The warehouse that I now work in is just under 30 minutes away. Once I get comfortable with the location of speed traps and where the cops like to hide, I’m sure I’ll get that time down to 15 minutes.

I expected to sit down at my new desk and begin writing code right away, but they’ve got different plans for me. I will likely not be allowed to touch their system for two months! Instead, I will be moving from department to department, learning how everyone else interacts with the system I’ll be maintaining. I’ll be trained in each one like I was a new hire for that group, starting with Receiving. This is similar to Virilion’s orientation program, except that Tech For Less will have me work in each department for a week and have me write a report at the end of each week.

I made several laps through the warehouse, and I felt like a kid in a candy store. So. Many. Toys. Everywhere!

I was let go early, so the sun was still out on the way home. I took this video of my favorite part of the drive, seeing the mountains that make me feel so insignificant (in a good way):

You may hear me making silly noises and stupid comments in the background. Please ignore them. This is Titus Blvd, the lone road that leads to the village we live in on post. It is also the only place you can hit 40 MPH.

Best Buy had Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (PE7) on sale yesterday. I bought it because I’ve heard very good things about that program, specifically that it is much better than Windows Movie Maker (WMM). I’ve dabbled with WMM a few times and found it to be simple, but limited. If PE7 was anything like it, then I’d be happy.

It’s been about two hours now. I’m trying to apply a transition from one scene to the next in our cruise video (from last year). This is the best I can do:

That looks like shit. Why is the current scene spilling into the transition? Why isn’t it showing the next scene instead? I searched online for help, and everything I could find either was specific to Premiere Elements 4 or required me to start a paid subscription.

I fired up Windows Movie Maker and loaded the same two scenes. It took me five seconds to do what I wanted:

So, the free program I already had does this extremely simple thing better than the paid program. Had I just pirated this app, I would have paid $0 and lost nothing but a few hundred megabytes of hard drive space (which I would have gotten right back after I uninstalled this piece of crap).

If any of you can offer some (free) advice on how to do transitions correctly, I would very much appreciate it.

While watching 24: Redemption (I’m pretty happy this show is finally coming back on the air), I caught most of them on the bed again:

Using Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Photo together has made it much easier for me to post on a regular basis. I don’t need to fight with HTML anymore, I don’t need to manually upload or resize images, and I don’t have to manually add the bit of JavaScript needed to display the larger images in a pop-up window.

My next thing to do is to add video to my posts, as I did above. We’ll see if I can continue this trend.

You see, Leila and Todd are incredible mousers, and they are the best lap cats ever. I understand that they are your cats, but I’ve come to regard them as my own. In the interest of fairness, you can have one of your cats back.

In trade for the cat you don’t choose, you get Luna:

Yeah, she looks crazy in that picture. But don’t worry, she’s not like that all the time. Trust me, it’s a fair trade.

However, it is possible that I have some sort of gift when in the presence of someone else’s computer. Whatever issue they describe to me over the phone will go away when I’m standing in front of it, ready to work on it. This happens over 90% of the time. I should probably go work for Geek Squad. It would be the easiest job ever.

This gift reverses itself, becoming a curse, when I deal with my own equipment. My computers and devices begin to implode when exposed to me for too long. As my brother-in-law can attest to, I fall victim to problems that can’t be easily solved. Even asking the internet doesn’t help.

As part of my Unified Media Collection series of posts, I attempted to install Live Photo Gallery Beta to show how I will unify our photo collection. At the end of the install process, I got this error message:

So, it’s got enough permission to completely wipe out my C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery folder, but not enough to put anything back in. Awesome. Perhaps Vista thinks that I’m not the owner of that folder. Let’s take a look:

As far as Vista is concerned, I am not an administrator when it comes to this folder, and a secret user owns it. This issue also plagues my Apple Update Software app, so I can’t update that (and, in turn, cannot update iTunes). Additionally, I can’t run Windows Update anymore due to Error 80240016 (which I believe is related to this, as it seems that I do not have permission to install or to even check for updates).

I’ve tried all the tricks I can find, which total two: enable the super secret admin account to restore permission and to run takeown to take ownership. Neither one work. The William admin account isn’t really an admin. The administrator admin account is not an admin either.

This is the kind of crap I run into with my computers all the time. No one can ever help me. No one has ever run into any of the issues I find. I get angry and just want to break everything (how my PC is in one piece as I write this is nothing short of an amazing feat of restraint on my part).

My solution: format c:\

When that’s done, spend about $200 on Vista Ultimate. I’m not exactly pleased with that plan, but that’s all I’ve got.

