Billy Fire LLC

I have been thinking that it might be fun to create some video tutorials of various aspects of this business. This practice seems to have become even more popular with the advent of YouTube.

I was aware of some software packages available, such as Camtasia, but Camtasia is expensive and probably has an overkill of features compared to what I was looking for. I noticed that Adobe has an offering (Adobe® Captivate® 3). It looks really nice and feature filled, but at a fiendishly high price. So I looked for an inexpensive alternative solution.

Overall I downloaded about 5 packages, all of which had free tryouts available, but also were very reasonably priced. The first 3 that I downloaded did not record sound through my microphone (I have a USB microphone and headset which may cause issues for some packages) . Finally I found Screen Recorder Gold.

The software installed easily and worked first time - video and audio. Audio and video quality seem excellent. You can choose the capture area and you have the option to add mouse and keyboard sound effects. I am not sure about sound synchronization, but I don’t think this is too critical as there will not be any lip-sync in my videos. Also the ability to add captions seems to be somewhat limited, but my intention is to create basic video with an audio commentary. If I get more sophisticated I will have to save up for Camtasia.

Up until now, backing up my PC has been a very onerous task. I had to use multiple DVDs, without any real confidence that I would be able to restore files should disaster ever strike. And apparently disk drive failure and data loss are very frequent occurrences.

I recently heard about Carbonite on the radio. Carbonite is a new backup service that runs a small backup application on your PC. It gradually backups up all the files that you need backing up and once this is complete it continues to backup files as they change. This ensures that you always have an up-to-date backup (or at least close to up to date). The best part is: this all takes place in the background without any effort from the user.

Two things hat really caught my eye about this service are:

1. Carbonite claim you get unlimited backup
2. At the time of writing this post, one year of services costs $49.95 and 2 years cost $89.95

Use this link to download a free 15-day trial subscription to Carbonite, and get an extra free month of service when you buy: http://www.carbonite.com/raf/signup.aspx?RAFUserUID=148521&a=0

I never realized how much I used Windows Explorer until yesterday.

For some, yet to be discovered, reason every time I opened Windows Explorer (or the Control Panel) for that matter I got a “Windows Explorer has encountered a problem” error. This was followed by a “DrWatson Postmortem Debugger has encountered a problem” error. After this my computer completely hanged and all I could do was switch it off, check disk etc.

I found that I could still use Windows Explorer by just ignoring the error window, but it seemed sluggish and I was just putting off the inevitable computer hang. Having said that, DrWatson only seemed to rear his ugly head on a random basis, so sometimes the screen would just refresh itself and I could carry on as normal.

Of course I searched the Internet for possible solutions - and it seemed that every man and his Windows XP using dog were having similar problems. To make matters worse every problem posted in a forum was followed by multiple possible solutions.

I was beginning to start pulling out my already thinning hair when I found a truly excellent Web site:

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/techfiles/explorer-crashes.html

The site suggests that a lot of problems are caused because of ’shell extensions’. It suggested downloading some (also excellent) software called ShelExView which shows you all the shell extensions running on your computer. By disabling all the shell extensions and then opening Windows Explorer and then re-enabling each extension, one at a time, I was able to find, firstly whether a shell extension was causing my problems (it was) and secondly which specific shell extension was causing me my problems (WMN Toolbar from Visicom Media).

I uninstalled the toolbar and now everything appears to be fine. Pheww….

As you may know, one of the beauties of cascading style sheet (CSS) formatting of Web pages is that you can create a different style sheet for screen and print (and several other options for that matter, like handheld).

One thing to bear in mind is that background images will not appear in print unless the user has the ’show background’ image option set on their browser. In other words, say you had a logo that you wish to appear on screen and in print, you will need to put the image in the Web page as opposed to including it as a background image for a style.

Is it me or is there something terribly wrong with the Sprint ads? I know they are designed for the lowest common denominator, but surely there must a fewer idiots in the world that Sprint imagines?

The basic premise of all the ads is that the customers are so amazed and blown over by the Sprint offer that they have to use the in-store singer or rental family to express how amazed they are at the incredible offer. To me this is like telling the viewer: “Hey, you are too stupid to see what a great offer we are making to you, so we are going to spell it out really, really slowwwwwwly,” or perhaps, “Hey dopey viewer, we don’t have a very good offer at all but when we show you a few fake customers supposedly getting excited by our offer, you will behave similarly.”

I suppose on the upside I have great recall for these silly and annoying ads - on the downside this recall will remind me to never to do business with Sprint for their marginal, me-too offers.

You don’t need to read too many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) advisories before you see recommendations to register your site on DMOZ. DMOZ is the ‘Open Directory Project’ and is now owned by Netscape. The way it works is, various people (about 74,000 according to the DMOZ Web site) work as volunteer editors. Anyone can submit a site to a specific category. An editor for that particular category will then determine whether the site is deemed suitable for the category. Definitely a ‘directory’ but it doesn’t sound very ‘open’ to me and you could argue that ownership by Netscape means that it is no longer a ‘project’, at least in the original sense of the word.

You might ask whether anyone actually uses DMOZ to search for anything? I imagine a few poor souls do, but as other (non directory) based search engines (such as Google) do a tolerably reasonable job - I suspect not many people search using DMOZ. So why the importance that SEO experts place upon registering with DMOZ? The answer is that, supposedly, Google and other search engines place serious store on what is included in DMOZ - hence a DMOZ listing could improve your search ranking in other search Web sites. That is why SEOs are so interested in DMOZ.

My own experience has been that some of my sites and client sites get listed on DMOZ - others do not. And what’s more, I will never find out why or why not. One of my sites provides free, quality information and is consistently on the first page in Google - it does not appear in DMOZ, despite being submitted. I don’t know for sure, but what is to stop a competitor or rival becoming an editor and then deliberately suppressing my site in favor of his own? Certainly not because the process is ‘open’ or ‘transparent’, which it certainly is not.

I reckon that a sizeable number of the 74,000 are involved in SEO in some way - which means that DMOZ is flawed - you certainly could not rely on it for reliable content in my opinion. If there ever were any advantages in being edited by humans - they have now certainly been forfeited because it is edited by humans with their own vested interests. I believe that if Google and friends stopped placing any weight on DMOZ listings (which they should), then the 74,000 editors would disappear very quickly and this anachronism would very quickly go where it belongs - into information technology history.

E-mail spam is invariably very badly written, offering the same dubious products as a million spammers have done before. I know that the response rate is minimal, but obviously some people must avail themselves of the spammers’ offers. Who are these people? Some village must be missing them very badly.

I though the SuperBowl ads were very disappointing. Some, like the Pepsi, were just plain lame - although I suppose I remember what they were for, which is more than could be said for some of the others. Overall my impression was that bunch of advertising folks had been given a pile of money and told to do something BIG. The result was lots of celebrities and a conspicuous lack of imagination.