Zoom-in Online

By way of introduction, I thought I'd start with a brief (by 'brief' I mean crazy-long) post about me—who I am and why I'm a new contributor to the Zoom In Online blog.

Well, what about me... I started out as a child...—what, no early Bill Cosby fans in the house??—I am a filmmaker, musician, writer, gamer, instructor and Mac fanatic, and run my own media company based in northwestern Massachusetts, Howard Digital Media. I provide Mac-centric consulting and creative production services in the DV, film, DVD, audio, video and web space, and often a mishmash of many of the above. I have been in involved in many facets of media production over the years, from producing and editing an independent feature film around the turn of the century (I love saying that), to writing, recording and also performing music (as a bassist and vocalist, mainly); from writing books about software-related learnings (first a book on HTML and now I'm writing a new book [no you're not, Todd, you're blogging!] for Thomson Publishing on the next version of GarageBand) to teaching seminars, workshops as well as instructing on Magnet Media's DMTS series titles Inside Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Inside iLife '06; from shooting video and authoring DVDs to helping to run a 450+ person guild of end-game raiders called TheBrethren on the Khadgar server under the name Lorlor in the increasingly popular mmorpg World of Warcraft (yes, I play a female night elf hunter.)

I'm in an acoustic roots band called Last Fair Deal, and sometimes do my own singer/songwriter thing. I like to play music in both the folk/acoustic genre and also the loud rock genre. The Last Fair Deal stuff (the acoustic track above, called "New England") was all done on my G4 PowerBook on Logic Express 7, and I produced and mixed that. There's a whole CD of the LFD stuff called True Tales in case you want to snag it from iTunes. If you're into the genre, I think you'll dig it. That rock track "Blister" is something I did with my lifelong collaborator Don Gunn, who is based in Seattle. That's me singing and on bass and guitar. Don's on drums and did all the engineering and mixing in Logic 7 Pro on a G5.

I am going to Mac World for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the opportunity to blog for Zoom-In while I'm there. I'm quite happy to have been invited to participate. The team at Magnet (Zoom-In) is an absolutely top notch group of folks, and to be considered part of the team like this is an honor. I hope to bring you some insights from my perspective as a creative professional, Mac-head and DMTS instructor, on the expo/conference itself, the keynote and Steve Jobs' corresponding announcements, and maybe most importantly that part of all of our lives that I like to call "keeping up with the joneses." Let it be known that I am not referring to the ubiquitous "neighbor-next-door-to-us-all," but in fact to my own "jones" as a creative pro Mac-head to obsessively learn the newest methods and most creative and inspiring approaches to wrangling the bits and bytes that make up my daily digital sandwich. Ok that metaphor was mixed all to hell, but at least I've shown my cards early, you can count on it happening again.

On the mixed-metaphor note—and other arguably dissonant chords that may strike my fancy along the way—if you're allergic to the liberally employed parenthetical (you know, these annoying things that supposedly flesh out ideas that are stuck in the middle of sentences to avoid punctuation and/or reworking of tense) or the "aside" of the oft emdashed-phrase—yes, these things—I suggest you tune me out immediately and dig into some posts by the incredible array of talent that is contributing to this blog alongside my longwinded runonsentency self. If those types of things don't concern you, well then I'm glad to have you along for the ride! (Actually, if those types of things do concern you, I would very much like to speak with you, as I am looking for a part-time copy editor. Please forward your resume asap if you're available. ;-)

I'm driving to JFK in 5 hours—this might be a reasonable explanation for my overall punchiness. I plan to post while waiting in the terminal for my flight (that is, if I don't get lost dealing with long-term parking) about the things I'm planning on doing this week, the things I'm looking forward to, and some predictions about Tuesday morning's keynote. Glad to be here... and thanks to Zoom-In and Magnet Media for inviting me.

To contact me directly, feel free to email me any time, you can use todd (at) toddhoward (dot) com, or better yet, post a comment here on the blog. If you agree or disagree with my take on something, I'd love to hear about it and discuss it.