So let me start off by saying that the idea for this blog came to me via Twitter. An #AVTweep took umbrage with the way I reacted to my wine experience in my last blog, “The Difference.” We had a brief tweet-versation about it online that culminated in him recommending that I call myself out […]
(****Update*****2/6/2014. I received a couple comments that sediment in older wines is normal, which is entirely true. This wine was not a 7 year+ bottle, so the yeast/protein sediment they referred to would not be normal for a 2011 bottle. Crystalline sediment may be normal if they use a more traditional process that doesn’t filter […]
Experts are still analyzing a June 2013 shoot out in Orlando that injured two and nearly injured a third. A recent publication by one Leonard Suskin, brought into question the motivation for the shoot out in the first place and also leveled some criticism at the way the responding officer, AV Phenom, handled the situation […]
There will be a lot written today about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his amazing and important legacy in fighting for the God given rights every person in the world deserves, regardless of their ethnicity, race, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, etc. I can’t imagine living in a United States that was segregated like […]
A favorite scene for any AV geek has to be when R2D2 gets cleaned up by Luke Skywalker on Tatooine. All of a sudden, a light sputters out and projects a holographic image of Princess Leia pleading with Obi Wan Kenobi to save her. That scene set the stage in many people’s heads about the […]
Ever since cavemen sat around a fire and pointed at cave drawings, light has played a key role in communication. It is hard to imagine an AV industry without devices powered by artificial light. We owe a lot to people like Volta and Edison and their little glowing pieces of wire. Going a level deeper, […]
OK, so maybe like one of my favorite movie protagonists, Jerry Maguire, on New Year’s Eve “I ate two slices of bad pizza, went to bed and grew a conscience!” Only time will tell if what I’m about to write should have been ‘the things I think but do not say’. (Even the cover looked like The […]
It has been an interesting December to say the least. I have been from the “79 and Sunny” of Rancho Santa Margarita to the subzero climate of Eden Prairie for the Milestone annual meeting, I have had to break the reality of Christmas traditions to my 10 year old daughter, and I have fought the […]
It’s getting close to Christmas time and as such family traditions are in full swing at the Coxon household. One of those traditions for the last 5 years has been reading “The Elf on the Shelf.” For those of you unfamiliar, the book relays the story of an elf that comes to watch your children […]
I sat down last night with the intent of writing my 2nd Annual Thanksgiving post on the AV Industry’s “Blessings” and “Turkeys” for 2013. Upon sitting down to write, I found out that one of the hardest things to feign is “righteous indignation”. I just wasn’t feeling it. This morning, while helping some integrators get […]
I remember a few years back, before I started in social media and blogging, I was very active in some AV industry chats and forums. One of those forums used to ask questions of established industry veterans about industry practices and standards. As you may imagine, there were sometimes few responses, as it seems that […]
There has been a lot of talk about gaming here on rAVe lately. It started with Matt Cooper’s blog Gamers: An Untapped Market for AV Integrators in which he shared a bunch of stats from the ESA. Then, Gary followed up on that article with a Rants and Raves audio diatribe entitled “Can Gaming Save the […]
I have worked for 3 integrators over the last 13 years, working on projects that include everything from structured wiring in residential to corporate boardrooms to award winning digital signage projects at universities. As such, I know the advantages of being a one stop shop. In residential for instance, being able to offer structured cabling, audio video, […]
Your business is in a whirlwind of growth and is spiraling, looking for some way to use technology to stabilize the vortex. All of a sudden, you find yourself in a strange land of AV full of unfamiliar and inconspicuous players. Somehow, you assemble the proper combination of Brains, Heart, and Courage that it takes […]
I had the pleasure of supporting a distributor of ours, Almo ProAV at their E4 Expo in Irvine last week. That event was kicked off by a keynote from rAVe’s very own Gary Kayye. During the Q&A section of the keynote, someone asked is Gary saw HDBaseT as a replacement for HDMI in the future, […]
You know I can’t resist the chance to do a point/counterpoint article, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity (especially after I was so blatantly targeted in one of Gary’s Rants and Raves Episodes not too far back. The guy acts like he owns the place . . . oh that’s right, he does! J […]
