Archive for the 'Advice' Category

Feedburner

Published
by
Chalupa
on November 17, 2008
in Advice, Google, RSS and Technology
. 4 Comments

If you have an active blog or website with RSS feeds enabled, Feedburner can be a very useful tool to see how many are subscribing to your feed and what’s being looked at and downloaded.  I recently upgraded my Feedburner account to the *new* Google version last month because I wanted to check out the new Adsense integration features.  This would allow me to put Google Adsense ads into my feeds.

After the migration was all said and done, I lost almost two years of feed stats on my podcast.  Major bummer.  So even though you can maybe, I highly stress maybe here, make a few bucks off of some ads, make sure you’re willing to lose all history of your statistics.

Lee Ziegler - Lame Photographer at large

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 13, 2008
in Advice and Review
. 8 Comments

I’ve always heard horror stories about wedding photographers, but never actually experienced it until last summer. I was at two weddings in Muncie, IN where Lee Ziegler was used. The guy seemed nice and I heard he was supposed to be “one of the best” in the area. I also heard he charged a lot of money, but he also offered a lot of services like being around all day and setting up slide shows at the reception, etc.

I’m not going to give out names, because I’ve been told there may be lawsuits involved so I’ll called them wedding1 and wedding2. Things seemed to go ok at both weddings until it actually came time to get the pictures. Ziegler promised them 800 or 900 pictures. Both got maybe half of those. A ton of standard shots were missing like pictures of the bride and groom, pictures of the groomsmen, pictures of the family, etc. There were, however, no lack of shots for the “hot” bridesmaids and one mother while she was getting dressed. Creepy? I think Walter Sobchak would call this guy a nihilist.

After seeing these pictures, wedding1 and wedding2 both tried to talk to Ziegler about the issues and he just turned into a total jerkface about it. Refused to answer emails, yanked their chains by “giving them the pictures” with things purposefully messed up and in thumbnail sizes*. Another thing he does is to take some of the money you pay him and give you a credit on a photo printing site. The problem is that Ziegler won’t tell wedding1 and wedding2 how to use the credit. He also won’t post any of the pictures they want printed on said site.

At one point both wedding1 and wedding2 asked for a refund, as stated in the contract. Ziegler told them, “I’m not in a position right now to offer a refund.” So the guy spent all their money I guess. I wish I had better words to describe him other than profanities and “he’s a bad business man.” This is the kind of behavior that gets you beat down on the playground or in jail. So what do I really have to say about Lee Ziegler, the wedding photographer from Muncie, IN? Stay away from this guy. He overcharges his customers. He doesn’t fulfill his contracts. He screws people over and he makes brides cry.

If you’d like to read some more, check out what Lij has to say.

* After writing this I was informed some of those thumbnail pictures turned out to be ok, they were just in a Photoshop-only format. I guess I forgot that most people, who have no expertise in photography or the photo industry, spend hundreds of dollars to own Adobe Photoshop. Man, I’m such an idiot.

Pizza Hut’s new crust…

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 4, 2008
in Advice, Cheese and Liz
. 1 Comment

isn’t worth being called one. It’s being labeled as CRUNCHY! and CHEESY!, but it only really falls under the first category if you ask me.

Last week Liz and I ordered one. I always eat faster than her so I had 3 breadsticks and two slices down before she had gotten to the crust on her first piece. I asked her what she thought about it and her response was something like, “Parmesan? I think they accidentally use crap-esan.” That’s right folks it’s TERRIBLE. I love cheese. I eat it all the time. I’ve had several varieties of parmesan both grated and sliced. Pizza Hut’s new creation doesn’t taste like anything I’ve ever tasted. It even smells bad. If you’re into cheesy crust, please, for your own sake, stick with the stuffed crust.

Olympus hardware follow-up

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 16, 2008
in Advice, Hardware and Podcasting
. 0 Comments

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I had purchased an Olympus DS-40 and TP-7.  My original plan was to post some files I had recorded as examples of what it can do, but I obviously never got around to that.  I would like to report that the DS-40 is amazingly meeting my needs for podcasting.  We took it with us on our recent roadtrip-interview and it worked beautifully.  The built-in mic on the DS-40 compared to the mic on the WS series is at least 10 times better in my opinion.  Hiss and background noise are greatly reduced.  The DS series has three separate settings for mic sensitivity along with different filters and quality settings you can set within the menus.  The manual even gives you a chart with different circumstances and suggested settings configurations.  I’m a big fan.

The TP-7 also worked wonderfully.  I couldn’t quite tell how it worked by the picture, but it made much more sense after I physically had it.  It’s an earbud that plugs into the mic jack of your voice recorder.  On the back side of the earbud is a microphone.  You put that into your ear and then talk on a landline-phone or cell phone to record your conversation.  The mic picks up pretty well, however, it picks up background noise as well.  I did a test call to Liz and it sounded a little breezy because there was an air purifier running about 3 feet away from me.  So I would suggest recording your phone calls in quiet area if you’re concerned about background noise.

