As some of you may have seen on Engadget, Ryan is challenging himself to a month of suffering at the hands of the Wii Fit. And while he is nowhere near overweight, we do live a somewhat… sedentary lifestyle. A lot of sitting is involved. Therefore I’ve decide to come along on his fitness odyssey, not only as a supportive measure, but also to encourage myself to live a healthier lifestyle.

Yes, if it takes a video game to get me off my lazy ass, then so be it.

According to the little white board sitting on my living room floor, here are my stats so far:
Weight (I can’t believe I’m telling you these things): 117 lbs
Height: 5′7″
BMI: 18.5
Body Age: 35 (WTF?!)

OK, so apparently I’m a little underweight (my burrito belly is begging to differ). I’m not sure how Wii Fit expects to solve this problem (”Please get off the Wii Fit and go eat a pizza while watching Battlestar Galactica”) but I guess I need to build more muscle mass. The Fit also told me that my balance sucks by asking me “Do you trip a lot when you walk?” You snarky bastard.

I’ll be reporting every couple of days to let you know how this thing is going. I know the Wii Fit isn’t exactly the same as training for a triathlon, but it’s more exercising than I ever do (except for climbing, which I hope to work more into this month as well). Wish me luck!

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The folks over at Qik were kind enough to outfit me with a Nokia N95, so I could test out their service. I’ve been quasi-resistant to lifecasting of any kind, for a few reasons:

1. My days are typically very boring.
2. I feel bad shoving a camera into people’s faces and streaming them.
3. You wouldn’t like me anymore if you knew just how frequently I speak to my cats.

Jason and Scoble seem to find no end to the things they want to share with the Qik (and by proxy, Twitter communities), but I find myself hesitant to turn on the camera. After some brainstorming, here are some applications that I could see Qik being useful for:

1. Clothes shopping — If I’m out shopping, and I can’t decide which shirt or shoes to pick, why not let the live audience help? I mean, they’re the ones that have to look at the outfit on camera later anyway, right?
2. Company on public transportation — As if there aren’t enough crazies on SF Muni, let’s add one more (me) talking AT my phone (instead of on it) during my commute.
3. Instant support group — If one of my girlfriends is having man trouble, it would be nice to have another hundred or so people to back me up at any given moment to say “Dump the loser!”

I’m only half kidding on some of those. What value do you guys get out of lifecasting? Why is it so popular? Maybe because it’s like reality TV, but without all the convinient editing? I’ve tried a few other services, and none of them have been compelling enough for me to continue to use them. The mobility factor with Qik is a definite plus, so maybe that will help.

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Most of you guessed that one of my new projects was over at Revision3 as the new co-host of Tekzilla with Patrick Norton. And yes, you are correct! In fact, I was over there yesterday shooting for Friday’s episode. As I’ve said before, I love working with everyone over there, and I think it’s going to be a blast.

However, there’s still another project that I can’t say anything about just yet! A girl’s gotta have her secrets, right?

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A few weeks ago I received an email from the girlfriend of a member of the band, The Carps. In the letter, she told me that they had written a song called “Veronica Belmont,” and that it was based on Internet culture and feeling like you know the people you meet online. She linked me to their MySpace page, and there it was! It’s a fun song, and some of the lyrics definitely made me chuckle:

Dark light as we expire,
But go ahead, just dance, dance, dance

He pwned in that disco,
When they played chocolate rain, rain, rain.

Apparently the band is really starting to blow up, because I’ve been getting emails every day from people telling me they’ve heard it on XM, indie stations, and even on RCRD LBL (where you can download the track for free!). It’s awesome (and humbling) that they thought of me, so I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to those guys. I hope they tour in SF sometime!

Waves and Shambles, the EP with the single on it is coming out this Tuesday, the 8th! I can’t wait to pick it up. But of course, all bets are off if they steal my Google juice. (I kid, I kid!)

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It’s impressive how far the show has come since we started; at first I was a little apprehensive about the idea of doing episodes 5 days a week while building it from the ground up (as I imagine anyone would be). But with time we’ve assembled a really great, motivated team that makes the whole thing look effortless. Of course, there’s no shortage of solid talent at Mahalo, and they’ll be working with more people in the future too.

