So, last month, during the Adobe Community Summit in San Jose, California, I had a nice visit with my cousin Karen who lives there. We had dinner at her house (where she lives with her partner Peter), and they made a comment during dinner about doing some karaoke in their living room afterwards. At first, I thought they were kidding, but my cousin isn’t exactly a jokester. Peter is seriously into karaoke, and we had a ton of fun for a couple of hours singing in the living room. Oddly, I think I caught the karaoke bug, because it’s been in the back of my mind since the trip. This week, I bought a karaoke game for the XBox 360 (which I haven’t turned on for a long time), American Idol Encore. As far as karaoke games are concerned, I think Konami (and Blitz Games) did a pretty decent job. I don’t think the 3D renderings of Randy, Paula, and Simon are all that great, and that’s probably the biggest thumbs down for the whole game playing experience for me. Oh, I guess I should disclose that I’m an American Idol fan, but that’s not necessarily why I got the branded title. I just couldn’t find many options for the XBox 360 that were karaoke style games. I’m hoping that if I practice a bit on the XBox that I’ll be in better form for the open lounge singing at Nye’s Polonaise Room with Piano Bar. Watch out Jer Thorpe! Here I come!

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On2 announced on Monday some interesting improvements/enhancements to their VP6 codec:

http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=439&news_id=623 

I’m told by Jon Luther at On2 that these improvements are available now in the Flix Engine and will be available later this year in the On2 desktop products.

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For the last six months or so, I’ve had my Francis!Francis! (aka FF) X1 espresso machine taken apart and laid out in my work area in the basement, and I’ve known for a while now that the only thing wrong with this overpriced but stylish espresso machine is a faulty thermistor. This little d0-dad simply opens/closes a circuit when the boiler reaches (I think) 125 degrees Celsius. I’ve found some close but inexact matches at various electronic parts stores online, but I would really love an exact match. Anyone know where I can grab some spare parts? (Oh, and I won’t go into the long and dreadful story of contacting customer service for seeking a replacement part and not a full blown repair requiring the whole unit to be shipped.)

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Dave Schroeder at Flashbelt just added a new Flash Video workshop that I’ll be teaching in June. For more details, check out my speaker and session details at: 

http://www.flashbelt.com/#/speakers/

Post a comment if you plan on attending!

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I’ve been MIA since Monday morning trying to solve a crisis with my home office network servers. Of course, being the tech idiot and geek that I am, I run my own Microsoft Exchanger Server and maintain a domain controller, yadda yadda yadda. What happened Monday morning? Well, I got a new MacBook Pro. Cause for celebration, yeah? I started by trying to setup Active Directory services on the new computer, and me, being the tech idiot and unnecessarily rushing the process while looking after my daughter, inadvertently specified my domain controller’s computer name as the MacBook Pro’s name when I added the the new computer to the domain. Well, SHEEEEAT! All hell broke loose with Active Directory–so much that Active Directory’s DNS zones registered the MacBook Pro’s IP as the IP for the lookup of my domain controller, and I only have one primary DNS service running on my network. I have a secondary DNS, but that doesn’t allow me change jack, and that secondary DNS is running Windows 2000 Server, not Windows Server 2003.

It’s now Wednesday and every tech note I could find on Microsoft won’t help me get rid of the error messages I’m seeing on my poor domain controller. Luckily, I have an older domain controller that’s been offline for the last eight months, but I don’t make many changes to Active Directory, so rolling back to that data shouldn’t be a problem. BUT, and here’s the huge but, that machine has been on the fritz, not completing boot cycles, hanging randomly, etc. So, I cloned that machine’s hard drive to some a new drive and put it in a Pentium 4 box and ran the Windows Server 2003 install CD and performed a repair. So far, everything looks intact, but I haven’t rebooted the monster domain controller that’s run amuck yet. All e-mail @theMakers.com is down at the moment, and I’m hoping to have it resolved tonight.

BTW, I should mention that I did have backups on the monster domain controller, but the last backup was CORRUPT! The damn BKF file couldn’t be read by NTBACKUP and the most valuable information there–System State–could not be extracted “as is” by all of these damn popular BKF repair utilities. Those are great if you need to recover documents, but system recovery? FORGET IT!

