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.

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.

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.

Ever since it came out that President Obama was having his White House chefs homebrew White House ales, I’ve been thinking about how I can contribute to both the beer world and the political world – at the same time. So I decided to launch a political movement.

Today I launched Beer Drinkers For Obama.

Our goal is to support President Obama and to support American-owned breweries. American craft beer is growing more than 10% a year (when the big companies are flat or losing market share). I feel that President Obama has come a long way from his days of drinking Bud Light at the Beer Summit.

His support of locally-produced beer is a basically the same way that craft breweries started. Jimmy Carter signed a bill that essentially legalized brewing at home, people started getting back into brewing at home, and some of the more adventurous folks started breweries not long after.

Craft beer controls a little more than 5% of the market, but if we as Americans support local products owned by Americans, we can build an already strong American industry into something even stronger. So take a minute, read our Manifesto, and like/follow us if you agree.

Thanks to everyone who gave me advice, especially Mark Silva. I you a few beers, man. See you next month.

- Josh, Founder, Beer Drinkers For Obama

I was in Lyons, Colorado this past weekend to go to Yonder Mountain String Band’s Kinfolk festival. After I had bought tickets, I also found out that the USA Pro Cycling Challenge would be rolling through town the 2nd day of the festival. I had only really been to one cycling competition before, but nothing of this caliber.

But I’ve seen Breaking Away enough times to know what’s what. Go Cutters!

A number of the participants rode in the Tour de France, Olympics and this race, all in the span of the last 6 weeks. And the race is in my home state. And they’re riding through some of the most beautiful wilderness in the entire world.

I wasn’t going to miss this. (or check out the larger flickr photo set here)

So I wandered down from my campsite at Planet Bluegrass about 12:30pm and scoped out locations. I saw that they had a sprint in the middle of town and that looked like where the action was going to go down. I posted up right near the line (and across the street from Oskar Blues’ original brewery).

And then I waited. People started to get lined up, lots of kids were running around, and there were some hijinks. We were having a good time.

This dude wanted to get a better vantage point.

I think that this dude worked at the cycle shop up the street. On the front of the kid trailer was a sign that said “DOPE” on it with a message about Lance Armstrong’s alleged performance-enhancing drug use.

Then shit started to get real.

Cop cars started flowing around the corner and going past us, having come down from Nederland ahead of the pack. A few minutes later some car-based commentators came to give us the lowdown. 14 riders had broken away from the peloton and were about four minutes ahead. A second later one of the official photographers got right next to me. Apparently I had picked a good spot to be in!

We got ready to cheer.

Next we heard the television helicopter in the distance, and as the rumbling got louder you could see the breakaway pack come around the corner towards me. Team Exergy rider Serghei Tvetcov was in the lead, and really started to turn the speed on through the straightaway. I love how torqued to one side his bike is as he’s off his saddle, pushing hard to get the sprint points.

A little peek under your shoulder at the pack to see if they can catch you.

Then crank through the “Waste Management Sprint Line”.

The rest of the breakaway group can eat your dust.

And just like that, in maybe the span of 20 seconds, the pack is past you and that’s that. I took a peek at the photos on my LCD and realized it’s easier to just use a way wider lens. So I quickly changed lenses and waited the 4 minutes for the peloton to show up. A majority of the riders are in this group.

Did you see that little smudge at the top of the frame? It was actually the TV chopper.

So the peloton passes through, followed by a ton of team cars that carry support staff & spare bike parts of every shape and size.

So you basically wait around for a couple hours to secure your space, chat with other people out to see the spectacle, and then the actual racing part was about 5 minutes long! I loved being able to check this out and take photos of it.

Just over 3 years ago when I worked at Flying Dog Brewery, President Obama had a Beer Summit. Their brewery is about an hour from the White House in “scenic” Frederick, Maryland. When I found out that the beers of choice at the Summit were Macro-brewed beers instead of tasty beers from American-owned craft breweries, my brother and I devised a protest the next morning outside the White House.

The company Winnebago and a bunch of employees were going to be in D.C. anyway that day*, so we had people in Maryland make some signs and head down to the White House to protest their choice in beer. We put up some video:

Fast forward a few years and now it turns out that the President maybe heard our calls to Think Globally but Drink Locally.

He recently got his staff to start brewing two beers: a light & dark honey ale, with the honey being sourced from the First Lady’s beehive. While it’s probably a little closer to homebrewing than a production-level brewery, that doesn’t really matter to me. What matters: now that we’re at the pre-prohibition levels of American breweries, even the White House is producing its own beer instead of buying Budweiser, which is owned by a Belgian mega-corporation.

It’s insourcing. It’s promoting locally-sourced American-made products. It’s not the snooty wine or champagne that you probably saw more of in the White House in the past.  And it’s also probably damn fresh (and damn tasty).

* – UPDATE: My friend Gwen told me on Facebook: We weren’t actually going to be in DC anyway. We kind of made a special trip. It was a super fun day! <— My bad for misreporting this.

I’m a science fiction nerd and I’m a sports nerd. Hey, at least I never played Dungeons & Fucking Dragons. Wait, fucking dragons? That can’t be good for you. Anyway, I was looking at Twitter and saw that Friday at Dodger Stadium is Star Trek Night. Which is pretty awesome in itself.

But they got the promotion wrong.

William Shatner will be at Star Trek Night, which is pretty cool. But the Dodgers are giving out Spock “Federation Baseball” t-shirts. You can’t give out Spock shirts when Kirk is in the crowd! Well, apparently you can.

I would have made Khan shirts, maybe.

Khaaaaan!

I think it’s cool that nerds who like sports get their own night at Dodger Stadium, just wish that the marketing tie-in made more sense with the special guest they had. If a sci-fi & sports nerd planned it I would expect to see more things like this:

• Romulan Ale booth for all the craft breweries that are starting to pop up in LA.
• Communicator night? Awesome iPhone & Android cases that look like communicators would be sweet. Those might cost some money.
• Star Trek: Deep Space 9 baseball team patch or sticker night. There were a few episodes with baseball themes in DS9 (even if the show was pretty average). What about Buck Bokai baseball card night? He was a major character in the episode “If Wishes Were Horses”. Bokai broke Joe Dimaggio’s consecutive game hit streak – 14 years from now.

Even with some of the flaws in this event, I may have found one reason to go to Los Angeles. That, and to wear a robe into Ralphs and drink some half & half, Dude-style.

I was up in Boulder last night to hang out with my brother and his family. My nephew showed me how he plays the fiddle, we had a little homemade frozen yogurt, went on a walk, and had a run-in with a sprinkler! He’s fun to take photos of.