It was really interesting going back to school as an adult. Your perspective is much different (obviously) than when you attended as a teenager. What really struck me was in fact how bad some of the professors are at teaching, and I mean bad. For example I had one professor who essentially sat in his office and waited for you to come and ask how to do something rather than teaching the class how to do it as a group. Others had been at it for so long that they just rambled through the material without caring if anyone understood it. Of course the faculty deal with adult students a little differently than they do with the average student right out of high school, I think because we tend to catch them and call them on their shortcomings. So by playing the game you can usually get what you need and they are most helpful. My biggest disappointment in the whole process was that a lot of the courses really seemed like work (ie. a job you had to do but didn’t actually want to) and in my opinion these professors are supposed to inspire you, drive you to want to learn and explore… I found very little of that. That said I still learned a lot, and it was all very new to me, although I had been inside a computer before I had never been inside the microchips that run them. My biggest triumph was overcoming my poor math skills and learning enough to actually do calculus. I had 3 really great teachers in the math department that were really able to get through to me. I also made some really great friends.

So why did I go back to school? There are a number of reasons but mainly I went to work angry for about 2 years and I really didn’t like who I had become. It cost me relationships, I don’t speak with many of my former colleagues or friends, I tried keeping up with them after I left but the damage had been done. I had also been in the industry for 10 years, and since my 5 year plan had not materialized, I figured it was a good time to move on. I wonder sometimes where I would be now if I had stayed but I don’t think it would have been a good place. I also love technology, I had always been the unofficial computer tech in the office so computer engineering seemed like the right direction to go.

What’s next? Employment! Which given the current economic crisis may prove to be more of a challenge than going back to school was. The trick for me will be to find something that uses my broad skill set and keeps me close to the Niagara Peninsula and my family. I don’t function well in large corporate environments, I need small driven groups of people to keep me energized and motivated, that I can play off of and play with. In truth, until going back to school, I had only ever had one job interview. That interview was for the first job I got after graduating from the Film studies program at Niagara College in 1995. After that all of the work I did came from recommendations and a solid track record. As a result I kind of suck at the interview process, I get nervous and tongue-tied and I am not good a selling myself since I have always had my work to speak for me. I have been very selective about the places I have applied to in the last few months, trying hard to look at the employers’ needs and what I have to offer and how well I thought I would fit in their environment. Hopefully the new year will bring with it the job opportunity I have been waiting for, I am very anxious to get back into the workforce and become a productive member of society once again.

What do you do to prepare for interviews? Share your tips in the comment section.

This is the video tour

Here is a video from Common Craft that explains it all very nicely:

Sync in Plain English

I would really like a chance to try this out myself to see how well it works. If you have ever tried any voice activated device including voice dialing which is fairly common on most cellphone handsets these days you will know how awkward it can be talking to a machine. Here is a video from Ford that lets you see the system in action. It looks and sounds pretty good but you still have to train yourself to say the right commands and wait for the computer to respond. For example form the video it appears the rather than just saying “call SoandSo” you have to tell it you want to use the phone and then tell it to call. I still think we have a long way to go before we get to the same place as the crew on the Starship Enterprise.

Ford Sync™ Demonstration

All-in-all you have to give Ford and Microsoft credit for at least trying to make the integration of your digital life safer and easier when you are taking them along for the ride.

“Integrating DMDS into our evaluation process was an easy decision,” said Melanie Berry, President of CARAS. “The technology is not only more efficient and less expensive, but it also poses clear environmental benefits. The Canadian Music Industry was the first in the world to embrace digital delivery for their promotional releases to radio and other destinations, and it just follows that the JUNO Awards should be the first major televised awards show to adopt this same technology.”

Aside from the environmental savings there are also security benefits. Yangaroo’s DMDS is secured by encryption, biometrics and watermarking which will help to reduce the chances of piracy. The 2009 Juno panel of judges and members will be able stream or download the packages for offline listening on their portable media players. This distribution model is a first for an award show.

“We are proud to have been chosen by CARAS for this process,” said Cliff Hunt, Chairman and COO of YANGAROO. “We expect that with the JUNO Awards taking the lead, the many other award shows throughout the world will soon follow in their footsteps, creating an entirely new revenue opportunity for the company ”

Yangroo Press Release

TeraCopy is from Code Sector who make a whole bunch of Windows applications, most of which are available free for home/personal use.

TeraCopy features:

TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user a lot of features:

• Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
• Pause and resume file transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click.
• Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer.
• Interactive file list. TeraCopy shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files.
• Shell integration. TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy and move functions, allowing you work with files as usual.
• Full Unicode support.

It integrates seamlessly into Windows and just appears whenever you copy files and it’s defiantly faster than the built in file copy utility.

What I really love is that if it has a problem with a batch copy it will skip the problem file and continue on so that you don’t need to watch it transfer 5000 files for fear of the 50th hanging up the process. If you copy large numbers of files around your system or network then you should defiantly check this out, the paid version is only 15Euros and well worth the money if you need it for a corporate environment.

Yesterday, September 2nd, 2008, Google Inc. launched their own web browser called Chrome. The release itself was rather unique because the day before the browser was available for download Google released a comic book that explained what it was and what made it better than the other browsers in the market today.

