Category: Internet & Technology

My CBC TV interview happened today, and it was an interesting experience. The whole thing lasted nearly two hours, all for a segment that will run 2 minutes. Not all of that was on-camera mind you – one of the things I helped the reporter with was to shoot two short promo pieces, shown below.

[Not sure what happened with my camera’s white balance above – the video below is much warmer in tone.]

[Note the incredulous tone in her voice – the angle of the story is that these unboxing videos are kind of strange and quirky, and who watches them anyway? I think I explain their purpose quite well…but we’ll see how it comes out post-edit.]

I filmed her doing the promos on my Canon HD camera, then edited them and uploaded them to YouTube (in private mode). Then she took her big expensive pro camera and filmed the video clips playing on my computer screen on the YouTube page. It should make for an interesting visual! I thought I’d share the two promo pieces here because I think it’s cool how she has that “news voice” – it makes me sound way cooler than I really am. Hah! The “one million views” she’s referring to is my total number of video views, as reported by TubeMogul. It’s a total number of all the video views across all the video sites that I upload to (about 12 of them). 99% of the views come from YouTube though.

The story will be shown on CBC Calgary, Monday the 19th, at 6pm – that’s channel six in Calgary. I haven’t seen how it turned out yet, so I’ll be watching it hoping that I didn’t come across as a complete idiot or shifty-eyed-home-office-dweller. I was nervous about it at first, but I eventually started to enjoy myself – the reporter was quite friendly and was very low-pressure. HP and Buzzcorps will be happy because the flashy geek gadget I used for most of the shots was the Vivienne Tam Edition HP Mini 1000 they sent a couple of weeks ago for Ashley to check out. Nothing like some free press for a product that’s going to be coming out in Canada soon, right?

OK, so that CBC radio interview I mentioned earlier? It seems that the radio interview was interesting enough to catch the attention of a CBC reporter, and she’s coming over tomorrow to interview me on camera and talk about my unboxing videos and what I do. It will be on TV on Monday, the same day as the radio interview – they want to do a “one-two punch”. Oh my. I’m already getting nervous about it – secretly I long to be a technology pundit, because most of the guys the mainstream media tap don’t know as much as they think they do, and I really enjoy sharing what I know with others – but I didn’t want to pursue that until I lost 30 pounds and looked like a healthy, ripped technology pundit. HAH! Damn, I knew I should have spent the first two weeks of January eating 100 calories a day. 😀

Once a year for the past four years, give or take, I’ve taken some photos of my home office workspace – mostly for my own amusement. It’s really neat for me to be able to look back on the way I’ve changed the technology and layout of my office over the years. I have some photos of my condo in 2001, and the technology I was using then, and it’s hilarious to look at. Big-ass CRT monitors everywhere! I took these photos for this thread over on Digital Home Thoughts – the timing was great because my office hasn’t been this clean or organized in months. I cleaned it up (with Ashley’s help) because a radio reporter for the Calgary Eyeopener, a CBC Radio One program, was coming over to interview me about unboxing videos. Yes, it’s radio, but I didn’t want to answer the question “Why is your office so disorganized?”. 😉

If you’ve ever been browsing a network drive and right-clicked on a folder and accidentally selected “Always Available Offline” (it’s easier to do than it sounds), you’ll have no doubt seen the little green Sync Center icon that comes up every time from that point forward – even when you’ve de-selected all the offline sync folders, and it has absolutely nothing to do, it still loads at every boot. The solution to stopping it isn’t found inside the Sync Center itself – where you’d think it would be – instead you have to go to the Control Panel and double-click on Offline Files. Once there you’ll see the above window, and it’s as simple as clicking on “Disable Offline Files” (in the image above, I’ve already done this) and rebooting. Voila – no more Offline File Sync Center.

I’m watching CNN’s coverage of the US presidential election, and I had to laugh at what they came up with: WILL.I.AM being broadcast as…a hologram. A hologram? Puuuuhlease. A hologram is a projection of light. What CNN did, as near as I can tell based on Anderson Cooper looking at a monitor to figure out where should look, is just a green screen trick where they projected WILL.I.AM like a weather map. It’s a nice trick, sure, but don’t insult science by using a term that’s completely inaccurate.

Oh yeah, and Obama is the next president according to CNN – and by a huge electoral margin. I tend to skew pretty strongly towards right-wing, conservative political thought, but after the past eight years of watching “W” doing his thing, let’s just say I was rooting for Obama. This is a historic day in a lot of ways, and I think Obama is going to do some good things in this world.

