The Hello Bar is a simple web toolbar that engages users and communicates a call to action.

This likely won’t come as a shock to many of you; I’ve been invited to go work on Empire Avenue.

Of course, I said yes.

Start­ing Thursday, Septem­ber 1st, my role will be, as with any star­tup, kinda fuzzy to begin with. Offi­cially I’ll be the Dir­ector of Social and Com­munity Man­age­ment. In real­ity, I’ll be blog­ging, work­ing with the vari­ous com­munit­ies, and help­ing the team get things done. Whatever those things may be. Clean up after the Squir­rel, you know.

What I’m leav­ing behind
For the last five years, I’ve been a Web Con­tent Spe­cial­ist and Web Busi­ness Ana­lyst with the Alberta Motor Asso­ci­ation.

It’s be a great time with a mar­velous people and a great employer who’s allowed me to make mis­takes, grow, and test the cor­por­ate waters with innov­at­ive social media exper­i­ments (hello @AMARoadReports)!

If you’d like to check out the pos­i­tion I’m leav­ing, here’s the link to the offi­cial post­ing. And I’d be happy to dis­cuss the role, or the organ­iz­a­tion should you have any ques­tions — email me (bradblog@gmail.com).

The Future
Well, as I said, it’s going to be kinda fuzzy. Empire Avenue is a star­tup, and as such, there are lots of cool things that we’re doing, and that can be done! And in my work with com­munity, I’m going to be work­ing with and ask­ing a lot of ques­tions of *you*.

So, what can we do, together, on ‘the Avenue’, hmmm? Let’s find out!

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I’m a huge Portal (and Portal 2) fan, so when I saw this fan-made pro­duc­tion mak­ing the rounds of the social media nets, I had to check it out.

Wow. Watch the HD ver­sion, full screen, with the audio cranked.

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A friend recently turned me on to one cool applic­a­tion that let’s me listen to syn­chron­ized music from all my net­worked devices at the same time.

This is likely one of the coolest soft­ware enhance­ments I’ve made to my home listen­ing exper­i­ence in a long time. [click to con­tinue…]

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Summer’s almost over and if you’ve got a stu­dent in your fam­ily, it’s time to start think­ing about prep­ping their com­puter to safely return to Hog­worts school.

Proper com­puter secur­ity is a defens­ive game. You want to build pro­cesses (both soft­ware and beha­vi­oural) that encase your com­put­ing envir­on­ment in a series of pro­tect­ive shells, pro­tect­ing the data (through backups) pro­tect­ing the soft­ware and sys­tem integ­rity (through anti-virus scans and mon­it­or­ing), and pro­tect­ing what gets to your com­puter (through device and net­work monitoring).

Com­puter secur­ity is a very com­plex topic, but luck­ily, there’s a few great pro­grams out there that do all the heavy lift­ing for you, let­ting you worry about doing your com­put­ing thing, while they do their secur­ity thing.
[click to con­tinue…]

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Almost bought this, and now it’s free!

June 24, 2011

Valve has just removed pri­cing from Team Fort­ress 2 — the sem­inal multi-player first-person shooter — in Steam, Valve’s online game dis­tri­bu­tion net­work. Pre­vi­ously I’d been a Bat­tle­field Her­oes fan, but got busy and had little time for it. Now, with TF2 being free, and hav­ing a bit more time avail­able, I may just give […]

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Memories of Flight.

June 7, 2011

Cre­ated: June 07, 2011 at 11:58AM — from Ins­tagram: http://instagr.am/p/FWTtY/

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2012? Now what the f*#k are we supposed to do?

June 1, 2011

Yep, looks like Ali­ens: Colo­nial Mar­ines will be released in 2012 — great news for any­one want­ing to go on a bug hunt. Of course, when I saw this teaser video, I just had to share it:

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A spacy new way to browse music on your iPad

May 20, 2011

Listen­ing to music on your iPad is usu­ally a visually-sparse affair. Load up your player, nav­ig­ate to your lib­rary, and select the muisc. Play, and do other things. Not any more… Outta this world! Plan­et­ary is the new (and free!) app from Bloom Stu­dios that gives new mean­ing to nav­ig­at­ing through your music col­lec­tion. To quote […]

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Libraries are dead. Long live the Librarian!

May 18, 2011

I love it when coin­cid­ence and syn­ergy lead to a blog post, this post in fact. In a post earlier this week, Seth Godin lead us through the his­tory of the Lib­rary and the Lib­rar­ian. In his post, he even­tu­ally settled on the some­what alarm­ing concept that the Lib­rary was basic­ally dead: Wiki­pe­dia and the huge databanks […]

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#Winning on Friday the 13th

May 13, 2011

Today is Fri­day the 13th. The only Fri­day the 13th of 2011 as it works out. This spe­cific date has spe­cial sig­ni­fic­ance for me — and it has noth­ing to do with movies. Since Fri­day the 13ths occur so infre­quently, and are  some­what fam­ous, I use the day as a semi-random chance to get my digital […]

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50 year old infographic shows NASA’s first manned forray into space

May 5, 2011

NASA’s Image of the Day Gal­lery provided this cool infographic show­ing Alan Shepard’s brief flight into space — America’s first. It appeared magic­ally on my desktop cour­tesy of John’s Back­ground Switcher — a cool win­dows desktop wall­pa­per applic­a­tion that man­ages and dis­plays many image sources.

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Many flavours of RSS readers for iPad

May 3, 2011

Earlier today Feedly was rein­tro­duced to the iPad iOS world with sig­ni­fic­ant buzz — Robert Scoble pro­filed the reader (check the video below). One of the not­able things about Feedly is its HTML 5 base — which allows the major­ity of func­tions to be device agnostic (Android, Win­dows Phone, etc). But on iOS devices, there are […]

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