[Author's note 2016-05-11: this picture is one of those news-breaking 2006 stories that just as suddenly disappeared from the media. It's claimed to be a step pyramid found in Bosnia. It would represent the oldest pyramid known, predating the Egyptians by centuries. Dated at around 12,000 years, a team of Egyptian experts was brought in to examine the ruins. At that moment, for reasons unknown, nothing has been heard about this discovery since. Not a peep.
You can read the story here, but National Geographic is not generally known for publishing hoaxes. Boring-as-hell articles with great pictures, yes, but not hoaxes.]
[Author's note 2021-05-07: the story on this pyramid and all links have long since disappeared. The original link was National Geographic, where it is very rare for any story to just evaporate into thin air. But this one did.
This day was dedicated to a video project, and it was a failure. No big deal, you get that sometimes. I took the Pirates reunion disk and went all over it with both Roxio, where I managed to get the audio to play back on both channels and the video of session 2 onto the hard drive (where it can be edited). Session 1 is holding out, I can view it but not copy it.
I just hate to have to admit it, but video editing has been turned into a total abortion by the manufacturers. It is plain by this late date that they have not learned you cannot do business the old ways any more. There are separate and incompatible software processes for the cameras, the images on the camera, downloading the images, image storage, image retrieval, image manipulation and so on. None of these, as far as I can tell, do things in the same format, and I have discovered some that won’t even read the files they create without making careful changes.
The remainder of the day was tackling the networking. The way it works, there is no clear starting point. By that, I mean if I was to explain it to you, it would be difficult not to have to sidetrack and cover other items, such as how your printer driver was originally set up and what name you gave your computer, if any.
There are numerous blind alleys and outdated instructions, plus an annoying number of messages that appear on screen which are not explained, for instance when you go to shut down, you are also shutting down anyone else that may have been logged on. What are you supposed to do? Go find them? Save their work for them? Or say to hell with it and shut ‘er down? All three would get you into the hot tank at the phone company.
I’ve read close to 600 pages on the matter, most of which in true MS fashion overexplains the basics and goes into useless histories obsolete things. Does anyone using wireless even care what materials are used in co-ax cable?
This turkey came in the shop for Mike to look at his laptop. He had some cockamamie idea that wireless worked right out of the box. The sad part is that sometimes it does. He had one Linksys computer that would not work – where have we seen this before? I say a turkey because he thought he knew more about computers than all of us put together. Mike is laptops, not wireless. I am software. He actually said to Mike, “You shouldn’t mess around with people’s computers unless you know what you are doing”.
My advice was to send him to that new store up the street, Bay Six Computers. Tell him there is a real pro over there that knows exactly how to fix his problem. Let him drive them out of business. That statement about "mess around" has already become a stock joke around the shop whenever something goes wrong.
It was an evening of intensive study and it has given me second thoughts as to claims made by others about home networking. This has convinced me that their main method is trial and error and that they are flying blind whenever the unusual occurs. Whenever I can’t get a straight answer out of a tech, I know I am in for this kind of drawn out research. Thus, you may safely conclude that networking is like all other aspects of the computer world – you can’t really study it in isolation.
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