My friend recently sent me a text message,

“Ever been stuck in an elevator? Any ideas on how to pass the time?”

Aside from feeling bad for my friend and passing text messages back and forth to consume the 30 minutes he had to wait before getting rescued, there wasn’t much else I could do. I did however remember about another guy who was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours before finally being discovered. Now that’s a long time to wait. During that time his mind started running through scenarios around the stability of the elevator. Was it damaged for some reason? Was the building on fire? What if he fell to his death?

I wouldn’t doubt that most of us have entertained the idea of a elevator suddenly plummeting towards the ground due to some mechanical failure. Well the good news is that short of a catastrophic event to the building, there are enough safety checks to make sure this never happens.

But what if it does?

I remember watching cartoons as a kid where Daffy Duck was falling out of the sky in a box container and at the last second he steps out of the box and safely walks away unharmed as the container absorbs all of the impact and is crushed. This of course raised the question about the possibility of “jumping” at the last second should I ever be faced with a failed elevator rocketing towards the Earth. Could it work?

Of course I assumed not, this doesn’t seem possible but I was curious what the physics were around the reason and I found a pretty simplistic explanation while reading more about the man trapped for 41 hours. Here’s the answer from an expert:

To the age-old half-serious question of whether a passenger barrelling earthward in a runaway elevator should jump in the air just before impact, Pulling responded…, that you can’t jump up fast enough to counteract the rate of descent. “And how are you supposed to know when to jump?” he said. As for an alternative strategy—lie flat on the floor?—he shrugged: “Dead’s dead.”

So there you have it. If you find yourself in the situation, chances are you’ll be saved by one of the many fail-safes. if those fail, well it was nice knowing ya.

Seesmic Twitter App Gets Updated: Supports Multi-Accounts, up to 50 Social Networks with Ping.fm and TweetPhoto

Loic Le Meur of Seesmic gave us the heads up that their twitter client for BlackBerry Smartphones will be getting a big update today (should be live soon). You can visit seesmic.com on your BlackBerry’s web browser to download or checkout their BlackBerry product page here. As for the update, it brings multi-account support as well as support for up to 50 social networks thanks to Ping.fm integration and their partnership with TweetPhoto.

I remember taking the SAT back in high school and just the other day I was wondering if they ever update the questions to stay current. Are kids today answering the same questions that I answered years ago? I certainly hope not. I mean times have changed and we really need to come up with questions that kids can relate to in today’s world. So in an attempt to help further childhood education, I propose the following questions be added to the SAT’s immediately:

4Squares is to Twitter as MobWars is to…
a) Facebook
b) Flickr
c) XBox
d) None of the above

Define “LOL”:
a) Lots of luck
b) Laugh out loud
c) Lame, overly lame
d) Listed on Letterman

What is the next logical item based upon the following release sequence of gaming consoles:
Atari 2600, Nintendo (original, not Super NES), PS2…
a) Wii
b) Intellivision
c) Apple IIc
d) Pong

If Tom can text at 12 words per minute. How many seconds would it take him to text out the following sentence:
“Dude, I’ll be there at 4:00?
a) 30 seconds
b) 60 seconds
c) 90 seconds
d) None of the above

If you have 200 friends on Facebook and 20% of them commented on your latest status update. How many comments would you have?
a) 4
b) 40
c) 60
d) None of the above

Ok, your turn. Did I miss some? If you think you can do better, let’s hear it in the comments section.

I recently ordered a Canon EOS 50D DSLR camera and while waiting for it to arrive, I’ve had some time to research taking photos. Luckily in today’s digital age, there is plenty of free information out there for getting started with a DSLR camera. Since we also live in a world of A.D.D. I thought I might summarize the basics of what I’ve learned so far. Think of this as a “Cliff Notes” version on DSLR camera photography and getting started.

Now I should premise this that my so called “expertise” in DSLR camera photography has been built through about three days of nothing but Internet research and no actual field work (like I said I’m still waiting for my camera to arrive). In other words, I’m about as dangerous as my grandmother behind the wheel of a car but all of this information below is based upon pretty common concepts that I’ve pulled from various sites and can be a good starting point if you’re looking to get started with a DSLR camera.