And being the pragmatist that I am, I’m going to compare the current USD to CAD exchange rate of 1.13 to whatever it is tomorrow morning. 😉

I installed Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 the other day, and it helpfully gives you the option of where you want to store the virtual hard drive for the virtual machine you’re creating. I put it on my D: drive, which is a pair of 500 GB Western Digital drives in a RAID 1 array. I expected all the changes I made to that virtual machine to be kept inside the virtual hard drive. Not quite! Virtual PC 2007 creates a folder inside the documents folder called My Virtual Machines, then inside that it creates a sub-folder with the name of your virtual machine. And inside that sub-folder, it stores all of the files that it creates for disk undo changes. In my case, after only a week, it was 2 GB of files in total. Because I use FolderShare to sync my documents folder across all my PCs and laptops, this was 2 GB worth of files that were useless everywhere but the computer that was running the virtual machine.

I scoured through all the program settings, and couldn’t find any option that controlled where these files are stored. Ugg. The good news? I was able to move the virtual machine files out of my documents folder and into the same folder as the virtual machine hard drive on my D: drive and everything worked seamlessly – it didn’t even prompt me asking where the files went. I made a slight change to the virtual machine, saved the changes, and watched as the change was comitted to the folder on the D: drive.

So, if you’re curious about whether or not you can move Virtual PC 2007 files out of the Documents Folder, yes you can!

One word: wow. If I ever have an extra $2000 sitting around that I don’t know what to do with, I could easily find things to spend it on at Sideshow Collectibles. The Iron Man figurine pictured above is “only” $174, but the ultra-cool life-sized Iron Man bust is $699. They have amazing items from all genres: comics, fantasy, TV shows, movies, and a lot more. I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t want a replica of Thor’s hammer?!? Must…put…credit…card…away.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to do this, but my installation of Windows Vista Ultimate on my media editing computer was acting so funky it was time for a wipe and re-install. I’ve been watching it go down hill for a few months now, mostly around codec problems (which is a rant for another day) and random application crashes. This morning was the last straw though: I kept getting DEP (Data Execution Protection) errors when using Sure Thing label-making software. Crash crash crash. I was somehow wishing that Windows Vista was different in this regard, but Windows is still Windows: shared DLLs, shared codecs, sloppy third party development, and a tendendency towards instability over time. I’ve found Vista to be better XP – most of my installs last a good year – but it’s still a frustrating problem to have.

I decided to roll back to a squeaky-clean image I had created last year using Acronis TrueImage. The idea being that I have a version of Vista installed, activated, and with all the drivers I needed for the on-board hardware. I installed this clean version of VIsta (after dealing with TrueImage’s tendency toward idiocy in dealing with USB-based keyboards), then I let Vista patch itself up to current status. When SP1 never appeared I did a manual download and install. That worked well, and the final update I did was an NVIDIA driver update. After the install of the video driver, I rebooted my system, only to be presented with an error messages generated by my monitor telling me that the system was displaying a monitor setting that the monitor couldn’t match. I rebooted a few times by punching the reset button, then I booted into safe mode (which worked), but I was unable to set the system to a resolution that the the monitor would support. It’s worth noting that this is a 24″ Dell LCD monitor that runs at 1920 x 1200…so I can’t imagine what resolution the video card was set at (2560 x 1600?). System restore? It seems I turned it off on the image I’d created with Acronis TrueImage.

My only real choice left was a re-install from scratch of Windows Vista. I pondered whether to go 64-bit or not, but in the end I decided that I wanted compatibility more than any of the rather nebulous benefits of going 64-bit (other than getting to use an extra 698 MB of RAM). The install has now finished, and the system is fully patched. What I haven’t done, however, is to re-install all the drivers from Shuttle. After Vista installed, everything just worked: audio, networking, video, etc. In fact, looking at the Device Manager, there wasn’t a single unrecognized device. That’s quite impressive. So the question now is, do I stick with the WHQL-certified plain-jane drivers that come with Vista – which tend to be stable, but not optimized for speed – or do I seek out the proper drivers for my hardware? I updated the video driver of course, but I’ve left the sound, networking, and chipset drivers alone. Decisions, decisions. Opinions?

One thing worth noting: Vista absolutely screams when it’s brand new!