Author: Jason Dunn

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):

1. Fire up the registry editor (START > RUN > REGEDIT)
2. Drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Class
3. Select 4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 (the first REG_SZ will say “DVD/CD-ROM Drive” to help you identify the right one).
4. Select the LowerFilters value and press the Delete key.
5. If you see UpperFilters listed as a value, select that as well and delete it.

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!

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.

CBC-thepoint-jason-dunn-unboxing.mp3

Another unboxing article was published this week, in a local paper called Metro Calgary. It’s one of those free papers that you’ll see outside grocery stores, transit stops, etc. The article was published in the paper on Thursday the 29th of January, and the same article was featured on their home page (pictured above). The photographer, Robin Kuniski, took a few photos like the above image – pretty standard stuff. But he brought an empty box with him and had a cool idea to put his camera in the bottom of the box and have me open it from the top – I saw a quite preview of the results and the photos looked great! Sadly, Metro Calgary ran with the above image instead, complete with me looking down creating a double chin. Gee, thanks Metro Calgary.

The article itself is kind of strange – it seems that the journalist that interviewed me, Jennifer Hilliker, didn’t really understand how YouTube works. The first line, “As Calgarian Jason Dunn unwrapped his Dell Studio Hybrid computer, about 90,000 Internet viewers watched in fascination”, makes it sound like YouTube is a real-time streaming video site. That Dell video has had nearly 90,000 views, yes, but when I opened the box the only one watching it was me. And check out this last paragraph:

“Ryan Felgate, blogger for techvibes.com said that people have to be careful, as he suspects some corporations launch “unboxing” videos under the guise of a regular person. “I’m not sure if a YouTube video could be an authentic depiction of a product,” Felgate said.”

Felgate makes it sound like none of the unboxing videos on YouTube are legitimate, which is ridiculous. I can’t imagine that’s what he really thinks, because the awkward quote isn’t even proper English – maybe he meant “I’m not sure if all YouTube videos are authentic depictions of a product”. I’ll drop him a line and ask for clarification, because it’s quite a broad condemnation of anyone that does unboxing videos – and I find it hard to believe that’s what he really meant.

I also couldn’t help but notice that Hilliker URL-dropped the Techvibes site, but not one of my sites, and I’m the topic of the article. I’m stunned at the lack of willingness to mention the name or URL of my site – I’ve dealt with more than half a dozen different journalists in the past three weeks, and thus far none of them have told any of their readers/viewers where they can actually find me online. More on that later.

The media coverage of my unboxing videos has continued over this past week, the latest being this article published over at The Weekly Albertan. And the words “Geek Porn” are in the title. Hooray. <sigh>