A literary success story

Every author dreams of something like this :

A few months ago, 28-year-old Dean Carter was a small cog in a very big machine. Hidden away in the basement at the grand old publisher Random House, he spent his days sorting mail sent by fans to such eminent writers A S Byatt and Tom Wolfe.

Now, after a series of lucky encounters, he is the recipient of a five-figure, two-book deal, has senior publishers saving his emails as collectors’ items and could soon be considering film deals from the likes of Brad Pitt and Robert De Niro.

And believe it or not, he still works in the mail room.

(Via The Elegant Variation by way of Ezra Klein)

When translation robots attack!

My publishers regularly send me copies of my books that have been translated into foreign languages, and it’s always amusing to see my by-line on a book written in a language like Thai or Romanian. But I’m not used to seeing my words translated on the Web, as in this curious link in my referrers’ log: La Culture De Fraude .

Someone did a search on Google, found a page from my site that sounded interesting, and used the language tools to translate my words into (very rough) French. Something tells me that anyone who follows any advice on this page is doomed. Just for fun, I used Google’s language tools to translate a paragraph from the translated page back into English:

The problem is that the basic infrastructure of the Internet supposes that each one on top should be done confidence. Consequently, technical measurements conceived to block hostile software, the Spam, and any other refuse must be grafted above jusqu with the top of the existing systems, rather than to be built-in as an element of the base. The more these filters function, the more the bad more persistent types become in the test to work around them, and more it seems that us are completely surrounded. A blowing simple inondator out of 10 million messages per day by hundreds of diverted computers resembles an army, even when it is really right an alive loser pathetic in park of bottom of page.

Hmmm. I don’t remember saying that. (If you want to compare the original, you can read it here.)

Eavesdropping on an MCE support call

First, Thomas Hawk posts a long entry about his MCE Television and LaCie Big Disk Problems:

Well this weekend I attempted to rehook a television signal back into my MCE machine and I was reminded that television indeed may be the biggest thing still holding Media Center back. The issue really boils down to two things. 1. Really poor television quality and 2. Incredibly complex set up.

He did what you’re supposed to do when you’re asking for help, which is to provide all the details a support professional would need. And lo and behold, he gets some serious help from Microsoft’s Charlie Owen and Matt Goyer. Which is like taking your car in to the local dealer because it’s got a rattle and discovering that the factory’s top engineers are hanging around the shop that day. It’s very cool to get such top-level support and to know that your issues are certainly going to get fixed in the next release of MCE!

The more I read about Thomas’s system, the more I think he has a driver problem of some sort. He says, “I have always been disappointed with these USB 2 external drives. The Maxtors frequently give me I/O device errors when I try and copy large batches of .mp3 files, but this performance from LaCie is the worst yet.” And previously he’s described problems with file transfer operations taking inordinate amounts of time or failing completely.

This sounds very familiar. On a PC I used about two years ago, I had constant disk I/O problems. Those turned out to be related to a faulty audio driver of all things — it was conflicting with a disk controller driver and causing all sorts of havoc. When I updated both drivers, the problem went away. I currently have four or five external USB 2.0 drives, all running flawlessly. I never get I/O errors and I copy files at full rated speed all the time, moving lots of files (my music collection) and small numbers of really big files (recorded video) without any errors.

Thomas’s other issue is video quality:

Now maybe I’m just incredibly spoiled and forgot how bad MCE television quality is after spending the last few months watching all of my high def television on my DirecTV TiVo. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that there is more to it than this. One of the things that has perplexed me with MCE from day one is that there is a huge amount of signal degradation. … A while back someone once suggested to me that the compression technology that MCE uses is inferior to the TiVo compression technology which was the reason why it looks so bad.

My experience is exactly the opposite. I have had a Series 1 TiVo for years, and when I switched to the MCE machine for SD recordings I was shocked by the improvement in quality. No, it doesn’t compare to the HDTV pictures I get from the cable box, but I really don’t see any degradation, and we’re able to watch SD programming without any complaints about picture quality. Drivers? Hardware? Or something else?

