PowerPoint Killed the Video Star

Posted on May 15th, 2010

So, you’re getting ready for a big meeting where you’re going to give a presentation to all the bigwig muckity-mucks at your company. Your boss, and even his boss, will be in attendance to hear what you’ve got to say. You’ve spent all week crafting the perfect PowerPoint presentation to wow them with on Monday and now, on Friday at 4:30pm, you are ready to add all the flair and pizazz that you just KNOW is going to get you a promotion.

It’s time to add the videos and music.

You’re no rookie presenter, you’ve been using PowerPoint for almost your entire career, so you know exactly what you need to do to insert your videos and music. You make sure they’re all in the same folder as your PowerPoint presentation and that they’re all in a file format that PowerPoint can use (WMV or AVI for movies and all your music is MP3). Heck, you even went online and made sure your computer’s CODECs were up to date. What could possibly go wrong? You smile as you remember how Smitty’s presentation flopped last year when his video of cats dancing to the Macarena didn’t play during his big presentation because he thought a MOV file could play in PowerPoint on a PC. What a moron. It’s his own fault that he was transfered to shipping with no hope of a promotion. He should know that MOVs are native to Macs and not PCs. He should have converted the files, or at least tested the presentation beforehand. He just got sloppy. The poor bastard.

But that’s not going to happen to you.

Smirking in your superiority, you click the “Insert Movie from File” button and insert the first video. Fifteen minutes later all five of your awesome movies are inserted and you’re ready to do a test run of The Greatest, Most Awesomest PowerPoint Presentation In The World Ever™. You start the show and go through your mental checklist of all the things a PowerPoint presentation must have in order to be considered AWESOME.

• Light blue, gradated background? Check.
• Yellow Comic Sans header text? Check.
• Typewriter or laser sound effects for each bullet point? Check.
• Wacky and “cool” animations for every-god-damned-thing on each and every slide? Check.
• Some slides filled top to bottom with 25 bullet points in 8 point font? Check.
• Indecipherable charts using every color of the rainbow? Double check.
• Video of polar bears playing with giant rubber balls? Che… what?

The video isn’t playing.

This can’t be happening. It’s not possible. You checked everything, you made sure… DOUBLY sure, that the videos worked before you inserted them into your presentation. You spend the next two fricking days trying to figure out what the problem is but nothing seems to work. You convert the files to WMVs (again), but that doesn’t help. You make sure the videos are in the same folder as your presentation, which they are. You change your computer’s video settings, to no avail. You do the whole Windows Update thing, including updating MS Office, but still no video. It’s enough to drive you completely mad!

You cannot believe that you’re going to crash and burn like poor, stupid Smitty.

Then, after clicking through your billionth search result you stumble upon a possible fix that is so utterly, ridiculously, stupendously simple that you cannot believe it could possibly be right. But, because you’re already at your wit’s end, you decide to give it a try.

And, by great Odin’s beard, it works.

Fina-FRICKING-ly, your videos play correctly in PowerPoint. The Greatest, Most Awesomest PowerPoint Presentation In The World Ever™ is ready to wow your boss and get you that pomotion you’ve always wanted. Even better, you still have three hours before you need to get up for work so you can get a little sleep.

Maybe even take a shower, praise the lord.

As you drift off to sleep your mind wanders back to the genius on that message board from 6 years ago who pointed you to the solution that just saved your butt. The fix was so simple that you didn’t even need a special program or hacker skill set to implement it. All you needed to do was… and you STILL can’t believe it… shorten the filename and/or file path of the videos. How crazy is that? Somehow, even though Windows itself allows filenames (including the file path) to be up to 255 characters in length, mplay32.exe (the actual video player PowerPoint 2003 uses to play videos) can’t play a file with a filename (including the file path) longer than 124 characters! How the hell ANYONE would ever figure out that THAT was the problem when their videos didn’t play in PowerPoint is beyond you. Lord knows Smitty would have peed himself and resigned before he ever figured it out. Lucky thing you found that old message board or you might have been weighing packages and stamping boxes eight hours a day like that poor SOB.

