It’s all in the marketing

I’ve started downloading the footage from last weekend’s “Fan Film The Movie” shoot this weekend. And with the biggest drawback of shooting on DV tape on a consumer camcorder being that it downloads in real time, I have lots and lots of time to sit in front of my computer and monitor the download making sure no frames get dropped, scenes at are indexed, etc. So I figured why not start on the poster and see what I can come up with using the fantastic photos Dave took during the costuming  photo shoot we had Sunday afternoon. I have some more ideas for the poster, but I liked how this turned out. Gotta love Photoshop filters!

Security Fail

Why is it, that when you put a site into your “trusted site” list in Internet Explorer, that somehow causes IE to start asking you if you are sure you want to go there?

I put it in the trusted site list so you wouldn’t ask me that. Why start now?

Or is it unfair to bash an eight year old operating system? I don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway.

It’s a Wrap!

NeoZAZ wrapped up primary shooting on our latest film project, “Fan Film: The Movie” (tentative title, but that’ll probably be what it’s called). It was a marathon of Indie Guerilla film making – 23 hours over 2 and half days resulting in 5 hour and 20 minutes of great footage. All with the help of 6 friends of ours with a lot of enthusiasm, patience, and trust in that Dave and I knew what we were doing.

With everyone’s help we got everything that we wanted, and more. We even had time for a photo session to make a kick-ass poster for the project.

It was a lot of fun to film and should be just as much fun to put together.

I’d once again like to thank everyone that gave up their whole weekend – both day and night – to get this done. So thanks once again to Karen, Dave, Chris, Gregg, John and Sunday, as I might have mentioned, I truly appreciate your help on this project and can’t wait to put all the pieces together.

There’s more to say, but I unfortunately have to leave the state on business tomorrow and should probably get some sleep. Once Gregg can get me a copy of the production shots, that’ll jar some memories and stories to share.

D-1-3 Episode 7: Booger

Careful – there’s a new episode of the D-1-3 show available here. Do not, under any circumstances, download and listen to it.

You have been warned.

I Just Feel So Dirty

Virtualizing operating systems is certainly one of the most obvious benefits of Apple switching to Intel CPUs. Those of us who choose to use Macs in our personal life can now use them for business purposes that were heretofore unavailable due to little incompatibilities, simply by installing Parallels or VMWare, or even Boot Camp, although rebooting just to open a spreadsheet or run IE sounds like a bit of a pain.

It just so happens I have to open and interpret a couple of fairly complex spreadsheets, with lots of formulas and macros, for some work I’m doing. Since Mac Office dropped VB support in the latest version, I needed to run it on Windows, which runs rather well under VMWare Fusion.

I figured that, being one of Microsoft’s flagship products (the other being “Microsoft Bob”, of course), it would be fairly easy to purchase or demo a copy of MS Office for Windows.

Microsoft, being a pure software company (not counting the keyboards and mice, which I believe are outsourced, and the XBox, which is essentially a cheap PC running stripped-down Windows, and certainly not counting the Zune, which is a rebadged Toshiba mp3 player, and hardly counts as a product) makes the overwhelming majority of their profits by selling countless copies of Windows and Office, which, after a certain point, are pure profit. You’d think they’d make it as smooth as possible. You’d also think you’d be able to move an empty text file to the Recycle bin in under four minutes. In both cases, you’d be wrong.

Once you find the Trial Download page, you need to jump through a few hoops about creating a Windows Live account (why would I want that? I just want a copy of Office) and giving them all of your pertinent information (I’m certainly not giving them a valid phone number for this) before you get to the actual download page.

OK, so you’ve finally made it. You have a Download button and are ready to go. Well, not quite:

Impressive – that one bullet point contains two sentences, and two lies.

• There is no “Download Now” button, and there are certainly not two “Download Now” buttons.
• You do not need to click both buttons to download the product, which I will get to in a moment.

Assuming you need to click both Download buttons, which do you suppose you should click first?

If you guessed “Download 1″, you might think you made some sort of mistake by the dialog that pops up:

I still have no idea what that’s for, even after encountering it three times.