Overall, I think Thomas has nailed one of the major issues with this technology: For the mass market to accept Media Center PCs, they have to work like appliances. TiVo boxes meet that standard because they’re designed that way. An MCE box is designed to be expandable and extensible, which sounds great but also introduces the possibility that you’ll start fiddling around with an interesting utility, a flaky add-on, or a buggy driver and end up with a machine that crashes or exhibits odd behavior. Not an appliance, by any means.

What I’d like to see in a Media Center PC is an even more robust System Restore, with the ability to capture snapshots of the system and roll things back in the event something starts to misbehave. Windows XP has that feature now, but it takes expertise to work with it. A device that’s supposed to behave like an appliance should be capable of rolling back to a known good configuration without any muss or fuss.

Technical problems resolved

Some sort of routing problem in the Great Lakes area (weather-related, no doubt) made it impossible for me to post last Friday. Rather than fight it, I decided to take the weekend off and watch some football.

Posting will resume shortly. I’ve got some good stuff saved up.

Would you subscribe to this site via e-mail?

I know some people prefer e-mail to RSS. So, two quick questions:

If I made a weekly digest version of this site available via e-mail, would you subscribe?
If I posted a Windows/PC tip of the day/week/whatever. would you want the option to receive it via e-mail?

Of course, your e-mail addresses would remain completely private forever and would never be used for any purpose other than the explicit ones you signed up for. I’m not interested in creating an e-mail newsletter empire or building a mailing list. I just want to offer you different options.

Voice your opinion in the comments section of this post, or click here to send me a note.

I remember Bob

The pictures of Chairman Bill were a huge hit, so I thought I would follow them up with this video tour of the legendary Microsoft Bob (alas, that clip circa March 2001, via The Screen Savers, no longer works, but here’s a replacement). I once had a copy of the software, but alas it has been lost to the ages, and all that survives in my office is this semi-priceless baseball hat, somewhat dusty and never worn, with the Bob logo:

(Props to Slate editor-at-large Jack Shafer for the link.)

And woohoo! My old PC Computing buddy Rich Schwerin just sent me this shrink-wrapped copy of Bob:

What’s the point of digital media?

In the comments to my previous post on ripping a CD collection into digital format, Ken asks some good questions:

Ed, educate me. I use my home computer primarily for e-mail, Internet browsing and research, word processing, the occasional PC game, and CD burning — but not CD ripping for the purpose of listening to music or watching DVDs on my computer (after all, I have a plasma HD television and top line DVD player, excellent stereo equipment in both my house and my car, et. cet. specifically designed for those activities). What, then, is the point of ripping CDs and saving them onto hard drives, other than having one additional copy of all your files in case something happens to your CD collection?

I know people do it, but I have never understood why. Even if I downloaded music from the Interent, I would rather burn it to a CD and then play it on equipment designed primarily to play music or video. What am I missing out on, if anything? TIA.

Let’s start with what I think is the single fundamental (but perfectly natural) misconception in this question, that PC-based equipment is inferior to dedicated audio and video equipment. That was once true, but no more. Today, PC-based equipment can do many of the tasks I once needed dedicated audio equipment for, and it integrates well with home theater components. The quality of audio and video is at the same level of quality as (and in some cases better than) consumer electronics equipment.

My home theater PC outputs 7.1 surround sound via a digital optical connection. In an A-B test, I don’t believe you could distinguish it from consumer-quality audio equipment. It uses component video connections to go straight to my HDTV, again with quality that is indistinguishable from a consumer DVD player and my digital cable connection. (And when I get the HDTV connection working, I expect its quality to be indistinguishable from my cable company’s HDTV signal.) My home theater system now includes an HDTV, two receivers (one for the den, the other for the speakers scattered throughout the house), and a Media Center PC that handles music, standard TV, digital photos, and DVD playback.

With an 800–CD collection, the logistics of managing the CDs as physical objects becomes overwhelming. I had a 300–CD jukebox that was almost impossible to use and couldn’t handle the majority of my collection. The idea of dedicating 20 or 30 feet of shelf space to CDs and then keeping all those CDs filed in some logical way is depressing. And what do I do with my extensive collection of live recordings and downloaded music, which represent the equivalent of another 400+ CDs?

