value and actual value. Perceived value is crucial though.
      A good example of perceived value is the new Apple iPad that was announced yesterday. Many people(myself included) did not see any perceived value to it. That as an initial reaction is never good. However, there may be some actual value there. Getting the customer to realize that value is harder once the perceived value is diminished. Come out swinging, and just as important, stick to it. If you have sales or immediately change a price point, you diminish the value further. Avoid it if possible. Sometimes a mistake is made. I'll use Apple as an example here again. The original iPhone came out at a very high price point and after only a few months, they dropped the price. Since then, they've stuck to their price points whenever a new model comes out.
     Want another way to kill value, fees. Nothing turns me off more than seeing 'convenience fees'. I'll see a promotion for something that is a great value, but you see the fees and you realize they're trying to just make more money while trying to keep the value there. It doesn't work. Build that into the cost rather than add fees to your product or service.
     No customer is going to happily pay for something that has no value to them, so focus on building the value of your brand, product, or service.

-Trent

Monday, January 18, 2010

Attitude adjustment

     The more I see people start small business, the more I see they think they are entitled. They deserve everything because they worked hard in the past, now they get to relax. Running a business is quite the opposite of a relaxing time and the sooner you realize that, the easier it will be.
     Back to the entitlement thing though, people expect big things without big effort. It's about time people humble themselves and recognize those who are successful at what their doing. I'd say 99% of the time they had to work their butts off to get where they are today. And most of them probably had a  few failures along the way. Fail happens, it's what you do with it after that makes the difference.
      I'm not here to say that you shouldn't dream big and know in your head that you'll become successful, just remember it involves a lot of work and probably a few failures along the way.

-Trent

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Fresh Start Update

     Here is an update to my Fresh Starting Point blog post. I now have 4 keywords in the top 10, 2 of which are in the top 5 on all the major search engines.Also, traffic has exceeded expectations and the Alexa rank went from non-existent to 1.6 million at the moment, but with traffic increasing, it is bound to go up. All this in less than a month. I'll probably provide one more update in a month or so.

-Trent

Thursday, January 7, 2010

New Blog

     Here's one announcement that got pushed up while my other announcement about the revised/revived project is pushed back to next week. I'm starting a new blog!
     I have a knack for getting myself into situations that no one else seems to get themselves into. This is often followed by my inherent clumsiness or lack of quick wit. Then, I go into damage control mode which happens to...create...more...damage. When I fail, I fail hard!
     This is an idea that Yom and I came up with while we were in Vegas. It will be contributed to by a couple of people with our life experiences of failing. We're all human, we make mistakes. Now you can laugh at our failures. Sounds great, right? Check it out over the upcoming weeks as more posts are added.

FailHard.Net

-Trent

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

The age of paper is dead

     How do I know this to be true, the calendar. Every year I get bombarded with free calendars from suppliers and clients. It then becomes a process of deciding which one I like best. Last year I picked a car themed one because well...I like cars. Anyway, this year I received zero calendars. I happen to know most of those suppliers are still in business so that's not the case. I'm sure it came down to budget cuts. However, it has been habit that when I sit at my desk, I glance at the calendar whenever I need to see an upcoming date. Problem is my calendar is stuck on December. Obviously I'm not going to base that paper is dead on this one incident, but I'm sticking with the calendar theme.
     I happened to be at Barnes and Noble right after the New Year and I was thinking about my lack of Calendars, so I decided to see if they had any left. Usually the racks are empty around this time, but not today. They still had a rather large selection. The same thing happened when I was at the mall passing by the kiosk that sells calendars and games. Plenty of Calendars to be had.
     My solution to the problem has been to keep a tab open with my Google Calendar or keep iCal open. Fortunately they're synced so I can get the information I need on demand, but it's still a little different for me to get used to.
     Some may argue that paper died off long ago, but I think only recently with eBooks becoming more prevalent and being able to sign contracts digitally, and using tablets on computers to draw that you can really start getting close to declaring the final nail in the coffin. 
     Currently I use a standard old fax machine as well and have been contemplating eFax solutions to replace the tired old machine. And with the age of digital signatures, text messages, Google Wave, eBooks, etc. do you consider the age where we rely on paper to be dead?

-Trent

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Expirement time!

   I tend to have a lot of old computers sitting around because I go through computers a lot and I got my first computer when I was 12. It's enough to drive my wife crazy because I don't get rid of them. Well I came up with a way to repurpose one computer and experiment at the same time.
   I've talked multiple times about the Opera Web Browser/Web Server. Right now I just have been keeping Opera open while I'm at work, so basically M-F from 8-5. It's a basic web page with a couple links and sure enough, I've gotten clicks from that webpage. So now, I'm going to launch a web page and host it on the Opera Web Server and on that server alone to see it how it handles that. This week I'll post the details and the link.

-Trent

Friday, January 1, 2010

No more daily blogging goals.

My experiment to blog daily really pushed me to be creative and try new things. It was great, but now, I need to focus on work and not force a blog post. I think it will add value to the blog. I still plan to contribute regularly, just not everyday. And it may happen every day, or like in some cases I'll come up with several at one time, type them out and schedule them once a day for a few days. We'll see how it goes.
Also, welcome to 2010!

-Trent

Happy New Year!

May the year 2010 be a successful year for you!

-Trent

P.S. This was scheduled to post at midnight, but didn't.