Helder Guimaraes
Oh, man. Helder is slick. He starts off his performance with some old tricks that we all know, and before long these old tricks are fooling the CRAP out of us magicians. Just watch. You won’t see anything.

Stan Allen
Things worth thinking about. That is the whole talk. Stan brings little gems from his collection for us to simply “think about.” These are priceless. There is gold here for everyone. Absolutely priceless.

Session 4 (10 am Eastern)
Mike Caveney – Welcome to Session 4
Luis de Matos – Flypaper
Topas – Idea Society
Performance by Miguel Angel Gea
Paulino Gil – Magic Goes Public
Ponta the Smith – Radical Coin Magic
Performance by Anton Lopez
Jason England – Magic and Cardsharping
Q&A Session
Session Highlights:
Lots of cool stuff here, but what I am going to be watching closely will be Ponta’s talk on coin magic and Jason’s talk on cardsharping. Should be epic.

Session 5 (1pm Eastern)
Marco Tempest – Welcome to Session 5
Carlos Vaquera – Good Practice Makes Good Design
Performance by Apollo Robbins
David Brtiland – The Mind of Dr. Frost
Performance by De’Vo Vom Shattenreich
Paul Kieve – Five Tricks You’d Never See in a Magic Show
Performance by Dani DaOrtiz
Panel Discussion – Topas, Helder Guimaraes, Richard MacDougall, and Eric Eswin, moderated by Max Maven
Performance by Guy Hollingsworth
Session Highlights:
Apollo Robins is going to be a treat to watch. Paul Kieve should have a very interesting talk for which I am excited to watch. De’Vo’s performance will be interesting to see at the very least. I am also excited for the panel discussion. Big names will make for a big event.

Q&A Session

Session 6 (4:30 Eastern)
Stan Allen – Welcome to Session 6
Marco Tempest – Magic Online
Max Maven – Who Was the First Close-up Magician?
Performance by Finn Jon
Helder Guimaraes – The Mental Path
Richard Wiseman – The Tricked Brain – Explorations into Psychology and Magic
Performance by Cyril Takayama
De’Vo Vom Shattenreich – Art and Business of Manipulation
Q&A Session

Session Highlights:
There is not a single thing here I will be missing. Marco Tempest is a legend, as is Max Maven. Their talks will be priceless. Finn Jon should be pretty epic. Helder has grow a lot in my opinion in recent times, so I look forward to his presentation. Richard Wiseman is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, and his lecture will not disappoint. One of the performances I have been looking forward to the most for this whole conference will be tomorrow when Cyril takes his turn. Last, but not least, De’Vo giving a talk at the EMC ought to be intriguing.

Session #1 (12 pm Eastern)
Luis de Matos – Welcome to the EMC
Eric Mead – Puzzles, Tricks, and Magic: On the Curious Aesthetics of Conjuring
Performance by Ponta the Smith
Dani DaOrtiz – Card Magic

Session Highlights
I am looking forward to the entire thing, so don’t get me wrong. I will simply highlight the specific events I am looking forward to the most on a personal level, you go find your own. Eric Mead is a genius. His talks are always fantastic, so I will not be missing that (Well, yes, I will miss the live session while I work, but it will be the first recorded talk I run to.) Following that, Ponta the Smith is freaking insane. I can’t wait to see his performance.

Session #2 (4 pm Eastern)
Topas – Welcome to Session 2
Gaetan Bloom – Simply Bloom
Performance by Helder Guimarães
Stan Allen – 33 Things Worth Talking About
Performance by Marco Tempest
Barry and Stewart – Everything We’ve Learned So Far
Performance by Carlos Vaquera
Panel Discussion – Cyril Takayama, Luis de Matos, David Britland, and Max Maven, moderated by Marco Tempest
Performance by Gazzo
Q&A Session

Session Highlights
Three performances I am dying to see, Helder, Marco, and Gazzo, and I am excited to see Carlos perform for the first time. I lived in Scotland for a couple years, so Barry and Stewart are always among my favorites. The Panel Discussion is so full of world class material that you are not going to want to miss it.

