Category: Miscellaneous

I went to the University today for a New Media faculty meeting. I am the New Media Representative and so I sit it on the meetings and let the rest of the students know what’s going on in the Faculty.

Although it was a long meeting, I did appreciate learning a few things. I found out that they are considering buying 51 licenses for Maya – maybe Maya Complete or maybe Maya Unlimited. (Apparently Maya Unlimited is more complete than the former – sheesh.) They decided that if they do go ahead and get the Maya licenses, which it looks like they will, that they will not be dropping their 3D Studio Max software.

They also showed me a list of the software available to the students this semester, and it looks like among other things they’ve upgraded to the CS versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, and the Macromedia MX 2004 package.

I think it’s going to be a good semester for me.

MAYORBOB of Plastic.com fame has decided to stop posting at least for awhile and go into deep lurker mode.

The community responds; here’s to MAYORBOB.

I was having some trouble at first, but now I have two monitors setup on my computer. If you don’t have a video card that supports two monitors, (ie. has two places to plug them in) then the first thing you need to do in order to get them working is to install a second video card. Originally I was using an onboard NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 video chipset. I installed a Cirrus Logic 5446 Compatible Graphics Adapter but couldn’t get it to work. I searched the net but didn’t have much luck finding the answer. It turns out the key to getting both monitors working is to change the BIOS / CMOS settings to look for your video card first, instead of just using the onboard video. It took me a couple of trys to find the setting that I needed.

I now have two monitors working and it’s great. It’s particularly handy to do New Media work having one monitor for tutorials and another to follow along with.

I hope this explanation of what I did helps someone else who is trying to do the same thing.

My sister Jackie and her husband Glen delivered a baby boy today. Congratulations guys.

The University of Lethbridge New Media Movie Making Camp for July 2004 is done. I’m now an unemployed movie maker instructor / lifeguard. Actually I’m technically employed as a lifeguard but I’m not on the working schedule at present.

The camp itself was, in my opinion, a great success. I’ve become a better teacher and I believe the program will grow as word spreads about how fun it is to make your own movies. I wish I had the storage space and bandwidth required to show some of my favorite parts on this blog, but you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that for kids averaging between 11 and 13 they made some mighty fine movies.

I came into the University today to finish up some things and to meet with my boss for a little review of the job. I’m getting a pretty good feeling about my chances of doing it again next year. Also next year they will likely try to stretch it out for an additional one or two weeks.

In the meantime aside from hanging out at the University I’ve been putting out ads for a new roommate, trying to get my student loans application filled out, working out in the pool, running errands, and mostly waiting for Anna-Maria to be done work so we can go home. :)

I used to hate camping. It’s a secret from Anna-Maria and most of my family, but I don’t think it would come as a big surprise to those that have been with me on Scout Camp. I’ll try not to delve too deeply into the bad memories.

It’s not that Scout Camp is inherently bad. It’s not even that LDS Scout Camp is inherently bad. Which as you can guess is what I went too. But do I ever hate those bastards. Please don’t take offence if you are reading this and happen to be the one or two people from Scout camp that actually made it bearable. I’m hoping you know who you are.

The thing about Scout camp was that our troop had a very motley crew of people that I would never hang out with in real life. Nice guys – most of them, but so many of them just weirdoes or mental cases. They were either too different in their interests or too anxious to start a fight with us. It was especially bad after they split our ward. Which meant that most of the people I liked to hang out with were no longer in our troop. I sometimes snuck in to the other wards camps because ours sucked so badly.

Anyway having had enough of this tangent I’ll be getting to the point of this post.

I went camping with Anna-Maria on the weekend and we had such a good time. Trust me when I say that I was extremely skeptical (even though I kept my skepticism to myself).

I’ll try and keep it condensed. On Friday we left and arrived in Sparwood (we = Anna-Maria and Sophie the Dog). Saturday: after eggs and bacon for breakfast we went bridge jumping on a VERY HIGH bridge. I’m guessing approximately 5 or 6 meters 10 meters &8212; I didn’t realize it at the time but it was about twice as high as the 5 meter platform at the University. This bridge was HIGH! There were a wild bunch of guys there jumping off and one of them even did a backflip. There were signs that said, “No Jumping – No Diving” but we got into our wet suits and promptly ignored those signs.

I joked to Anna how we would probably still be here after those locals were gone and the RCMP showed up. I was half right. The RCMP showed up when Anna was dangling on the side of the bridge and the others had all dried off. She quickly scrambled onto the bridge but it was pretty obvious that the two of us dressed in our wet suits were up to no good. I thought for sure he was going to give us a hard time. Just then the wild backflipper guy climbed out on the edge of the bridge. I felt immediately relieved because it wasn’t Anna or I that would be getting into any trouble today. He smiled at the officer and leaped head under heals down towards the frigid water. I looked at the cop who just said to us, “Tell him that next time I want to see a double back-flip with a twist.” They laughed and the tension was broken. I guess he was cool with it (maybe because nobody was drinking? Or maybe because he really didn’t care. It wasn’t a dangerous place to jump and he probably wasn’t looking for a confrontation anyway.) Either way it made me have a lot more respect for him as a guy who can tell the difference between harmless fun and reckless self endangerment.

