Weird Excel Issue

It has been a while since I told you what’s wrong with Office 2007. Unfortunately, I am getting used to Word, Excel and Access (the only three applications I use at work). Access is the most difficult to get used to as it has the most items that work better… and worse. It is really different.

But this is about a very weird issue with Excel. Everytime I open a spreadsheet by double clicking it Excel will startup… and just sit there. It will sit there blank… until I click on any other open window, giving the focus to another application. At that point the spreadsheet pops right into view.

How weird is that?!?

Netflix Keeping Profiles

Hooray!

I posted on this blog that Netflix was removing its profiles feature. I also wrote an e-mail to Netflix. Apparently I am not alone. I just read that Netflix is keeping its profile feature after protests from its customers… of which I was one.

I found it annoying that there was no place on their web site to contact customer support through e-mail. Every single link that says contact customer support points to various FAQ questions and answers, and a phone number to call with a wait time. But no e-mail address. I think I eventually got through with customerservice@netflix.com, but I don’t know for sure. I tried 3 or 4 addresses and finally gave up reading the delivery failure notices.

Profiles is a means of dividing up your movies into separate “mini” queues. I use this feature to allow my son to rent movies without me worrying that I will have 8 cartoon DVDs laying around the house. My son can only rent one at a time. This reduces my own 8 at a time movie queue to 7 at a time. I also use another profile for myself to watch oldies. This further reduces my main queue to rent 6 at a time, with the benefit that my family is not waiting on me to watch a bunch of oldies when they want to see current movies.

I appaud Netflix for listening to its customers, I just wish it was easier to reach them.

Speed Vista Bootup With Dual Cores

I just came across this posting about speeding the boot time of Windows Vista by using both cores of your dual core system for booting. Normally Vista boots off one core until it is going. The change described here is very easy to implement.

I am going to try it tonight.

HBO on Zune Part II - The Success Story

If you read my last post, you know I was not able to watch any movies recorded on the analog HBO channel because Media Center put some kind of rights management on the file. This also prevented me from syncing a HBO movie to the Zune.

I used the WinTV Scheduler that came with my Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV tuner card to record a movie on channel 14, the analog HBO channel. The WinTV software records shows in .mpg format, which the Zune software will not recognize. I loaded up a file conversion utility I have for converting files for the Zune  (Daniusoft Zune Video Converter) and changed the file to a mp4, which should work on iPods as well as the Zune.

Success! I was able to record Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix from HBO and convert it to mp4. It took about 1:15 to convert a 2:30 recording. I then synced the mp4 file to my Zune 80 and all is working.

I setup about 6 or 7 movies to record over the next two weeks.

HBO on Zune

In the “old” days we used to be able to get HBO on channel 14, an analog channel, if you paid for HBO in the digital channel section. We do have HBO, channels 320 - 333. However, quite some time ago channel 14 stopped working on the analog TVs in the house. It said that if you still wanted HBO you should contact Time Warner and upgrade to a digital receiver (necessary to receive any channels above 99 anyway).

I tell you this story because Media Center shows HBO on channel 14 through my Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV tuner card. Cool!

Well, not cool. I recorded a couple of movies on HBO this way. When I went to play them in Media Player it claimed I do not have the proper rights to play, copy or sync the movies. Oops! I double checked Media Center, not Media Player, and sure enough it would play the movies. I tried playing the movies in the Zune desktop software and it gave the same message about not having the rights to play or sync the movie.

I checked the “guide” that Hauppauge sets you up with (really just a web site) and it did not list channel 14 like Media Center does, so I manually recorded a movie with the WinTV Scheduler.

I will update you when I get the results of that recording. I already know I am in for trouble as the WinTV software does not record shows in a format compatible with the Zune. I will have to dig out some conversion software for that.

Stay tuned.

Netflix Losing Profiles

I just received an e-mail informing me that Netflix is not going to support profiles anymore. Profile are a way of dividing up your movie queue into multiple queues. I currently pay for 8 movies, which means 8 movies at a time. Normally you put all your movies in a queue and they send you 8 at a time. With the profiles I was able to “redirect” part of the main queue to another queue. I let my son use a 1 movie queue, so its like he has his own 1 movie at a time subscription and I have a 7 movie at a time subscription. I further divide my queue into a second 1 movie at a time queue (dropping my main queue to 6 movies at a time). I use this last queue to rent old movies without impacting the new releases I rent for my family.

But why aren’t they reducing the price with this reduction in service? Good question. Maybe I should ask BlockBuster.

