Autodesk University 2011 Conference in Las Vegas

A couple weeks ago I traveled to Las Vegas to speak at the Autodesk University ADN Media & Entertainment conference! It was a lot of fun and I had a great time hanging out with some Autodesk buddies and also presenting some recent work.

I wasn't sure what to expect in Las Vegas (I have been there once before, but it was also for an unusual reason - a rock climbing trip!) but it was really fun. The hotel was fantastic and the room and bed was really epic - probably one of the most comfortable hotel rooms I've ever stayed in. Very fancy!

I got there a couple days early and wandered around Vegas for a few days, dodging the dodgy folks who were handing out flyers on the street and doing some general exploring and wandering. I got tickets to see Beatles LOVE, the Beatles-themed Cirque de Soleil show, and it was a lot of fun. The acrobats were really cool! I wandered to a mall and got a back massage from massage therapists at the mall which was funny.

One of my favourite spots was the mall called "Fashion Show". I found a Pull-In Underwear there, my favourite fancy boxer store from France. They had some crazy designs as usual. I also found a Teavana tea store which I was keen to try. It was great.

The Coca Cola store was really interesting and had cool T-Shirts from Coca-Cola Brazil! It also had a "round the world platter" of different and unusual flavours of soda from around the world. Fun. I eventually found myself at the Bellagio and decided to waste $5 on a slot machine, fully expecting to lose it. Of course, given my luck, I won $50, cashed it out instantly and left. :) And decided to spend it on (most) of my Beatles LOVE ticket. Wahoo!

The Venetian has a restaurant called Bouchon which is run by Thomas Keller, the same guy who owns the French Laundry, that ultra-fancy place in Napa. It was a great spot and I had a nice brunch there.

Oh yes, and the conference itself! The conference had some interesting talks and it was great to catch up with some familiar Autodesk faces and also meet some new people too. My talk went very smoothly and people enjoyed it. It was fun to give the talk and much less pressure than TEDx the week before! Great times. That evening we went out for Tacos, appetizers and drinks with everyone.

The last evening in Vegas I went to see the Muppet Movie as I couldn't hold out any longer - it had already been out for 5 days! Then I decided to waste another few dollars "for entertainment's sake" in a slot machine... and won $100. Of course. Some lady said "Oh, you should really cash out now". haha and of course that was the plan! I got a nice crisp $100 note and put it right in the bank - wondering if I was the only person ever to actually win anything and keep it ;)

A fun time, a great conference and networking opportunity, and lots of tasty food and shopping. A great little trip!

Sweet TV at a TV History Exhibit at SFO

Cool Space Helmet TVs

Amazing pillow top beds at the hotel!! Fancy!!

The hotel room was almost as big as my apartment, haha. Actually it had a few steps and this lounge area, super nice

TV in the bathroom?!!

Venetian from the pool deck

The pool

After wandering for a while I found a Banana Republic in the Venetian Shops with stuff on HUGE sales. These khakis were $11!!!!!! Pretty epic. That's my kind of splurge. :)

Got another pair of sweet pants at Banana Republic

Dressed up to wander around, just for the fun of it

Winter Wonderland at Venetian

Nice tree outside our hotel

Funny Dr. Seuss Pompom flower things at the Wynn Casino

Encore and Wynn

After some further wandering I found a Pull-in Underwear store?!?!!! These are those epic boxers from France that have crazy designs and I love them, and turns out one of their only US stores is in Vegas. Amazing.

Wow, this is my kinda Vegas. Awesome boxers store and Teavana, a fancy tea shop :)

Bellagio Fountains

Cool Mojito Boxers I bought

At Thomas Keller's Bouchon restaurant for Sunday Brunch. Tool Angelique's recommendation and tried the (glorious) chicken and waffles (French style!) The chicken was perfectly roasted (not fried) and the waffles were fluffy and fantastic. Really excellent food. Vanilla Bean butter and Maple Syrup were an excellent addition.

Elvis Suit at Hard Rock Cafe

Round the world menu at the Coca Cola store

I got the Round the World platter to try (no I didn't drink them all!)

This was crazy. Kiwi Mango and Pine Nut from South Africa were the best

The Mint one was super gross!!

