Category: Tech

According to PC World Magazine, as a Verizon FiOS customer I am in a small, but happy, minority of residential Internet consumers.

How’s this? My first Flash-style embedded video, with a preview frame, without the jumpiness seen with the Media Player box when scrolling. And without resorting to YouTube™.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Movies/Wordpress/Oct06/PeepingTom4.flv 400 240]

The results have their own technical drawbacks and advantages. This wasn’t easy to do!

This clip shows, as promised previously, Moira Shearer about 10 years after she was in The Tales of Hoffmann.  Here she is in 1960’s Peeping Tom, also directed by Michael Powell.

As explained previously, I have Verizon FiOS for my Internet service, and I’m quite happy with it compared to Comcast, which I still have for cable TV.  But now I can get FiOS TV.   The announcement for my town came out last week, following approval by the board selectmen (no mayor, have we).  Is it time to cut the Comcast coax?

I’ve decided to stop using embedded video and audio.  Everybody moans. Awwwww….

Sorry, but the problem with it is the setup phase, which can be seen in the status bar message, “Connecting to media.”  When there are several of these on the same page, the load time takes too long, especially if the hosting service is busy.  The server is in Phoenix, by the way.

From now on what I’ll do for video is take a screen shot and make it a link to the file.  The videos will appear in their original size, 320×240 pixels, and you’ll have to use your media player to make them bigger.  For audio I’ll try to find a picture to use for the link, but failing that there will instead be a text link.

Here’s another boring screen shot of a technical-related thing.  Sorry!  Will get back to fun stuff in the next post.

If you don’t know what the “Feeds” on the right do, this is how they appear in my Yahoo! home page.  I’m extremely sensitive to how daunting all of this new technology is to the vast majority of people, but to me it is neat, although frequently as frustrating as it is to anybody else.

Yay.  The $20 rebate for my 2GB flash drive is finally here, so the final cost is $50.  This takes just a teeny, tiny bit of the sting out of the $1100 it cost to put a catalytic converter and oxygen sensor in my ’98 Accord.

The new SanDisk drives include a system called U3, which is one of several competing systems for loading applications off of flash memory.  At first I was wary of it, but I’ve decided my concerns were unfounded and now I’m excited about its potential.

Here’s a screen shot of the U3 Launchpad, with my selection of applications.  The Filezilla file transfer program is very good, and I use it to push big files up to this blog.  And I really like the design of the Essential Personal Information Manager.  It has a great little graphical HTML editor.