Update: I got two bits of advice today about this problem! My brother-in-law told me to boot into safe mode (repeatedly hit F8 during boot up) and attempt to reset my permissions. Oddly enough, the Photo Gallery folder was no where to be found. I logged back in normally, tried to install it again, and it worked! However, that had no affect on the similar problem I was having with iTunes and Apple Software Update.

In comes commenter Eric, who provided two links for me to look through. The first one had my answer! It took a very long time for the program to run, but by the time it was done I was able to uninstall Apple Software Update, then repair and update iTunes. Thank you Eric!

That just leaves one problem: Windows Update. For about four months now, I have been unable to download any updates for my Vista desktop because of error 80070490. I logged a support request with MS to see if they can help.

First, I rewound the episode a bit, since I was watching it on the DVR. I fired up the free Shazam application on my wifi-connected iPhone so that it could sample the music. A 30-second sample showed this result:

The artist’s name is actually misspelled there. There is no space between the two Honeys, and they are all lowercase. I grabbed my Zune and searched the Zune Marketplace (via my home’s wifi network) for honeyhoney. This is what it found:

I selected the Loose Boots album and played Little Toy Gun from there:

I was able to stream the track directly from the Zune Marketplace (ZMP) because I pay for their $14.99/month Zune Pass. This gives me access to most of the ZMP’s music (tracks that are marked as Album Only cannot be accessed using the Zune Pass). After verifying that I had the right song, I added it to the cart, which allowed me to download it to the Zune. Later on, when I sync to my PC, the song would transfer to the collection on my PC.

While I’m away from home, the Shazam app works just fine since I usually have at least an EDGE connection. However, the Zune is limited to wifi, so I couldn’t download anything from the ZMP until I returned home. This makes me hope that a Zune app will find its way to Windows Mobile.

On a related note, the Zune team is now giving 10 free downloads a month to Zune Pass subscribers. So if I really like Little Toy Gun, I can permanently add it to my collection. It should be available as a 320kbps MP3 or a 192kbps WMA (the latter is still DRMed, but I believe I can just burn it to a CD and then rip that CD to get it as an MP3).

Thanks to Jordan, I learned about imeem. Using their service, I can embed the tune that caught my attention and prompted me to write this post about how I use these two mortal enemies together.

Photos

Nadia’s 25GB collection of photos lives on an external 125GB Maxtor connected to her desktop. She uses Picasa 2 to manage her library.

My 9GB photo gallery lives on the hp MediaSmart Server, and I interact with it using Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.

Music

Nadia’s 44GB DRM-free music library is stored on an external 150GB Western Digital hard drive connected to her desktop. She uses Windows Media Player 11 to manage her music collection, and syncs her library to a 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M.

My 20GB music library is stored on my desktop’s 320GB hard drive. I use Zune to manage it and to download new tracks. Since I subscribe to Zune Pass, the majority of my music is DRMed.

Video

Aside from the handful of ripped movies on our desktop hard drives, our movies are all in VHS, DVD and HD DVD format, scattered in boxes all over the living room.

Our television shows are in DVD boxed sets, purchased from Amazon Unbox or iTunes Store, trapped on our Motorola DVR provided by Baja Cable, or on our desktops (both have Media Center installed). Nadia’s PC can record two shows at once, while mine can only record one at a time.

The Goal

I want to find a way to bring all this media together in a way to make it easily accessible from any device we currently own, excluding obvious incompatibilities (like getting my Zune Pass music onto Nadia’s Zen). Regardless of the computer used, I want to see the same music library and playlists. I want to stream all of my movies to the 360 in the living room, and I want the same files to work on our portable media players. When Nadia imports new photos, I want to see them in my library.  When one of us wants to get to our media collection when we are out of the house, I want to be able to do so (assuming an internet connection is available, of course).

This is a pretty tall order. As I work my way toward a solution, I will document everything I learn here. Feel free to throw in your suggestions.

Well, those aren’t the only reasons. I’ve been overloaded at work after announcing my decision to leave. I will be working at a technology-focused online retailer by the name of Tech For Less here in Colorado Springs. It is going to be very different from Virilion in that I will be focusing on a single system, their internal inventory system, instead of working on a handful of sites. While I will no longer be able to dip my toes into all of the different technologies and languages that Virilion utilizes, I will also no longer need to carry a pager or play part time system administrator. So I lose some, but I gain some too.

Part of me can’t believe I gave up working from home full time.