Scud Stud Wins Another Case Against Big Media

 

Calgarian Arthur Kent has won yet another battle against big media, this time settling the

suit that he launched against Universal Studios earlier this year for unauthorized use of his voice and images in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War. Earlier in his career as a journalist, he sued and later settled with NBC over the network’s refusal to air his stories about the worsening situation in Afghanistan in the early 1990’s. He went on to chronicle the experience in a book titled Risk and Redemption.

Kent, who earned his nickname by reporting from the 1991 Gulf War conflict with Scud Missiles firing in the background, tried his hand at politics earlier this year. His campaign ran into trouble, however, when Premier Ed Stelmach canceled an appearance at a campaign breakfast for Kent. That set off a firestorm of criticism, with Kent firing off most of the shots. The Calgary-Currie riding, which has acted as Alberta’s protest vote against the provincial government’s rural-partisan agenda, was going to be a tough race for the PCs regardless. In the end, Kent might have been more successful had he run against Stelmach.

But no matter – I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Arthur Kent. It’s also no surprise that Kent works best without a boss. He continues to report through his site, SkyReporter, and we find him from time to time hanging out at local barcamps. Stay tuned for more.

ZigTag is now Semantifind

Check out Randy Thompson and Bruce Johnson on the Demo stage showing Semantifind, the latest iteration of ZigTag (which we saw previously at DemoCampCalgary as a tagging/social bookmarking utility). The latest offering is built on top of Google Search, which takes care of all the “so how are you going to compete against Google”-type questions.

Many of you will know Randy Thompson from his work at VentureAlberta, and all of the other work he does with tech startups. Bruce Johnson is another well-known entrepreneur in Alberta, the founder of WinTax and the former CEO of Intuit Canada.

To view video click here..

Video From the Nikon D90

The new Nikon D90 has just been released in the U.S., but we’re still waiting our turn up in Canada. I snapped a few thousand pics on a recent family vacation, and was going through camera withdrawal after someone broke into our car and stole my D80. The D90 has a few more megapixels, and a huge screen, but the two breakthrough features are liveview (so you can use the screen as your viewfinder, like a point and shoot camera), and video.

Rather than wait, I decided that I needed one right away. It just so happened that I also needed to meet a few companies in the valley earlier this week, so now, I’m the proud owner of a Nikon D90 (one of just a lucky few in Canada, for another week or so).

The camera feels and functions pretty much the same way as the D80. It shoots amazing videos, but probably won’t be replacing your camcorder anytime soon. You see, while you can shoot video with any of your favorite lenses, autofocus is disabled during the capture process. It’s great for point-at-one-spot-and-shoot videos, but if you pan the camera and require re-focusing, you’ll be doing it manually. Also, it has maximum file limit of 2GB, which means you can only capture 5 minutes at full HD resolution (but obviously more at lower resolutions).

Here’s a video shot from the D90, on the plane taking off from SFO.

Click here to download:

DSC_0007-2.mov (46639 KB)

Posted by email from Patrick’s posterous

By the way, I created this post from my email program, with the help of Posterous. I attached the 46Mb file, wrote the headline in the subject field, and typed the entry into the body. Then, I sent the the email to post@posterous.com, and Posterous took over from there. Check out the original posterous page, where the video was embedded inline, automatically. I may never use the Typepad UI again.

For those of you who can’t sent 46Mb files through email, check out Loa PowerTools – a great little email utility that solves almost all the problems you encounter when sending emails. I’ve been using it for the last few months, and have yet to encounter a network where I could not send email.