Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Human? Or Bot?

One of the exciting new items technology brings to us are things known as "bots" short for robot. A lot of them are just software right now rather than a walking talking machine. These software bots do all sorts of things like look around the web for Google and tell them where sites exist. This morning I had a question about a product a company was advertising. One of the links on the page was a live chat with technical people for questions. After "chatting" with the tech, I started to get the impression that maybe it wasn't really a human on the other line but just a bot who was looking for a product ID and my email and the rest of it was just fluff. I'll attach the discussion right after...what do you think?


Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The Stream

Every Sunday morning at church we live stream the entire service in the main theater. We use a service provided by Livestream where we only have one stream to them and then they make it available to everybody who wants to watch. This gives us the opportunity to handle up to 50 simultaneous people before we have to upgrade to their paid service. Additionally, we produce the online content and record it which stays at Livestream. The down side is we rely on them to make everything available the up side is we don't have enough people to do it without them. Unfortunately, Sunday's message from 21 February has something going on with it and while listed it is grayed out and unavailable. We are at the mercy of Livestream now to get our recording fixed...I just hope it's okay.


Thursday, February 18, 2010

Amazing

It is amazing to watch somebody who is not just good but spectacular in their chosen discipline. Last night for the Olympics I watched Shaun White make his first run down the half pipe. The guy was just amazing. I don't understand the sport very well but even with my view of it I could see that Shaun was so much better than anybody before him. The guy was just outstanding! He scored the highest score...somewhere around 45.5. He then waited on the second run until everybody went ahead of him. Nobody beat his high score so he was celebrating at the top of the hill because he has already won the gold medal. He told his coach there was no way he could do the run he was so excited and his coach told him to have fun. So here's the kicker...Shaun White, the Olympic gold medal winner was just doing a victory lap. And he put down a higher score than he did before! The guy on a free run that was worth nothing put down a score of over 48 with a brand new trick that nobody has seen before. The guy is just so much better than anybody else that it is amazing to watch him work.


Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Attach direct fixed iTunes

Well, I attached the Drobo directly to my laptop with the firewire connector and that is REALLY fast. It won't help when I'm not at home but so far nobody really watches anything without my help so this should work for a bit


Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Posting to Blog

I have been using Blogger to post to all the blogs here at church for years now. It's been great because their software already has the work put into it to archive old posts and keep the new ones in order and have links to them all and everything. Unfortunately, I just received notice that they are turning off that functionality for us in another month. Now I don't know what we're going to have to do but I'm looking around for software I can change to that will import everything that has been done over the years and allow us to move forward without a tremendous amount of work on my side. Any ideas?


Friday, February 05, 2010

More iTunes problems

The last time I had problems with iTunes it was with the hardware but now, after a power outage, the array containing the iTunes library for the home still works fine. Unfortunately, the Windows machine that downloads everything and saves it all to the array has decided it can't remember how to do that. So I'm stuck trying to fix that now...guh.


Wednesday, February 03, 2010

It's finally here!

One of the more enjoyable things some friends and I have been doing for years now is getting the Jeopardy a day calendar and we keep track for a month to see who knows the answers. Well, I had to wait and see if I received it for Christmas which I didn't so I went out and found one so Jeopardy can start again tomorrow!