As for the new projects, well, you’ll find out soon enough! Needless to say, I’m very excited about what’s just around the bend.

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I wish this was an April Fool’s joke, but it’s not. Deutsche Telekom is demanding that Engadget Mobile discontinue its use of the color magenta, as it causes “confusion” between the brands. In response, Engadget has gone a lovely shade of pink for the day (although, I kind of love it and wish it would stay that way). Ryan has started a campaign (OK, maybe he didn’t mean to start it, but I am) to show DT that we won’t be bossed around! We’ll use #ed008c to our little hearts content!

It’s so silly, but it’s also a symptom of big business getting it all wrong once again. I’m not against protecting your trademark, but I’m definitely against frivolous and needless lawsuits. Oh, I’m sorry, were too many people going to Engadget Mobile to buy Sidekicks? Was Verizon blaming DT for leaked photos on Engadget Mobile? I don’t think so.

Please, feel free to argue in the comments, or to steal the image above and spread the word.

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I noticed today that Thomas Hawk (and later TechCrunch) are writing about a service called TagCow, which apparently can tag large batches of photos at a time. Anyone who takes a lot of pictures can attest to the immense annoyance of tagging tons of photos, especially when you want to be very specific about them. Sure, you can batch tag when you upload, but then you still have to go back and add whatever other tags are needed depending on the individual photo (like batch tagging all my SXSW photos “sxsw” “austin” “conference” and then going back and adding someone’s name, etc). Pain in the butt, right? Some people (like Tantek) bow to the wisdom of crowds and simply add a “needs tags” note to the photos, but it would be nice to have a service or program that could actually recognize the content of the photo and do it for you.

Is TagCow that much-needed service? Thomas seems to think so, although he admits that he’s not quite sure how the technology works. TechCrunch says that it’s got to be people actually viewing each photo and giving it the appropriate tags, although how someone could go through that many photos is beyond me (says the girl who works for a “people-powered search engine“). Arrington says:

The answer is, humans do it. I note that the TagCow site is careful not to say anything about the tagging process, and never use the word “automated” or anything else that would suggests computers are doing the work. Munjal Shah, the founder of Riya/Like, agreed, noting that it recognized a witch in Thomas’ photo - he says this just isn’t something a computer can do today.

But this makes me concerned about privacy. If I’m uploading 200 photos from my vacation, do I really want a bunch of dudes sitting around an office picking apart each one? No, obviously not. Therefore, I probably wouldn’t use the service. However, since TagCow is being a little vague about how everything works, I’m worried that people will walk into a situation where their privacy could be at stake. Does TagCow keep copies of the photos you send them? Do they live on some server there, even though you’re only tagging them for, say, your personal collection (as opposed to being on Flickr or Zooomr)? TC also writes:

And the business is definitely a little sketchy. Worried about the privacy of your data? Just don’t click on their Privacy Policy or Terms of Use: “Privacy policy is TBD.” and “Legal stuff TBD.” Not exactly a way to build confidence.

Yikes. Anyhow, I’m aware that I’m putting on my tinfoil hat a little early, considering we hardly know anything about TagCow. It could be the answer to our tagging prayers, or it could be a huge privacy-sucking black hole. For now I think I’ll continue adding my metadata by hand.

However, their tagline is hilarious.

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The best search tool for Twitter that I’ve found. One of my biggest annoyances about Twitter is that the Replies tab only shows responses with your username as the first word in the tweet (e.g., “@veronica talks about her cats too much”) and not responses with the username any where else (e.g., “sick of hearing about @veronica’s cats”). Tweetscan solves this by finding any instance of the word. It’s also really helpful for tracking hashtags, like #sxsw.

Takes the Tweetscan idea one step further by tracking entire conversation threads. You can see the divergent paths as the topic morphs and changes, and you can also see where comments of yours fit in with conversations already in progress. A new site on the scene, but one of the most useful.

