Buying electronics should be a pleasurable experience, but somehow it never is. The stores are built like labrynths with things in the most unlikely, illogical places ever. You’re always searching and waiting and listening to somebody crank annoying music to test out a hot sub or a super crappy iPod speaker set. There’s always someone who spoils the fun of your first moments with your new gear.

Now granted, I’m not your average electronics purchaser. I know my shizz. I go into a store knowing exactly what I want. And I want to get it in less than 30 seconds. I don’t want to discuss the features, or talk about extra warrantees, or hang out in the Mac section opening and closing iLife apps waiting for somebody to notice how cool I am. I just wanna get my gear and get it home and turn it on and realize I’ve bought the wrong batteries.

I get so frustrated in electronic stores that I have to actively fantasize about an alternate reality where annoying people are suddenly taken out by mythical demons and large beasts of the underworld…

Help Department:

Me: Do you know where I can find external HDs?
Dude: Uh… that’s not my department. [turns to guy next to him] uhhh, Dan do you know where the HDs are?
Dan: Uhhh… [looks at me] You should really get blue ray.

Suddenly, a crazy-eyed Spartan with a glistening sword leaps out from behind the USB cables. FOR SPARTA!!!!!!!!

Camera Department:

Me: I’d like to get the Canon G9.
Pale, skinny dude with spiky peroxide hair and slight lisp: Oh yeah. Super great deal. Great choice. Yeah, I’ll just go get one from the back for you.
[16.5 minutes pass. I see skinny dude yakking to his buddies in the Xbox section. Steam literally starts to come out of my ears. Camera dude finally notices me standing in front of me.]
Dude: Can I help you?

Just then a gigantic tarantula burrows out of the earth. ATTACK!!!

Mac Department:
mid-20s over primped girl with Gucci purse & high heels looking at MB Air: Do these Macs come with Facebook?

Just then a snaggle-toothed T-Rex leaps out from behind the Mac Pro… CHOMP!!!

My day started out pretty lame. I burnt the last two pieces of toast in the house and when I tried to scrape off the burnt bits my toast fell into a strainer full of old soggy spaghetti. Then to top it off, there was no jam, peanut butter, or honey. So I made some tea and guess what? No milk. NoooooooOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo. So I was preparing for a super crappy day o’ lameness, but alas, the fates were in my favour! Canada Post brought me some great goodies!

Adam of BeingPrimitive.com sent me Dr. Who Tardis Chockluts all the way from Stirlingshire, Scotland! The box even made strange noises. My package kept going off in the post office. People stared at me. I shrugged.

Then I got a package from Mr. Diggles of Oregon-based uber wallet company, dbclay.

Then Super Aussie Animator, Pasquale of Dark Motion drew me the best head boy badger ever.

I also received some awesome Penguin Vectorama entries. I still need your,s so get your Adobe-on! Deadline is this Sunday, April 13th at midnight (-8 GMT) to get your entries to me.

Then I put on my horns and my Ustream Tee that I got from Startups Schwag. No one wanted to touch my horns. Fail.

Aside: I maaay have been thinking of live streaming some Mostly Lisaness sometime. I’m not sure what I would do. Stare at you while you stare at me. What are you looking at? Oh am I supposed to entertain you? Not the other way around. Right. What do you think? Would you tune into live streamyness?

Then I got ketchup on my white tank top and stubbed by toe. So it all evened out in the end.

PS. if you’d like to send me goodies or a Macbook Air, I probably wouldn’t object!

Can it be true? Flickr, the photo sharing platform we’ve all grown to love and spend obsessive amounts of time on has just added video sharing to it’s list of uber features? Oh yes it’s true and here’s the proof!

The Deal:

• Videos must be 90 seconds or less, under 150MB (which is huuuge for a 90s clip)
• Upload of a 7.2MB file took about a minute (on my zippity quick internet)
• Accepted .mov and .m4v files a-ok
• Uses the same uploading tool as photos
• You can tag and describe your videos or add them to a set or group!

The coolest feature of the new Flickr video is that allows you to customize the size of your video to suit your embedding needs. That’s ace in my book. Plus, the navigation is really simple and familiar if you are used to using Flickr. And I think it’s super cool to be able to play a video from your Flickr homepage. It’s just really neat.

The lamest feature is the inability to change the thumbnail. Must have good thumbnaaiiiilll. Super important for the vain and self-conscious.