TV on Zune… and Zune on TV

Watching TV shows recorded with my desktop PC equipped with the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV tuner card is going very, very well. I have been impressed with the video quality. I have tried recording some shows in the lower quality that Media Center allows. At the lower quality you see artifacts, but it is not enough to detract from watching old shows. I have been getting into watching old Incredible Hulk shows from the 70’s I was a big fan, so it is interesting to see if there are any episodes I don’t remember at all. I have also recorded shows in Media Center’s highest quality and I can’t see anything wrong with the video on the device.

I just returned from a vacation at the coast. I bought a generic camcorder A/V cable from Radio Shack. It has a jack that plugs into the earphone jack of the Zune and it has yellow, white and red RCA connectors at the other end. It works great. It took a bit to figure it out. It seems that when plugged into the Zune the red cable is the video, and has to be plugged into the yellow socket on the TV.

Video quality from both record TV and movies copied from DVD with DVDFab Platinum look outstanding on a 25 inch TV. That’s all they had in the condo we stayed at. I will be testing it with my 65″ TV soon, but there is no option on the Zune for being connected to a 16:9 TV. I expect it will stretch the output and degrade the image. I’ll let you know the results in a future posting.

At this moment I am re-ripping a movie from DVD. The volume from the Zune when playing a movie on a TV is quite low. I turned on my laptop for one task the entire time on vacation. I launched DVDfab to see if it had any volume control. Sure enough it does. So I am re-ripping a movie with the volume set to 250%. I am hoping this will provide volume to match what I was getting from record TV without getting any distortion.

Stay tuned, there is more to come.

Hauppauge HVR-1250 Not Compatible With Zune

I tried recording a TV show, this time with the software that comes with the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV Tuner card instead of Media Center. A 1 hour show created a 2.7 GB mpg file. However, the Zune software does not recognize the file as a video. This means I am left with Media Center to record TV shows if I want to sync them up with my Zune 80.

I played around with the size, but I still have more to do. I wish you could save the 400 MB converted files without the space wasting originals from Media Center. I have an idea for that too.

I’ll keep you posted.

TV on the Zune 80

With my recently rebuilt desktop PC, complete with a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV Tuner card it was time to use Media Center to start recording and syncing TV shows. So far I have come across two issue:

1. The file format and size from Media Center is unique and large.
2. The Zune software converts the files before syncing them.

At the Zunes highest quality it takes up 3GB of space for each hour of TV. Considering that I am recording 640 x 480 broadcasts this is a lot. More than a DVD. The unique file format is a problem because the Zune desktop software must convert it before syncing with the Zune 80 player. Consequentially, it takes a long time to sync Media Center TV shows with the Zune. Leave it to Microsoft to allow the Zune to sync with Media Center, but have to convert it first. Thanks!

There is a good side to it. Once converted and synced, the files get down to about 400 MB per hour. That means I can store a lot of TV shows in the Zune 80.

I may have to use the software that came with the Hauppauge WinTV to record shows. I’ll experiment with that and report about it in a later post.

Windows 7 - Yuck???

I just saw this “screen capture” on PCMag’s coverage of the new Windows 7. Yuck! If this is really what the desktop of Windows 7 is going to look like we are all taking a step backward. I am all for a clean desktop, but not one that removed the mouse. Notice it says “use direction keys to navigate.” What happened to the mouse? This looks a lot like Windows Media Center. The reason Media Center works well with the directional keys is because it is closely related to the directional buttons on a remote control. I can tell you from personal experience that Media Center is less than mouse friendly. Will Windows 7 be less mouse friendly? Hmm.

WinTV with Vista’s Media Center

I have my resurrected PC working with the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250. I went through the steps to setup the guide that comes with the device. This is really a web site that displays your guide with ads. Since it’s free this didn’t bother me much. You can select to record shows in the web site guide and it downloads the information into the WinTV Scheduler. A little kludgy, but it works. The one thing I like about WinTV is that is starts by showing you TV in a window. Since my monitor is 1680×1050 sometimes you just want to see the video actual size. I am only getting analog TV on the WinTV HVR-1250, which means 640×480.

I also setup Vista’s Media Center. This was a problem. All the steps were logical enough, if a lot of them. But when it came time to setup their guide it kept getting an error 13 (could not connect to the Internet). That’s amazing since it connected to the Internet in the previous steps to get my cable provider’s name and such based on my zip code. Anyway, I had to disable Windows Firewall to get the guide to setup. I tried telling the firewall to let “Media Center” and the executable itself (ehSched.exe, thanks to Aaron Stebner for this) to go through the firewall, but nothing would work. Only turning off the firewall worked. However, once I did that the guide came up and it is very nice looking and fast.