Beatles guitar

Ticket people at the Beatles LOVE Cirque de Soleil show

After the Beatles LOVE show finished

Mirage

Cheesecake from the Carnegie Deli in the Mirage!

Time to give my lecture! All suited up in a cool work shirt. :)

Room where I gave my talk

On stage for my talk

Explaining my job history with a photo from Pixar

Cool sculptures

Dean taking a size of his epic "Woody Allen" sandwich at the Carnegie Deli in the Mirage

I love this photo

Kermit Adidas shoes

Animal shoes

Wine and cheese for dinner. After all the eating, just a light dinner was great.

iMenorah HD: Now available for the iPad

My buddy Matthew and I just released iMenorah 2.0 for iPhone with upgraded graphics, animation, and support for the iPhone 4/iPhone 4S Retina screen.

We have also released iMenorah HD, now available for the first time on the iPad!

Check out our website here, and thanks as always for your support!
http://imenorah.mikejutan.com/

iMenorah for iPhone

iMenorah for iPad

Busy few weeks

Whew!!

Been a busy few weeks, lots of jet-setting and so ons. Crazy!!

Anyhow, finally had a little downtime to clean my apartment and unpack my suitcase from like 2 weeks ago. I've got a bunch of photos and also thoughts from the TEDx event to post as well as some cool pics from the Autodesk conference in Vegas. I'll try to get those all posted this week.

Hope you are all excited for your December holidays. I know I am!!!!!!!!!! Not too much planned, just chillin' with the fam in SF and we're going to have a great time. Insanely psyched for Mission Impossible 4 and some of the other great movies coming out. I'd love to see Diablo Cody's "Young Adult" with Charlize Theron, Hugo, Sherlock Holmes, Tintin, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Red Tails, The Secret World of Arrietty, The Lorax, John Carter of Mars... and more. Wow. So many great movies coming out soon!

Mike :)

Twin Peaks at night time

Justin Rose and I took off to Twin Peaks late this afternoon to get some dusk and night time photos of San Francisco. Pretty awesome results, I was really happy with the night time one with the Yahoo sign in it.

Mission district

Bird on the tower

Castro to Ferry Building down Market St

Hovering eagle

Eaggllle!!!

These guys were fighting in the air

Alfred Hitchcock would be proud

Market St

Magic Hour

Dusk

Downtown, Civic Center, Market St, Ferry Building

My favourite photo of the night, check out the Yahoo sign

Market St and downtown

Justin's cool method of taking the photo on slow shutter and zooming the lens at the same time

TEDxIB@York 2011: One Stage. One Day. Thousands Inspired.

http://www.ourkids.net/blog/tedxibyork-2011-one-stage-one-day-thousands-inspired-17697/

What an amazing day it was!

Toronto Tempo

Epic timelapse of Toronto.

iMenorah 2.0, Development so far

Cabernet and I got together and knocked out a bunch of stuff today, it was SUPER fun.

The first goal was to get the majority of the artwork done - upressing the images so we would have images ready to support both the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S "Retina" screen, as well as the resolution on the iPad 1 and 2. As part of this effort I realized that the iPad 1 and 2 have the same resolution (a bit surprising) and that the iPad resolution is only slightly higher than that of the Retina screen. Cool stuff.

After some careful painting work by Matt to clean up some stuff on the images, the images looked sooo good and sharp in HD. Very nice.

We then spent a while incorporating those images into the iMenorah code. Not too bad as Apple has a really fantastic method for supplying the high res images - you just make a new image called imageName@2x.png which is a 2x-sized version if imageName.png. If you call the code correctly, the proper image will be swapped in automatically on the correct device. Well done Apple!

The iPad app launch was not quite as smooth as we took a while to figure out that the iPhone Simulator was not actually displaying the most recent code. After taking to my bro and iOS Guru Alex it's clear that we were doing something wrong in the setup file. You really need to make sure you're using a different binary name for the iPhone and iPad version of your app - the iPhone Simulator gets confused otherwise. So after fixing that and learning how to do a clean build, I think we are back on track.

