Karl’s Place

I don’t know if this was a real test or not, but it makes sense to me.

What would happen if you built up a lot of static electricity before or while pumping gas? …

I love the “Crane” commercial that GE is running during the Olympics.

Watch it here.

The turtles at the end are a great touch…

I learned about NBC’s plans to offer extensive online video coverage of the Olympics at the Microsoft Server 2008 launch event earlier this year.  It’s definitely impressive.  I’ve used IE and Firefox and had no problem (I already had Silverlight installed).  I’m especially impressed with the “Live Video Control Room” that lets you follow 4 events at one time, swapping them between the big windows and the small windows.

If you’re watching video and trying to find the Control Room, click on “Enlarge video” and then the Control Room icon:

The August issue of Technet Magazine contained a great article called “Taking Your Server’s Pulse“.  I especially appreciated learning about the counters that the Microsoft Service Support Engineers look at when troubleshooting problems.

Or see on ABC News site here: abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=4826897

Hoping that this will help someone who experiences this in the future, I thought I’d briefly write up what happened when I switched my Windows machine from one domain to another, and my iTunes library disappeared.

What happened:  My machine had been a member of domain A, and I had redirected “My Documents” and all of its subfolders (noteably “My Music”) to D:\MyDocuments.  My iTunes music was in d:\MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music and the corresponding .itl and .xml files were right above that in d:\MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes.

I moved my computer to domain B, knowing that I would get a new profile and a lot of cleanup work.  I should have remapped My Documents right away, but I didn’t.  I ran iTunes, and it had to do some reinstallation under the new user profile.  It finally opened, showing an empty music library.

After reading some articles online, I thought I could go into Preferences, Advanced tab, and just point iTunes to d:\MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music.  All of the documentation seems to indicate this, but it doesn’t work.  It turns out that the pointer in the Advanced tab probably only tells iTunes to look there for the music, but not for the .itl and .xml files that describe the library.  iTunes was still looking in my new profile path at a blank set of those file.  Of course, it took me hours to figure that out.

There are probably two solutions:  move the correct .itl and .xml files to the new profile path, or repoint My Documents again so that iTunes finds the existing files in d:\MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes.  I chose the second, and it worked well.

By the way, I couldn’t remember how I’d originally remapped My Documents, so I downloaded TweakUI.  The only downside was that TweakUI has you individually map My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, etc.  The method that I’d used before mapped them all when you remapped My Documents.

Here’s a tribute to a game that I’d never seen until moving to Indiana.  Of course, my new Indiana friends bear no resemblance to these boys…

No, not the movie.  This is scarier–it’s real life!

Tyson Kopczynski, author of Windows PowerShell Unleashed wrote a blog entry over at NetworkWorld called “5 free PowerShell tools to ease your Windows management pain“.  They look like they’re worth investigating, and also led me to The PowerShell Guy and Dmitry’s PowerBlog.

If you’re trying to live more frugally, definitely check out “100 Things to Do During a Money Free Weekend” over at the simple dollar.