Previously, I highlighted the fact that it was possible to register yourself with this Web site. It was this feature that provided the recent infestation a way in. The updated software should prevent it from happening again, but nevertheless I have disabled the feature.
I don’t want to go through another attack like that! After I realized what had happened, I sat stunned for five minutes, wanting to read “My Pet Goat”! 😉
I don’t own an iPod or a MacIntosh computer, but I admire Steve Jobs. He’s made mistakes, of course.
One mistake was hiring John Sculley; a man of limited ability, and zero vision, who successfully maneuvered to have Jobs removed from Apple a short two years after being recruited from Pepsi.
Apple barely survived the incompetence of Sculley. Jobs returned to run the company in 1996, and take on the seemingly impossible challenge of competing against Microsoft. Jobs’ stunning comeback is one of the all-time great business success stories.
The Jobs stock option scandal doesn’t interest me. What does are comments he made recently at an education forum, concerning public school teachers. He doesn’t like unions. He wishes school principals could fire teachers.
“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”
Michael Dell, who was present, explained succinctly why unions came into existence.
“The employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.”
Thank you, Michael Dell.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/BeautyBeast.flv 400 263]
After I played around with the audio speed for the Ross Bagdasarian posts and South Park, my sister wanted to hear a speed correction of Robbie Benson’s voice from Beauty and the Beast. There’s a video clip above, and below is the audio sped up by 15%. Not sure if that percentage is exactly right, but it sounds close enough.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/BeautyBeast.mp3]So, finally, I put up a banner, as I hope you can see above. It’s not the ambitious, evolving comic strip I envisioned, but maybe later. It’s a crop from a photo of my computer monitor. The TV tuner was playing CNN, and the “WHY” on the screen just happened to be there. For emphasis I sharpened the monitor and blurred the wall behind it.
© DOuG pRATt
A while ago I succumbed to my friend Tom’s interest in seeing a more interesting favicon (pronounced fav icon, like two distinct words). So I did neither dog nor rat, but my walrus character. It was done pixel-by-pixel in the Windows Paint program. The intent was to make it appear as though the walrus was moving out of frame, and to make him seem a bit menacing. Tough to do with 256 pixels, but I think I succeeded.
New scanner! New printer! It’s a scanner-printer. The Canon MP600. Won’t bore you with lots of technical details. My 6-year-old Lexmark printer was dead, and although my Epson scanner is still fine I wanted to free up some desk space. After much consideration, and wanting to keep the price below $200, I bought the MP600 for $160, and I used it for the last two posts.
After five months of blogging, and being generous with video, I’ve managed to use up 3.25 gigabytes out of a 50 GB quota. That’s 6.5%. Oh, no! I’m going to run out! Must get more! (That’s a joke for my wife.) But now I do have more. The Web-hosting service has increased the quota to 200 GB!
Obviously, at this rate I can keep going essentially forever. So I’ll increase the rate. The videos are encoded in Adobe Flash to stream at 512 Kb (that’s bits, not bytes) per second. The free Flash video (FLV) encoder I use works well, and I’m utterly reliant upon it, so I sent the programmer some money via PayPal. But the quality for a given bit rate isn’t as good as Windows Media Video 9 (WMV), or Flash 8.
There’s no way I’m going back to WMV9, because it isn’t cross-platform compatible and it doesn’t support a preview still frame. The problem with FLV8 is that it must be purchased from Adobe and it’s very expensive.
So what I’ll do to improve video quality is take advantage of all this storage capacity I have at no additional cost. I’m kicking up the bit rate for the videos by 50% or more. This will mean longer download times at your end. If you have trouble with sputtering-and-buffering playback, let me know.
