Videos from Studio 5

As promised, here are the videos from Stacey's demonstration on Studio 5. There are 2 versions:

• Stacey-Studio5.wmv (13.6 MB) - Broadband users
• Stacey-Studio5_small.wmv (5.4 MB) - Dial-up users

Happy viewing!

Stacey on TV

Yesterday, Stacey was on TV! She went on Studio 5, a daytime show targeting stay-at-home moms. She went on to demonstrate the vinyl lettering that she does with Uppercase Living. Her segment was 5 minutes long, but it went by very quickly. She showed Jane Clayson how to use vinyl lettering to decorate your home, particularly a nursery, as Jane recently left the news business to become a mother. Stacey did a very good job and it was exciting to see her on TV. She was very nervous about it, and honestly, so was I. I was standing just behind the cameras in the studio, and when they announced the 15 second mark till airtime, my heart started pounding for her. I will try to get the video and post it, but you can also see the web page about it here.

St. Patrick's Day

Saturday morning, Stacey had to leave for a Relief Society meeting, so I made breakfast for the kids. I did the usual St. Patrick's Day breakfast of green pancakes, green eggs, and green orange juice. The kids thought it was kind of weird, but they didn't mind. I have to say, though, that the orange juice was kind of hard to drink while I was looking at it, much easier to close my eyes.

****Warning: This next part may be a little crude. If you don't want to be grossed out, don't read it.

While we were eating, I told the kids that later on in the day or the next day, they would probably have green poop. They thought that would be so cool. Well, the next day at church, Kaylee had to go potty with Stacey. When they came back, Kaylee came running to me and whispered, "Daddy, I had green poop!" Aaron did the same thing later that evening. They were so excited to have green poop.

****End warning

It was a fun breakfast and fun day with the kids.

BYU in NCAA

Well, last night I watched BYU play Xavier in the first round of the
NCAA tournament. BYU hasn't had the best of luck in the NCAA tournament
for quite a while. I was hoping that they would finally be able to win a
game in the tourney. They had a good chance of winning that game, but it
seems that when they got a nice 8 point lead midway through the second
half, they went into "cruise control" mode and let Xavier back into the
game, going on a 13-0 run. That is horrible. Another complaint - how can
BYU be so bad at free throws? I don't feel that they have a single
player that is "clutch" at hitting the free throws. Every time they are
at the line, I'm concerned that they are going to miss the front end of
a 1-and-1. What really killed BYU was Xavier's guards. BYU's guards are
just not quick enough to guard them up top and when Xavier's guards got
around them, they either had a nice easy shot or a nice assist to a big
man. BYU really needs to get some quick guards that can play some good
defense, or learn how to help each other a little better.

Frustrating night as I thought BYU totally had a chance to win that
game. Now that they are out, I couldn't care less about the tournament.

Daylight Saving Time

In response to my brother's blog, here's my viewpoint of the whole daylight saving time. This was a big deal for most IT departments throughout the country, depending on the industry they are in. For me, being in a broadcast TV industry, this was a huge deal. Our industry depends on accurate time very heavily. Most people have NO IDEA how many servers and different pieces of equipment are required to get a simple TV show out to the public. We work with so many different vendors that run proprietary software. If we just simply ran the update from Microsoft on every piece of equipment, who knows what other problems that would have caused in their programs. So we actually were quite anxious for these vendors to be proactive and contact us and let us know what we needed to do to update the equipment. Even after updating all of our equipment, I came in at 1:00 AM Sunday morning to finish up a few things and make sure that everything changed properly and was working OK. Turns out that most everything was just fine. We did run into a minor snag or two, but for the most part, it went very well. However, I believe that is because such a big deal was made of it and we worked very hard to make it go smoothly.

That being said, here is my opinion of the daylight saving time change: HORRIBLE! Congress just wasn't thinking when they decided to pass this energy saving act. Any amount of money that may be saved by making this changed was immediately wiped out by the amount of man hours and resources wasted on making sure everything was ready for it. KSL is a small company in comparison to others, and we put a lot of time and money into it. In fact we have some equipment that requires a new chip to be installed. We have to purchase these chips at a cost of about $500. Now $500 is not a huge amount, but if you figure that every radio and TV station in the country is having to purchase these new chips, it adds up. Perhaps the chip makers were lobbyists to get this energy saving act passed. ;)

I can't even imagine the amount of resources that had to have gone into this at huge companies that are very time dependent such as airlines, credit card companies, etc. This truly was a mini-Y2K.