Tomorrow we're fixing a few bugs and then maybe adding one or two new features before hopefully submitting the iPhone App Update and the new iPad version tomorrow night.

iMenorah 2.0: Development starting tomorrow

Well it sure has been a while hasn't it!

My bro Matthew Parrott and I wrote iMenorah back in November 2008, soon after the iTunes App Store was first announced and in preparation for the first Chanukah that the App Store was live. Since then we've only updated it a couple of times, finishing off at version 1.3 in February 2009 just with some minor bug fixes.

Tomorrow I'm happy to announce (haha, uh, "blog", I mean) that Matt and I are working on version 2.0. We're planning on a few minor bugfixes, and more excitingly aiming for a couple of new features and... dah dah dah dah... iMenorah HD for the iPad!!! Wahoo!!!

This will be our first iPad app and it's going to be fun. The purpose of this app remains the same as it has always been: a fun, safe, match-free, airline-safe, commuter-safe, dorm-room-friendly way to participate in the ancient Jewish tradition of lighting the menorah at Chanukah, and a nice opportunity to donate a portion of the proceeds to a charity of our choosing.

My Mac Mini has more than earned its keep already, but it's still trucking along like a champ. Good news tonight, just got the old code up to iOS 4.3 standards (building in 4.3, not 5.0 so we maintain backwards compatibility with those folks who have not upgraded to iOS 5.0 yet) and compiled and tested. We will be creating a Retina version for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, as well as the new iPad iMenorah HD version. Exciting!

iMenorah compiling with iOS 4.3

More exciting news to come and some discussion of the bugfixes and whatever new features we have time to implement. Good times.

The whirlwind

The last few weeks have been a flurry of travel. After a whirlwind 4 or 5 days in Toronto for TEDxIB@York, having dinner with some amazing old friends and catching up with some close buddies, I zoomed back to SF for 5 days, a bunch of work, and a glorious Thanksgiving dinner. Then I zoomed off to Las Vegas to speak at the Autodesk University ADN M&E (Media & Entertainment) conference. I just got back from Vegas earlier this week and it was also a fantastic time.

I haven't had a spare moment to blog my post-TEDx thoughts or comments, and I have a bunch of cool photos to post as well. The YouTube video isn't up yet, but I will post it as soon as it is. I really can't wait to see it!!!!

I also took a bunch of photos in Vegas and have a few funny stories which will have to wait for the moment, I'll find time to post those hopefully sometime this weekend.

As the next post mentions, I'm working on iMenorah 2.0 for iPhone with Retina support with Matt this weekend, as well as a new iMenorah HD version for the iPad. It's gonna be fun!

Otherwise just chillin' after a very busy (but super epic and fun) few weeks.

John Carter of Mars trailer

Sweeeeeeeeeeeet

TEDx: thoughts and photos coming soon

Wooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was an epic and awesome experience and I loved every minute of it. My talk went exactly as I was hoping it would. People said it seemed "conversational" and "ad-libbed" which is super awesome and exactly what I was aiming for. The only way to make it appear ad-libbed but actually stay-on-point was to prepare like a maniac for 5 months straight, which is exactly what I did. :)

Awesome times. Kevin took a bunch of great photos and I have some excellent ones from the official photographer and a few other folks too. I'll post those and some further thoughts when I get a chance.

The YouTube is currently being edited by the fine folks at IBYork, so I'll be sure to post that when it's available. Sounds like a week or two probably.

What an awesome weekend.

New (crazy) shoes

I'm joining the Gym at work (finally) and found these crazy shoes in Toronto last week. They are craaaaaaaaaaaaazyyy. And I love them. But checking on Zappos (never bought from there before, it's pretty sweet) and they were only $89 here in the US, no shipping/tax. Pretty sweet.

This is the orange version, very awesome but they are so close to what I have already. So I didn't get these.

This is the one I got, Rainbow coloured. Epic.

Oh man these are insane.

TEDx time! Live at 4:15pm EST/1:15pm PST today!!

Had the TEDx rehearsal tonight and it went super well. Just got the schedule for Friday and my speaking time is 4:15pm EST (1:15pm PST). If you're logging in to watch the streaming simulcast I'd suggest logging in just before 4pm EST/1pm PST to make sure you have the right browser requirements etc.

http://tedxibyork.com

Thanks for your support!

