nathan jara

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that the Caped Crusader set up shop in Pittsburgh over the last few weeks for his newest big screen adventure. Thanks to the gentle cajoling of a friend, I made my way downtown this past week to see if I could catch a scene or two. After a delicious Italian eggplant sandwich with marinara and a side of risotto, we walked around Cherry Way, which was closed off for filming. Walking through the downtown area was interesting in that it really did feel like I was on set. Fake snow lined many of the streets and a fenced in area hid Batmobiles and Bat bikes. A shortcut through the downtown Macy’s to the opposite side of the building gave a good view to the afternoon action where, SPOILER ALERT, the Tumbler tumbled into a giant hole in the middle of the street. Geez, I hope Batman called the Gecko, Flo, or that guy with the blue telephone ahead of time.
 

Summer vacation this year afforded me the opportunity to travel to the sunny shores of Corolla, located in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Vacationing with family, both immediate and extended, provided for a great week of visiting, eating, napping, sunning, reading, sanding, ocean-ing, and general beach bumming. Corolla and the Outer Banks are a beautiful part of the Atlantic shoreline. The beach has certainly become my favorite vacation spot, well, except for maybe that time I went to Italy ; )

In addition to lots of time with my feet in the sand, we stopped in Williamsburg, Virginia and visited the Colonial Williamsburg area. I was able to take a stroll through the colonial town and really enjoyed seeing a glimpse into the rich heritage of our American ancestors. It’s amazing how times have changed. Another exciting aspect for me during the trip was it gave me a great excuse to use my new digital SLR camera, a Canon Rebel T3i. The camera was a ton of fun to play with, hence the pictures below. Check out more of my photos from the beach and Williamsburg on Picasa.

Sand dunes of Corolla

Dragonfly

Ocean evening

Colonial Williamsburg

If you haven’t heard the latest Buzz, Google recently released its Facebook killer, Google+. The Google Plus Project is the technology giant’s all encompassing foray into the dangerous world of social networking. If you were lucky enough to get an invite to the initial beta testing period, you’ve already monkeyed around with Circles, Sparks, and Hangouts. While I haven’t jumped into all the new fancy pants features, I have to say I’m liking, no Facebook pun intended, the Circles feature most. Circles basically allow you to group your Google+ friends into different categories of your choosing. You can place all your closest chums in your Friends circles while keeping work buddies in a Coworkers circle. The best part about this feature is that when sharing a post, comment or message, you can select the particular person or persons with whom you want to share that post with and not always everyone under the Facebook sun. I think the customization and personal choice of who gets to see what with Circles is an awesome move by Google. As one who has complained about Facebook’s approach in the past, it’s good to see a company taking the user’s choice into account from the get-go.

I am surprised, however, that there hasn’t been more hullabaloo about this categorization aspect of Circles. I thought for sure we’d be hearing people complaining that this “putting people into circles” business (insert whiny voice here) is unfair and will hurt people’s feelings because everyone should be equal. I’m glad there hasn’t been such comments, or at least I haven’t seen any, because I think this feature is needed. When it comes to social groups, we all have people we’re closer to and not so close to. People we want to share more personal things with and those that we just want to say “hey!” to every now and then. I think Google+’s Circles reflects more realistically our offline social lives.

If you agree, ask around and demand an invite from a pal. It’ll be interesting to see how Google+ progresses and grows over the next few months and if any Facebookers will jump ship for the new web hotness or just double up their social worlds. I doubt the Madelaine Zammits of the web will be coming aboard, but I’ve definitely tested the waters and am feeling much more relaxed. Heck, even the Zuck-man himself took a dip. +1 Google, +1.

This past week, Pandora announced that you can now enjoy the comedy of your favorite, well, comedians on the internet radio site. The powers that be at Pandora gathered a team to start a Comedy Genome Project like the Music Genome Project to categorize and filter the different comedic styles. Needless to say, I’ve been laughing since Wednesday. And if you haven’t heard John Pinette, click the image to the left ; )

Remember back in the day…playing those kick butt video games…amazingly retro in their 8-bit graphical glory? Well now you can re-live those days everyday with Neven Mrgan’s Pixelfari. Yes, I said Pixelfari. Pixelfari is Mr. Mrgan’s latest creation that allows you to view the web with the Safari web browser, but enhanced to transform all the places you visit on the world wide inter-web into 8-bit clarity. Below is yours truly’s site with the browser. I know you’ll want to download here.