This would be insanely helpful to me if I had a car. Alas, I do not, but I think this site kills two birds with one stone: you get instant traffic info, as well as the ability to vent your gridlocked frustrations.

Too lazy to read the news? You can read the outrage and support for the candidates here. Clicking on the individual candidates names will show you other ways to follow them online (i.e., Flickr, Facebook, MySpace) as well as their most recent tweets.

I’m not entirely sure how much of the Twitter API Ze Frank is using, but it’s gotta be worked in there somehow! When I first heard of Colorwars, I was not impressed. However, once I set aside my childhood fears of being chosen last for everything, I realized that it was a fun and interactive way to use Twitter. Not only that, Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV promised us presents if we joined veryGreenTeam.

Of course, there are many others that are fun but don’t really have much purpose other than to be entertaining: TwitterVision, TwitterPoster and Twitterholic come to mind. Tweetmeme is another one that has potential, but it almost always features non-English tweets, which makes it difficult for my monolingual brain.

Do you have any personal favorites that I missed? For a huge list of other sites and for more API info, head over to the Twitter Fan Wiki.

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Sunday: This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, Steve Gillmore, John C. Dvorak and Patrick Norton. We talked about all sorts of news, including SXSW (and Twitter, natch) as well as some unfounded rumors involving Revision3. Which leads us to…

Tuesday: Tekzilla! I love guest hosting this show, mostly because it means I get to hang out with Patrick and Roger all afternoon.

Thursday: The Instance Episode #100! I was honored and delighted to be on the 100th episode of my favorite podcast. Scott and Randy had folks on air that have made appearances or recorded special pieces for the show over the last 100 episodes, so it was like a big homecoming.

Friday: I went down to CNET for an in-studio recording of Buzz Out Loud. It was nice to be back in the BOL chair, even if I let Tom run the production side of things (it’s been a while, I’d probably break it). They live stream on ustream.tv now too, so I was able to record it. Not too exciting to watch us talk, I bet, but you get to see me chug some coffee.

And on Monday and Wednesday I recorded upcoming episodes of Mahalo Daily, so it was quite a full week.

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Looking for a reason to drag out your old copy of The Matrix or Raiders of the Lost Ark? OK, bad examples, you don’t really need a reason for those. How about Batman and Robin or Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith? These movies can actually be tolerable with the help of Rifftrax, possibly the greatest thing to happen to home movie viewing since Netflix. Created by Mystery Science Theater 3000 alum Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, they continue the tried and true formula of commenting (hilariously) as a film plays. If you’re not familiar with the format, think of it as having your three most sarcastic and absurd friends sitting in your living room with you, with a constant running commentary. Yes, it could be annoying if you’ve never seen the film, but Rifftrax tends to hit the most popular blockbusters that you’ve likely seen 50 times.

I’ve seen MST3K in the past, and Ryan is a huge fan (and by “fan” I mean he was an actual fan club member…), but it was our friend Dan that introduced us to Rifftrax a few months ago. I was surprised that I hadn’t heard more about it, considering how neatly it fits into two major areas of interest for me: geeky movies and downloadable content. Getting your Rifftrax is easy enough: you pick a movie, download the Rifftrax audio file, and then follow the syncing instructions. Throughout the film, DisembAudio (the robotic voice behind their “Perfect Synch Technology”) will read a line of dialog at the moment it should be said on the film, so you can pause for a second if you’re out of sync. Beware — the syncing process can lead to arguments amongst video watchers: “No, just pause the film for a second!” “No way, it’s the Rifftrax that’s off, pause that!” “Oh great, now it’s totally screwed up…” and so forth. Luckily, they have their own RiffTrax Player that will do all the work for you, if you’re watching the DVD on a PC (dammit).

I’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, 300, and The Matrix so far, and 300 was definitely my favorite. There are over 50 titles available and they cost between $1.99-3.99, and it’s absolutely worth the money to breathe new life into some of these films.

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See? Now if I’m ever on your flight and the pilot goes unconscious, I can probably rescue everyone! Uhh… maybe not.

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