Mr. Aggarwal

I am fed up…completely.

iMovie doesn’t work natively with AVCHD files…that’s garbage. When you import files, the resulting, encoded files are 3-6 times larger than the .MTS files. Even with their expensive time capsule, I would have to buy multiple ones to keep my memories.

Vegas doesn’t have skimming and takes longer to edit.

Figuring out the right settings for posting online vs. DVD vs. is a mess…I just want to specify a simple calculator that tells me resulting file size, video length, resolution, and video quality.

Why is video editing such a pain when technology has come soooo far?

We have all been touched or hurt by the emotions we envision someone else has gone through. At what point, if any, is this taken too far?

When do other people’s joys and sorrows begin to affect you to the point where you are being “too empathetic”? What kind of person is prone to being/becoming “too empathetic”? Do you even believe there is such a thing?

I think there very well could be such a thing, and in a society where we feel that people are becoming less sociable, I tend to believe we will end up with some level of social “climate control” issues…where people cannot form the proper balance with many important social constructs, including empathy. I am concerned that people will begin to go to the extremes of feeling either too little empathy (I believe that everyone feels at least some small amount of empathy) or too much empathy. I believe there will be empathy balancing techniques that will be devised and training courses for the “social climate control” crisis we are already facing or will soon face in our technology-driven, impersonal world.

What are your thoughts? I know many people must be seeing this as it unfolds in front of all of our eyes. Maybe we can get to this and improve people’s quality of life in the current and future generations faster than we can find ways to solve the ozone issues or viable alternative fuel sources.

If you have been connecting to a machine via remote desktop and using the blow command, you may have noticed this no longer connects to console:

mstsc /console

With XP SP3, you now need to use:

mstsc /admin

If you aren’t doing multiple monitors yet…you need to. Here are some tools that will get the wheels turning:

• Matrox
• Multiplicity
• MaxiVista

If you have a laptop, at least get started with two monitors for which you should not require any additional hardware or software, expect for the external monitor, of course. If you have a desktop that has multiple video outputs (i.e. VGA and DVI) you too should be able to try this out without any extra tools.

I know this may seem obvious to some people, but believe me…it needs to be said…

When you drive in city, highway, fast, slow…anywhere…

LOOK CAREFULY FOR THE LIGHTS ON CARS AROUND YOU, specifically, the signal and brake lights.

Here is a freebie tip…while on the highway, don’t just look for brake lights of the car directly in front of you. Be conscious of brake lights for a few cars ahead as well. You will be better able to anticipate any sudden stops, which is how many highways accidents occur.

Again, I know even you might think you do this, but this is all about training yourself to do it constantly and consistently when you drive. Thank you for keeping the roads safe all the time, not just when you have nothing better to do like talking on the phone, finding your favorite CD, plugging in your cell phone to the car charger, reading a newspaper, responding to SMS’s/emails, or something even more insane that I can’t even image, yet I know people can think of and actually do while they drive.

Better comparisons can be drawn once the Instinct is released, but I can comment based on what I know about each…

1. Instinct is slated to support Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync on day one — how Apply and iPhone could avoid this for so long is amazing to me, but I am glad to hear that even they plan to support Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync this summer

2. Instinct supports faster broadband speeds than iPhone (again, iPhone is coming out with a new version this year that supports similar speeds)

3. Instinct is being released on Sprint (and I’m not sure when they plan to release on any other network). I really dislike the idea of a phone only being available on one network. I hope Instinct does not pigeon-hole into Sprint for too long.

4. iPhone is releasing an SDK. Instinct programs are written with Java BREW. I guess we will see how many useful applications will be written for each in time. I assume iPhone will get the advantage on this because of the simple fact that it currently has so many more users.

5. iPhone incorporates all the iPod features. I don’t have/use an iPod, but so many people do and there is a distinct advantage in combining the most popular music and video solution into the phone as a single device.