So you say, “big deal another browser, how many of these things do I need?” Well as far as I am concerned you only need one, unless you do web development and then you need them all. Is Chrome the one?… not yet, but it has major potential. It’s design is totally different from the other browsers which evolved with the web, it benefits from being built for the web we deal with now.

Key Features:

• Tabs are “sandboxed” each tab runs as an independent process, if something in a tab crashes you don’t have to restart the whole browser and sacrifice the other tabs that were open and running.
• It’s fast, because it’s lean (and there are no add-ons for it yet) and because of the new V8 javascript engine.
• Better memory management as a result of the independent tab processes. When a tab is closed that memory is immediately freed to do something else, unlike Firefox or IE.
• The Omni-Bar, like Firefoxes “Awesome” Bar it auto-fills as you type, the benefit here is that it does not suggest every url you have ever visted, just the ones you have typed in. It also serves as your window to search engines.
• Google Gears is built right in which makes interfacing with Google Docs, Gmail and Wordpress even speedier.
• It’s built on Apple’s WebKit. (Which of course begs the question why no Mac support yet?)

What it lacks right now are the plugins we all know and love from Firefox and I was slightly dissapointed that there is no Mac or Linux version yet and no release date either.

So far I am really happy withe the performance and have not seen any problems with rendering web pages. I love the tear off tabs, which lets me group them into different windows based on content. The Omni -bar seach is really great too, type the letter g and hit tab and it turns into Google Search. It’s had the benefit of being tested against the Google database of websites before it’s release which has allowed them to release a fairly stable beta.

Google needs to get into gear and get the Mac and Linux versions out and get the plugin developers moving if it want’s to survive. I really miss CoolIris and Scribefire.

I found this plugin while browsing TechTreak.com’s list of 35 Most Popular Wordpress plugins, it’s a great list!

I have used a number of MP3/PMP players and the only one I ever really liked was the iPod, for form and functionality there was nothing better, and there still isn’t. That being said I really do like the Zune and it has some really great features it’s the desktop software that fails miserably.

What do I like about the Zune?

1. Battery Life (seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-12 hrs of music playback)
2. Video support (Apparently you can connect it to a TV with a A/V kit)
3. Wireless sync (I like that you can drop stuff onto it without having to connect it to the computer)
4. Wireless sharing (It’s kinda cool to be able to wirelessly trade stuff between Zunes)
5. Built-in FM radio

What I don’t like about the Zune?

1. The proprietary cable to connect the Zune to the computer. (What?..wait didn’t you say it could sync wirelessly? yes but it charges through USB port on your computer or travel adapter that you plug the cable into) Which means when you travel you have to bring yet another cable along. Yes I am aware that iPods also require a special cable and that is a flaw in the Apple design as well.
2. The headphone port is on the bottom. I know this isn’t major, more of an ease of use thing.
3. The Zune software is not good. My major problem is the view of what is on the device. The options for viewing what is already on the device are confusing and do not display all the information I need to make decisions about what I am removing. For example I am a big Alice Cooper fan and I have several Alice Cooper albums on my Zune, but Alice Cooper does not show up as an Artist on the Zune, only the albums titles do. Alternatively I also enjoy The Sisters Of Mercy of which I have 5 albums on my Zune but the only thing that shows in the device list is The Sisters of Mercy artist but not which albums are there. As I said earlier this is the single biggest downfall of the Zune, I know that I will be labeled a “fanboy” but iTunes is leaps and bounds ahead of the Zune software and if Microsoft could fix that they would have an amazing PMP.

Over all the user experience with the Zune is really good. I had some trouble setting up the Zune software initially, I think that it was a result of the Zune being connected while the software was installing. After removing and reinstalling everything went just fine. I had the opportunity to play with the wireless sharing while I was at the cottage with some friends last week and I was really impressed at the speed of the transfers but somewhat disappointed in the 3 days or 3 plays limitation but I understand the reasoning behind it so I am not calling it a fail (and I am not sure if that applies to pictures and podcasts as well or not).

Here is the link for my ChatThreads conversations, if you took the time to read this I would appreciate you letting them know. It will only take 5 minutes and you could win 500$.

My favorite feature of digsby by far is the little balloon that pops up on your main screen with the info you have asked digsby to provide, the best part of this is that if someone sends you an IM you can type your response right into the balloon, no switching to the IM client window, this is really handy if you just need to send a quick reply back to someone and is much less disruptive. The other most excellent feature is the ability to combine multiple contacts into one, if you have friends on more than one network you can group them into one contact on Digsby and they show up with whichever service they logged in under but you only have one contact entry. It also has a great chat widget for Facebook or that you can embed in a blog. What makes that cool is that when someone hits your page you see a guest show up under digsby chat in the Buddy List.

There is also a Mac OSX and a Linux client in the works. I am hoping that they will add other social networking sites in the future as well as a mobile client that way I could use digsby everywhere!

Features

• View your mobile screen on your desktop.
• Control your mobile by using desktop keyboard and mouse.
• Copy/Cut/Paste text between mobile and desktop.
• Capture mobile screen.(Still or Video)
• Drag and drop files to your mobile.
• Support ActiveSync / IP Connection
• Support Mobile Explorer (File Browse)

The drag and drop files to and from will be really useful, and I can sit the phone off to the side with my headset on and answer calls right from my keyboard.