In LA

This is going to be a boring screed if you don’t care about UI design or how to get rid of on-screen controls in Windows Media Player, but it could be read as a bit of instruction in what to do when you find yourself wits end over what should be a trifling computer problem. The key thing is knowing how to find information, and having no fear of poking at menus and options and buttons.

I received a new monitor, yippee, and wanted to see what some high definition video footage would look like when played on it. So I downloaded the 720p HD film trailer for ‘Amazon’ from Microsoft’s WMV HD Content page and played it back full-screen in Windows Media Player. It looked great (except for surprisingly nasty artifacts around areas of fast motion), but Media Player displayed these distracting and bright on-screen controls that took up the top and bottom 10% of the screen.

I checked all the buttons on these control bars, and one of them, featuring an icon of a push-pin, would supposedly tell Windows Media Player to “auto-hide” the controls, presumably if no mouse activity is noticed during playback of a movie. I tried clicking it so that the push-pin icon changed state, started playing the movie, and took my hand off the mouse. Nothing happened, the controls stayed put. I changed the state of the button again, hit play, left the mouse alone, nothing. The stupid controls would not go away. I took a look through the “Tools>Options…” menu to see if I could find something, anything, that would get rid of these onscreen controls, nothing.

So I turned to Google and searched for “how to hide windows media player full screen controls“. Thankfully the information I needed was out there on the net (thank you Malektips), but it amazes me how well hidden this option is within Media Player. Who would have thought that this user-interface issue would be hidden away under a series of tabs and buttons (why both?) that go through the categories of Performance, Advanced, and Video Acceleration Options. Video Acceleration Options!? Performance?!

While writing up this post I did a due diligence search through Windows Media Player’s help file just to see if I wagered correctly when I decided to do a net search first before bothering with the manual, and though I don’t doubt that relevant information is in the help files somewhere, I couldn’t find it. On the plus side the help file did inform me that control-m and control-shift-m should have something to do with hiding menus during full-screen playback, but I tried these key combinations during full-screen playback (with and without on-screen controls enabled) and they don’t seem to do anything at all. In case anyone from Redmond is reading this, I’m talking about Windows Media Player version 9.

From the looks of this advertisement, they dropped a couple-hundred-thousand colored superballs down a hill a couple blocks away from my old San Francisco apartment. It’s amazing looking (if you’ve got QuickTime 7, watch the high-bandwidth version, it’s really nice).

ummm, I’m sure there’s an explanation for this Taiwanese music video (QuickTime, fairly big), but I don’t know if I really want to know.

Some fun motion graphics in there. Bizarrely sexual (some animated diagrams) but with no actual nudity for those of you at work.

In an attempt to one-up the Numa Numa Dance, a couple of Chinese college students calling themselves the “后舍男生” or “Back Dormitory Boys” have uploaded to the net several videos of themselves lipsyncing to Back Street Boys songs. Pretty amusing stuff — I especially like the dormmate playing Quake in the background of one of the videos.

This sounds like an interesting little obsessive organizational methodology, from the book Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Actually, it kind of sounds like common sense mixed with a healthy amount of obsessive compulsive disorder, but sometimes even if something seems obvious it helps to have it articulated into a series of steps and concrete concepts. I may have to check out this book before my desk is perfectly camouflaged by papers and mail.

This is a cool hint from lifehacker.com — you can create a del.icio.us search for funny videos in quicktime format, and then subscribe to the RSS feed of that search with iTunes. The end result is that whenever iTunes updates your subscribed podcasts, you get the latest funny quicktime files downloaded automatically to your computer and to your ipod if it’s one of them newfangled ones that play video. Pretty darned cool.

The URL you subscribe to in iTunes looks like:

http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:mov+funny

Excerpts from FEMA officials’ emails, as reported by the Associated Press:

Sharon Worthy, Brown’s press secretary, to Cindy Taylor, FEMA deputy director of public affairs, and others, Aug. 31, 2 p.m. “Also, it is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner. Gievn (sic) that Baton Rouge is back to normal, restaurants are getting busy. He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes. We now have traffic to encounter to get to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc.” Bahamonde (regional director for New England) to Taylor and Michael Widomski, public affairs, Aug. 31, 2:44 p.m. “OH MY GOD!!!!!!!! No won’t go any further, too easy of a target. Just tell her that I just ate an MRE and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern about busy restaurants. Maybe tonight I will have time to move my pebbles on the parking garage floor so they don’t stab me in the back while I try to sleep.

Wow.

If you followed the link, you might note that the first message about conditions at the Superdome is from Aug 28th, and Michael Brown claimed he didn’t learn about the Superdome until Thursday, Sept 1st. Nice.

Want a high-ranking job with the Bush administration? Well hurry up and donate a bunch of money to the GOP, then enter your resume into the cronyjobs.com database. If you’re loyal enough, maybe there’s a lucrative government career waiting for you!

Supreme court nominee Harriet Miers says:

OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M THE NOMINEE!!! This is BIGGEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!! EVER!!!! OMG OMG OMG

more at http://harrietmiers.blogspot.com/