Jason Weill Web Productions

In June and July 2008, I’m going from Seattle to Providence to New York to Rome to Tuscany to Venice to New York to Seattle with a backpack full of digital goodies.

text confessional: it works!

Originally uploaded by Lele McLeod.

Earlier this year, a co-worker pitched to me the McLeod Residence, an off-beat project in which he was an investor. “The Residence” is a bar/gallery/social club with an emphasis on creating a sort of synthetic family. […]

After two months of delays, the hatbox-shaped Sony VAIO VGX-TP1 PC is finally shipping. Mine arrived last week, and I took a few photos of the various components as I unboxed them.

Just like the initial photos showed, this is a computer with very austere looks in an unusual squat cylinder case. The TP1 […]

On this day in 1978, the very first unsolicited commercial e-mail message was sent. It promoted a DEC product presentation and was sent to hundreds of recipients (so many that they spilled out of the “To” line and into the message body). The Defense Communications Agency (DCA) decried the message, claiming that ARPANET […]

I just got an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) account. With EC2 and Simple Storage Service (S3), I think I can convert my DVDs into iPod-video-sized files much more quickly than my desktop and laptop could do. Here’s one person’s experience with doing the conversion using FFmpeg. He estimates that it costs well […]

After days of holding out, my co-worker iseff finally got me to join Twitter. Twitter is the newest trend among techies, and there are already many thousands of people using it, but I’m still at a loss to explain just what it is.
The Basics
Twitter asks every user to answer, in 140 characters or less, […]

February has come and gone. 24 is getting more intense though I still like season 5 better than this season. The Office continues to stand out as a great show in its own right.
In February I spent $33.67 on video expenses. Compared to my usual cable bill of $70, that’s more than […]

The Joost user interface features several unobtrusive widgets that disappear when the user stops using the mouse and keyboard. (enlarge)
The folks who brought Voice over IP to the masses with Skype are at it again, making Joost the punchy new name for their multicast Internet video system. (The old name, the Venice Project, was even less […]

Today was the hugely-anticipated keynote at the Macworld Conference & Expo. As expected, we saw the final version of the iTV (now called Apple TV) which streams video from five PCs and syncs with one. For $300, as much as I paid for my Xbox 360 (which will act as an IPTV set-top […]

I’m already starting work on my first new year’s resolution: I’m cutting cable out of my expenses.
Comcast quoted me a promotional rate of $30 a month for digital cable, plus $10 per month to rent a high definition DVR that is crashes and malfunctions nearly as much as the model I had in Pittsburgh. […]