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I was cleaning up my basement office a couple of weekends ago and I came across an tired, old copy of a photocopy of a copy of an article obviously taken out of a book. It’s title was called “Le Instant French“, by Stephen Phizicky. It brought back a lot of memories…

One of the unique things that makes us Canadian, is our nationwide angst over the French Language. I know all sorts of people across this great country, from one coast to the other, each and every one of them has a very distinct opinion, usually at one end of the spectrum or the other, about it.

I first learned French in High School, and I really loved it. I was paranoid about pronouncing it perfectly. I even tried to attended extra classes to ensure I spoke it properly when it came time to recite a chapter in front of the class. After school, I never had the opportunity to speak French again and slowly my skills started to disappear.

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A buddy of mine recently loaned me his copy of his Nero 7 to evaluate. He claimed that it would convert and burn an AVI file onto a DVD in half the time that I reported DIKO to be able to do it. If it worked I would certainly be impressed enough to let everyone out there know. (Note Nero 8 has just been released…)

Installation

After getting the software from him I started to install it. The first thing it insisted on was the removal of my current Nero OEM version that came with my burner. Not a problem, go ahead I said. It commenced and then insisted that a reboot was necessary (ah the many joys of windows!)

I make a habit, if given the choice, of doing a “custom” install instead of just letting the software do what it thinks is right for me. In this case it has paid HUGE dividends!

Nero 7 comes with a lot of photo and video editing capabilities and one of the things it assumes is that once you have Nero 7, why would you want to use anything else! It had highlighted every single type of multimedia file available and assumed that you would want to open it with Nero – thankfully, it allowed me to deselect everything so that I could keep my current file associations without having to manually recover them all later! Unfortunately, there was no single button, but rather a separate tab (each with its own master button) for each type of media before I could reverse all the selections Nero had made. There was also the capability to select or deselect each file association separately. (if you really wanted to…)

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Well I just received a couple of feedbacks…. well, sort of. They actually just took one of my articles and linked it onto their blog and then gave me a linkback (I think.) I can only assume they either liked, or found something useful in the article to refer to it. Thanks!

It has given me time to think though, that I am not getting any comments on most of my postings, except for linkbacks and so I decided to investigate it a little further. Could it be that I have tied down the security on my site just a little too tight?

My technical background covers a lot of ground, but a good part of its history involved ensuring strong computer and web security. To that end I have always erred on the side of security rather than usability. All that being said, however, a blog that makes comments impossible to make, is no fun at all.

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Well I’m a little late starting this tonight, as I have spent most of the day doing some evaluating of freeware tools that will allow me to either convert avi files to something more manageable, or preferably convert and/or burn them directly to DVD.

I have a fairly extensive library of commercial VHS tapes, mainly movies that need to be converted over to DVD. I figure that since I paid for the license to view them, then I should be allowed to copy my own tape onto my own DVD.

Originally I purchased a great Sony DVD recorder for the task. It worked wonderfully on all my home moves, and I had a lot of them. Everything just sailed through fine. Now I can use the video software I currently have, Pinnacle Studio, to manipulate, add titles and special effects etc. (Well once I get the time anyways that is…) It’s something that I have always wanted to do ever since I had my first movie camera, let alone video camera.

So, like I said everything went fine. Then about two months back I wanted to watch one of my VHS movies on the VCR. The darned thing jammed halfway in (or out depending on your point of view). It took a bit of cajoling and fussing to finally get things working the way they should and it hit me that what if it ate the tape half way through the movie!?

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So, I warned you yesterday that I would be taking a closer look at improving my editor options within WordPress… Who knew it would be so soon!

There was actually two tools that I was looking for. One was an improved editor, or enhancement to what I currently had and the second was a statistical tool that would allow me to see how well my blog is doing with you the reader.

I decided that the first thing that I should look at is WordPress itself and see if it had any tools that could help me… While it should have been no surprise to me that it would, I never realized just how large a variety I had to choose from!

WordPress, as of this writing, has over 1,000 various plugins to choose from and experiment with. Some of them can actually change the original code of your WordPress engine, while others work in conjunction with what is there. My preference at this stage of the game is to work with what I have, and if I don’t like the plugin, to be able to remove it without damaging my current system.

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