Ah, who are you kidding? You’re a fricking GENIUS!

So, let that be a lesson to us all. If you must include an insipid piece of video trash in your PowerPoint presentation, keep your file paths and names as short as possible or your fabulous videos may not play properly. And we all know that without those stupid fricking videos in PowerPoint all your presentations would suck anal lint from angry badgers.

And for god’s sake, stop using Comic Sans!

Filed under Education | 6 Comments »

Minor GMail Hack

Posted on March 4th, 2010

If you’ve run into the GMail limit for checking your other email accounts using POP3 then you might find this helpful.

If you have a lot of email accounts all over the place and want to use GMail to manage all those accounts, you might have run into the limit GMail places on the number of accounts you can access using POP3. There is a quick and easy workaround for increasing the number WAY past the five that Google allows. All you need to do is create another GMail account that will access up to five of your email accounts and forward all the email it receives to your primary GMail account.

Simple, no?

For example, let’s say you need to check 10 email accounts but your main gmail account only allows you to check 5. So, if your main GMail account is “SuperDuperEmailMan@gmail.com” you could create another gmail account “SuperDuperEmailMan1@gmail.com”, have it check 5 of your email accounts and then forward all the mail it receives to “SuperDuperEmailMan@gmail.com”! There. Now you can create millions of email addresses and still check them from your main gmail account.

Go knock yourself out.

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I Hate Thumbs

Posted on January 5th, 2010

I was going to write a whole diatribe about Windows 7 and the usually un-deletable Thumbs.db files that clutter up the folders on your hard drive that contain pictures and/or videos and then give you step-by-step instructions on how to solve the annoying problem, but thanks to Technoleros I no longer need to spend the time doing it! Fred has written an excellent how-to post on fixing this annoying issue here so now I can spend my time doing far more important things…

Like eating Cheetos and watching Riptide.

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Define Thyself

Posted on March 5th, 2009

I wish people would stop mistaking me for a Nerd.

A lot of people keep calling me a Nerd without understanding that I’m a Geek, or even that there’s a difference between the two. So, since so many people don’t know the difference I think I’ll try to explain it here so everyone out there who wants to know can finally find the answer. Or at least my best attempt to answer this complex conundrum. And then, when some fool tells me that I’m a Nerd I can calmly tell them they’re mistaken and give them this URL so they can become educated on the subject and thus save their life because I won’t stab them in the uvula with a fountain pen.

My sincerest apologies, Frank. Get well soon.

In the hopes of making my personal definitions of Nerds and Geeks as simple and easy to comprehend as possible, I’ve tried to come up with a simple phrase to help describe the differences. Something that would be easy to remember. A defining catch-phrase that cleverly illustrated my point.

In that endeavor I failed miserably.

The best I could come up with was to co-opt and bastardize Bruce Lee’s famous description of Jeet Kune Do and liken Nerds and Geeks to water. But before I get to that, let me fully define to you the differences between Nerds and Geeks so you’ll fully grasp the utter lack of originality and cleverness of my catchphrase. That way, when you read it, you’ll have even greater joy as you write a hurtful and inflammatory comment making fun of me, my website, my lineage and my stupidity.

Hey, I always give the audience what they want.

So, to start off, how about we define what a Nerd is? OK, first off Nerds are fricking SMART. They usually have a vast and deep knowledge of a very narrowly defined subject like relational quantum mechanics or the theoretical viability of dimensional travel using man-made wormholes. Nerds are also, for the most part, socially awkward or even inept. They do not do well in public settings and have a really, really tough time interacting with figures of authority or people of the opposite sex. And if they are so unlucky as to be forced to attempt interaction with someone who is both a figure of authority AND a member of the opposite sex, then the poor Nerd will most likely spontaneously explode in fiery giblets from the sheer magnitude of their fright. Nerds usually have a very good sense of humor, but only if your IQ and area of expertise matches their own. Which is probably why 95% of the world thinks Nerds aren’t funny unless they’re getting into awkward situations on a sitcom, or involved in elaborate pratfalls in a movie.