I did have just enough time before leaving for work to notice that you are very limited in recording a series. There is a global option for recording a series as new shows and reruns, or new shows only. There is a third option I can’t remember, but I don’t like that this option is global. What is I want to record all the episodes of a show that is new to me even though it is in reruns. Yet other shows I want to just record the new shows. This is something that should be available for each “series” you record. This would be fairly easy to add to the software. I know I am a programmer by profession.

BTW… the remote that came with the WinTV card works Media Center just fine. Cool!

I have not had time to play with it, but I setup my machine to record its first TV show through Media Center. I also installed the Zune Desktop application. I left my machine this morning to copy all my music from my laptop to the resurrected PC into the Zune folder. Tonight I will re-sync my Zune with this new PC and see how it gets TV on the device.

Stay tuned.

New/Old PC Performance

My resurrected PC is doing wonderfully. I installed Halo and FarCry (my two favorite, if a bit old, PC games). I was able to set Halo to the highest resolution it handled (1368×786) which my monitor scaled well (the monitor is 1680×1050). The came performed perfectly, if a little sensitive with the mouse. I was able to run FarCry at 1680 x 1050 with all the graphics set to Very High. This is the first time I was able to do that. I played it for a little while and it looked very good. It made me wonder if this machine will play Crysis.

Stay tuned for that.

Next up is F.E.A.R. I will hopefully test that in the next couple of days. I did not get far in F.E.A.R. when I played it on my laptop. I will see if I can transfer the saved game files, but I am not too concerned. I would not mind playing it from the beginning.

So far the biggest issue is sound. I hooked hop my Creative 5.1 speaker system to the motherboard based sound system. My rear speakers are not hooked up. Previous pets (a cat and/or rabbit we no long have) chewed up the speaker wires in my study. At the moment I only have the center, left and right front speakers and the sub-woofer working. When I setup the speakers in Windows Control Panel it stepped me through perfectly to test each speaker and even tell it that the rear speakers were not attached, even though it was a 5.1 system. Very slick.

Non of this is the problem with sound. Playing games with sound is the problem. My study is right across the hallway from the master bedroom. If I turn up the volume to hear background sounds or voices it is too loud for the gun fire and blasts. Oops. The troubles we go through. I loved playing for a couple of hours when no one was home.

I have to get to F.E.A.R. now. I’ll keep you posted.

BeerTender for Father’s Day

My wife got me the Krups BeerTender for an early Father’s Day gift. We will be out of town on Father’s Day and I am having a poker game next Saturday. So getting the gift today is extra special. I am not a huge fan of Heineken beer, so I am going to be weighting with bated breath for other brands to make these mini-kegs for the BeerTender.

It’s too early to make a judgement call, but that will come at next week’s poker game. I am sure l will love it when I can use it with a variety of beer.

New PC Up and Running

My New/Old PC is up and running. All the parts came Friday, except the TV Tuner card which arrived on Thursday. I put the main computer together on my bed while I watched the season finally to Lost last night. I installed the TV tuner card this morning.

I don’t want to give away too many details on the components I purchased (I am saving that for an article on my main column). I hit some limitations with the motherboard. I went with the cheapest motherboard from ASUS or GIGABYTE that met my minimum requirements. These are two companies I trust, and I wanted a motherboard that could support gaming performance later. I got a GIGABYTE board and I realized why I saved money. For 1, there are only two memory slots. Not a problem yet because I bought 2 GB of memory with 2 memory sticks. Should I upgrade the memory I will have to replace my current memory. Not a huge deal, but something to consider if you know you will upgrade.

The next issue hit right away. The motherboard only has 1 IDE connector. And this connector only supports two devices. Damn. I was collecting all my hard drives and optical drives to install in this rig. I have a 100 GB SATA hard drive, a 120 GB IDE hard drive, a 20 GB IDE hard drive, a Plextor DVD/RW drive and an old ASUS 52X CD-ROM drive. I was hoping to use each hard drive as a bootable drive to play with other operating systems (Vista, XP, Linux). Well, I was left with only being able to install the 120 GB IDE hard drive and the DVD burner on the sole IDE connector. This not too bad, but it was kind of disappointing. I still have three SATA connectors left, so any future hard drives will go right in.