As for it’s role in video sharing, we will see. It’s definitely quick and easy to upload video and great for sharing that 20 second hail storm video, or a quick video snapshot of Paddington station, but with the 90 second limit it won’t directly compete with Viddler, Vimeo, Revver, and YouTube for true vloggers. I see it being really hot with young tech savvy travelers who want to share a small vid with friends and family on the fly.

Also, Pownce has added support for Flickr Video, so finally Powncers can share something other than YouTube vids.

Thanks to Laughing Squid who broke the news on Twitter as it happened and Phillip Jeffery who broke the news of the breaking news. It was super twittery.

*sorry for the back to back video sharing posts. this flickr video came outta nowhere and i had to give it a go. early adopters ftw!

I’ll admit it. It took me some time to get to know Viddler. With so many video sharing platforms out there it’s hard to decide which one is best. I have been using Revver for the majority of my videos and Vimeo for a few odds n’ ends here and there, but recently I had a bad experience with the Revver wp-plugin. And Pasquale can vouch for me. I had a total geek freakout. To put it lightly, the Revver wp-plugin was slowing my blog loading and my admin panal down considerably and has been for months, only I didn’t know it until yesterday. ARG! Fail Revver!

So after that tiff with Revver, I decided to give Viddler another go. And I’m so happy I did! Viddler has a really cool and interactive community that I’m excited to meet and friend. Oh and they also featured my Super Awesome G4 video! Go check it out on Viddler.

Hi5 Viddler. And a big Mostly Lisa welcome to all my new Viddler friends. So far I have 2. So, I’m pretty optimistic that I’ll have at least 2 more by the end of the week!

PS. Can I come to the Viddler Villa next year. I’ll even bring Junior Mints.

Vectorama is a monthly design competition on MostlyLisa.com. The First Annual Vectorama was held last month and the results were superwikkidawesome. 12 fantastic designers battled it out with one goal in mind: Vector Sized Glory! The winner was Sway Media and he claimed his ad space with true iPirate gusto and tried to auction off his winning adspace to the highest bidder. Savvy.

This month’s Vectorama Challenge will not be easy. But, I’m opening it up to include Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks, so you have the tools to create the most awesome Penguin Themed Illustration ever! That’s right. Penguins.

Here are the rules:

1. You must use Illustrator, Photoshop or Fireworks.
2. Your design must include at least one penguin.
3. You must include some kind of text that encapsulates the meaning of your illustration or just makes it ridiculous or funny or all three.
4. Your design must not scare small children or warp the minds of impressionable youth (for some reason a lot of teenage boys visit my site…hmmm)

What you win:

1. Vector Sized Glory!!!
2. A coveted adspace on my sidebar which will display your winning design and link to your website for one month.
3. A whole lotta link l0v3!

**Send your 500×300 entries to mostlylisa *at* gmail *dot* com. You have until Sunday, April 13th at midnight (-8 GMT) to get your entries to me.**

A few weeks ago, I was a nobody. I know it’s hard to believe, but I was basically rabbit kibble. Do rabbits eat kibble? Chomp?

But then G4’s Attack of the Show ranked me as the 5th hottest woman of the web and my life went from bunny kibble to like, a really expensive cheese… that’s been aging for years and packaged in fancy paper and served on a silver plate from a store that sells uber fancy plates. Don’t forget the Crystal.

For more videos as cool as this one check out: Mostly Lisa’s Presents a Model Moment.

I wouldn’t mind if you Subscribed to my feed.

Peaking over the screen of MB I saw this uber sunset, so jumped up, grabbed my camera, and ran out my door and into the middle of the street to snap this shot.

PS. Danger is my middle name.
PPS. I realized, only after returning to my apartment, that I was still wearing my pajama bottoms. Oh well, the humiliation was worth it for this photo.

 
It’s gonna be a super productive evening. I can feel it!

I tried so hard to get a part on this show as it is filmed in Vancouver. My efforts of setting up a covert lemonade stand outside of Starbuck’s condo did not yield the results I had been hoping for. On the plus side, I made $1.45.

I did, however, turn down opportunities to be an extra and get on the uber set, only cuz it’s kind of an unspoken given in the industry that if you are seen on camera as an extra (especially if you are featured), you won’t get cast in a speaking role later on. You’ve already blown your screentime and most uber fans of the show will recognize you. They’ll say,

“Hey didn’t that girl play the third, three-headed dragon keeper in the dragon vs. fire-eating goblins S1E08? Uhh. They’ve brought her back as the tortured emo vampire lover in S3E10. So lame to recycle actors like that. I bet they thought I wouldn’t figure it out because she’s wearing that big plastic suit and the head piece with those huuuuge horns as the dragon keeper and the fact that there are two other heads. I mean you can’t even see her face. It’s subtle, but I noticed. And it pretty much annoyed me enough to stop watching the show.”

