Plead the First » Internet

ConvergeSouth Promo Video

Anthony — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 04:29:59 +0000

ConvergeSouth is coming soon. Ben asked if I’d be interested in creating a short promo video for it. At first I said “no” because while I enjoy making home movies, I’d never made a video that didn’t involve small babies and family members. Eventually, I decided to give it a try. Here’s the result:

I’m not entirely happy with the way YouTube compressed the video. Ben did a much nicer job, which can be seen on the ConvergeSouth media server.

For those interested in this sort of thing, the footage was shot on my Canon MiniDV Camcorder and edited with FinalCut Express. I had to retouch a couple dozen frames by hand in Photoshop to remove some dust that was in the frame (that’s what I get for shooting through my car windshield). The two still-photos in the middle are courtesy of Sue. The soundtrack was arranged in GarageBand.

Retooling the Factory

Anthony — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 03:37:10 +0000

I don’t often blog about work related items, but I thought folks might enjoy this. New and wonderful things are in the works over at my day job at The Iconfactory, and we’ve come up with a series of animations leading up to their unveiling. Start with Day 1 and work your way through the links at the bottom of that page to see them all so far. Enjoy!

Police bring crime into your home, via the Web

PotatoStew — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

This is a very cool way to use the Internet:

Tipping off the police has never been easier.

Law enforcement agencies in the Triad increasingly are using the Internet as a tool to collect and deliver information. This creates a situation where residents can more easily discover what police have found going on in their neighborhoods — or let police know what they haven’t discovered.

The Greensboro Police Department’s Web site allows residents to submit anonymous tips to Crime Stoppers.

People who are hesitant to actually speak person-to-person to tip off police about something might not be so reluctant to anonymously use a website to do so.

High Point’s department began putting incident reports and other information online. The service rapidly became popular, with more than 4,000 requests made during the first half of September.

“It’s getting a lot of use,” said Lee Hunt, a crime analyst for the department. “We hoped it would happen.”

The site allows users to map out activity, which permits residents to see what is going on in their neighborhood.

I took a look at High Point’s site — visually, it could use some love, however, functionally it’s intriguing. When we first moved down to the Triad we actually went to downtown Greensboro and spoke with the police to get similar info about areas where we were looking at apartments. An online database makes that process a lot easier. Looking at some of the reports, details are often sketchy, or altogether absent (”I responded to the above location in reference to a property related issue”), but the reports seem to be useful for getting an idea about the type of crimes or frequency of incidents in an area. It would be nice to be able to search by zip code, or neighborhood though, something in between the street and city level.