But the important question is: If it automatically does the second download for you when you click “OK”, why does it need to yell at you in the first place?

I know that picking on Microsoft user interfaces is like shooting blind, comatose, fat fish in a barrel with an IED, and the barrel is wrapped with TNT, but with all the money they spend on pushing their products, you’d think they would catch these high-profile gaffes that are right in their profit stream.

Rule number 1 of commerce (e- or brick & mortar): Do not confuse your customers when they’re trying to give you money*.

*Actually, since this was the free trial site, I wasn’t actually trying to give them money, but I probably will after the 60 days is up, as I’ll need to keep using it.

Sometimes Tech Support Scripts Do Work

As computer professionals, or even amateur geeks, well know, calling Tech Support can be a nightmare of “Did you plug it in” and “Have you turned it on” and on and on until you finally, after days of plodding through the front line tech’s script, you finally get to talk to someone who understands what an IP address is.

Which is why we generally avoid calling tech support whenever possible and just hit the online forums instead.

Well, once in a while, you need to talk to someone, and this happened to me today.

Several months ago, I bought a Roomba vacuuming robot. You see, I have a big house, with lots of carpeting, and can’t be bothered to vacuum it as much as I should, so when I saw a Roomba on sale for $99, I figured it was worth a shot.

For those of you who do not own a Roomba, let me put it like this: It’s like Tivo. For those of you who don’t have Tivo, let me put it like this: Remember that whole “sliced bread” thing? That’s absolute pants compared to Roomba.

It actually vacuums for you, without you having to do it yourself! Now, I have a very primitive model (4000 series), which means it doesn’t automatically find its charger when it needs it, and it doesn’t have any laser-guided border sensors or anything. It basically ambles around the floor until it hits something, then turns. Very inefficient.

But, even though it takes much longer to do a room than it would for you do it yourself, it does it without you. I just set it loose while I’m working out, or making dinner, or whatever, and give it a nudge if it gets stuck on something. As far as time-savers go, it’s right up there with the microwave oven.

So you can imagine my distress when it started malfunctioning last week.

My poor little circular servant droid would move pitifully in fits and starts for several minutes, and then stop altogether with a sad little beep.

(Sidenote: One of the best things about the design of the Roomba is that it is so easily anthropomorphized. It makes a cute little “doo-doo-de-doo” noise when it starts up, and a sad little “doo-dooo” when it runs out of juice or gets stuck. Makes it very easy to use personal pronouns.)

In case some of you Roomba owners out there are wondering, I clean out it’s brushes and parts after every use, so I didn’t think it was getting clogged with anything.

I didn’t find anything useful on iRobot’s forums, so I went to the last resort – tech support.

I was connected with a nice woman whose name I forget, and after taking all of my information (name, address, phone number, email address, model, serial number, date of purchase, etc.) she asked about the symptoms.

When I explained that my poor little guy was just sputtering around and then giving up altogether, she got really apologetic. Now, I’m all for apologizing when you’re in the wrong, and sympathizing when someone has a problem (especially if it’s with a product that you sell or support), but her apologies sounded very scripted and unnecessary. Just solve my problem and stop apologizing for it, already, mmkay?

The next thing she said was, “Can you get a small phillips screwdriver and remove the side brush?” Being a geek, I do have a varied selection of small screwdrivers at hand at all times (phillips and flat), and so promptly removed the side brush, revealing a small, but non-trivial amount of cat hair and carpet fibers taking up residence in the general vicinity.

I removed as much as I could and put the side brush back on and voila! It works perfectly again.

You know that the whole side-brush thing is the first item on the tech-support script (once they enter a few key symptoms into the computer, I’m sure). And for once, that was the trick.

I don’t think I would have thought to look there, given the behavior of the Roomba – I wouldn’t have thought that the side brush being clogged up with hair would have had much to do with the behavior of the rest of the unit.

Maybe I should look at the source code.

Oh My Backpack

The latest D-1-3 Show is posted. Go get it and stuff it in your backpack!

Shiny

Hey! The new D-1-3 show is up. Kids – be the first on your block to get one!