Here goes... EVERYTHING!!!!!!


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In TO for TEDx

As Remy from Ratatouille would say... Let's.... DO THIS THING!!!!!


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Moonlighting within Microsoft

Awesome article about "intrapreneurship" at Microsoft:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/business/27novel.html


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TEDx countdown!

Whooooa this is the week!!!!!!!!!!!

I was offered the speaking role way back in April and wrote the first draft then over a weekend. Since then it changed many, many times and the last 4 months or so have involved a lot of writing and re-working of ideas. Then I made the slides and tightened them up, shortened them, and sharpened the message over the next couple of months. The last month or so I haven't changed the speech content, and focused only on practice, flow, intonation, emphasis, and a couple of silly jokes :)

I can't believe this is finally the week where I'll be presenting it!! Crazy!!! Like any creative endeavour, getting it prepared, re-worked, and finished up to your absurdly high standards is 99% of the work. Getting it "out the door" is really just the last step, and I of course will have a few butterflies on the day-of, but getting on that stage is gonna be SO fun. Can't wait to see all the smiling and laughing faces (I hope, if the jokes are good enough, haha!) and to have my chance to give my message of the benefits of enthusiasm and hard work in glorious combination - if there is any "secret" to my success, it's this, and I'm so happy that my TED talk is exactly what I want to say to the world.

Oh, happy days.

Also: I completely finished my Autodesk talk!! It's only 10 days after the TED conference so I had to do them in parallel for a little bit. But it's all ready to go, and quite different than the TED talk. It's 50 minutes long, I have notes and a podium and it's for a technical/programmer crowd so the vibe of it is quite different. It was pretty quick to prepare as the focus of that is just on the information. Now that's completely done and off my plate so I can focus only on TED now for the rest of the week! Exciting!!!!!!!! This is gonna be great. Super psyched to present and also really happy that lots of good friends are coming to watch, either in person or online. Thanks everyone for your kind support and encouragement through this entire process, and especially thank you so much to Mom, Dad, Norm, Kevin, Alex and Heev for a pile of great ideas, a stack of suggestions, and for being exceptional sounding boards and advisors through this whole process.

Here goes... EVERYTHING. :)

Dinner at Jutan's

Had dinner at my place for some friends on Friday. Tried some new dishes, it was fun!

Crackers and Brie

Steelhead Trout, a lot like Salmon

Caprese appetizers

Appetizer area

Making Quinoa, Rice and about to put the fish in

TEDx Speech Time: Fri Nov 18, 4pm EST

Hello friends!

My speaking time is now finalized for TEDxIB@York next week. I will be speaking at 4:00pm EST (1:00pm Pacific) on Friday, November 18. The whole event will be streaming live via the LiveStream link at http://tedxibyork.com.

My talk runtime is 18 minutes. If you're keen to watch I suggest logging in a 15 min before or so to make sure you have the correct internet browser requirements etc.

If you can't catch it on the day-of, it will be available on YouTube sometime following the conference.

Cheers!
Mike :)

New Math 3 Building at Waterloo

Awesome!

http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/613278--opening-of-uw-s-math-3-building-a-pink-tie-affair

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New Mobile Blog Template

Thanks to Blogger's awesomeness, I've now got a fancy new Mobile template. Happy reading, iPhone and Android afficionados!




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Movie Review: In Time

Well, that sure was freakin' awesome.

I saw In Time over the weekend with my bro Finkel along with my old friend Meagan and her fiance Eric who just moved to the city. For some insane reason, RottenTomatoes is giving it only a 38%, that seems way under what it should have been. It was incredibly fun to watch and I really liked the serious undertones too. The "time"-based puns were over-the-top and so hilarious and I love that they kept using the same joke over and over. Justin Timberlake knocks it out of the park and proves again how well he can act. "Pete" from Mad Men makes a fantastic co-star and Amanda Seyfried did a really solid job too. I thought it was great. This is why we go to the movies: a fun, exciting adventure, some romance, a few laughs, and a few (but not too many) serious things to think about. I thought it was excellent. Probably one of my favourite movies of the year so far.