Geeks, on the other hand, are also intelligent but just not to the extreme of a Nerd. They also have very large areas of knowledge and can carry on a conversation with nearly anyone as long as the conversation doesn’t get too deep into the minutia of a subject. You see, whereas a Nerd knows nearly everything in there area of expertise, a Geek knows a little bit about a vast amount of different subjects. Geeks want to know something about nearly everything that catches their fancy, while a Nerd usually only cares about knowing everything there is to possibly know the few things that interest them. This helps make Geeks far more socially adept than Nerds because a Geek can speak on a whole array of different subjects and thus integrate more easily with whatever social group he or she finds themselves engrossed in conversation with, while the poor Nerd would feel either ostracized or bored due to their lack of knowledge about whatever the subject du jour was. Lastly, a Geeks sense of humor is far more approachable to the average person because of, and due to, the Geeks wide pool of knowledge from which they can connect seemingly unconnected concepts. An obscure factoid gleaned during a late-night conversation with someone three years ago will, at the most opportune moment, be remembered by a Geek and used during a conversation today to make a hilarious punchline. In essence, Geeks thrive in social settings where they can use humor, while Nerds wither unless their expertise is being utilized.

Thus, the difference comes down to depth of knowledge (Nerd) vs. breadth of information (Geek).

This is why to me a nerd is like a very deep but frozen lake and a Geek is like a fast-moving but shallow river. Nerds are way, way, WAY smarter than Geeks on certain subjects and have a depth of knowledge on those subjects that few others could ever hope to comprehend, let alone match. Geeks on the other hand have larger areas of interest and thus a much wider pool of information to draw upon. Geeks know enough about nearly any subject to at least hold a conversation with someone where the Nerd simply could not. And that is why I classify myself as a Geek. I do fine in social settings, I can hold my own in nearly any conversation on almost any subject, but I’m just not anywhere near smart enough to be a Nerd. That’s not to say I’m not a little Nerdy on a few subjects (Anime anyone?), and I’m betting most people are Nerdy about a few things, but usually the differences between Nerds and Geeks spelled out above help to classify whether someone truly is a Nerd or a Geek.

Another way of putting it; Geeks are smart but Nerds make Geeks look stupid.

Nerds are frozen lakes with hidden depths of knowledge and Geeks are frothing rivers of information. If you want to have a conversation with someone where you’ll probably laugh while learning something new, talk to a Geek. If you want to truly understand a subject in great detail skip the Geek and go straight to a Nerd.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Filed under Education | 4 Comments »

Presidential Freebie

Posted on March 4th, 2009

Did you know you can spend money to buy money which SAVES YOU MONEY?

Do you have a rewards credit card? Does it offer you cash back for purchases? Then you can use this little “cash-hack” to earn rewards without really spending any money. For example, if your credit card offers you 1% cash back on purchases then you can use this little “hack” to earn that 1% and not actually spend any money while earning that reward. So if you spend $1,000 you’ll get $10 free. Spend $10,000 and you get $100. Spend $100,000 and… you’re an idiot. But you get the basic idea.

Free money?! But how?

Here’s how. The U.S. Mint is selling Presidential $1 coins at face value with free shipping and handling. That means you can buy money from the U.S. Mint, receive the money in the mail, deposit the money in your bank and then pay off your credit card with that money! See?! You can earn rewards from your credit cards and it doesn’t have to cost you anything at all. It’s even better if you have a rewards card with a higher cash back percentage, 3% is the current leader I believe, but any free money in this economy is good news, right?

Wow, never thought I’d live to see the day George Washington’s face on a coin gives me a woody.

Filed under Announcements, Education | 3 Comments »