This summer I have the pleasure of working for www.ReConstruct.org.

My official title is Facility Assistant / Photographer. My main responsibilities include: taking digital pictures and short videos of individual volunteers and groups, uploading them on our site daily and creating the DVD for groups to take home at end of each project week.

I am really psyched to be able to live in Nashville this summer and work with such a great group! I look forward to learning Mac and the iLife suite. I have already started training and working with iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto. So far I am really enjoying it. Video editing and DVD creation has been a dream of mine to do for a while now and I am excited to have the opportunity to learn this summer!

All websites I run will remain operational and some may even be updated a little while I am away. As always if there are any problems, suggestions, or concerns I am only an email away. Have a great summer!

I found this today while browsing Gizmodo. How awesome is this?

Nothing screams impeccable taste like having a fireplace in the middle of your coffee table and now, thanks to Planika Fires, you can keep the flames roaring without worrying about smoke or soot. The company makes the magic happen using a proprietary liquid biofuel called Fanola, which burns completely smoke and smell free.

Fanola, the company says, is a biologically clean product which emits nothing but water vapor and CO2. Heating inserts ensure that the only thing burning in your shag pad, besides the fireplace, will be the flames of love. The fireplace technology comes in a variety of designs, so you can mix and match with every piece of Ikea furniture ever created.

The original post can be found here. Also, more photos can be seen in this post on Green Upgrader!

I thought this was a funny touch to the article..

Pricing info was not available, but can you really put a price on staying classy?

Okay, I’ll admit it. I am very impressed. I normally use fireworks for my graphic design and slight image touch ups I do. I used some basic photoshop tools on this recent photo I took and I am pretty happy with the results this far.

Remember, this is only about 10 or 20 minutes into editing. There are a lot of small details that need to be polished. I am happy so far though!

Before:

After:

You can view full versions to get a better idea of the changes on my flickr located here: http://flickr.com/photos/matthewkammerer/

Thank you to David at Tutorial9 and this tutorial for a little inspiration!

Comments welcomed!

This morning I got an email from FastWeb with the title ‘FastWeb Alert’. At first I wondered if I had finally been awarded one of the many scholarships I had applied for. As suspected, that was not the case.

The first paragraph of the email was as follows:

Recently, a column appeared in Newsweek (full article can be found here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/135371) analyzing FastWeb, how we operate, and the services we offer. While we were disheartened to read this criticism of FastWeb - as we feel we truly provide a valuable service in matching you with the right opportunities to obtain free money to help you pay for school - we were also inspired by the students and educators who responded to us, (and some even to Newsweek editors!) referencing their dissatisfaction with the column.

The news article is very interesting and reveals a lot of points my friends and I have discussed. It goes into detail how FastWeb is being used by corporate sponsors for cheap promotion.

An instance is brought up about a Chuck E. Cheese scholarship. It suggested singing up to its newsletter when applying for the scholarship. This is a simple way to harvest many emails to use in promotions later on.

According to Chuck E. Cheese spokesperson Brenda Holloway, more than 1.6 million contestants signed up for the contest, which ended last week. She doesn’t specify how many of those joined the club (typically in contests, the majority of entrants take the suggested path), but did say that the club’s population rose. That’s hundreds of thousands of new Chuck E. members, at a cost of to the company of a few pennies each. And only one got a scholarship.

I agree very much so with this article. FastWeb is a lottery of sorts.

Now, in their defense.. I do think it would be awfully hard to try to offer scholarships to this many people. It just just the whole website seems to be over monetized and the initial goal seems to have been forgotten.

I found this video via digg this morning. It showcases an eight year employee of Google who’s main purpose is to identify websites who try to raise their page rank by using potentially ‘black-hat’ processes.

Some website owners think having misspellings at the bottom of their page are alright, and just bring them extra hits. This is against the terms of Google and in the long run you will be punished. I try to run my websites as legit as possible and am glad to share this information with you.

The full post can be found at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-google-knows-about-spam/

Andrea linked me to an article discussing the future of Polaroid pictures. It seems the company is going to discontinue the look sometime after next year. Here is a direct quote from the article:

Polaroid is saying goodbye to its iconic, white-bordered instant pictures. It expects to stop selling the film next year.

Generations of photographers have watched Polaroid pictures develop almost magically before their eyes, but digital photography has made the instant photos seem less instant.

The article on wikipedia also gives some insight on the end of production for “instant film” here:

Group Worldwide) announced it would cease production of all instant film; the company will shut down three factories and lay off 450 workers.[1] Sales of chemical film by all makers have dropped by at least 25% per year in this decade, and the decline is likely to accelerate. Fujifilm is now the only remaining supplier of instant film in the United States.

Want to read more?

Here is the link to the first article: http://www.ireport.com/ir-topic-stories.jspa?topicId=19093

The Wikipedia article is located here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_film