6. Apple has marketing prowess and a general sexiness factor that Samsung can do almost nothing to compete with. I really like Samsung products (like their gorgeous LCD monitors), but I don’t see the overall market share tilting a great deal regardless of how compelling the phone features prove to be.

I am hopeful that the Samsung Instinct will be a viable competitor to the iPhone since healthy competition is only good for us consumers. As I mentioned, I don’t think the market share for this kind of device will shift too far away from Apple (reference the history of the iPod and the many viable competitors that came out before/after it), and this will be a large factor that continues to lands in Apple’s (and the iPhone’s) favor. Besides, in this case, Apple has quite a bit of time ahead of all other devices in this arena and the multi-touch was real innovation that was brought to the table (and it worked perfectly from the day it hit the shelves).

Apple has proven to innovate at a rate and with a quality better than others, but this, combined with their lead time and market share will make it very difficult for any other company or product to make a real dent. Of course, I remember another product (Palm Treo) that was considered the de facto standard “smart phone” in somewhat recent history; so I look forward to allowing our world’s business, marketing, and technology surprise me as soon as possible.

Hmmmmmm…maybe the oPhone will do it…

I am just at a complete loss as to why I can’t sort emails in Outlook by the sender’s domain name. As much as I use searching and search folders, as well as color-coded rules, I use sorting once I get to a point where I have a reasonable number of results to look at. And I am simply fed up after 7+ years of using Outlook everyday that I have never been able to sort by the sender’s domain name. I have even gone through the trouble of writing my own formula to display the sender’s domain, but I can’t sort by my own formula field…

So, I want to know 2 things:

1. Is there anyone else that finds this to be as annoying as me (and/or would find this feature to be incredibly useful)?
2. Does anyone know of a way to make this happen (yes, I will even pay money for code, instructions, or even to have an add-in built)?

I happen to think there is simply no better email client on the market, but this one little feature request has eluded me for years.

RAID used to be a topic discussed by only business, and even within business, only by a subset of folks within IT.  Now, I am starting to see it pop up as options in consumer desktops, and believe it or not, I had the option when configuring my last laptop.  Yeah, yeah, 5 years from now — actually, with the way technology advancement accelerates, it could be more like 5 months from now — this post will seem like I am just talking about the days when he walked to school uphill both ways.

But, since I have people ask me about this now-a-days, I thought I would shed some light on it — some “practical” light that I think almost all of you will find useful:

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives (or Disks), also known as Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (or Disks).

RAID configurations can be achieved with hardware, software, or a hybrid of both.  I will focus on hardware, since that has been the most common, and is generally considered the best option since it does take away the same valuable processing power that would be used to run software.

There are actually more types of RAID than just 0 and 1, but I will focus on those for now since there are the only RAID configurations that can achieved with as little as 2 disks (and most consumers won’t have the option of their RAID configurations just yet).

RAID 0 - Striped Set

Fragments of data are written across both disks, providing higher throughput, and higher performance.  Since “parts” of the data are written to both disks, however — and this is the part most people leave out — your chances of hard drive failure effectively “double” since data from both drives is lost when either disk fails.  Sure, as consumers, we may not have high-end backup/replications, but we all have our external hard drives these days.

RAID 1 - Mirrored Set

For a consumer, which do I recommend?  NEITHER!  Here is the part that NOBODY tells you: forget your hard drive failures and the pain it is to get new ones swapped in place…if your motherboard fails, and you don’t have the same hardware RAID controller laying around (aka the same machine with the same specs), you can plan to spend the next few days/weeks:

• On EBay looking for the same machine to buy for as cheap as you can (which will be hard at this time, since RAID is so new for consumers)
• Spending a few hundred dollars/hours with the Geek Squad while they surf for porn
• Wondering why the he** you got RAID anything in the first place.

No, this hasn’t happened to me, but I think I have had at least one sleepless night just thinking about it.  The only time I dealt with RAID configurations on PC’s, it was for business, and we bought four machines with the exact same configurations (aka RAID controllers) so that we could minimize risk as much as possible.