Later that night we had a game of Frisbee golf and then late night partying.

Sunday – We drove to Trail, BC to visit my cousin Don and his family. They just had a new baby girl last week.

Monday – Drove home, bought some fresh BC cherries, a peach, and four cobs of corn at a roadside shop. I can only describe how good they were with a sound that has no English word to represent it. (Think Homer Simpson drooling over donuts).

And when it was all over we were very happy to be back in a familiar bed.

In conclusion, camping isn’t that bad when you can shower in the morning, free fall into a cold deep river for at least 3 seconds, drive to the store for lunch and take off for relatives if those you are camping with are too boring or having marital problems or both. You can’t go wrong camping with Anna-Maria.

P.S. Camping with the Medicine Hat First Ward still would have sucked even with daily showers, but maybe not if I had had my Jeep and someone warm with whom to cuddle.

Anna-Maria drove her brother Josh back down to the States this weekend. Apparently a great time was had by all, until it came time to drive home. She told me her plan was to come home yesterday but she just couldn’t pull herself away — so she didn’t. Early this morning she took off for Home Sweet Canada, but alas the Road Gods had different plans for her. One of her front tires went flat about 9 miles north of Idaho Falls — which she drove back to, to change her “donut” tire for a real tire. She’ll be home late this evening. I, for one, can’t wait. I love her.

I took part in the federal election yesterday. Paul Martin’s Liberals ran surprisingly strongly and will form a minority government in Canada, with the balance of power held by Jack Layton’s New Democrats.

I voted for local NDP candidate Melanee Thomas. It was fairly certain here in Lethbridge that the conservative party would win, but nevertheless I feel disappointed that it wasn’t even close.

The sad thing is, it probably doesn’t matter who gets in. I realize it’s not good to be this pessimistic about voting at such an early age but I think Gary put it best, with his government Cat & Mouse analogy. We’re all just mice voting for the cats whom are perceived as the least hungry.

I upgraded my MSN Messenger to the newest version today. The MSN site explained that there were security problems with their older versions that upgrading would fix. When I actually installed version 6.2, a screen from the installer gave me the option to install three “features.” Good thing I was paying attention and unchecked the default options.

First off, the irony in offering a pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer (IE) is fairly striking. Why does the Redmond giant need users to install an add-on to their product through messenger to make it better? Why not just include the pop-up blocker with IE instead of trying to manipulate upgrading users into using it? The real question is, why didn’t they include a pop-up blocker option with IE in the first place? I believe Microsoft thought blocking pop-up ads was bad for business. Advertisers might not like the fact that they can’t sell you X10 cameras from every webpage you visit if your browser can easily block their ads. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft wouldn’t want Internet Explorer blocking even their own Hotmail pop-ups. Is nothing sacred? I assume that it is Google’s popularity (specifically the Google Toolbar – which, by the way, is excellent) that is signaling Microsoft that maybe now is the time to get on the ball and offer a product worth using.

Which brings me to the second “feature”. Make MSN your default search engine. Why? So we can spend twice as long searching and then end up searching again on another site anyway? Google is the fastest, most reliable, and most entertaining search engine out there. Millions of people worldwide use it as their home page.

Which may be exactly why Microsoft has another default check in front of their third choice, “Make MSN Home your default home page.” They want people to read their ads, use their search engine, and basically do everything Microsoft wants them to.

So was this upgrade specifically to fight off Google? Maybe, maybe not, but reading the Technical Description made me think that this mandatory upgrade isn’t very mandatory at all.

And the nitty-gritty from their security bulletin site:

Technical description:

A security vulnerability exists in Microsoft MSN Messenger. The vulnerability exists because of the method used by MSN Messenger to handle a file request. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted request to a user running MSN Messenger. If exploited successfully, the attacker could view the contents of a file on the hard drive without the user’s knowledge as long as the attacker knew the location of the file and the user had read access to the file.

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would have to know the sign-on name of the MSN Messenger user in order to send the request.

Mitigating factors:

• An attacker must know the sign-on name of the user
• If the user has blocked receiving messages from anonymous users not on their contact list by placing “All Others” in their block list, the attacker’s messenger account must be on the user’s allow list to exploit the vulnerability.
• The attacker could access files that the user had read access to. If the user is logged into the computer with restricted privileges this would limit the files that the attacker could access.

It looks like this is a pretty minor vulnerabilty. Someone would really have to have it out for you – and know a lot of personal information before being able to exploit this bug.

On the other hand, there are a couple of noteworthy changes in this version. Mobile users now appear with a yellow avatar instead of the standard green, as well their is an option to create custom emoticons or use a selection of new animated MSN ones. The best new feature appears to be an option to create a share folder which makes it easier to share files with other users.

So despite my complaints my advice is this – unless you are completely satisfied with your current version, don’t be shy; go ahead and upgrade. When you do, just remember to turn off the default checks for other MSN “features”.