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As if getting taxes done this year wasn’t enough (doing the books for [theMAKERS], etc.), I’ve had the misfortune of two different drives heading south. The first one was a Western Digital 500GB My Book USB/Firewire edition, and the second one was an internal Toshiba 80GB laptop drive–at least three years old if not five!–that I had in a USB enclosure. I don’t know exactly what went wrong with the former drive, but it failed to mount on my Windows XP Media Center. I was able to run chkdsk and I thought all was well, but I wasn’t able to copy files from the drive without errors, and the system would hang/lock up for long periods of time while trying to access the drive. I took the drive out of the Western Digital enclosure (not easy! no screws… had to google that one), and used my nifty newertech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter to connect the SATA internal drive to various systems. I’m still in the process of using Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software (about $100) to recover the files. Many of the files have been recovered without errors, but it’s a painfully long and slow process–I’m still not finished after a week or so of running the software. I hope the drive continues to “hang in there” while the recovery process is running.

The latter drive–remember the internal 80GB laptop HD I mentioned?–is doing much better with respect to recovery. I discovered that if I kept the drive in a vertical upright position that it could read much better. The crazy noises it was making stopped when I held the drive upright! (And, btw, it’s not in any enclosure anymore–there’s no fan or anything like that inside of the drive, and I imagine it’s the heads of the drive making the noise.) So, I have it affixed flat against the side of my new el-cheapo Dell Inspiron 530 desktop tower during the copy process. Seems to working great so far, and I’m nearly done recovering every file from it.

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My editor at Peachpit sent me the URL to a recent review covering my Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Video Studio Techniques book. AFAIK, this is an honest review–I haven’t met or talked to the reviewer, T. Michael Testi, but he seems to review quite a few books on photography and video.

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Dang it if I didn’t chip my front tooth while eating a bagel today. I’m at a client meeting here at the Schematic New York office. I was puckering my lips as much as I could to try to grab a glimpse of my mustache for lingering cream cheese, and somehow my lower front tooth caught my front tooth and chipped it. I already scheduled an appointment for next Wednesday with my dentist back in Portland.

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We here in Portland enjoyed prime viewing conditions for the lunar eclipse last night, February 20th, 2008. I didn’t realize an eclipse was in progress, even though I thought the moon looked a bit misshaped during my routine walk with the dog. (I thought some clouds were covering up part of the moon.) Thanks to the check-out clerk at New Seasons Market, I found out we were experiencing a lunar eclipse! Here’s my digital photo of the eclipse as seen from my back porch. The photo was taken with our Sony Alpha 700. This image was cropped down quite about from the original 12MP image, which included some portions of the next door house, trees, etc. I’m pretty sure that the two “stars” in the photo are the planets Saturn and Venus. Here’s a wider shot, showing the house behind our’s and the tree line:  Lunar Eclipse, wide shot, Portland, Ore. 02-20-2008

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The FITC organizers sent me the attendee feedback for my sessions at FITC Hollywood this past October. Here’s the breakdown:

New Features of Flash - Full Day Workshop

Attendee ratings:

• Was the speaker knowledgeable on the topic presented? = 10.00
• Did the session meet your expectations? = 9.80
• Did the speaker present the material in a clear and well-organized way? = 9.80
• Please rate the overall effectiveness of the speaker. = 9.80
• This session will affect the way I work: = 9.20
• Over all average = 9.72

Attendee comments:

• Great presentation!
• Very enthusiastic and very informative

Deploying Video - FLVPlayback Component  (1 hour session)

Attendee ratings:

• Was the speaker knowledgeable on the topic presented? = 9.83
• Did the session meet your expectations? = 9.61
• Did the speaker present the material in a clear and well-organized way? = 9.67
• Please rate the overall effectiveness of the speaker. = 9.56
• This session will affect the way I work: = 9.00
• Over all average = 9.53

Attendee comments:

• This guy needs a bigger stage.
• sharp fast knowledgeable A+
• I thought this was going to be more hands on…but it was cool
• I got free sh*t. 
• Robert is the greatest
• thanks for putting those tools online 

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