What it’s like to live and work as a baseball player in Japan

I’ve always wanted to be an ex-pat, living in some exotic locale. Japan sounds super interesting to me, but I don’t speak a lick of Japanese. However, if I were a baseball player I could afford to hire a translator to help out. Like this guy:

“I play cause it pays the bills. I play because there is still more than half a tank left in me. I play cause this is still my dream. It may not be the bigs, but over here it is. Over here I have a chance to win something, to honor guys that have played before me, and to experience things my dream never showed me.”

- Ex-Colorado Rockies player Ryan Spillborghs, on playing baseball in Japan this year.

I am looking forward to reading his Denver Post Sports blog entries & tweets throughout the season.

Sony hooked me up with a Sony Action Cam in trade for some content

Social marketing is kinda my thing.

I worked for the first US brewery on Twitter. I have about 20 different twitter accounts. Ford once lent me an F-150 in 2011 for a few weeks. I raise money for charity with an aggressive social media strategy. I have clients who use social marketing as their primary means of consumer interaction.

When I received an blog contact message from someone at the agency draftfcb about a social campaign last week involving me, skiing, video, and free stuff, I couldn’t say no. I am now a participant in “The Moving 303″ project.

One trade-off is that I had to go to the mall. On a Friday night. But it was cool because I picked up all this stuff.

Here’s the deal.

 

Basically Sony & draftfcb are sponsoring me to shoot video while I’m skiing. In return I get to keep a Sony Action Cam, and all the accessories that go with it:

• Sony Action Cam with wi-fi
• 16GB Micro SD Card
• Battery Charger
• A spare battery
• Bicycle handlebar mount
• Waterproof headband mount
• Camcorder cradle with LCD (this is super rad)
• Suction cup mount (also super cool)
• Set of adhesive mounts
• Anti-fog sheets

All in all, it’s between $400-500 in gear.

This is what I have to do with it to fulfill my end of the arrangement:

• Send some tweets & facebook updates about using the camera
• Test the capabilities of the camera. I’m an equal-opportunity tester. So I’m going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of this device. Don’t worry, though. My negative comments will be constructive. I promise. After a weekend of playing with it, there are ups and downs already.
• Make two 5-minute ski movies showcasing what you can do with the camera. One of these will be featured in the Denver Sony store.
• Give you people, my friends and followers, a look into what it’s like to shoot with this camera, where I’ll be, and what I like about skiing. This will take place over the next month.

 

One of the reasons Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sucks

So I complained on Twitter about how the opacity setting option in Illustrator CS6 changed from a simple-to-understand slider to a silly 10% incremental dropdown box. Especially when there *IS* a slider for the lightness/darkness of the UI (menu bar color). I tried submitting my request through their website, and got an error.

In traditional Adobe style, I figured it would be a good idea to copy my reply before I submitted it – pretty much like saving your complex photoshop and illustrator files every few minutes in case there’s a crash. Below is my submission.

*******Enhancement / FMR*********

Brief title for your desired feature:

Put the opacity percentage back to how it used to be (not 10% increments).

How would you like the feature to work?

I want it to work like it did in the previous 5 versions of Illustrator. Where there’s a slider and you can slide to any percentage of opacity. The hilarious thing is that you added a slider for UI lightness/darkness but you removed the one that actually matters. I know you can type in a percentage, but the slider helps so you can see different levels of opacity really quickly and easily.

Why is this feature important to you?

Why would you think that designers would be excited with 10 steps of opacity that are easy to define? I think that’s just silly. I’m tired of all these arbitrary changes to Illustrator, especially when I’m paying you every month for access to the Creative Cloud.

The Opacity issue I’m talking about is below. Clicking image will bring up the bigger size, look in the lower right corner. This has been changed from how it’s been since opacity was introduced in Illustrator, like 10 years ago.