Friday, December 24, 2004

Burning DVD's with iDVD

For those of you at work on Christmas Eve trying to burn a DVD for your wife to give to a friend of hers as a gift, let me give you some recommendations after you've seen iDVD crash three times on your G5 without even starting to burn. (How's that for a quality run-on sentence? That's so fine, I think I'll just leave it in here).


a) Throwing the computer out the window in flames to tumble all 11 floors down to the parking garage is not the answer. Even though it may look really cool, it will probably result in a pink slip.

b) Re-installing iDVD from scratch is a good thing. It appears to fix things up great. Make sure you immediately update to 4.0.1 without ever launching it. Why this works, I do not know. Usually I look at recommendations like this in user to user forums with great skeptism right along with "rebooting", "repairing permissions" and the best one "redo-prebinding". This time however, it does appear to be working (ie I haven't crashed yet).

c) Last but definately not least, uncompress this file into your home directory. Believe it or not, this exposes an easter egg that allows you to make iDVD save to a disk image. When you go to burn, control click on the burn button instead of just normally clicking on it, and this gives you the option of burning to a disk image. Even better, you can mount these disk images and play them in the standard Apple DVD app to check your "DVD" before you actually burn it using the Disk Utility. No more frisbees! I wonder which Apple Engineer let that little egg out...and why Apple hasn't allowed this feature all the time?

Anyways, a couple of hundred transitions to go, and then I'm out of here ;-)

Happy Holidays all!

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

It's not even out yet!

My wife is probably going to make me sleep on the couch for saying this, but the series is not that great.

The new Harry Potter is already topping the amazon book charts and it's not even out yet. What truly scares me is the purchasing power of the under-15 demographic. This book was only announced 24 odd hours ago.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Week 20

We had our mid term ultrasound this morning...I can't believe we are half way already! We got some insight into what we might be expecting. The doctor was 90% sure; said we might want to hang onto reciepts just in case though. He said that we will be able to make a more accurate guess sometime around the middle of May :-)

I won't post the results in case anyone does not want to know, but if you are interested drop Dave or I am email.

Monday, December 20, 2004

Best Wishes For Bruce McKinnon

I just found out that one of my best friends growing up is in the hospital today getting a lung removed. Bruce has been fighting cancer for several years, and proving it's the little miracles that happen every day that count. When he was originally diagnosed several years ago, the doctors weren't willing to give him more than 6 months. For those of you who don't know Bruce, suffice it to say that he is one of the most intelligent, talented, personable people that I've ever met. He and I sort of parted ways during high school when we headed to different schools, but have always managed to keep in touch. Every couple of years we get together, and it's like we'd never been apart.

Keep Fighting Bruce! There's a lot of us out here thinking of you.

Here's a quick clip of Bruce on the piano playing "I'll Get By" from his album "Something To Live For".

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

My 15 minutes of anonymous fame

Well, my 15 minutes are up, and I'm not even named :)

Check out paragraph two.

Oh well...it's a cool ad. You can check it out in the WSJ when it goes live (tomorrow I think!)

Thursday, December 9, 2004

Gotta Love Leviticus

Senator Rick Santorum
Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C.

Dear Sen. Santorum:

Re: "Federal Marriage Amendment":

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your speeches on the Senate floor in support of a Constitutional amendment against "gay" marriage. I am now trying to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them, as you said, that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.

Wednesday, December 1, 2004

iTunes For Canada

Hurrah! Finally....

MacCentral: Apple opens iTunes Music Store in Canada

Some new pics

hi everyone! I just got back from a nice quiet weekend at the lake, where my nearest neighbours were the McManus's and therefore my sources of entertainment included crossword puzzle books, the piano, and... my camera. Here are a couple of the shots I got. Actually... let's cancel that. Dave, what the &^*&^* happened to the "attach file" button that used to be here? Suddenly my image of being fantastically computer savvy is exposing the idiot I really am!
PS-- Happy Christmas Carol Day! It's now legal to listen to Christmas music for the next 25 days.