Overall the performance is very good running Windows Vista Home Premium. I have not activated it yet, because I have not made up my mind if I will stick with it. There is always Windows XP or Windows XP Media Center Edition (to go with the TV tuner card).

I’ll keep you posted.

What’s Wrong With Office 2007

As I mentioned, we were recently forced to upgrade to Office 2007 at work. I have my first legitimate grip. Yes, I think Office 2007 is a pain to use when coming from years of experience with previous versions of Office. I also think the ribbon bar takes up a lot of screen real estate. Oh, and each application is significantly slower to load than previous version.

All that aside, my first true complaint is with the title bar of the applications. The title bars do not use standard Windows colors for the title bars of an application. For instance, the default color for a title bar in Windows XP is bright blue when active and light blue when inactive. This gives you an immediate clue as to which application has the focus. Office 2007 applications use an even lighter shade of blue than the inactive windows color, with much less color deviation between applications with focus or without.

This breaks standard user interface guidelines… guidelines that Microsoft wrote. This is just plain wrong.

Rebuilding My Old PC

If you haven’t read it yet, you should read my article about resurrecting my old PC.

Last year my desktop PC was struck by lightening. I tried replacing the power supply, but it did not help. That meant I would have to replace the motherboard and its component (CPU, memory and video cards are all different from those in the fried motherboard). I don’t know if some parts are salvageable, but it does not matter. At this point all I need to re-use are the hard drive, DVD drive and the case.

All the new parts should arrive Friday (tomorrow). I know what I am doing this weekend.

I am not going to tell you here what parts I used. I am saving that for the next part of the article coming out on June 1 and part III which will be out on July 1st. However, I will tell you when it is running and any issues that come up getting it running.

Stay tuned…

The Workouts Are Working

Recently we purchased a Marcy SM 4000 home exercise setup. Well, the workouts are working. I took 4 quick measurements and weighed myself when I started. I just remeasured myself this morning and I am already making gains. My arms increased from 15-1/2 inches to 16-1/4. That 3/4″ in 5 weeks. Cool! My thighs increased from 23″ to 24″, but my chest is the same at 47-48″… depending one how I can hold the tape measure. My weight has gone from 219 to 225 lbs. This had me worried since I don’t think I can gain weigh “properly” that fast. But the ultimate proof came when I measures my gut and it went down 1″, from 42″ to 41″.

I can’t wait till I have those 17″ arms and a belly much smaller than my chest.

GM Volt - Too Expensive

I just read that GM thinks its new “plug in hybrid” is going to be priced around $40,000. Ouch! I had high hopes for the Volt. I understand it will run about 40 miles on electric alone. That’s a bit short for me with a daily commute of 75-80 miles, but it is promising.

GM is trying to convince Congress that they should get a tax break that would make the car more affordable. In other words… everyone would help pay for the Volt through taxes. I am not sure I like that. I don’t know the answer, but I would rather they beat Toyota at the hybrid game without needing a tax break.

Office 2007 - Like It Or Not

They are forcing everyone at work to upgrade to Office 2007. Whether we like it or not. My Operations Manager keeps saying we will love it after a couple of months. My wife has been using it for quite a while and she still struggles with it sometimes. I ran Office 07 briefly on my laptop when I installed Vista. I did not like it. I think the ribbon bar takes up too much screen real estate and the software is slow. When I switched back to Windows XP on my laptop I installed Office 2003 and find it to be more than enough for all my needs. In fact, Office 2000 is all I need, but I thought I might like Office 2003.

As you know, I have a page dedicated to Office & Outlook running on Vista. All my testing and all the posts to that page leave me to believe you should NOT run Office 2000 on Vista. Office 2003 works very well though.

I will report how I like Office 2007 in a few weeks.

New Domain Name

Well, all is working with my new domain name, ScottLewisOnline. I am currently hosting it on my home server. I bought the domain name through GoDaddy, and I am using FreeDNS to point the name to my IP address. Finally, I am using FreeDNS Update to keep the IP address up to date when it changes.

I like how it all seems to be working. So far my total out of pocket expense is $10.18. That covers the domain name for 1 year. The other items are free (as their names imply). It has been over two years since my IP address changed, so it may be a long time before I know that FreeDNS & FreeDNS Update are working as expected. I assume I could always change my IP address manually on GoDaddy’s web site. But that is not the point. I want it to happen automagically.

If FreeDNS works well, I will send them a donation. It seems fair. So, here’s to waiting for my IP address to change. Maybe I should power down the next time I go out of town. That would likely force an IP change. I’ll keep you posted as we are going to Rockport next month.