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Today was a race day. It was the day of the 40th ING New York City Marathon. A little sad I was following the live coverage on Universal Sports today. A little sad because I haven’t been there. But last year I was. It was my first Marathon and one of the greatest and coolest experiences in my life. And as I’m still running, I’m sure that I will do NYC again in 2010. Or maybe Chicago? Whatever I’ll do next year, I still enjoy watching the video of my 2008 run, which I want to share here with you. Thanks by the way to my friends Stefan and Marek for chasing me through New York City and shooting great footage.

Years ago I used to be a big TV guy, but I haven’t touched it really during the last 18 months – and I’m talking here about regular TV program (which is 90% bullshit anyway in my opinion). Of course I like to get entertained while relaxing and stuff, but at some point I kind of changed my behavior there. When other people turn on their TVs, I check my YouTube subscribtions, iTunes video podcasts or my Calendar for live broadcasts.
Okay, I have to admit that I’m a huge entourage guy (I know almost every line, try me) and watch also things like Californication or movies. But even this stuff I get mostly on the iTunes store and watch it where I want, when I want – so a classic on-demand-stealth-ninja.

Anyways, I wanted to make a little list of the shows I watch on a regular basis and give some comments on why I like it. Here we go:

1. This Week in Startups – TWiST

This show has quickly become some kind of a holy grail to me on entrepreneurial information, inspiration, tipps, wisdom and it is right now kind of my favorite show on the net. In TWiST, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis shares his knowledge and experience as an entrepreneur on a weekly basis (plus bonus episodes) and interviews a guest from the tech or startup scene in every episode. As expected his lineup has been pretty impressive so far. He had guests like Don Dodge (Microsoft), Matt Mickiewicz (Sitepoint), John MacFarlane (Sonos), Gary Vaynerchuck (Winelibrary) and even Mike Arrington in a little entertaining guest appearance while trying to interview Garry Tan from Posterous. Besides that, Jason takes calls from viewers of the show to answer questions, give startup advice or rate and comment fresh ideas. Sometimes it’s even like a little Silicon Valley soap opera if you follow the happenings around the Angel Investing Showdown, where Calacanis and the JasonNation (succssfully) went to war against a group of Angel Investors.

So as you might notice, you can get some pretty badass information out of the show, but it’s also very entertaining and a little technical glitch here and there makes it also very charming and even more entertaining. Highly recommended!

Link: This Week in Startups

2. Diggnation

I think I don’t need to explain a lot here, as Diggnation is one of the most popular video podcasts I know. Every week, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht are discussing popular stories featured on Digg.com, most of the time sitting on a couch, drinking beer, Tequila, tea, or whatever, while basicly having a lot of fun. Every once in the while Diggnation is doing a live show, often during conferences like SXSW or FOWA. Check out Episode 123, Episode 206 and Epsiode 214 to get an idea of what you can expect and how insane it can get Very entertaining!

Link: Diggnation

3. The Rest of Everest

I’ve discovered this podcast just recently, but I’m already a huge fan. Filmmaker Jon Miller has built this podcast on all of the footage he and others shot while filming the documentary “Everest: the other side” in 2003.  Miller has collected a hell of a lot footage and broke it down into 20 minutes epsiodes which he and others involved with the expedition are commenting. I’m not a mountain climbing guy and just 30 episodes or so in, but I can promise you, if you’re just a little interested in traveling and culture, you don’t wanna miss that.

Link: The Rest of Everest

On a not so regular basis I also enjoy watching videos or shows like garyvaynerchuck.com, WineLibrary TV, Digg Dialogg, Film Riot, Scam School, CSS Tricks and others. Most of them I can watch, using my AppleTV, iPod or Computer, when I want or have time (which is not a lot), giving me a lot of flexibility which is, in my opinion, getting more and more important these days. I can’t even imagine anymore getting on a specific time in front of the TV to watch my favorite show. Feels already kinda stupid to me and I think the game on how we consume these things is changing here over the next few years.

But that’s just me. I’d love to hear your opinions on that. Oh, and if you have other show recommendations, drop me a comment.

I’m just randomly browsing my travel videos while I’m thinking about what to do with my travelblog. Unfortunately some d*****b** deleted all the stuff from the server – by accident, so most of my stories and articles are lost. I’m thinking of re-building it on Wordpress, filling it with the old stories I still have in my backups plus adding the new ones I’m going to write through 2010, which is going to be a huge travel year.. Anways, here’s a little clip I really like and enjoy from time to time. I took it on a train ride from Nha Trang to Saigon in 2007.