Disclaimer: I am not, haven’t been in the past, and don’t think I ever will be (nor want to be) a system administrator.  I do, however, learn and do what my clients and business wants/needs, which does include hardware and software configuration.

Aside from hands-free talking on my cell phone (as long as I am within 2 feet of my phone), Bluetooth technology just hasn’t gotten me that excited. Take, for instance, syncing my PDA phone with Outlook…

Using my good ol’ USB cable, I am able to sync all my information in very short order. The same data transfer using Bluetooth takes OVER 10 times LONGER. I know PDA sync time isn’t all that important for some people, but it is for me, since this process can take over 1 hour for me with Bluetooth. It already takes around 10 minutes with the USB cradle. If I recall correctly, even my infrared transfers from computer to computer 8+ years ago would happen faster than Bluetooth transfers.

I’d really like to proven wrong and find more/better ways to use Bluetooth technology, but so far, Bluetooth has left me somewhat…well…blue.

I really think Apple is cool…and I mean too cool for school. Or maybe I should update that cliche for some of their recent products like the iPhone and MacBook Air to “too cool for practical business users like me”.

I have already written a brief outline of why I didn’t think the iPhone made sense for me, and I will give a couple bullets on why the MacBook Air also does not:

• Non-replaceable battery. I have 4 cell phone batteries and a few laptop batteries. I don’t like having to sit near an outlet to talk on the phone or work on the computer. I also don’t like sending in important hardware when a battery no longer has juice.
• Non-replaceable RAM. I don’t like picking a product that puts on a constraint like this that no other laptop I have ever considered puts on me.
• Glossy screen. I don’t like glossy screens since I do like well lit work areas — personal preference.
• No VGA and No DVI (only mini-DVI). I like using a laptop with a bigger monitor whenever possible. I don’t like to worry about ensuring I have a DVI connection, and certainly not a mini-DVI hook up. My current Acer has both VGA and DVI.
• No ethernet port. I am a pretty wireless (Air-ish), but not ready to give up direct connection to my gigabit switch when I want to work with other machines in my domain. Annoying to have to carry around a USB-Ethernet connection cord.
• $$$$$$$. This is way to expensive for the specs we are getting. The SSD is cool, but not $3,000 cool. The 4200 RPM drive with 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo is fine for an ultraportable machine, but again, not for $1,799.

I’ll pass on the MacBook Air, just like I did on the iPhone and iPod.

This is pretty incredible in my opinion. In fact, I think this is one of the most creative things I have seen in a long time. DO NOT stop this video before the half way mark…I assure you it will all make sense before the video is over.

The internet and technology are used for plenty of horrible things in the arena of “recreation”, but this is a great example of technology adding to modern art. And of course, what better way to disseminate that art than YouTube.

This is some funny stuff.  I’ll let you enjoy the music (by Jonathan Coulton) along with a funny “music video”.

If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? - Scott Adams

You won’t believe this…

I picked up a domain the other day (not to be mentioned).  I found out early on (after I purchased it) that the site was previously owned…which can be either good or bad (or both).  If it was a site in good standing with search engines, then good.  If it was blacklisted, then bad.  I had already set it up by the time I found out, so I didn’t really worry about it one way or the other. 

But a few minutes ago, I found something REALLY unexpected.  While “Googling” for it, a few sites came up that were [still] delivering ads for it!  I think some of them were originally shared links, but it seems some were actual paid ads.  And yes, the content of the ads is still pertinent.

I’m not really sure what to think just yet, but I am a little surprised and amazed right now…and so far, in a good way.  Of course, I am calculating the ways that this could be bad, but thought it was certainly something worth blogging about.  Any thoughts?  Anyone ever had this happen to them?

I have learned to use the word ‘impossible’ with the greatest caution. - Wernher von Braun