As the internet landscape has evolved at a blistering pace, universities have been left behind and often teaching skills and concepts that are years out of date. I was excited to read about The University of Colorado’s Boulder Digital Work program. Their stated mission is, “developing today and tomorrow’s digital leaders and entrepreneurs.”

This sounds like a very forward thinking program and hopefully it will produce a lot of local talent with a much better understanding of the digital realm than most schools offer today. Courses include Interaction Design, Experience Design, Digital Branding, Social Networks, and Software Development.

I hope this program is successful and that it will help to continue the growth of Boulder as a hub for innovation.

We’re happy to formally announce the launch of Support Details, our first planned public product. This is one of those ideas which was in the works here at Imulus far longer then need be. In fact the idea was discussed in ’03 and sadly it fell off the radar until this year. Support Details is an attempt to add clarification to browser related issues between non-technical web visitors and their clients & customers.

This idea started as way to save time. To solve odd browser issues our team was always asking the clients questions like:

“What browser are you using?”, “Which version of Flash is installed?”,”Do you have cookies enabled?” “What is your screen size?”

You get the point.

We simply were losing too much time to explaining the “how to” aspect; hence Support Details.

To be useful the product had to determine what browser a customer was using, along with any other configuration data which could be detected. Then, it needed a reliable way for capturing and sending the data over to the person who was working on the problem.

The concept is simple. That is part of the reason we believe it works so well. Yet, we’re always open to good suggestions for improvement and we’re eager to hear your feedback.

Recently I’ve been intrigued by the personal statistic service over at Daytum.com. In brief summary Daytum is a service that allows users to quickly generate graphs about anything they’re interested in. It then publishes them in a beautiful interface for others to see.

This new service got me thinking about how awesome it would be to have a detailed statistical overview of one’s life. I’m not talking bare bones stats, but rather in depth detailed statistics. I.E. cups of coffee consumed daily, total number video game hours played, the longest period of time spent awake, the number miles driven, the amount of jokes told, the amount of jokes flopped, etc.

Well, interestingly enough it was pointed out to me that the head graphic designer behind Daytum actually has compiled some yearly statistics of his life. You can check them out over at Nicholas Felton’s site.

Looking at Nicholas’ statistics made me start to wonder, how would you track these sorts of things? I imagine some of it would have to be guess work, maybe sitting down once every two weeks and going over your four or five big categories. “What was my average amount of sleep this week? How many girl’s numbers did I ask for, how many did I get? How much time did I spend reading?” Then, over the course of the year you could keep these life stats tracked in a service like Daytum. Or you could tweet them to a private twitter feed. Then at the end of the year you could run all this information through an excel sheet and see exactly where you stood. Granted it would be a definite time commitment, but I think it might be worth it to see an overview of your life in statistical format.

I’d be curious to know if anyone else has other good ideas for how to document these sorts of things, perhaps a good iPhone app? Leave your ideas in the comments or hit us up on Twitter @imulus.

Update: Edited spelling mistakes of Feltron vs. Felton, oops.

I find this whole dispute about the President-Elect’s Blackberry comical. What does it say about our security and acceptance of technology when we restrict our President from using one of the most ubiquitous business tools? Sure, Parliament banned it, Putin doesn’t even call people and Skarozy isn’t allowed to have it either, but shouldn’t we lead the charge here?

I’m sure RIM would love to make a special Obaminator version of the Blackberry, perhaps one with greater encryption and the use of private communication channels. Take a look at what the NSA is using, Sectéra Edge.

The President’s Blackberry is always going to be a target; but then again hasn’t telephone communications been targeted as well. Think of how odd this would sound if we said the President couldn’t use a phone, get real! Put our best minds together to find a way to give our most tech-savvy President the tools he used to run the most effective presidential campaign ever… maybe he can translate that into running a more effective government.

If you browse around online much, you might have seen people talking about HDR photos, or seen beautiful or weird looking photos that had HDR in the title. If you don’t know about HDR photos or are interested in them, keep reading. If you already know, move on because this will be a brief and simple introduction.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, which basically means more dynamic range than we have seen in the past. This is not to be confused with HD (high definition) or more pixels. Dynamic range is the title given to the ‘light levels’ of something a human is capable of seeing. A real world example would be a picture of a sunset. When the human eye looks at the sun for long enough, it hurts your eyes and burn your retinas. When a picture is viewed of the same sunset, no harm can be done since the light levels (dynamic range) are not the same, they are mimicked. Dynamic range can be defined as the ratio between the lightest and darkest element in a scene.

So the potential dynamic range of a piece of paper is nowhere near the real world, which is why pictures look like pictures and nature pictures rarely do the real thing justice. This, combined with technology limitations, is why your camera has to choose what to display when shooting a scene with a large range of lighting – think inside a dark house with a bright window

http://www.cybergrain.com/tech/hdr/

HDR photos now attempt to get closer to the real world by displaying a higher dynamic range. Here are a few examples:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynchburgvirginia/407618927/

http://www.cre-aid.nl/2006/06/13/hdr-high- dynamic-range-workshop/

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=455448365&size=Large

You can see that the photos have great color detail, and if you haven’t seen photos like this before they might almost look unreal. When I first saw pictures like this, the longer I looked at them the more they looked real.

Currently, HDR photos have to be produced with software, either from a few different exposures or using a RAW image format. Since there is no standard, the software can change a photo with varying degrees, some realistic and some ridiculous. I would classify the photo below on borderline unrealistic.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/177/477846714_d4572dad6f_o.jpg

Search online and I am sure you will find most HDR pix are a bit overboard. If you want to read more, here are a few good links that I used:

More in depth articles
http://www.cybergrain.com/tech/hdr/
http://tutorialblog.org/hdr-tutorials-roundup/

How to create a HDR photo
http://www.backingwinds.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-create-professional-hdr-images.html