PS. No spoil sporting all you spoiling-type people. I have waiting yonks to see this season in it’s entirety on DVD. And I shall right after I finish this work. *looks around to see if anyone is watching… presses play*

PPS. Check out my best Cylon impression circa June 2006… pre dSLR, hv20s, MB, and twitter. (You can tell cuz I actually have a tan that I got from the sun and not a PS warming filter).

The Scene: I walk into my local wifi-friendly coffee shop pull out my Macbook and sit down. It takes me 30 seconds to zone into internet land and fire up transmission *ahem* the iTunes store. Another 30 seconds pass. Tap tap on my shoulder.

Guy: So are Macs really all that?

Me: Uhh… [glances at MB. notes it's uberness] Yeah. Uh.. [shrugs]

Guy: Yeah, cuz I’ve seen them around. So I guess you use them. Macs [pause] eh?

Me: Yeah. They are great for what I do. I’m a blogger, media…

Guy: I’ve heard of Blogs.

Me: [looking for large mallet-shaped object]

Guy: Are you on myspace?

Fail. I bet you don’t think it’s possible to beat the finesse and wit of this pick-up line. Well it is. Check out the Best Pick-up Line Ever.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love Strobist super DIY photo guru, David Hobby. His blog, Strobist.com is a daily inspiration for me. When I got my first digital SLR, about a year and a half ago, I spent most of my time sculking about in the alleyways of my city, photographing “hidden treasures” that I’d find. This “derelict” phase stopped abruptly in July 2007, about 10 days into the 88 day Vancouver city garbage strike.

I then moved my attention to things that smelt nicer like cupcakes, Pez, & trees. And after a few months of photographing happy shiny things, I worked up enough courage to photograph real live people who were not always happy or shiny. My main lighting techniques were:

• Natural light is your best friend;
• A big window on a sunny or partially cloudy day is your second best friend;
• Low light? Open the aperture as wide as that sucker will go. f1.4 is money;
• Cheap whiteboard makes a really nice bounce.

During this time, I experimented with using my behemoth of a flash, the 580ex. But, it was so heavy, I always regretted bringing it out to live performances, and frankly it scared people, and now I have no friends. That’s an exaggeration. I have a few friends, it’s just they seldom talk to me.

In the last six months, I’ve started to the long journey to master off-camera flash setups in order to exploring light more and create cool fashion, modeling, and artsy shoots. The trouble is that I need to make these setups for cheap as I only found $1.45 in the crooks and crannies of my sofa.

Using Strobist’s awesome DIY projects as inspiration, I am starting a new series on Mostly Lisa entitled: DIY Photography tips for the Thrifty and Unrich.

For the first shoot I wanted to do something a bit moodier than a typical modeling/acting headshot using an off-camera flash, some hard reflective surfaces (both portable and non) and a wee bit of creativity and smarts.

How we did it:
For these two shots, we had two Canon speedlights (430ex and 580ex) with Stofen Omnibounces at the same height as the subject, pointed straight up to give a “bare bulb” effect that would simultaneously blow out the background (a white wall in my living room) and light up the two 2′x3′ pieces of whiteboard in front of the photographer’s face (just out of frame) as fill.

The flashes were triggered with two cheap and untrustworthy Gadget Infinity remotes and were at 1/8 power, with the 580ex maybe less two thirds of a stop because it’s a more powerful unit. We started shooting at f1.4, but the focus was a bit soft in the above photo, so we bumped it up to f2.8 and added the second flash to create edge highlights (as you can tell by the highlights on both sides of my hair).

The Set-up:
One whiteboard was clamped to another lightstand with a couple $4 Home Depot clamps duct taped together to make a two-way clamp and the other (actually two boards taped together) was standing up on a nearby shelf (like a Christmas card). The camera was handheld just behind and in the middle of the two bounces.

Some Levels and Color Balance adjustments were made in Photoshop to enrich the blacks, push the highlights up some more, and warm up the whole image a little bit. No retouching was done on the computer-induced-big-black-bags-under-my-eyes. Not one bit.

If you have any cool off camera flashy photos that you’ve experimented with, link them in the comments!

Or if this is all waaaaay too technical for you you can just answer one question:
What camera do you use?
i’m actually really interested what camera everyone has - even if it’s not a fancy smancy one. So, talk camera nerdy to me!