The advantage of having music available in digital format is that I can scroll through the entire collection using a single interface (Media Center) that runs via remote control. I can search for artists and albums, create custom playlists, retrieve saved playlists, and do it all without stacking up jewel boxes and trying to find just the right CD. When we have a dinner party, I can put together a custom playlist for the evening, mixing music that I know will be compatible with our guests. I never fail to get positive remarks on the music and I don’t have to constantly get up to swap CDs (even a 6–CD changer will run out in the course of a long evening).

We still watch DVDs that we rent from Netflix, but all of our TV watching these days is via a DVR — either the cable company’s HD recorder or my Media Center PC, and it is fun to be able to save a particularly enjoyable show and burn it to CD for later viewing. The output from the Media Center PC is indistinguishable from the digital cable signal.

Most people have justifiable skepticism about integrating a PC into the home theater. But when the equipment is well designed and reliable, the benefits are overwhelming. I think you’re going to see an explosion in this category in the next year or two. Just watch!

Thoughts on ripping a CD collection into digital format

John Walkenbach started with the idea of having a commercial service rip his CD collection for him but has since given up on that idea:

After doing some more research, I decided to abandon the idea of using a company to convert my CDs. As it turns out, the total number of CDs is closer to 1,000, and I failed to take shipping costs into account. All told, this project would cost about $1,000 — definitely not worth it. Plus, the idea of removing all of those CDs from their jewel boxes, shipping them, and then returning them to the correct jewel box is not at all appealing.

Wise decision. Actually, I did a similar project last fall (800 CDs) and it took less than two weeks. I used Windows Media Player 10 and configured it to rip automatically as soon as it recognized a CD. (You can choose WMA or MP3 format in bit rates as high as 320MB.) It was able to identify and correctly tag well over 95% of the tracks, downloading the album art in the process, and each CD took no more than a couple minutes. Anything that wasn’t immediately recognized I put on a stack for later handling. I did a couple of marathon sessions over one weekend, doing a few hundred CDs each day as I watched baseball games and dumb movies that required little concentration. Mostly, though, I just got in the habit of keeping a stack of CDs by my desk. I’d stick a CD in and (ahem) let ’er rip. I didn’t really need to do much more than pop out the old CD and insert a new one, and I was able to continue working on other projects throughout. All in all, it turned out to be pretty simple.

The more tedious part came later, when I went in to review tags. There were a fair number of errors and omissions that I wanted to fix. I found the eMusic Tag Editor indispensable for this task.

If you plan to do a similar project, I recommend you get two external hard drives and keep a duplicate copy of your music collection on the second drive. Don’t believe me? Just imagine the feeling in the pit of your stomach if that first drive grinds to a halt someday and you have to go through the process of ripping and tagging all over again.

Update: Based on some interesting questions from Ken in the comments, I’ve posted some follow-up thoughts in a separate post: What’s the point of digital media?

Congratulations to 2005 MVPs

Microsoft has released its list of MVP Members. Lots of familiar names on the list, and they all deserve a hearty thanks for their efforts to help other people.

I wish Microsoft would make this list more useful, however. Two options come immediately to mind:

Add direct links and links to RSS feeds for those MVPs who have Web sites or blogs. It would be really helpful.
Add links to searches for newsgroup threads that include posts by each member. You can learn a lot that way. Here, for example, is a search that includes all threads in the Outlook Express group that include the name of MVP Tom Koch.

If you haven’t used the Web-based Expert Zone newsreader, by the way, you’re missing out.

Get your own biometric desktop

No, not bionic. Biometric. As in Microsoft’s Optical Desktop with Fingerprint Reader. Amazon is currently selling this package, which includes a keyboard and optical mouse, for $59 with free shipping. A $10 mail-in rebate brings the net price to $49. My co-author Carl Siechert tested this for a chapter in our upcoming revision to Windows Security Inside Out. It has some nice features, but I’d be more impressed if it could integrate with Roboform.

Anyway, if you’ve been lusting after one of these gadgets, this is about as good a price as you’ll get. Until someone comes out with a bargain-basement iris scanner, that is.