Vista and Me; part deux

When we last left off the installation of Vista Service Pack 1 was in progress. It finished up about 45 minutes later. My camera and browser problem were resolved.

So all in all it took me just under three hours to have a video chat via Google Talk.  I considered myself a lucky duck, to complete this task, without tech support from India. That was until I saw a television commercial for Windows 7.

This guy who claims to be a PC, is walking though his house bragging about how his laptop is playing music from a computer in a different room. Another laptop is streaming  movies to the TV. He can print photos from anywhere in his house, and watch the latest stock reports on anything with a LCD screen, as he gingerly saunters from room to room. All is well in the world, because he uses Windows 7.

Is this how my life should be? How could this be? Did he throw out all his old computers and stuff and buy twenty-five grand of gear to live in this Nirvana? Even if he did wouldn't there be hours loading music and movies. What about the horror of seeing the printer in the network window but still not being able to print. How about his low tech wife who keeps on downloading pretty screen savers with embedded viruses. What about that TV, did he just get lucky that it has the hardware for just this type of wireless connectivity? And I wish he mentioned what model of magic router allows all these devices to work together without any IP conflicts. Or maybe Windows 7 is really magic that can transform all your current appliances into sentient beings.. .  but I digress. . .

My question now is do I muddle through with the Vista that I have or cross over to the Valhalla that is Windows 7. Even if I upgrade the install process will most likely set me back a few more hours, not to mention some more cash.

The saga will continue . . .  in part 3 coming on Monday.

Vista and Me

With all the hub-bub about Windows 7 lately,  I am wondering what this might mean to our future, or at the very least the future of my Toshiba Satellite M205 Laptop.

I purchased my Toshiba Satellite M205 Laptop when a freak "kicked power cord" accident prematurely ended my Acer 15" XP running duty cyle. While I'm not a devote techie, I know how to shop for a computer, at least I thought I did. The Satellite had some impressive specs, I was sure that this puppy would scream, at least in the XP world that I was used to. I plunked down my $700 at Circuit City and went home like a warrior with a fresh kill to feed his village.

Upon the 1st power up I was bitten by The Vista Bug, and it was incurable. The Toshiba Satellite M205 Laptop is not capable of running XP, at least not without following a gazillion step process of finding and installing various drivers and other deep tech tasks. My choices were Brick or Vista. The result was somewhere in the middle. The machine was dreadfully slow. It has all the Vista trappings, there was the constant battle with pop-ups, and it seemed like it was in a perpetual state of updates. I did not lose hope! This was a dual core machine with 2 gigs of ram, it must need just a bit more help, so back to the store, for  4 gigs of ram. (when in doubt add ram). Once installed and rebooted, I was faced with the fact that Vista can only use 3 Gigs of ram. The full 4 gigs  is there and working correctly but the system just doesn't use it.  You think the guys selling the ram would of mentioned that.

So now this laptop is turning into a hobby project rather than a business tool. Once I tried to install Apple's safari and itunes. The programs would disappear at the next restart. I tired the install 3 times with the same results. Then just gave up. I re-installed vista from the back-up disks, turned system options off and on, and after a long while found Vista to be kind of stable, kind of okay.

It is what it is.
I work on a desktop 90% of the time so the laptop really just become a nice office decoration, that I used basically as an expensive net-book. I have now reached a point where I needed the Laptop for a video conference through Google Talk, simple right? Not a chance. The camera and mic work fine , expect there is some conflict that when used through the browser does not allow me to see my image or the image from the other camera. Two hours of surfing led me to the answer that I need to install Vista Service Pack 1, to fix this problem. I started this a 10:45am EST, its now 12:17 and I'm at Stage 1 of 3 84% complete.

LaCie Network Space

I have been using LaCie products for years without a problem. So when they offered a nertork based hard drive for a very reasonable price. I was first online to bring one home. For the most part it has done it's job very effectively. That is until about two weeks ago.

Keep in mind this is a network dive which looks like a external USB or Firewire hard drive, but really acts like a baby server, making it very easy for up to five maching either mac or pc to share and store files. And like a baby server it's active all the time, even when not in use. When I asked LaCie about this they replied that's it's normal, because it always ready for use.

So after many months of use I was not able to access the drive, tried just about everything, changed Ethernet cable, shut off, turned on, unplugged, replugged, I even spoke sweet nothings directly to it. It's a one terabyte and I'm dreading having to sent this thing back in because I know that I'll nevr see the contents on the drive agian.

