New, tips, and more
I can’t believe I haven’t recommended this site before…
This is your jumping off point to a number of interesting offerings being provided for you by a few folks associated with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program. Plan to check this page every so often as new subwebs are bound to show up from time to time.
If you want to learn about almost any Microsoft program, this is the place to start.
It used to be that everyone who had a Gmail account would have half a dozen Gmail invites to pass along to others. Remember, Gmail is still in beta, and so you need to be invited in order to get an account. Then a couple of months ago they upped the number of invites to 50. A couple of times I donated 10 invites to the Gmail Invite Spooler and within a few days I would end up back at 50 again. Well, about 2 weeks ago I donated 40 invites to the Gmail Invite Spooler and today I’m back up to 50 again.
If you want an invite, I suggest you check out the Gmail Invite Spooler. If you want an invitation from Chris me directly, just let us know.
Kind of a weird idea for a site (and an even weirder domain name), but for some reason you may want to create a tombstone using the Tombstone Generator. Most people would do this for “fun”, but I suppose you could use it for real if you wanted to test out something for a departed loved one.
If you like this sort of thing, then don’t forget the Church Sign Generator.
From Yahoo! News:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is now offering customized music CDs for its online customers. The world’s largest retailer launched the new service Tuesday.
Like other companies, the Bentonville-based Wal-Mart already offers customers music they can download at their home computers for a fee. Customers with the proper technology can burn those songs to a CD.
Now, customers can go to the company’s Web site and select songs from a catalog of more than 400,000 choices, including rock, pop, country and new releases.
From MSNBC:
A federal magistrate has ruled that two North Carolina universities do not have to reveal the identities of two students accused of sharing copyrighted music on the Internet.
The music industry trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, filed subpoenas in November 2003 asking for help identifying a North Carolina State University student who used the name “CadillacMan” and a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student who used the name “hulk.” The students allegedly file-swapped songs using the universities’ computer systems.
Subscriber John Mood sent me this:
I have been using Audacity for a few months. It is a very excellent audio editor! Coupled with Total Recorder, it’s a killer combination. Audacity is free, and Total Recorder is very inexpensive to license.
I found both quite on purpose, having an ancient sound file that needed cleaning up (noise, pops, general fuzziness). Audacity can open and edit and apply a wide range of filters and effects (Normalization, echo, and over 20 others). The file was a copy of Orson Wells’ “War of The Worlds” broadcast. It did such a good job on “War of The Worlds”, I had to undo two layers of filtering just to make it believable. It honestly sounded too good.
It can be found at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. It’s open source, free, and better than some of the professional tools I have used at work. It complements Total Recorder and is now indispensable to me. It’s so good, if it went pro/shareware, I’d pay for it. I download and try a lot of shareware, and Total Recorder and Audacity are both worth a look see. I bought Total Recorder about 3 versions ago. Total Recorder grabs anything (even streaming audio – it eliminates the transmission delay silences) sound wise running through your system. Audacity is great for fine ‘polishing’ sound, music, and speech recording.
Real handy programs. Total Recorder does a super job on webcasts and the like. It can record right off of WinAmp, MusicMatch, and iTunes radio stations, listening for you and saving to MP3 (with the addition of Lame_enc.dll).
You can reach John by email at john@chipspeaking.com or visit his web site at http://www.chipspeaking.com/
I recently posted about the amazing Autostitch software that is available for free. Well, here is another one. The Panorama Factory is a commercial product that also has an earlier freeware version. I haven’t tried it myself, but you can read about it and download it at http://www.panoramafactory.com/download.html#freeware
From CNet:
In a move that could rankle privacy advocates, Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes.
The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the contents of documents that were being created. Businesses will also choose whether they want their own technology managers to receive such data when an employee’s machine crashes.
Follow-up to Intel posts $10K reward for Moore’s Law mag
From TechRepublic:
In a philosophical victory for pack rats everywhere, an Englishman gets top dollar for a magazine he’s been storing under his floorboards.
The chip giant, which had been searching high and low for a 1965 copy of Electronics Magazine that featured Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s thoughts on how silicon technology would evolve, has hit payola.
David Clark, an engineer in Surrey, England, had a copy of the coveted issue and has sold it to Intel, reaping the chip giant’s $10,000 bounty.
From SourcingMag.com:
Roger Green and David Cook seem like your run-of-the-mill high tech execs — well dressed, well spoken, bright guys. That is, until they tell you their business plan. (I heard it at a party last night here at the Gartner conference, then did a quick interview with them.) And then you have to wonder, are these guys whacked?
Here’s their basic idea:
Take a used cruise ship, plant it in international waters three miles off the coast of El Segundo, near Los Angeles, people it with 600 of the brightest software engineers they can find around the world (both men and women), and run a 24-hour-a-day programming shop, thereby avoiding H-1B visa hassles while still exploiting offshore labor cost arbitrage and completing development projects in half the time they’d take onshore or offshore.
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