Session #3 (7:30 pm Eastern)
Eric Mead – Welcome to Session 3
Mike Caveney – The American Zig-Zag Girl Scandal
James Freedman – Talk
Performance by Max Maven
Apollo Robbins – Cover Touches: Loading, Locking, and Other Audience Management Techniques
Richard McDougall – Use Your Imagination
Performance by Paul Kieve
Lenart Green –Master of Chaos
Q&A Session

Session Highlights
The legendary Lenart Green will make my night when I get to see him as the final speaker of the first day. Before that, I will be watching Apollo Robbins intently. I also am excited for the performances by Max Maven and Paul Kieve.

All in all, tomorrow ought to be awesome. When I get to see the conference live, expect me to be on the EMC chatroom, tinychat.com/exomagic, and Twitter (@lyleborders) covering the events live. If you aren’t signed up yet, DO IT, NOW.

L

Now, I know what you are thinking. “I live in , I can’t make it to Portugal tomorrow!” Here is the kicker to the entire EMC. It is online. Luis de Matos is organizing this as the world’s first web conference for magicians. Many people live far enough away from where the conventions happen (myself included) that they rarely have the chance to attend one. If you fall into this group, Luis is your hero. You can sit comfortably in your home tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday and watch the best of the world of magic talking about what it takes to be on the same level.

http://essentialmagicconference.com/ is the place to go. For 55 euros (about $75) you get the following – Live video feed and chatroom access through the whole conference, streaming video for each and every session for one year after the conference is over, and a complete DVD set of the entire conference mailed to your door at no cost to you. Sound like a steal? It should. A live ticket to a conference like this ought to cost much more without the streaming access and the DVD set. This is one of the best deals in magic that you could come by.

If you doubt me, go ahead and don’t take the last chance to register. I will be blogging throughout the event to keep everyone informed of what has happened. People who missed a session can see what coolness they missed. People like you who, for unknown crazy reasons, did not register for the conference can find out what you are missing. Stay tuned right here for the action, and also hop on the ExoMagic Tinychat space during the conference (www.tinychat.com/exomagic password – daivernon) to chat with other magicians watching the conference and discuss the creative ideas you have come to expect from ExoMagic.

Are you in? I am.

L

Today is Earth Day,

It is important that we understand our impact on the world. Today, ExoMagic would like to share with the world our steps taken to make Earth a better place. I took my morning off and brainstormed on how ExoMagic can bring a better recognition to recycling. We landed on the idea of promoting a couple of products we carry that are made with recycled material (S&M v4 & Bicycle Eco)

• Orders $30-80 receive 2 FREE Bicycle Eco Edition Playing Cards
• Orders $$80+ receive 2 FREE Smoke & Mirrors // v4 Green Edition
• 10% off all items until April 26th with the coupon code “earthweek”
  
  (note:1 discount per order)

Check out the ExoMagic Store “Eco Friendly” page. We have filled it with facts and steps on how we can all contribute back to Earth. Here are some quick things ExoMagic has done to help:

• Green Power
• Recycling
• Utilizing energy efficient servers
• Carrying ‘green’ products
• Replacing standard lights with CFL
• Planting trees

Want to know what kind of carbon emission footprint your leaving? Check it out

New vlog coming at you guys, this one is based around story telling and how to apply that to your routines. Basically using stories to connect to your audiences.

Greetings Exo Magicians. Mat here and I am very excited to be writing to you for the second time at ExoMagic. I would like to present to you a new way of approaching magic that I have been conjuring up over the last few months. Some of you may know me as pyro222 from PhatusMagic and if so, you will already know that my approach to the art is often off the beaten path. In this article, I will be expanding upon some existing concepts of what I like to call “tech magic” and hopefully together, we might just wear in a new path for some savvy magic and perhaps even pickup some skills you can use elsewhere along the way.