1) The “Exposure Triangle” – This is probably the first thing I came across when graduating from a point-and-shoot to a DSLR camera. Essentially, the Exposure Triangle refers to three variables to consider when taking a DSLR camera photograph. They are Aperture, ISO and Shutter Speed. I’d say that of the things I learned, this is probably the most important to review if you ever want to get off of the automatic settings for your DSLR camera and more into priority and manual modes. Check out this link on The Exposure Triangle to learn more with using your DSLR camera.

2) Correct Exposure is only part of the equation – Once you get the concepts of the Exposure Triangle figured out, that doesn’t mean the DSLR camera photos will suddenly become professional quality. The next step is to figure out how to get a creative DSLR camera photo that is properly exposed. You can have a properly exposed DSLR camera photo using a number of different combinations with the variables above. Finding the one that is best suited for the story you are trying to tell is what makes the difference between a good photo and a great photo. Watch this video on creating a creatively correct exposure.

3) Learn your DSLR camera settings – Seems simple enough but have you seen some of the manuals? Holy crap that’s boring! Besides, who wants to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to be sidelined with a thick booklet that contains probably 70% of information that I (as a beginner) am not ready for anyway? Again, this is where the Internet comes in handy. I went to YouTube and just searched for my DSLR camera’s brand and model number and I found instructional videos that told me more than I needed to know about how to get started. Plus in many of the videos I found suggestions on where to set my lesser used settings to get the best general results so I can leave them there until I’m ready to learn more about them.

4) Rules of Thirds – This is less about the technical settings of your DSLR camera and more about the artistic aspect of photography but I bet some would argue this is as foundational as a rule to learn as the Exposure Triangle. The Rules of Thirds basically states that if you divide your viewfinder into three horizontal and three vesicle sections, the intersection of each area is where the interesting points should go. A common mistake when taking a photo is to place the horizon at the center of the photo. This is conflicting and instead the horizon should go 1/3 or 2/3’s of the way down the picture to emphasize either the ground or the sky.

5) Learn the rules, then break them – If we all followed the same rules then we’d stop being creative. One common suggestion I’ve come across is that when it comes to photography, rules are more guidelines than rules. Sometimes breaking a rule makes the photo more interesting. Take a look at photos that others have taken and see what feedback they get on some of the photography discussion forums and you’ll start to understand what rules work and may not work in certain situations.

That’s all for now. Check out some of my older photos (using my point-and-shoot camera) on my new photos section of the website and let me know what you think. More photos from my new DSLR Camera coming soon (once it gets here).

Check it out below:

http://photos.dudchenko.com

QR Codes have been around for a while but I figure something like this will start to gain in popularity now that Google has put a stake in the claim. As a BlackBerry user who has BlackBerry Messenger 5.0, this is also pretty cool because we can take advantage of these QR Codes immediately. Don’t worry if you don’t have it, just  check this announcement by Google and they offer plenty of other options for cell phone users.

Take the image below:

If you open up BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 and select “Add Contact,” and then “Scan Invitation Barcode from another BlackBerry” you’ll be presented with the same view you get when you want to take a photo. Just point your phone at the image above (make sure you get the whole image to appear in the screen) and the phone will do the rest. No need to click the photo, the system will open a new browser when it reads the code and take you to the super-secret website (hint, it looks a lot like this one).

Want to make your own bar code? Check out Kaywa where you can generate a code that opens a website, offers a textual message, or even provides a phone number.

(click to enlarge)

My cell phone is not a business phone so I have a BIS account but I still like to get work emails on it so I don’t have to power up a laptop outside of office hours just to see if anything important came through. Of course, while in the office, it meant I was hit twice with any work email notifications; one on my phone and one on my laptop. To me it was pretty annoying, I’d be sitting at work and managing my emails on my laptop, and anytime a new work email would come in, I would get a notification on Outlook and my cell phone. I had to manage both devices to clean up the Inboxes.

