Just like last year, I went to Otakon, but didn’t pay to get in.  Perhaps next year.  So, like last year, I mostly photographed people  under the the awning of the convention center.  Unlike last year, I asked lots of people if I could photograph them.  It paid off as I was able to get lots of shots I would have otherwise missed.  It also yielded me a lot more single person portraits rather than just massive group shots that everyone else happened to be shooting.  So, here are some of my favorite shots.

Here’s my Aug Time Capsule.  It mostly consists of 365 Project shots.

It’s August - the last month to get to the beach, so I went with this image from Coney Island. Click on the image below and, when it loads, right-click to set it as your desktop background.

[caption id=“attachment_3498” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Aug 2010 - Desktop background for Square Monitors”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_3499” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Aug 2010 - Desktop background for Widescreen Monitor”] [/caption]

Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 - 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.

Almost exactly 2 years ago I started micro-blogging. Back then I signed up for Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk accounts. One month later I concluded that I really liked Twitter and that Pownce and Plurk were annoying. A few days later I discovered Identi.ca - a FLOSS version of Twitter and decided I would send frivolous tweets to Twitter and tecnological dents to Identi.ca. Then, a little while later Pownce was taken off the net. So what has happened in the intervening years?

As always you can view it on their site here.  (and sign up for your own)  Here are the photos from the late July Photojojo time capsule.   It’s mostly my 365 with a little bit of Otakon thrown in.

This year I attended my first HOPE conference.  HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a hacker conference organized by 2600 The Hacker Quarterly.  After hearing about the talks they had at 2008’s HOPE (The Last HOPE) when I was listening to the 2600 podcast, I knew I had to attend this year.  I was not disappointed.

HOPE, if this one is an indication of how they usually are, is like an East Coast version of Defcon.  Really, the only difference is that the atmosphere of the talks is slightly different given the HOPE being located in NYC vs Defcon being located in Las Vegas.  While the playful hacker spirit is present at both, there’s usually an extra bit of an anything goes feeling in Vegas.  There were also a few talks that were presenting preliminary versions of the data they hoped to present at Blackhat/Defcon.  It makes sense, since those are the more prestigious hacker cons.

Once again I share with you the funny (and in some cases, insightful) quotes I’ve gathered over the last few months:

I had this conversation with Duffy yesterday about how politicians need to hire me as a lifestyle coach “Hey Dan, should I pay all my taxes?” “Yes! Are you stupid?” “Hey Dan, should I solicit male prostitutes in the bathroom if I’m a conservative Republican?” “…No…”

Dan: I was ready to get lunch, but found out I’m not hungy. It sucks.

View it online here.  For those new to this blog, Photojojo is a time capsule that emails me my most interesting photos from a year ago.  This time it’s mostly involving our trip to Florida for my grandfather’s birthday.

As I mentioned yesterday, all went to see Toy Story 3 (in 2D) at a 2230 showing. We mostly had the theatre to ourselves – it was somewhere between one quarter and one half full – great for a movie that hadn’t been out very long. But, we are odd ducks in our hatred of 3D. I thought the movie was the perfect ending to the trilogy. You never know when the entertainment industry is involved and there’s money to be made, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read that the Toy Story franchise is done as far as feature-length movies go. Given the nice, neat close this movie gave to the characters, it’s probably best that way. I’d like to get into some potential spoiler material to explain why I enjoyed the movie so much. I’ll probably go in order along with the movie so you can decide when to jump off if you think it’s too much information.