Two weeks pass and I resolve that I must deal with this issue, I check out the laCie site for what hoops I have to jump through to send in the unit and get a new one or have this one fixed. A last ditch effort reviewing the Troubleshooting section lead me to this:

Media server stops working after a power loss

The media server index can become corrupted after a power loss at certain times. When this happens, the media servers (either TwonkyVision or mtdaapd) will not stream properly, or may not index media files.

If this happens, power off the device for 30 seconds, then power it back up.

If that does not solve the problem, the drive must be reset to factory settings.

Now I'm frantic how do I reset this unit to factory settings? Search the site . . .nothing, search the instruction manual . . . nothing then there it was

The procedure below will reset the Network Space to factory settings:

Switch the drive OFF. Wait for the drive to power down. If it does not power down within two minutes, unplug the drive from power, then reconnect it.

Switch the drive ON. After about three seconds, flip the power switch to the OFF position, then ON again.

If the light on the front quickly pulses, the drive is now reset to its factory settings. The data is unaffected by this procedure.

Now all it right in the world! Lesson learned, always check the support section of websites! I suppose that up there with read the directions!

Mac Keyboard Shortcuts, The Power of the Thumb

There are many easy and fast keyboard shortcuts available to Macintosh Users.

The easiest way to remember them and use them starts with your left thumb. Keep your left thumb reserved for pressing the command key [ ⌘ ] and use your pointer finger to press the action key. Once your hand memorizes this motion, more complex keyboard shortcuts are a breeze. However if you try and use a different finger for the commad key when more advanced three and four key shortcuts are needed you'll fingers will become a twisted mess.

Cut stuff the easy way! Mac Users: Place left thumb on the command key and press " x " with you left pointer finger.

Paste like a pro! Mac Users: Place left thumb on the command key and press " v " with you left pointer finger.

Copy it fast! Mac Users: Place left thumb on the command key and press " c " key with you left pointer finger.

Undo or redo! Mac Users: Place left thumb on the command key and press " z " with you left pointer finger.

Viral Marketing

The words far below are probally the best definition of viral marketing, however in people speak it's really just another annoying way to sell ones wares. with every medium the annoying outweighs the good, but nevertheless there is good to be found in this medium. Twitter is very casual about making connections. As a beginning twitter user; I asked my self who would follow me what do I have to say that is so important? and why do i want to follow that guy, he seems like a moron.

And in that lies the beauty of this medium, you can search for topics, names, events and more than likely someone else has something to say about the same thing, and there is usually a link to a bit more on that person view of the subject. Now you have invested two clicks into the perspective of a person who you would of never found without this medium. A few more click and an email and you may have made a friend. or even still someone to buy your stuff.

from wikipedia-

The buzzwords viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet^[1]. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.

The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along.

The term "viral marketing" has also been used pejoratively to refer to stealth marketing campaigns—the unscrupulous use of astroturfing on-line combined with undermarket advertising in shopping centers to create the impression of spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm.^[2]

Why Twitter Matters Can the fledgling microblogging service become a social media powerhouse to rival giants like Facebook—or will it be gobbled up?

It's easy to laugh at nonsense on Twitter, the microblogging rage. "My nose is leaking," writes someone called Zapples, "so imma go to sleep now.…" But I've heard lots of similar drivel (and even produced some myself) on the phone—an important technology if there ever was one.

The key question today isn't what's dumb on Twitter

What is CSS

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"CSS" redirects here. For other uses, see CSS (disambiguation).

For the use of CSS on Wikipedia, see Help:Cascading style sheets.

Cascading Style Sheets

Filename extension	.css
Internet media type	text/css
Developed by	World Wide Web Consortium
Type of format	Stylesheet language
Standard(s)	Level 1 (Recommendation) Level 2 (Recommendation) Level 2 Revision 1 (Candidate Recommendation)

Cascading Style Sheets
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HTML
HTML and HTML 5 Dynamic HTML XHTML XHTML Mobile Profile and C-HTML Character encodings Font family HTML editor HTML element HTML scripting Layout engine Quirks mode Style sheets Unicode and HTML W3C Web colors Comparison of document markup languages web browsers layout engines for HTML HTML 5 Non-standard HTML XHTML
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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the colors, fonts, and layout. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. While the author of a document typically links that document to a CSS stylesheet, readers can use a different stylesheet, perhaps one on their own computer, to override the one the author has specified.

CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Internet media type (MIME type) text/css is registered for use with CSS by RFC 2318 (March 1998).