If you are an Exo regular, you will have undoubtedly come across the infamous “Google disappearing OOs” trick. I absolutely love magic of this kind, not just because of its visual aspects, but because when we combine technology with illusion, our gimmicks take on a whole new “virtual” element where ideas can become more dynamic, and most importantly, the materials are free and unlimited. Now I will be honest, this is not for the faint of heart, and if you are not familiar with some of the current web technologies, this may appear somewhat intimidating for some however I will attempt to keep it as simple yet informative as possible so hang in there and lets give it a shot. In the following steps, we are going to be using a technique, perhaps already familiar to some, called JavaScript injection. Now the google trick I spoke of earlier is a great intro to this style of illusion, however it has its limitations in that it does one thing and one thing only. You are also bound to the fact that the server hosting the “fake google” page must be available to you at the time of performance. However with javascript injection, we rely only upon the magician (ourselves) and our understanding of the technology. The more you understand and research, the broader the possibilities will be for you. Ok, enough said, lets get to the good stuff.

First things first lets discuss some basic html and then we will move into how we can manipulate the html using JavaScript. Just about every document you will view on the web will always rest upon the html that is presented to your browser. Sure there are server side scripting languages such as php, asp, and so forth, but in the end it will render the html and that is what you see now before your very eyes. There are probably literally hundreds of different ways to manipulate this html with JavaScript injection however I will just be covering some of the basics and we will leave the advanced stuff for the forum discussions. Also note that everything we do from here on out is case sensitive and also keep in mind that some browsers (say your buddie’s) might have a script blocker add-on installed and will need to either be disabled or set to allow scripts temporarily. That being said, lets do some javascript injection.

First open a new tab in your browser. If you have never done any programming before, it is mandatory that every “noob” start with the customary “hello world” program. (Sorry I don’t make the rules). Highlight the text in your browser’s address bar and replace it with the following text and press enter…

javascript:alert("hello world")

Congrats! You have just injected you first piece of JavaScript code. If you did this correctly, a small alert window should popup containing the text “hello world”. Lets try something a little more fun now. Make sure you have closed the alert window and point your browser to http://www.exomagic.com/blog and once the page is loaded, select the text in the addressbar, replace it with the following and press enter paying special focus to the welcome message in the upper right of the blog…

javascript:void(document.getElementById('welcome').innerHTML="<h1>Ace of Spades</h1>")

Now were getting somewhere. If all went well, The text in the welcome box should now display “Ace of Spades” in big letters. To briefly explain, we basically injected some code that identifies the tag containing a particular ID, in this case we were after a div tag with the ID “welcome” and we changed its html contents to “ace of Spades”. Pretty cool eh, but still, not of much use to a magician. We’ve gotta be more magical. Lets throw in a delay and see what happens. Again point the browser to Exomagic.com/blog and change the address text to the following hit enter, and count out 4 seconds in your head…

javascript:void(setTimeout("document.getElementById('welcome').innerHTML='<h1>Ace of Spades</h1>'",4000))

If you did everything correctly, there should have been a 4 second delay this time before the welcome box changed. Note that all we did differently here was encapsulate our code inside the setTimeout() function. The “4000″ at the end is the amount of time in milliseconds we wish to delay the code from being executed. Now obviously 4 seconds is not much time to cover your tracks, so this is where your misdirection and timing skills come in. Say you set the delay to one minute (60000ms) and executed the code just about 5 seconds past the minute on the computer’s clock. You could then have enough time to replace the code with the blog url (exomagic.com/blog) and then just wait for the computer clock to tick over the next minute. Place your hand over the box and you know you now have about 5 more seconds before it changes. Pretty clever eh? You can also change images, vanish images, alter buttons, move things, fade in and out, or just about anything else you can come up with. The possibilities are really infinite and the more you understand, the more you will be able to conjure up on the fly, and most importantly, use your timing skills, do the math, and setup early. Now I know a lot of you are pretty savvy these days and could probably school me in the ways of JavaScript so be sure and post your ideas and code snippets to the forums, and If any of you have been confused by this or don’t quite fully understand, that’s ok because thats what the forums are here for and I, and I’m sure many of the other Exo members will be more than happy to answer your questions. That’s it for now. I hope you all have enjoyed this article and check back often as there is plenty more to come.
Peace out!
-Mat