I ran across the video below of Britney’s Piece of Me, where a fan-remixed her video (and the international version) to the Mike Rizzo remix of the track.  And say what you will about Ms. Spears - she’s a guilty pleasure of mine, though - the remix   video gave me a really great idea.

So here’s the deal… I won’t have time to get a new mix out before New Years - I’m travelling quite a bit for the holidays, and working on set in Seattle for a work shoot.  So I’d like to change it up this time… and do a fan-made house mix set, chock full of your requests.

You know my ear, and the style of house tunes I be mixin’.  So if you know of a hot new house track you’d like to submit, shoot me an email.  If you’ve got the mp3, I’ll toss her in the mix bucket.  If you just know the song and the remix, I’ll see if I can’t purchase it at Beatport to add to the playlist.  I’ll mix us all up something hot.

Vague requests of “this one great song, can’t think of it” will sadly be overlooked.  Nobody likes a cock tease!

To my fellow bloggers out there, I’d appreciate any help you might like to give to spread the word - let’s have some fun with this.

Feel free to link to my mixes if you need to prove I’m worth my salt. If you feel I am.

Oh my God that Bravehound’s shameless.

They want a piece of us.

That’s right boys and girls… more accurately, boys and more boys… us and ours are off to Toronto to bring in the new year.  I get to see some of my West coast buddies, and bring in the new year seeing my favorite event DJ, the amazing and always energetic Offer Nissim, hailing from Israel.  Fuckin sweet.

Strangely enough, this’ll be my first time to Toronto (outside of the airport).  It’s Offer Nissim’s first time playing on Toronto, too, and it’s sure to be a hell of a time. 

If you’re lookin’ for some fresh NYE plans and wanna bounce the night away to some hot house tunes…

After beating hundreds of teams around the world, twenty young international teams competed last June at the YCC: Film competition.  They were given the same brief, and 48 hours to create it.

The Task? Create a 30 second commercial for MTV’s Switch campaign, using the Nokia N93i.

Italy won, and now all the video submissions are online for all of us to see.  I don’t know about you, but of the good many I watched, Norway (above) ended up being my favorite.

This is just the latest effort by Nokia to get creative and film professionals to dive in and use their devices.  Which they might as well show off, as they have little competition in terms of video quality on a mobile.

… and yes, my Nokia N82’s video quality matches the N93i… and in some ways, beats it :o

I’ve had the Nokia N82 for a couple weeks now, and rather that just do a typical review summarizing my impressions, I thought I’d break it down a bit.

And instead of starting with the hardware (the true first impression gathered when you pick up a new device) I thought I’d dig in on star feature of this sucker - it’s camera capabilities.

The first thing I did when I wanted to test the camera on this phone, was turn off the lights, pull the shades, and block all light from my office.  Then I unsheathed this little beauty, and saw how it might do in complete darkness.  The result is my trademark self-pic as seen above. 

No noise reduction - no sort of help was required to get a great low-light - or in this case, NO-light - photo result.  A first for Nokia.  Fucking.  Sweet.

Considering most folks that grind the day away at work, quite a lot of life happens after the sun sets.  So I’m loving this.

Here’s a photo of Mark reading towleroad at his desk.  Our office has pretty low-lighting, and this is an example of a portrait-style shot that would have turned out pretty cruddy on any phone that doesn’t have a Xenon flash.  Now, it’s no problem.

Now, just couple of random shots… one of our coffee table riddled with Wii paraphernalia, and another of a purple reflective Christmas tree.  So far, colors are turning out to be super vivid, much like the N73.

It’s a shame I didn’t have this phone when the leaves were turning this fall… would have made for some pretty sweet photos - the K800i I was using washes colors out a bit.  The N82 does the trademark N73 tweak to even small bits of color to make things seem a bit more saturated than what’s really there… also a sort of photographic inaccuracy.  But it’s one most people not only don’t mind, most would actually prefer.

Next are a couple shots indoors, where there are is streaming daylight coming in.  Depending on how you set up the shot, it can really darken subjects or give undesired glare.  You can see a *little* bit of that here, but non more that you’d expect from most typical digital cameras.

Here’s an example of a shot I’m really happy to show you.  Here we are, having a good time out for drinks, and I snap a group photo.  Lighting is dark with the occasional strobe, my hand holding the camera certainly isn’t super still by any means, and neither are we. 

Not the world’s best photo by any means, but an amazing photo to show the quality of the N82 in an environment most phones would produce grainy, dark, blurry photos with purple in the dark areas and crazy amounts of noise all over.

Now, I know there are many ways to test a camera’s photo quality, and I certainly admit that I haven’t covered them all.  I just wanted to show how the N82 will stand out from other 5MP camera phones in just the first couple weeks of normal use.  Once I stop working around the clock, I’ll be sharing more.  And, of course, once the photo journal gets caught up - a couple weeks behind, still - all my new travels will be captured on this sucker.

Do I love it?  Gosh… have I ever even had a camera phone before this one?  Doesn’t seem like it.

I’m pretty sure this is my first unboxing. Certainly appears to be.

It’s just a quick and dirty video of me opening my N82 package for the first time. Also decided to give iMovie 08 another chance at a simple video editing job. It’s hard when you’re used to After Effects, to know that you can’t move a title if you wanted to. But it did the job ok, for this sorta thing.

Now I just gotta catch up on a few weeks of backlogged photos so I can get to posting N82 photos!

And, of course, I’ll be reviewing the N82. But after a day of use, I can already tell you to expect great things.

Gosh, what could it be?  I’ll just have to open and find out.

Like you had to guess.

So.  Excites.  All over my face.