Greg Needel's Blog

Employment

Greg Needel — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:06:35 +0000

Thanks to all who have expressed concern. I can not go into all the details of what happened today, but I am still employed. I was offered an option which allows me to continue but it requires relocation to another facility. I will be making my decision over the next week and it is not going to be an easy one.

Right now my heart goes out to all of my other co-workers and friends who were not given this option. I hope all of the talented people who were let go today will find another position quickly at a company who is more employee centric. While I feel fortunate to have a choice I can’t feel anything but anger and remorse that this situation had to happen in the first place.

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Stanley Contest

Greg Needel — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:25:29 +0000

Stanley who makes high quality hand tools is having a contest to win an awesome collection of tools that I would love to have in my shop.

Check out http://www.aconcordcarpentercomments.blogspot.com/2010/02/stanley-tool-giveaway.html for information about the giveaway

And

http://www.stanleytools.com to see their complete product offerings

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New Discovery ad

Greg Needel — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:41:00 +0000

Discovery channel made a new video, it features FIRST kids, and optimums prime very cool.

Posted via email from robogreg’s posterous

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Posterous Test

Greg Needel — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:54:55 +0000

Please bear with me I am trying posterous.com to update all of my social media and I suspect I will be getting double and triple posts in some places. i am going to try and sort this all out.

Posted via email from robogreg’s posterous

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Auto-Tune the News

Greg Needel — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:23:41 +0000

A couple of months ago a friend sent me a link to a youtube clip called “auto tune the news” After watching it I needed to have more. Now at semi-regular increments they are doing new ones. The general premise of the videos is that they take clips for relevant news stories, CSPAN, CBS News with Katie Couric, and other sources and run them through and audio processor called “AutoTune.” Auto Tune is traditionally used for after effects smoothing for pop, R&B, and other genres to cover mistakes and to add a level of computer sounds to music. Artists such as Sher, Janet Jackson, and T-Pain made it famous. Recently it has been used as a method to make amateur songs as it can be setup to convert regular speech into something which has a melody. You can read more about Auto tune on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune

A group called “The Gregory Brothers” http://thegregorybrothers.com/ is responsible for them and I hope they keep them up because they are a good laugh every time. At this point there are 7 of them (#5 is my fav). You can view them below and make sure to subscribe to them on youtube to find the new ones. On a side note I wonder if Katie Couric knows about them.

Edit: as it seems the mastermind behind these videos is a guy named Michael Gregory, If you check him out on google you will see he has done a bunch of other parody, autotune, and performances, including an aired audition to American Idol. I may be going out on a limb but he could become the next Weird AL.

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Life changing week

Greg Needel — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:40:22 +0000

I can very convincingly say that this week is going to be one of those times which I will remember forever. There is so much happening that come the beginning of September, I will be living a quite different life then I am right now.

In continuance of my house searching, I put an offer in on a house. This home came out of the blue and the situation seems like it is the correct move. Right across the street from me there is an identical duplex unit for sale (includes both units) each one is 1200 sq-ft with an attached garage. There are atleast 2 offers for the house including mine, but if I get it the plan is to live in one side and rent the other one out, essentially living for free. This concept is really novel to me, because I keep the same quality of living that I have right now except i now save a considerable amount each year. We will see what they say tomorrow, as my offer expires Monday @ 5pm CST.

Tomorrow morning at 7 am I am getting in my car and will not return until Sunday late next week, at which point I will have the love of my life Christina in tow. I have been somewhat quite about my relationship but Christina and I have decided to move in together and she is relocating from Buffalo NY to Jackson. This is a really big step for us and we are optimistic as we begin our life journey together.

I am excited and not one bit nervous about the changes going on in my life, and know that this week’s results will hold a forever impact on my life.

Somehow this seems relevant. Change the word lease to “purchase offer”

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Open source House hunt

Greg Needel — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:31:57 +0000

As many of you know I have made the decision to settle in Jackson, TN for a few years. And since the housing market is at the bottom of the barrel and there is an 8k tax credit I have decided to buy a home here. I have been conducting my search for quite some time now, asking the opinions and impressions of friends, family and co-workers. Now it is time for me to Open source my house search. I have created a new page on my site called “houses” www.robogreg.com/houses It contains an embedded google map and google doc of the homes which I am considering. I also have a large gallery of photos of the 20 or so homes which I have viewed which will be sorted better and added as details in the google map. So if you want to help me pick out a home just keep checking back to my page and leave me comments.

View House search in a larger map

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Bonnaroo Media Continued…

Greg Needel — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:06:25 +0000

So to my surprise I was not the only one with a gigapan at bonnaroo. It looks like one of the media pass guys also had one. His came out a bit clearer then mine but I am going to investing in some upgraded camera hardware to fix that issue. Here are his.

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Billy Mays…a tragic loss.

Greg Needel — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:35:00 +0000

Unless you have been living under a rock(in which case you won’t be reading this), you know that this past week has been very strange with the losses of 4 Celebrities. Ed McMahon known for star search and the tonight show, Farrah Fawcett for her work as an actress and model, Michael Jackson for numerous Pop Music hits and of course Billy Mays the ultimate Pitchman. While each of these people brought a different element of entertainment and contributions to the world I make the argument that the significance of the loss of Billy Mays is by far the worst.

In today’s society it is common place for us to put actors, musicians and sports stars in the spotlight, it is because culture likes to be entertained. While I am not bashing or saying that we don’t need entertainment we create such an importance on it due to the fact that we want to be distracted from our own lives. Many people get sucked into entertainment that they forget to live, watching endless sports games and movies; And while I indulge in this quite a bit, we as a culture should be focusing on the more important things in life.

People like Billy Mays and his “Pitchmen” counterpart Anthony Sullivan and their related direct response companies are one of the best encouragements to American society. I say this because many if not most of those products are the result of an individual entrepreneurs invention or efforts, just take a look at one list of products http://www.asseenontv.com/ . One of the driving forces which put the USA on top of the tech is our innovative products and inventive people. These days when people are concerned with the economy, shipping jobs overseas, and many issues to numerous to mention, we need to be encouraging people to go into their garages and workshops and try to invent something. While I don’t mean to downplay Billy’s personal life he stood as a public spokes person in an industry which promotes and celebrates innovation and invention. The American dream of coming up with an idea and bringing it to market in hopes of making money from your brain child is something I believe lives deep down within each one of us.

As someone who works for a big company that does product development I have become aware of how hard it is to bring something to market, and can further appreciate how much of enablers Mays and the direct response industry is. While there are many different programs which encourage the same ideals loosing a public figure can hurt this effort. I hope that people keep inventing and keep pushing themselves so that we as a country can stay prominent. I for one have lots of ideas which I would love to see products and I am sorry that Billy Mays can’t be my pitchman, but am hopeful that when I am ready there will be people who can help the little guy, like myself.

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Bonnaroo media

Greg Needel — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:28:43 +0000

As most people who were exposed to my twitter posts last weekend know that I was at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. The festival itself was a blast and in addition to taking in some great music and taking some photos of the event I got the chance to bring my gigapan out to play. The gigapan is a tool which take many photos using a robotic camera base, then uses software to create super high resolution images by joining all the photos together. I took 5 gigapans over the weekend and while I am still stitching them together and doing correction, this is a good example. This one was taken on the WHAT stage from the comfort of my vip seating hill when Galactic is on stage. It has some washout which I am working on but it still is good to get a feel for the show.

you can click here to see the full gigapan in a larger view

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