Hilarious and so true..

found by @molily

In my daily work, FDT is probably the tool I use the most, besides Apple Mail and Seesmic Desktop and I thought it would be nice for beginners who are not familiar with FDT, to highlight some of my favourite features in a blog post. To make it even more challenging for me, I thought that I should make small video clips. Well, here they are. It was not quite as simple as I thought it would be, especially if you’re not a native english speaker, but it was fun anyways. So, have fun and please be gentle with a first time screencaster   Comments, in the form below, on Twitter or on Facebook a highly appreciated.

You’ll get by the way the best experience if you switch to fullscreen mode.

1. Live Error Highlighting

2. Code Completion / Content Assist

3. Quick-Fix

4. Templates

5. Refactoring

To get more information on FDT, visit my buddies at Powerflasher.

Follow me on Twitter/marcelfahle or friend me up on Facebook.

I just read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox on Password Masking. At the first half of the article I couldn’t believe what I was reading as Nielsen just suggests to unmask all Password-Textfields. But in the second half he suggests to add a checkbox, so that the user can decide wether to unmask the password or not. In my opinion a very good and simple thing to do, which Apple is doing for years by the way, but I also think that most people will get a little confused, especially not so tech-savyy people when they see that the password is unmasked by default.

Anyway, from now on I will add such a little checkbox to all my loginforms (right next to the “Remember me” checkbox).

Just kiddin’! I found this stupid boring video while cleaning up the harddrive of my videocamera and felt like I had to share it   It shows me and Frank building the FDT Booth at 2008 Flash Forward conference in San Francisco. Music, as always, by my buddy Patric la Funk.

A while ago, the folks over at 9elements launched a new photosharing website called img.ly. You might wanna say “why the hell do we need another one?”. Well, because 9elements wanted to refine the key features of those sites and wanted to make them a little bit better. In my opinion, they’ve made a pretty good job at this, and as I spoke to the guys earlier this week, they still have damn good stuff in the pipeline.

What makes img.ly for me so special is the ability to tag people by their Twitter-Names in a photo, similar to what we all know from facebook (BTW: aren’t we friends yet? http://facebook.com/marcelfahle ). A pretty neat feature I think, especially when it comes to Tweetups or otherreal life Twitter events or conferences.

Besides that you can also tag your tweets, attached with your photos. Img.ly will convert these tags or keywords to Hashtags and sends them along with your tweet, which is a very popular technique in the Twitterworld to categorize or filter tweets.

At this time img.ly is supported by four Twitterclients (Tweetie, Destroytwitter, Yatca, Twitterville, SimplyTweet), and I think there will be a lot more in the future. Oh, and of course you can upload your image directly on the site or send it by email.

The Img.ly website is already optimized for a number of devices including the iPhone, Android devices and mobile opera. They even just introduced some alternate 3D views for navigating the site.

Very cool stuff. You can check it out at img.ly.

Well, FOWA is over and I’ve got to say, unfortunately, as it was an incredible conference. Usually my I’m hanging more at various flash conferences around the globe but I thought that this web app thing is kinda interesting for me because I do alot of web apps myself using Adobe Flex.
The fact that the conference was taking place in Miami was a little side benefit for me as I’ve got some “friends” in the city

Anyway, I was really impressed by the workshops and sessions I attended. For me every single session was both inspirational and educational, I really underestimated all the capabilities of modern browsers, or what is generally going on in the browser scene.

I have to admit that I never heard a lot of these names in FOWA’s lineup. Sure I knew about web celeb dudes like Vaynerchuck, Fried, Spolsky, but I’ve never heard of Francisco Tolmasky, Aza Raskin or Alex Hunter for example. Well, from now on I’ll keep an eye on all of these because these geeks killed it on stage (as @garyvee would say).

These are my personal highlights:

• Atlas – The new way of building web applications (by 280North, based on cappuccino framework)
• Aza Raskin showing Ubiquity
• Alex Hunter – very inspirational speech on Marketing (not just because I’m a Virgin/Branson-maniac)
• Jason Fried – Getting real 2.0
• and of course Gary Vaynerchuck on Passion:
  

  Passion is undefeated. You will be one-happy-snork-writing-mother-fucker

The next FOWA takes place in Dublin but I think that I can’t make it. But I’ll definitely attend on of the upcoming Carsonified events.

Oh, the only downside would be the timing I guess, because I have to come back in four weeks or so for Winter Music Conference 2009. So @ryancarson, maybe you consider combining FOWA with all the party madness going on by the end of march.

As a little appetitzer for the upcoming Flash on Tap conference in May, Adobe Community Expert Pablo Parrado, also known as ActionScript Hero is doing an Adobe Connect online session on February 12th together with Keith Peters, author of this fabulous book . Besides a 30-minutes interview, Keith will show some demos of his work and will be available for an extensive Q&A.
The event takes place on February 12th, is totally free and you can register using the EventBrite Flash Widget below, where you also can find more information:

To be always up2date follow Pablo, Keith and the Flash on Tap guys on Twitter.