Well, as happens many other times, I drew inspiration for this post from a fellow “Blog Squadder”, Lee Distad. (That’s “Blog SquaDDer” as in Blog Squad Member as opposed to “Blog SquaTTer”, which is someone who reserves a bunch of WordPress addresses that may be popular and sits on them). Lee wrote about sales pitches, […]
So, before anyone accuses me of copy-catting or riding the coat tails of another article released lately by a competitive publication, I just want to say you’d be wrong. I actually wrote about this idea in 2011. Now considering only about 200 people read my personal blog, I ‘m betting you didn’t see it and it went […]
It’s Labor Day so I have been reflecting on how grateful I am to be working. Over the past several years I have known quite a few AV folks that have lost their jobs or had to start over. In many cases these folks had some trouble landing for an extended period of time, despite […]
There are two major areas of buzz in the display market right now. The first is 4K, (or really 2160p), a technology that is arguably not ready for prime time for most applications until the content catches up to the standard (if you missed my thoughts on 4K, see them here). The second display technology […]
I was reading another post by fellow BloqSquad member Robin Raulf-Sager about the advantages that Video Telconferencing (VTC) may provide during the interview process (if you missed it, click here). I started to leave a comment that was way too long so I stopped and considered writing this blog. In an effort not to be […]
One of my previous articles on my HDMI Extender Shootout at InfoComm13 yielded a few comments. One of those came form Jason Griffing at DSI in Los Angeles, and asked if I had read “HDMI Uncensored” by Boccaccio and Flickinger. I related that I hadn’t but that I was familiar with Mr. Boccaccio and needed to get […]
Typically the fall guy is defined as the one who takes the blame when something goes wrong. The term in that sense could be interchangeable with scapegoat. However in this case, that is not the kind of fall guy I am asking about. I’m asking about the Colt Seavers type of “Fall Guy”. In the […]
“In 1982 a crack commando unit was sent to Japan by IBM to install a Video Conferencing system that did not yet exist. These men promptly saw the potential and left IT, escaping to the Audio Video underground. Today, still wanted by an array of clients, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have […]
So fellow blogger Lee Distad just released a blog on LinkedIn and why, as he says, “it sucks”. In the spirit of offering praise first and criticism second, I can’t disagree with Lee’s premise that LinkedIn endorsements, in all of their glory, are virtually worthless. Given that LinkedIn prompts users to endorse their friends for […]
There is an interesting discussion taking place on LinkedIn in the AV Industry Professionals Group. Sam Malik of Premier Mounts asked a great open ended question, “What is the Value of CTS Today?” As you can imagine, the responses vary, depending on what the respondent felt the word “certification” meant. Some feel that it merely […]
Any of you following my Press Release Challenge may wonder what lessons we can learn from the rewrites I attempted over the past couple weeks. One thing I learned was that writing press releases isn’t easy. However there are some very common themes into how to make your message more effective when putting one out. […]
Alright, it’s the last week of the AVPhenom Press Release Challenge, and as such, I wanted to make it hard on myself I guess. I didn’t get any nominations this week, so I had to dig into the nominations of the past couple weeks. I wanted to rewrite one fellow BlogSquad writer Lee Distad sent […]
So this is a retread from my own blog, but I wanted to see if a wider audience drew some comments. . . I was reading an article on the Tucker Tuesday Blog about Magical Thinking and it inspired me to think a little about his question of whether an AV System that lives outside of […]
In an astounding turn of events I have found myself in the market for a job. In my 13 years in AV and IT I have been digitized, publicized, patronized, chastised, (and even Super Sized occasionally at lunch time), but I have never been right-sized. . .until now. So far my AV community of friends […]
Many of my friends and followers of my Twitter feed, @AVPhenom, may have gathered that I ended up with a little bit of “unexpected” free time lately. That left me with a touch of extra insomnia as well, and as such I turned to my old friend the DVR. I had Field of Dreams on […]
Last week I took on a press release by Crestron that needed a little help providing specifics and context to a plethora of product features. Many of these highly technical or feature rich product press releases just need help connecting the dots between the features and why integrators should care about them. But what if the […]
