An evening of spyware, pizza and podcasting

Tom and David
Originally uploaded by CaptQuirk.

Last night, I went over to Tom Wright’s to help him rid his computer of spyware because his system had become so sluggish that he could hardly get anything done. David, shown here in November ’04 photo with Tom, has recently rented a room from Tom (to help ease the general financial burden on both of them) and he was there as well. We had fun with the project, though much remains yet undone. I was able to help speed up the system a bit, but we ran out of time before I got everything accomplished.

I have always enjoyed visiting Tom’s home because it so evidently reflects his interests and his personality. In an older section of Knoxville near the downtown area, it is neat and tastefully decorated and a tribute to his talent for making it his own.

We ordered pizza to be delivered (it’s apparently an unwritten rule that geeks always have to eat pizza when they are working on such a project), and after we had devoured as much as we wanted, Jack (the cat) came in, pounced up on the counter and, in what Tom described as a “cat-off,” the left-over pepperoni was the cat’s choice.

It was a fun evening with friends on a sultry night in Knoxville. I was even able to rope them into listening to an example or two of my podcasts and thereby introduce them to podcasting. That experience evolved into a spontaneous kind of mini-focus-group about the names of software programs that intimidate the non-geek population and how they might be better named to make them more approachable for that segment of the computer-using world. I’ll most certainly be sharing those observations with James Prudente, as he is nearing the release of MixCast Live 1.0.

Test post of image

This post is simply a test to experiment with Blogger’s addition of the ability to post an image.

This image illustrates the options available in Firefox.

This is the way I have my tabbed browsing set up.

Fandango.com

This site has links to movie theater listings by zip code with show times, prices, and in some cases online ticket purchasing. Could be useful.

Oops, Jubilation a bit premature

Although Blogger Support has given me a work around, it isn’t perfect yet.

If you notice in the previous post, you’ll see that the text goes under the sidebar to the right.

It’s back to the drawing board.

Thank you, Blogger Support

At long last, I heard from Blogger Support and they have posted a work-around for the “bug” I discovered in their handling of templates. They suggested that I insert some code into my template that seems to have resolved the problem I’ve had for the last three days. Hooray!!! My faith in Blogger is restored.

Day three, and still no Blogger support response

To my consternation, I still haven’t heard any response to my plea for help from Blogger support, aside from their automated acknowledgement of having received it. This post will reveal, no doubt, that the problem still persists.

Meanwhile on other fronts, I have recorded a 10-minute podcast response to James’ efforts while attending Gnomedex over this past weekend. You can listen to it, if you wish, by clicking this link, and in this link, you can hear James’ response. These podcasts are part of a series of podcasts in which those of us who are using MixCast Live and BigFeeder.com are participating in an audio discussion about the product/service and our use of it. To listen to any individual podcast in that series, just click on the M3U button beside the podcast you want to hear. It will download a small playlist that will start up your MP3 player, probably Windows Media Player, to stream the podcast to your system.

As James indicated toward the end of his comment in response to my podcast, I really need to produce a more general podcast for you, my loyal readers of this blog. Look for that real soon now, perhaps in the next couple of days. And thanks for continuing to tune into this blog, despite its currently unsightly appearance.

Still no personalize response from Blogger support

This post will reveal whether yesterday’s posting problem, in which the title of the text and the body of it are separated by an amount of white space that equals the height of the sidebar on the right, still persists.

I find it quite frustrating that the way this is displaying is not at all what I intend. I’m sure Blogger support has other fish to fry, but they need to reach the point they can respond to emails from individual users within a 24 hour period. An automated, canned response directing the user to answers to some of the more commonly occurring problems is certainly better than nothing, but it isn’t sufficient.

I’ve got to believe that what I am seeing is something that has occurred before and that it can be fixed easily. But when and how?

The strangeness persists

After having posted the previous entry, I now note that the formatting weirdness persists but primarily with the first entry on the page. I’ll have to contact the Blogger support team and ask them to look at my blog and give me some help in fixing it.

Update. I’ve sent the plea for help to Blogger support and received a standard reply from them. As yet they haven’t had the time to respond to this unique situation. 1:39 PM EDST

Blogger strangeness

I haven’t a clue about what is causing the entry prior to this one to display in such a weird way, but if you scroll down far enough, you’ll seen the entry associated with the title. If I could fix it I would, but since I haven’t changed anything, I don’t know what to fix. In fact, I’m interested to see whether this additional entry shows the same strangeness.

From the first day at Gnomedex

Aside from all the oo-ing and ah-ing over seeing the “celebrities of the blogosphere” in the halls of the Gnomedex conference, the major news from the first day seems to have been Microsoft’s announcement that it is building RSS support into IE7 and Windows Longhorn, the next version of Windows due out at some as-yet-unspecified time in the future. In this entry at the IE Blog Dean Hachamovitch, who made the presentation that revealed the news, gives a one page summary of the significance, as he sees it, of what this development might mean to developers and users. And the 58 minute video, which was shot by Robert Scoble of the Channel 9 team, at this link shows some of the people involved in the project (including Dean) and provides a more in-depth explanation of it along with a few views of how it might look in IE7.

And James Prudente, our intrepid representative at the conference, doing his best impression of Kermit the Frog as the ace on-site reporter with microphone in hand (I don’t know whether he’s wearing a trench coat and frumpled hat with a press pass in the hat band, but I like the image) contributed five, count ’em, FIVE different podcasts from yesterday’s session. In this one, just after the Microsoft announcement, James gives his impression and assessment of the news for about 9 minutes. Here’s the link to the show notes he mentions in this podcast.

In this one-minute podcast, he captures the moment when Dave Winer and Adam Curry shake hands on stage, which elicited a round of applause from the audience because it seemed to signify a truce in their not-too-hidden “feud.” (I’d explain what the feud is about, but it’s not worth the effort, in my opinion.)

In a three-minute podcast about conversational podcasting, he gives a glimpse of where he sees podcasting going. In many ways this is one of the more important of the podcasts he has done from the conference so far, because it reveals a vision of what is possible but not yet being done in many podcasts.

This podcast recounts a hallway encounter with Adam Curry who, not realizing that James was the developer of MixCast Live, recommends his competitor’s product.

Here, James interviews Spencer Nick, a recent convert to the Mac OS who runs a web site called TachyonXero, about podcasting and their experience at Gnomedex.

Listening to all these podcasts and watching the video at Channel 9 will occupy a considerable amount of your time, but doing so will also give you a sense of what it is like to attend one of these events. So if you have the time, watch and listen. I think you’ll find it interesting. I know I did.