Joomla embedded video

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 15, 2008
in Advice and Joomla
. 5 Comments

I recently started embedding some video on my Joomla site.  I thought everything was working fine until I realized it was requiring you to be logged in to view that content.  This seemed really weird so the first thing I checked were the permission levels on the two content items and everything was set to “public,” which is the default setting.

I had used the embed code from YouTube so my next plan of action was to try a plugin I already had installed and was using for some audio - AllVideos.  It took me a couple minutes to figure out what exactly to snag as the YouTube code and get it setup, but that didn’t work either.  I then decided to stream a local video with AllVideos.  This worked, but I still couldn’t figure out why.

I posted on the Joomla forums, talked to a couple geek-friends and pondered on it for most of a day.  Do you know what finally fixed it?  Completely starting over.  I just deleted the two offending content items, re-created them and everything worked fine.  Wish I had thought of that right away.

Migrating Deep Freeze

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 9, 2008
in Advice, Deep Freeze, Software and Work
. 0 Comments

Like I said in the previous post, all you need to do to migrate your Deep Freeze Administration software is to make sure you know two things:

  1. The Customization Code you originally installed it with
  2. The IP address or name of the machine you’re installing the software to

From there it’s a piece of cake.  You just install the software on your new server or machine and then tell your computers to point to the new administrator machine*.  I was able to have my original console and the new console up simultaneously by remote desktop’ing into the new location.  I was then able to update my machines using the old console, watch them dissapear and then re-appear on the new console.

After you’ve pointed all of your machines to the new console you just have to link to the new console yourself.  Faronics (Deep Freeze) has instructions to do that.  It’s not too bad.  They also have great tech support if you need to call or email them.

* When changing the network settings to tell a computer where to report to, I had to make sure I checked LAN/WAN instead of just LAN.  I work for a university and we have computers all over campus in different buildings on different VLANs, switches, etc.  While having LAN checked, I was only able to see computers in the same building I was in.

Deep Freeze Scare

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 8, 2008
in Advice, Deep Freeze and Work
. 0 Comments

If any of you are managing labs/computers with Deep Freeze, I’m sure you probably know it’s some pretty cool software. Currently the Enterprise administration console resides on my personal PC and we’re going to be moving that to a server just so it’s easier to access, always running, etc.

To do this you just need to have your customization code and send out an update to change the network settings before you install the admin software somewhere else. Well, I thought I’d try pushing out a configuration update file on one computer to test things out. So I entered the network settings on a new file, saved it as a configuration file and pushed it.

I then found out that all fields need to be filled in, like the password for example. I didn’t quite know what to do because my PC couldn’t communicate with this machine anymore and I couldn’t login locally on the machine to turn Deep Freeze off. Luckily, the calvary arrived in the form of a One-Time-Password.

To use the One-Time-Password feature you have to first get the token from the login window on the machine you need to create a password for. Use that token to create a password in your configuration administrator and you’re good to go. I was then able to login, change the network settings and unfreeze the computer. Now I could talk to the rogue machine again with the admin console on my PC.

So, if you’re going to make a configuration file, I would first open the executable you used to originally install Deep Freeze on that machine or lab, make your changes and then save it as a configuration file.  This way you’ll be sure to have all the settings you need.

Folding category plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on December 30, 2007
in Advice and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

Just found what I’ve been looking for.  A plugin to expand/hide my categories.  I’m not using it here, it’s on my Movie blog.  Here’s the site for where I got it from.  One nice feature is that it actually works with Wordpress 2.3.2.  Now I just have to categorize a couple hundred posts.

Audacity tip

Published
by
Chalupa
on November 19, 2007
in Advice, Audacity, Nerdy/Geeky and Technology
. 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to use Audacity, a few audio editing program, lately to edit my podcast. I had been doing all of the editing with Adobe Audition at work, but really wanted to just do it from the comfort of my own office chair.

It’s a pretty nice program and you can’t really argue with the price. One thing I was frustrated with though is some of my audio clips were sounding all warbly and degraded after I exported my project as an MP3. I finally figured out what was happening. Most of my clips were recorded in mono. A couple of clips I imported were stereo. After I split those stereo tracks and deleted a channel, then the warbling disappeared. Another thing I was playing around with was the bit-rate and sample rate. That can also make a difference, but definitely split your stereo tracks into mono if you’re doing multi-track editing.

Joomap and Google Webmaster Tools

Published
by
Chalupa
on October 7, 2007
in Advice, Google and Joomla
. 0 Comments

If you’re looking to submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and you’re also using the Joomap component for Joomla, you might have some problems with your sitemap being valid. After a couple days of searching and scratching my head I finally figured out the problem by reading a couple other threads on the Joomla forums.

Your URLs in your sitemap must match the URL of the site you’ve setup in Google WT. I originally used “http://www.lebowskipodcast.com” but my sitemap had “http://lebowskipodcast.com” as the start of all the URLs. To fix this I just added “another site” using my URL minus the “www.” I then resubmitted my sitemap and now everything works.