Category: Tech

Men in blue

With Studio 100 turning K3 into an international franchise, and girls in England recently auditioning for UK3, it’s fitting that today I saw Blue Man Group. The Blue Men, who are not Blue Meanies, are in various cities, with interchangeable, essentially anonymous performers.

Blue Man Group has been at the Charles Street Playhouse in Boston for almost fifteen years. Carol saw the show with a friend more than ten years ago, but today was the first time for Eric and myself. If you’ve ever doubted the entertainment potential of so-called performance art, Blue Man Group will erase all doubt. We loved it!

There’s a video featuring the current Boston trio, which makes them less anonymous, that will give you an idea of what it’s all about. (The program book lists two other Boston Blue Men, so I assume there must be some rotation.) Once again YouTube has the video aspect ratio wrong, so I’ll put it here with the correct shape.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/NOV/BlueMan.flv 448 252]

I hate software

I’ve been working on a couple of items about last weekend in New York that will have numerous images. But the browse feature for the upload function within WordPress when using Firefox stopped working. It worked in IE 7, but then I ran into a different problem with that. So I went back to Firefox, determined to figure out what happened. Eventually, I remembered that I’d taken an update to Abode Flash recently and, sure enough, when I disabled it as a Firefox add-on, the browse button re-appeared.

Ya know, I’m really, really tired of this sort of [insert anagram of the word “this” here]. Why the [insert word that rhymes with luck here] should Flash interfere with this function within an editor? It’s [word that rhymes with clap] like this that makes me say I’m glad I figured out what the [rhymes with bell] was wrong, but it’s late and I give up for now so I can go to bed and go the dentist in the morning. Eventually I’ll get to publish what I’ve been trying to get to for the past three days, but haven’t been able to due to illness and technical inanity/insanity.

Ah. Here we go. Wish I’d found this an hour ago. Big problem, and in the release version of Flash 10, too.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/177127

DON’T USE FLASH 10 WITH FIREFOX! Did I mention I’m really tired of this sort of stuff?

P.S. I downdated to Flash 9 and browsing to upload media files is working again.

Composite video beats HDMI?

This will be a totally techie comment, but I’m so surprised by something I’ve got to explain it. I have a Verizon FiOS Motorola QIP6416 DVR set to 720p with an HDMI cable going to my Panasonic video projector. HDTV looks wet-your-pants fantastic. SDTV is rather disappointing, and I avoid it.

I have a FiOS Motorola DCT-700 digital/analog converter with a cheapie RCA composite video cable going into a Panasonic DMR-ES15S DVD Recorder that’s set to 480p. From there is a 12-ft component video cable going to a Kenwood THX receiver that has a 50-ft component cable going to the projector.

There is absolutely no comparison in picture quality. The bottom-of-the-line DCT-700 going through the recorder and the receiver totally blows away the video going directly from the top-of-the-line DVR over HDMI. Savvy techies would say “no way!” but I’m telling you definitely yes.

If you can read this, don’t worry

I just received the notice below from my Web hosting service. If you’re reading this, then you’re unaffected, and you don’t care. If you aren’t reading this you should be worried!

Connectivity Between Cogent (Our Bandwidth provider) and Sprint

If you are having issues connecting to your website, or any other website hosted by IPOWER, this alert will provide some information to you.

Yesterday, 30th October, 2008, a press release was put out notifying the industry that Sprint-Nextel had severed its internet connection to Cogent (the provider of bandwidth for IPOWER), resulting in the inability of Sprint-Nextel’s customers to connect to any website that gains bandwidth from Cogent.

As our datacenters utilize Cogent to provide bandwidth, unfortunately, our customers are affected.

We’ve been in contact with our provider, who says they are attempting to work with Sprint to resolve this issue.

Our Network Operations team has begun investigating a way to get around this block, to get our customers back viewing their websites. However, it is uncertain at this time, if that will be possible.

For more details on what happened, and why, the press release can be found here: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=cogent+sprint&btnG=Search+News

We appreciate your patience while we try to resolve this. While we would love to assist you, there’s little to nothing we can do in this situation, aside from relay the message to our provider that our customers are having issues. Please remain patient, and we will provide more information when it becomes available.
– 10/31/08 at 10:11 ET