Team A'Hearn

ScottAHearn.com has been pretty quiet lately. Work has been a bear, I’ve been logging way too many hours in front of a brand new home computer, and I’ve been making grand plans for a new website. Unable to think of something catchy on my own, I have blatantly stolen a domain-naming convention from my friend Jeff and purchased teamAHearn.com. It’s only taken five years of marriage to realize that my domain name should probably reflect the content – and most of what I post is not just about me, but Stephanie as well. For now, teamAHearn.com will just be a mirror of ScottAHearn.com, so feel free to update those bookmarks now. But a name change is as good an opportunity as ever to come up with a new design as well. Stay tuned!

As a pseudo-audiophile I find myself very interested in the latest buzz around Direct Note Access, the new technology behind Celemony’s “Melodyne” audio processing software. Akin to current Auto-Tune processing (which can correct a single pitch), Direct Note Access gives an audio engineer the ability to identify and manipulate individual notes from within pre-recorded, polyphonic material. For example, one could change specific notes in a guitar chord or even fix one wrong note played by a musician in a symphony orchestra.

If you have a few minutes, watch the demo video featuring some of the software’s core capabilities. It’s pretty fantastic stuff from an audio engineering standpoint, but I realize this isn’t the kind of thing that everyone can get excited about. I’ll post again when they come up with software that makes Nickelback sound good.

Big news in the digital photography and photo processing world today with the announcement from Adobe regarding Photoshop Express. This is a free online utility for working with your photos (cropping, resizing, red eye reduction, and other enhancements) using the established quality behind Photoshop. You don’t get some of the more advanced features like layers or text, but it’s still pretty nice for a free utility. I’ll need to play around with it a bit more.

While I’m at it, I also highly recommend Google’s Picasa, another great free piece of software for photo editing. I’ve been using it for a while and it has most of the same features as Photoshop Express, including intuitive online photo albums with good privacy controls.

Take a moment and count up the remote controls that you actively use when you sit down in front of the TV. How about when you switch to a DVD on that great home theater setup? Three, maybe four remotes? I know I’m late to the party with this, but those days are gone. The A’Hearns where generous enough to get me a Harmony Remote for my birthday, and it is nice. Control everything at once from just one swanky remote, and seamlessly switch among different components. Worth every penny, even with the lower-priced models.

Pardon my “geek post” here, but after suffering through ridiculous amounts of confusion and mess, I have finally replaced the code that generates the weather information along the right pane of the website. Years ago I was simply scraping data from Weather Underground, but that was becoming unreliable. Then I switched to Yahoo! Weather, but found that their interpretation of “well-formed XML” is somewhat different from mine. Nerd attitude, I know.

I’ve now settled with a free affiliate subscription service with The Weather Channel’s XML Data Feed. It provides an enormous amount of detail and is not overly strict, giving me the ability to pick and choose which data I’d like to use. I have yet to work out all the bugs, but for now I’m happy. Please let me know if you see anything unusual.

Wired.com had a good article (?!) the other day about the evolving behaviors of people online, specifically with respect to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Match, and the like. There are some great issues to consider here, especially for those of us who spend ridiculous amounts of our lives online in some capacity: how and why have we gone from being nearly rabid with online privacy, only to expose so much of ourselves to an online network? Granted, there’s a big difference between my social security number and the last book I read, but not everyone has such a “meticulously managed profile” and may easily go public with some unintended snippet of highly personal information. This then leads to the issue of how one presents themselves to a social network, or online at all. A great deal has been written about thinking twice before posting that awesome photo of last month’s New Year’s Eve party, liquored up and sitting in the back of a squad car; but let me stress this – regardless of how popular a site is now, the Internet is merciless and the Internet is forever. Recruiters, managers, friends, or family can all stumble upon publicly available content, and the reaction might not be a high-five.

Now I’m not joining the tin-foil hat club here, but as someone with way too much of himself online I can promise that most, if not all of these more popular sites have very good privacy and viewable-content-limiting capabilities. Lock yourself down, and if there’s any doubt at all, just don’t even post it.