The movie itself looked beautiful, the credits rolled and top of the list was the Director of Photography, the glorious Roger Deakins (from all the Coen Brothers movies). So that's why it looked SO good. The story was super interesting and captivating, and the parallels to "class warfare" are extremely current with the whole "Occupy" movement and protests happening literally this week. It was incredible, the action was great, there were some nice cars and good chase scenes and some really cool ideas in it. It was exactly like a Bond film but there is actually some serious important issue they are also talking about. Why in the world are all the critics hating on this so hard?!

Anyway, I thought it totally rocked and was definitely worth seeing. Awesome movie. The writer-director also directed Gattaca and The Truman Show, so this totally fits with his usual style. Very cool movie, and well pulled-off. Forget the haters, I say go and check it out and have a fun day out. :)

Dear Japan National Tourism Organization: Please send me back to Japan!!!

Well this sure is cool.

The Japan National Tourism Organization is apparently considering the option of issuing 10,000 free round-trip tickets to Japan to bloggers/people with social influence of some sort. Their website says the government has not yet approved it, but if they do, they will announce it next year. This is a method to encourage foreigners to come visit Japan (following the natural disaster and nuclear power plant issues) and "report back" to the world that Japan is still a safe and "SUGOI!" place to visit.

Dear JNTO: if you're reading this, I love Japan, and I will blog like CRAZY about how awesome it is if you send me!!!!!!!!!!!

For those who haven't read my Japan tour blog from Winter 2009, please check it out here: http://www.mikejutan.com/travel/japan2010/

Japan honestly remains as one of the best trips I've ever taken in my life and I would definitely choose to go back in the future, irrespective of a free trip or not. It's a really awesome place and absolutely worth the trip. It was so easy to travel around as a foreigner who doesn't speak the language at all, and the people were so welcoming, nice, and helpful to someone who was obviously fully and completely out of his element. I didn't get to explore Sapporo in the far north, or the cool surf islands of Okinawa in the south, I'd love to go there on my next trip. I also sadly spent only 1 day in Osaka! The capseru (Capsule Hotel) was such a funny and awesome experience, but I'd love to spend more time there. I would stay in a traditional ryokan again at a MOMENT'S NOTICE!!!!!!!!!! Even thinking about it makes me want to go back.

Anyway, for those bloggers out there, keep an eye out on the JNTO website in case they announce this, sounds like an amazing opportunity. If they end up doing it, I'll definitely be submitting an application for it.

Sugoiii!!!!!!!!!!

TEDx talk: The Home Stretch

Right before the release of something big that you really care about (in my world, typically a software product), you would think that you'd be really nervous about it. Turns out the opposite is true.

After months and months of prep for this TEDx talk, I'm really just plain ready and excited for it. I've iterated and iterated on ideas, had several horrible ones and crumpled them up, had a few mediocre ones and crumpled them up too, and then after hours and hours and hours and hours, finally settled on something I am really happy with.

Don't get me wrong - the journey has been super fun too, it's like planning a world trip. You spend days and weeks and months planning and thinking and anticipating. But in the couple weeks before you go, you've prepared so much mentally and emotionally for the trip that all you need to do is pack your bags, jump on the plane, and have the time of your life.

I'm very much in that state right now. It's been a lot of hard work to prepare this, and I've changed and modified and completely remodeled the speech several times over. But the last few weeks have just been practice and minor tweaks. I am now just preparing the cadence of the speech and getting very comfortable with the flow of the slides and with the timing of each section. It's all about the presentation now - the content is locked down and I'm going to submit the slides in the next couple of days. The only thing left to do is the presentation itself. And as I mentioned in the previous post about this, that's the easy and (really) fun part!!! Going back to the travel analogy, preparing like craaazyyyy for my Japan trip was a lot of hard work over months and months. But actually jumping on the plane and GOING to Japan?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!! That wasn't stressful at all. That was the fun part. The hard work (stress, if you want to call it that), is all done at that point. At this point, it's all about straight implementation.

On that note, I'd like to announce the name I've (finally) settled on for the speech.

