Category: Tech

Wake up call

When did William Dean Singleton become Chairman of the Associated Press?

http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/04/06/daily16.html

In a past life I worked for Singleton, when he was working for a guy named Joe Albritton. Singleton had a house in town and whenever he was there he required a 6 am wake-up call from the newspaper. It was an afternoon paper, and for a bunch of us the workday started at 5 am. One of the girls always took care of calling Singleton, and I got stuck with the chore maybe once or twice. I think one time it was on a dare.

I got into computers from that job. We had a Harris system that never worked right, and when the production guy in charge of it wasn’t around I’d step in. My moment of truth came when I read a sticker on the computer that said, “Use double density diskettes only” and when I took one of the 8-inch floppies out it said single density.

One thing led to another, and working with Harris technicians by phone, I got the thing working well enough to hang in until the system could be replaced. My involvement with that process resulted in one of Singleton’s guys offering me a job in New Jersey, leading a team of installers and troubleshooters.

At the same time, one of my college roommates was trying to talk me into doing the same sort of work, except at hospitals. I decided that hospitals were a better long term bet than newspapers, and as a fringe benefit I’d get to work with my college buddies.

From the item at the link above, it sure seems that Singleton is the same guy he was, both good and bad. I love newspapers, but I despair for the industry’s survival and I’m very glad that I got out of that business.

Aspiring Netbook

I don’t own an iPod, nor do I have satellite radio, but I’m otherwise technologically up to date. For $250 at BJ’s Wholesale Warehouse, I bought an Acer Aspire One netbook, running XP Home with 1 GB of memory and a 160 GB drive.

I’m very impressed. Everything runs smoothly, including video that sputtered a bit on the SSD version of the Aspire One that I tried last week. This post was done entirely on the netbook, except shooting the video clips; which, come to think of it, I might have been able to do with the built-in Webcam and a mirror!

Here are some examples of video playback. First, from this page on my blog.

[MEDIA=32]

One of the things I wanted to do with the Acer Aspire One was manage my Netflix queue for the Roku Media Player, but Watch Instantly also plays fine on the netbook. Here’s a bit of Supersize Me on Netflix Watch Instantly.

[MEDIA=33]

45 is 60

Today is the 60th anniversary of the humble, yet mighty, 7-inch 45 rpm single. It was developed by RCA, at the same time CBS had come up with the 12-inch 33.33 rpm LP.

Originally there was competition to see which format would dominate, but each found its best use — singles were for kids, and albums were for adults, although that changed after The Beatles made albums the thing to have for anybody over 13. Stereo came along in the late 50’s, but mono would still prevail for nearly another ten years after that, until the rise of alternative FM radio crushed AM for music, and transistors made stereo record players cheap.

The combination of magnetic recording and vinyl records was a huge advance in audio technology. It replaced 78 rpm shellac disks and dominated home music listening for the next forty years.

Bismo recently asked me to convert a couple of 45’s to MP3, and this is them. First, the flip side to the Blue Brothers 1978 single, “Soul Man”…

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/MAR/Excusez_Moi_Mon_Cherie.mp3]

… and a real rarity, Stars on 45, featuring The New Sam & Dave Revue.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/MAR/New_Sam_Dave_Revue.mp3]

Good Grief! More Roku

Back in November, I expressed an interest in the Peanuts Motion Comics, done in Flash animation (like South Park and Spongebob), and available on iTunes. I don’t have iTunes, but today, Roku added Amazon Video on Demand to its streaming digital player, and for $8.99 I bought all ten of the Peanuts Motion Comics. I’ve taken my first step — well, my second — into a larger world of streaming video, on TV, free of the computer.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/MAR/MotionComics.flv 320 212]

BTW, I have my WiFi glitch with the Roku all fixed. It was a DHCP problem with the FiOS/Actiontec router. I tried adjusting the lease period, etc., but ultimately the solution was to use the WiFi access point of a spare router — a D-Link DI-624 — and it’s now working AOK.

Rokusjesdag

My little Roku streaming video-on-demand player is so nifty I could kiss it. Nobody else has, that I’ve seen, done a direct video capture off of a Roku, so I’ll do one here. I don’t want to present an idealized view, so I used WiFi rather than ethernet, and I made the recording during the peak evening period, when there always seems to be congestion and the buffering can slow down before the video starts playing. Netflix is very good, however, about picking up where you’ve left off. This is a glitch-free run-through. Everything is the result of a button click on the remote, although now I realize that I neglected to demonstrate a simple pause and continue.

[MEDIA=24]

The quality rating is for the end-to-end connection, with four dots being the best. There’s a separate WiFi signal strength rating. Scanning can be done in three speeds, or you can manually click between individual preview pictures.

Picking up on a theme from earlier this month with June Marlowe in “School’s Out”, that’s the late Sue Randall playing Beaver’s too-good-to-be-true teacher, Miss Landers. Kids have always had innocent and safe crushes on teachers, of course, but over the past 20 years something seems to have changed. The number of women teachers who have developed what is delicately described as inappropriate relationships with students is shocking. Priests abusing kids in private was covered up for decades, if not centuries, but a teacher running off with a student isn’t something that happens unnoticed, and fifty years ago it would have been even bigger news than it is today.

Vera Miles, who I consider to have been a second only to Grace Kelly in the looks department, is seen with Francis (Mayberry) Bavier, in the first installment of the anthology series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. In 1940, fifteen years before he appeared on TV, Hitchcock introduced the long-running radio series “Suspense”, as heard here, in an entry I made back in the fall of ’07.

Another follow-up to a previous post is a bit of remastered Star Trek that you can compare to a transfer from VHS I made, by clicking here.