The alerts quickly came to a stop, I adjusted my settings on my BlackBerry to not alert me when I got a work email (since I’m right in front of my laptop, I don’t need my cell phone to tell me this). The challenge however was with managing the emails on both devices. When I did check my phone for any other personal notifications I might receive, it was easy to lose a text message or personal email in the mix of the mass amount of work emails received in one day.

The solution was relatively simple however. I set up a new folder in Outlook (I run 2007) and routed all email into this new folder. Since I have a BIS BlackBerry account, I don’t get emails that are not stored in my Inbox. By routing the emails to a new folder, I just work out of this folder during the day as a regular Inbox but my cell phone doesn’t receive any of these emails anymore.

The way I set it up, I created a folder and called it “0) Inbox”. The “0)” part is to make sure it resides right below the actual Inbox since Outlook lists all folders alphabetically. Then I created a rule to route all email into this new “0) Inbox” folder. The rule is set to the condition of “on this machine only” and this is important because what that means is when I shut down my laptop for the evening, all emails I receive will now still go to the original default Inbox and I will get them on my phone.meaning I can still check work email from my phone after hours. When I log back onto my laptop (presumably the next morning) the rule kicks in and moves all of those emails into the new “0) Inbox” folder with everything else.

Again, highly technical and niche but if you were looking for help with this I hope you found it.

Luckily, before we ventured out on the road, I had read that in order to do this with a regular camera, there are a few tricks to learn that you must consider while taking the digital photo. Ideally, I would snap a photo, move the camera slightly to the right, snap another photo, then repeat and when I got back home, I would splice the images together and viola, there’s the panoramic picture. This of course only works if the photos are perfectly aligned. The trick, is to overlap the subsequent photos because this will allow the splicing (that occurs later) to work best.

Here’s a sample of what I mean. Say you wanted to create a panoramic photo that looks like this:

You would need to take say, three separate digital photos in order to capture everything.

 This requires that the line where one photo ends is exactly where the next photo begins. This is impossible to do on-the-fly. Rather, try to overlap the camera’s viewpoints about 30% so it looks more like this:

In this case, I took four photos but made sure there was considerable overlap between each photo. This is important because when we splice the photos together the tool we use will require this overlap to set up the photos and align them properly.

The other trick, which I learned after my trip unfortunately, is that you want to maintain the same white balance on your camera for each photo. This basically means setting the white balance to a manual setting or turning the auto-balance feature on your camera off. The reason for this is that, especially with outdoor photos, the adjustment of white balance from one photo to the next can throw off the panoramic photo later on. The left side of the photo may look darker or lighter then the right.

Finally, splicing the photo together is actually the easiest part. I know Photoshop does this but since I didn’t have Photoshop, I needed something else, and preferably free,

It turns out, Microsoft offers just this sort of thing from their Windows Live Photo Gallery which is a free download. After installing and adding the photos into the library, I just selected the 4 images I wanted to use and then right-click to “create panoramic photo” and wait. It runs on its own and the end result is a great panoramic photo to save or print out.

I printed mine out to keep at the office using EzPrints if you want to try them.

Did you want to see the final panoramic photo from my trip to the Grand Canyon?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PeteDudchenko

You can also click on any of the RSS links I have on this page as well. The old URL will still be around but this one will be better for reading.

If you haven’t heard of Google Voice I recommend you check it out. Its still invite only I believe but if you were lucky enough to get an invite then you probably noticed that they’ve been offering free business cards with your new Google Voice Phone Number to help promote their service (and to help you promote your new number).

I noticed this myself the other day and remembered a post by Lifehacker about creating Social Calling Cards and thought that this was a perfect opportunity to create some free social cards myself.

By default, the format that Google offers is more of a traditional business card with space to add your address, name and email. It’s very easy however to transform these fields into social contact information by eliminating the address information and replacing it with any social network you want to add. I personally added my Twitter Account, along with the address to this website, and an email address (in addition to my Google Voice number).

After submitting my mailing address, I was done and in only a few days I received 25 free social cards in the mail.

So thanks Google!