Mike Jutan: "!!! (and why it's so important)"

If you already know me in person, you already know what I mean by "!!!". If you don't, I hope you understand it after my speech. Tune in live (and free) at http://tedxibyork.com on Friday Nov 18th. I'll be speaking sometime in the afternoon, eastern standard time (Toronto time zone). If you can't make it online to catch the speech, don't worry. Sometime following the speech, a version will be posted online on YouTube to watch at your convenience. Thanks to everyone who has helped me prepare and offered advice, wisdom and direction. I hope you enjoy it.

Mike :)

Weight-loss reward #1: Tea kettle and new tea

In keeping with "celebrating small successes", I've decided my reward for getting 1/3 of the way to my goal is to buy that fancy new Cuisinart tea kettle I was looking at. A friend at work recommended it and it sure looks cool. I like how it keeps the water warm and also how you can select a temperature for the type of tea leaves you're using, or for french press coffee. Very useful, and very fancy.

I wanted to buy myself something as a reward for losing 10 lbs and I wanted it to be a non food-based reward. Not clothes either as I'm planning to drop some bills on a nice suit when I reach my actual goal. The tea kettle and some new tea is perfect, because it's NOT a food based reward. It's actually one of the things that's helping me lose weight - it's really tasty and good and I'm making a point to have a few cups in the evening. I thought I might do that IF I got hungry to take my mind off snacking, but I'm actually finding that I don't even think about snacking anymore. It's pretty awesome. So that must mean the tea is working so well I don't even notice it. Even better.

So yes, I'm buying that fancy Cuisinart Tea kettle I posted a few days ago, and I'm gonna get a couple of teas from The Republic of Tea to start, as well as probably the British Sampler Pack from Upton.

Minor website update

Very minor update. Removed the Google Buzz social networking icon due to it's deprecation coming up in the next couple weeks, and replaced it with a link to my new obsessive fun website, steepster - a "tea lover's social network" haha.

For those of you who have been to my house you'll know my tea cupboard is something of an epic nature and it's reaaaaaaaaaaaaally fun to go through each of those in succession and decide which ones I like the best. Haha. I should probably sleep more instead of this. Anyway, it's fun, so whatever. :)

Weight Loss Progress

This graph is really motivating.



This graph is from the Myfitnesspal app and shows my weight loss progress over the last 2 months. The decline is at a reasonable rate and holding very very steady. No spikes up. No "bad weeks" where I slipped back into bad habits or went off the rails. There are a couple weeks where the weight loss plateaued somewhat, but the longest plateau so far came in right around 3 weeks ago and only lasted for about 10 days.

The real reason this is working this time and why I am going to succeed at reaching my goal is a longer answer, some of which I covered in my previous blog about this. But in short: I've actually made this a priority. I am an insanely goal-oriented fellow - good friends and close blog readers know that. So applying my usual mentality to something like weight loss is bound to work - but why has it never worked before? That's also a much longer and more complicated answer. Suffice it to say: I love traveling. Paying several thousand of my very hard-earned dollars to explore Peru and Argentina next year is going to be so awesome that I wouldn't dare ruin it for myself through my own inaction. The Inca Trail is going to be one amazing hike and I plan to enjoy every minute of it.

But don't expect Peru to be over and for me to return to old snacky bad habits. This is a major lifestyle shift - a permanent one - and once I reach my major goal weight of 180lbs (approx 11 down, 19 to go), I may either set a further weight loss goal or focus more on continued healthy activity like fitness and weight maintenance. It's about time I knocked this weight loss thing out of the friggin park. And it feels really good to be well on my way.

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The Art of Non-Conformity

My bro Heev passed this site along to me. In a word: "WOW".

This guy's goal is to travel to EVERY country on the UN list of countries - a list of 193 - in the 5 years between his 30th and 35th birthday. Amazing.

His blog is absurdly inspiring and interesting, and it looks like he covers a wide range of topics from entrepreneurship to what he calls "travel hacking". He has a really solid message about living life to it's utmost and I really, really, reaaaaallllly like this message.

Well done Chris. After 10 seconds of reading the first article on here, I knew I'd better add it immediately to my blog roll list so I can read it often. There are some really awesome people in the world.

Check it out, this guy friggin' rocks.
http://chrisguillebeau.com/3x5/