There Are Bad Ideas, Then There Are B*A*D Ideas

karaoke-tunes.JPG

That’s a banner in a booth I saw at CTIA 2007. So the idea here is that you use their software client to sing along with Karaoke tune, then whenever your phone rings you get to hear yourself singing. I’m a vocalist myself, so I have a bit of a narcissistic streak when it comes to hearing what my own singing voice sounds like, but this is completely ridiculous. And sharing it with others? “Hey, here’s a ring tone for you – what it is? Why, it’s yours truly singing Bootylicious…no, wait, why are you walking away?”. Some business plans deserve to fail.

It’s Just One of Those Days

Upgrading WordPress is a Pain in the Ass: I just finished updating WordPress from 2.1.1 to 2.1.3, and for this particular version they strongly suggested that people delete most of the WordPress files and re-upload them from scratch. What a slow, frustrating process that was – I can’t believe that with all the users WordPress has, they wouldn’t have come up with a smoother, more automated process by now. I’m keeping my eye on Habari to see if it evolves into a smarter solution.

Someone Hacked My Church’s Web Site: What kind of a degenerate hacks a church Web site? Evidently a degenerate that lives in Turkey. He got in through a Joomla exploit and didn’t seem to do much damage other than putting up a “You’ve been hacked” front page display. Thanks to Jorj and Janak, who did the investigating, it seems that only that one account was compromised and everything else on the server is ok. Yet I still remain a big nervous because you just never know…

Buy a Fresh, Whole Rabbit from Amazon.com

I don’t know if this is an April Fool’s joke or what, but my sick and twisted sense of humour found the “buyer” reviews to be extremely amusing. Here are some of the more amusing ones (thanks to Todd for the heads up).

“A lot of my friends like to shop online, so I added this to my baby registry. My best friend received one at her shower and she loves it! So when I got TWO at my shower, it wasn’t the disaster other duplicate gifts can be! My little girl is now three months old and we are still getting a lot of use out of the Fresh Whole Rabbits.”

“Thought it would make a cute Easter gift, no one else thought so, kids are in counselling now. Apparently I’m the only one with a sense of humor in this family. At least it’s a hit with the dog, one extra star for that. I’m way too scared to even try to take it away from him, he loves it so much. ‘Heh, OK SirFluffles,’ I say to him, ‘it’s YOUR fresh whole rabbit.'”

“How many weekends have I spent, in the loincloth, knife clenched in my teeth, running through the fields trying to find a rabbit? (A bunch, trust me on this, a bunch.) All so I can have something to sacrifice on the altar once I get to the cave. Now, with this, home, fix a cocktail, go through the day’s mail, finish my drink and drive over to the cave, yank this carcass out of the box and offer this at the feet of my dark lord and master, boom, done. I’m happy, my dark lord and master is happy, everybody wins. What a time saver.”

Gears of War Quandry: Surely This Can’t Be Right?

I picked up Gears of War a couple of months ago, but have only recently started to start playing it more seriously. Some friends were over a few weeks ago and we played in co-op mode for a bit, and got to a certain checkpoint. Then this last Saturday I fired it up again to play with a buddy of mine who’s in Ontario. I wanted to start over a new game from scratch with him, but I also wanted to keep my previously saved game. The game wouldn’t let me do that – it said that if wanted to start a new campaign I would lose my previous campaign and checkpoints. That can’t be right – am I missing something? How do you play a solo game and also do online campaigning with your friends? Or what if you have more than one group of friends you want to play with?

Video Woes & Wishing For More Laptop Firepower

I took a several videos today at CTIA, all of Windows Mobile applications being demoed. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight I really didn’t have the right hardware or software to get the job done properly. I thought that YouTube was limited to videos 10 minutes long, but they also have a 100 MB file size limit. My Canon SD800 doesn’t have any sort of video compression beyond basic MJPEG, so the file sizes are huge. An 8 minute 44 second video clip at 320 x 240 resolution weighs in at 325 MB. That means I’m having to compress them to get the file size under 100 MB before I can upload the videos to have YouTube compress them all over again. It’s not like you can see the double-compression though with the crappy bitrates YouTube uses.

Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but my Fujitsu P7010D doesn’t have the graphics power to run Windows Movie Maker (which is incredibly stupid that it requires hardware acceleration and won’t run at all), and I didn’t install Premiere Elements before leaving, so I was left without any ability to edit video files. I tried Movavi, but it turned out to be highly problematic – it locked up on me several times, complained about missing codecs even when Windows Media Player could play back the file without trouble, and generally wouldn’t do a damn thing properly. I really wanted to like Movavi – it seems to have a great set of features, but I’ve tried it on two PCs now (one Vista, one XP Pro) and it was unstable and dysfunctional at editing video, splitting video, and ripping a DVD. Next I installed Nero 7 because I happened to already have the 175 MB “upgrade” downloaded – it’s ridiculous how Nero releases a trial version of the entire suite as an upgrade for customers, but in this case it happened to be helpful to me. A quick phone call to Ashley got me the serial number I needed. I installed it and rebooted, but bizarrely enough Nero Vision (the video editing application) won’t work with the Canon AVI files properly – when I add one to the timeline it only recognizes the first ten seconds. No errors, it just won’t work properly.

