I’ve blogged about the Firefox spell check before, but this really got metoday: Firefox 3.0.5, the US English version with the Canadian English dictionary installed, generated this series of red error lines:
Do you see any spelling errors in that sentence? I don’t. So what’s with all the red lines? Come on Firefox developers, you can do better than this…
I’m not sure how or why, but a few months ago the DVD drive went missing on the HP Pavilion Slimline that my wife uses. Not physically missing of course, but missing in software – as in, there was no optical drive showing up in the list of drives. Putting a disc in the drive did nothing – I couldn’t load any new software on it. It wasn’t a big deal for quite a while, because we didn’t have much use for the drive, but this week I needed to load software for a new HP multi-function laser printer, so I figured I’d try to get it fixed once and for all.
When I saw that the optical drive was showing up in the device manager with a small yellow exclamation mark, I tried the normal thing: uninstall it, scan for new hardware, and let Vista fix the problem by re-installing it. Unfortunately, that didn’t work – it continued to complain about a bad driver, giving me error coe 39. I did a bit of searching and found this page on HP support that addressed the problem through a variety of steps. I knew the drive had power because it would eject properly, and the case hadn’t been opened in months so I figured it wasn’t a cable problem.
The solution ended up being in the registry. Here are the steps I followed to fix it (a shortened version of the steps from the HP site):
After a reboot, I was back in action, with the DVD drive showing up. Thanks HP for having worthwhile online support and saving me a phone call!
If you’re the kind of person to read a blog, you’ve probably already seen one of Matt “The Dancing Fool” Harding’s videos – his two videos of him dancing in various places around the world have been viewed over than 30 million times. The video above is his 2008 video, and every time I watch it, it makes me smile. Isn’t it interesting how when we see someone smile at us, we’re compelled to smile back? I believe we’re all created in the image of God and each have a divine spark – and when we see someone experience true joy we feel a resonance in our own heart; and we smile back.
If you find the song he used in this video as compelling as I do, you can snag it from Amazon.com for 99 cents.
The most recent, and probably (hopefully?) my last television appearance on the topic of unboxing, is courtesy of CityTV’s “Your City” news program. I had the most fun with this interview, largely because the camera guy was kind of geeky himself and we were chatting about digital cameras, HD video, video editing software, etc. As for the piece itself, I think it went pretty well. What I found particularly amusing were the facial expressions of Sandra Jansen, before and especially after the piece – you can tell she was thinking “Really? People watch this?” 😉
“Aamer Haleem hosts a lively, fast paced, provocative and always entertaining array of conversation, debate and good old fashioned water cooler chat.
Informed and plugged-in guests bring insight and analysis on the big stories of the day and what they mean to you. And you’ll hear stories you won’t hear anywhere else that are guaranteed to get you talking and joining in the conversation.”
Last Thursday, the 29th of January, was when I was on this show. It was a neat experience to be in a radio station sound booth, wearing a set of headphones and talking into a microphone – I hadn’t done that since back in the Sound Doctrine days (the band I was in). What was a bit strange was that the host, Aamer Haleem, was in Vancouver – so I was alone in the sound booth. I was invited to be on the whole segment, which made me a part of the topic of the day…which happened to be “Should fighting be banned in the NHL?”. I tend to have an opinion on everything, but since I watch hockey essentially never, this was a bit of a stretch for me. I think I handled it well enough though. You can check out the full version of the interview over on the CBC site, complete with two songs, or you can listen to the edited down version that I created below.