I would love it if congress passed an act that completely abolished this time changing event completely. Of course, I like more daylight during the summer, so I would say that we stay on permanent daylight saving time. No more going back to standard time, but that is just my $0.02.

Vista

I have been using vista at home for about a month now. I just installed it yesterday at work. I have to say that my overall analysis of it so far is that it is very nice. There are a lot of things that I really like about it, and I really like the advanced security. Sure, there are programs that are not completely Vista-Compliant, but can we blame that on Microsoft? Yes, it is their OS, but 3^rd party companies should have had plenty of time to adjust their code for it. With the amount of software that is out there that IS Vista compatible, it makes me wonder what happened to the companies that haven’t made the change. Why are they so much slower? One of those applications that doesn’t work is the U3 software that comes on my SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive. I wish they would fix that. However, I predict that it won’t be too long before Vista really takes off. By the way, if you are interested in purchasing Vista, DO NOT buy the full product. There is a trick that you can use to install Vista on a clean hard drive using only the upgrade version. You can find the entire article here, but if you don’t want to go there, here are the steps:

 

Step 1. Boot the PC from the Vista DVD.

Step 2. Select "Install Now," but do not enter the Product Key from the Vista packaging. Leave the input box blank. Also, turn off the option Automatically activate Windows when I'm online. In the next dialog box that appears, confirm that you really do want to install Vista without entering a Product Key.

Step 3. Correctly indicate the version of Vista that you're installing: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate.

Step 4. Select the "Custom (Advanced)" install, not the "Upgrade" install.

Step 5. Vista copies files at length and reboots itself one or more times. Wait for the install to complete. At this point, you might think that you could "activate" Vista, but you can't. That's because you haven't installed the Vista upgrade yet. To do that, run the DVD's setup.exe program again, but this time from the Vista desktop. The easiest way to start setup again is to eject and then reinsert the DVD.

Step 6. Click "Install Now." Select Do not get the latest updates for installation. (You can check for these updates later.)

Step 7. This time, do enter the Product Key from the Vista packaging. Once again, turn off the option Automatically activate Windows when I'm online.

Step 8. On this second install, make sure to select "Upgrade," not "Custom (Advanced)." You're not doing a clean install now, you're upgrading to Vista.

Step 9. Wait while Vista copies files and reboots itself. No user interaction is required. Do not boot from the DVD when asked if you'd like to do so. Instead, wait a few seconds and the setup process will continue on its way. Some DOS-like, character-mode menus will appear, but don't interact with them. After a few seconds, the correct choice will run for you automatically.

Step 10. After you click a button labeled Start in the Thank You dialog box, Vista's login screen will eventually appear. Enter the username and password that you selected during the first install. You're done upgrading to Vista.

Step 11. Within 30 days, you must "activate" your copy of Vista or it'll lose functionality. To activate Vista, click Show more details in the Welcome Center that automatically displays upon each boot-up, then click Activate Windows now. If you've dismissed the Welcome Center, access the correct dialog box by clicking Start, Control Panel, System & Maintenance, System. If you purchased a legitimate copy of Vista, it should quickly activate over the Internet.

 

 

Pretty cool if you ask me. However, technically, this shouldn’t be done unless you have purchased a previous copy of Windows 2000 or XP, but most people have done that. Of course, this whole process would’ve been null if they had just allowed an upgrade be installed and at a certain point, ask for the Windows XP CD, like they have done in past versions of Windows. I guess they decided that it was much too easy to get your hands on just a CD of Windows XP, that they better make it a bit more difficult.

 

Like previous versions of Windows, Vista comes with some games by default. One that my kids really like is called Purble Place. It includes 3 different games, definitely targeting children, but they are definitely entertaining for them. It comes with a pretty decent chess game for the geeks like me who like to keep up their chess skills.

 

If you are brave enough to try out Vista, good luck and have fun!