I started to get a bit desperate at this point, so I did a search for a freeware video editing application and tried AviTricks. I didn’t work and puked on codec errors. At this point I was loudly cursing Canon for making their video format so difficult to deal with. As a last-ditch effort, I tried the crusty old Windows Media Encoder 9, and it actually worked! The problem is this 1.2 Ghz Pentium M CPU is exactly made for fast video encoding – it’s taking me forever to encode each clip, especially when I encode a file only to discover it ends up being more than 100 MB in size.

I actually spent some time researching what laptops a local Best Buy here had because I was convinced I’d need a new laptop in order to get all this video transcoding finished before I left Orlando – selecting a new laptop is a topic for another post though, because it’s proving to be a frustrating trying to find the right one. At any rate, the closest Best Buy was out of stock on all six of the HP laptops I was looking at. What are the odds? 🙁 The nearest Circuit City only had one HP laptop, not the one I wanted, and no one at the store would pick up the phone. I gave up and decided to rough it with my little Fujitsu, and while it’s slow, I’m getting the videos transcoded and uploaded. Back to the grind…

CTIA Connectivity Sucks

This blog post sums it up nicely:

“It’s become aritual: thousand of people gather in one place to exhort the glories of communications in this glorious wireless age—and damn little works as planned. Today, the CTIA WiFi, which already was slow and glitchy yesterday, has been overwhelmed since before the keynotes ended and the show officially opened…I wish I were alone. The cries of “the wifi is down” were ringing throughout the press room and elsewhere. Some cell phones are taking much longer than usual to connect. I heard one person wondering if Skype was being blocked because he had so many problems; I could get through on chat easily (when online) but never tried a call. I asked a press room tech assistant about it and he didn’t know what Skype is.”

It’s a dark irony that at a conference all about connectivity, it’s so damn hard to get connected. Someone needs to get punched in the head for this situation.

Jeremy Toeman’s 10 Tips for PR People

Jeremy has put together a list of 10 tips for PR people that are working with bloggers, and it’s a great read. Here’s one of his tips:

“Do your homework.  Most blogs have an ‘about’ page, in which you’ll discover the blogger’s full-time job (assuming it isn’t blogging), region of the country/world where they live, topics they prefer to cover, how they’d like to be contacted (bonus tip: IM or email is almost always the answer, not the phone), etc.  Read this and understand it.  Furthermore, doing a little background research will quickly tell you whether or not the blogger is good at keeping secrets/embargos (some do, some don’t – learn the difference).”

I’ve received probably 100+ press releases from PR firms in the past 30 days leading up to CTIA, and it’s stunning how completely random and un-targeted they are. I can tell that 99.9% of the people sending them to me have never visited any of my sites, and know absolutely nothing about me or what kinds of things I cover. It’s no surprise then that I delete 99.9% of them without wasting my time reading them.

Jeremy also has a great post covering 10 tips for bloggers working with PR people, and it’s also a good read. Having a background in PR myself, I tend to know what the PR people want and don’t want – but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that #10 (Setting Expectations) is my biggest problem. I have a real struggle finding the discipline to write reviews in a timely, consistent manner – and more often than not I find myself apologizing to PR people for taking so damn long to write my reviews. It’s something I really wanted to improve upon in 2007, but I have to admit it’s proving to be harder than I thought. I’ll keep at it though!

Well Wouldn’t You Know It…

It figures that the week I’m on a contract writing gig my laptop decides to flake out on me: for some bizarre reason the “e” key is partially sticking and not responding to key presses properly. I was wondering why, when I was writing an article on the airplane, I kept missing the letter “e” when typing. As a touch-typist, you get used to hitting every key with the same amount of force – not too much, not too little – and it’s hard to change the muscle memory in just one finger on one key. I don’t quite know what the problem is, but I can’t risk opening the laptop here (nor do I have the proper tools) so I’ll just suffer through it and try to remember to pound the “e” key whenever I need that all-too-often used vowel.

I’m looking at getting a Sony TX series laptop, largely because the Fujitsu P7230 (the upgrade of my laptop) isn’t all that impressive. I’m holding back though because I generally loathe Sony as a company, and most of their products. I wish Samsung sold their laptops in North America!

I’m in Sunny Florida

I’m down in Florida doing a blog project for Microsoft, and I had to pack up and leave on my birthday (yesterday, the 25th). I wish I could say that I had a great birthday day, but I woke up pretty early (when I think it should be mandatory that you get to sleep in until whenever you want on your birthday), packed my bags, then got on a plane for Orlando. After a very looooong five hour flight sitting next to a family that brought greasy fast food with them onto the plane, I made it to Orlando. I did a poor advance planning job and didn’t prepare any ripped DVDs or TV shows to watch (one of my favourite activities to do on a flight), so I ended up reading a lot of my book, iCon.

Then I had to wait 30 minutes for my bag to show up on the luggage belt. After waiting another 20 minutes in line for a taxi, I got onto a taxi shuttle that went to almost every other hotel before mine first, finally made it to my hotel, waited another 10 minutes in line as the single desk clerk checked in the three people in front of me with Japanese names that he couldn’t spell, stumbled exhausted into my room, then waited an hour for a greasy pizza to show up because I was too tired to be bothered with going out to find food myself. Quite the adventure. I already wish I was back home, but work is work, so once more unto the breech I go!