To the many who have contacted me about Disney’s High School Musical 3 auditions – I regret to inform you I have nothing to do with them. I have even been contacted by hopeful actors who have told me the Disney Channel is giving out my contact info for auditions. I have a hard time believing that – but again, my regrets to inform you I do not work for Disney or HSM3.
As an additional tip – if you search “audition” on my website you will find many articles I have written about the audition process and tips to improve your success. Emailing people and saying “please fly me to auditions I’m really good” is not really the way to do it. And I say that to be helpful to your careers.
I hope this post will save someone else some time. I installed Nero 7 on a computer that was not connected to the internet and had to upgrade once the Lame Mp3 and Pro Mp3 convertor trials expired. I purchased an authorization for the Pro Mp3 feature, but was not given any options to input the serial number to activate it.
So I connected that computer to the internet, but still no options to input the update. Also, I was unable to download updates from the Nero website. This was a big waste of time and ticked me off a bit because I was not using cracks or warez, this was a real copy of Nero. I had thought the Nero website was down or had crashed.
What DID work was to download the Nero enhanced from their website. And with Nero enhanced, the Mp3 Pro feature is included in the software. Which is the way it should have been all along. Why should we pay $100 for Nero, only to have it force the Lame Mp3 encoder on us. Thank you to Nero for now including the Pro Mp3 encoder, which is the best encoder I have used.
Tech support was very fast at getting back to me, so kudos to Nero staff for that.
Problem: Authorizing Mp3 Pro encoder with Nero 7
Fix: Download Nero enhanced from Nero.com – which includes theMp3 Pro encoder.
After the lengthy review of Emoto’s research methods and results, I have come to believe that Dr. Emoto is offering pseudoscience to the masses in the guise of defensible research. *Only time and review by others will tell if there is any truth at the heart of Mr. Emoto’s claims, as Emoto himself thoroughly believes in his findings but does not value the scientific method or community. What is truly fearsome is the great numbers of people that accept his words as proven facts without looking deeper to find out if his claims are truly justified. While I respect Dr. Emoto’s desire to save the Earth’s water from contamination and pollution, unless he can produce a scientific paper and get it published in a scientific journal, I believe that he will continue to be ignored by the scientific community, and his claims will never be soundly proved or disproved.
Kristopher Setchfield, BA, Health Science
Natural Science Department
Castleton State College, Vermont
December 20, 2005
*He still has not published peer reviewed experiment results in a reputable scientific journal. His one claim to “peer reviewed” was submitted as a “photo essay” – not as experiment results submission. And that was back before 2004 – lots of claims, no publication. No results repeated and verified. No double blind studies. Why is that Mr. Emoto?
And for people who think I’m being hard on him or close-minded – go ahead and Google his name. You might notice a whole slew of websites selling stuff – stickers, water, seminars, certificates – stuff. And here or there you’ll find a couple people like me speaking out. Feed the money machine – it’s ok – because while you’re feeding it, there are real discoveries being made within real science. And THAT is what matters.
ADDED FEBRUARY 2009:
Ok, so maybe I WON’T spare you my ramblings on Emoto. His “research” on water crystals pisses me off to no end for a number of reasons. Here are some of them:
When he first announced his “research” it was heralded that he was “published in a peer reviewed journal”. This surprised me. I read the entry. First of all it was submitted as a “photo essay” which bypassed any editorial review before inclusion, it was NOT printed as a scientific experiment submission. He was VERY misleading by seeming to infer that his work had been accepted as an actual science experiment peer reviewed. Second, it was not a mainstream journal, it was an Alternative journal, not one with a strong mainstream reputation. Some people seem to think that’s because his findings would not be accepted by mainstream science because it’s so cutting edge, when in fact it was not accepted by a mainstream journal because there was NOTHING TO ACCEPT. It was just a photo essay. What is a “photo essay”? Just that, photos and thoughts.
Part of his experiments are to label water that is played different styles of music. Then it’s showed that “heavy metal” music has gross looking crystals, while water that was played classical music is nice and pretty. Having worked in music and audio full time my entire life, I also find this offensive. There is nothing inherent in the music vibrations, it is the receiver that puts meaning into the sounds. The water does not have an opinion on what music is “good” or “bad”. He does the same with words like “hate” and “love”. Again, these are just words. It is US that put the meaning to them. Water does not have an opinion on these matters. What Emoto is inferring is that there is good and bad that can be detected by water – but he has not performed any reproducible experiments to show this is true.
He’s making money off of his claims. In America it’s mainly from the New Age and New Thought segments. If you are an “Emoto supporter” – I would say there’s a very good chance you are “New Age” or “New Thought”, or if you don’t like those labels, then I would guess that you might also be interested in things like Chakras, Out of Body Experiences, Past Lives, etc. I am pointing this out because these groups have been targeted to host Emoto workshops and to sell products to. There are not targeted because they are open minded and on the forefront of progressive thought; they are targeted because they usually have no understanding of the Scientific Method (even though the word “science” might be used a lot in those circles, especially in the context of religion). In other words, these groups do not understand that his work is bullshit.
I have personally seen people taught to purify water with their minds. And they would spend hours staring at glasses of water to practice purification. This was a step in learning how to “manifest”. A lot of money changes hands in these areas and a lot of time is being wasted on these pursuits.
What would appease me? To have Emoto have his original claims published in a mainstream journal and his experiments duplicated by others in a double blind study environment. In other words: For him to actually do what he infers he can do. But he won’t. Why? Because the crystals are chosen. It’s so silly I can’t believe it.
If you are still not understanding this let me explain it one more way. What Emoto does is similiar to this: Send me two pictures of two people you know. One of them you love very much and the other one you hate. I will tape them to glasses of water then take pictures of the crystals after I have frozen it. I will take pictures of the crystals. The glass with the photo of the person you love will show a photo of a beautiful crystal, the other will show a gross and ugly crystal. Of course, I will have to know which person is which ahead of time. And I will choose the crystals myself from dozens of photos to get the results you want.
It would be funny if he weren’t getting so much money from people and leading people down paths that waste a lot of precious time…
Why is it a big deal to me? I worked for a “mind science” institution for many years and believed all this stuff until someone showed me what science actually was. Fringe groups like the Ramtha followers gravitate to this stuff like bees to honey. I have friends who also used to be in Ramtha. It’s a very ugly thing when you start to think for yourself and leave those groups. Emoto’s is just one of many people profiteering off misinformation in the sciences to a naive and well-meaning audience. And that misinformation can start people down a very dark road. That’s why it’s a big deal to me.
Trent Reznor vs. Zoolander? I notice an uncanny resemblance in the two poses. What was Zoolander’s super secret pose? “Blue Steel” – “Blue Ice” or something like that. No offense meant to Mr. Reznor, he is the keyboard king.
I read once that for someone to have good ideas, they need to have a lot of ideas. I like that concept. It’s not uncommon for me to fall flat on my face with really bad ideas, but those that know me know that I have a LOT of ideas. Fortunately, it’s usually the good ones that people hear about.
So here I am humbled before you all, letting you know about two REALLY bad ideas I had once. It was to open two discussion forums for TurbanTalk.com and AlQaedaTalk.com – My idea was for them to be parodies. AlQaedaTalk.com would be a place for Al Qaeda operatives to get emotional support for things like dating, mingling at cocktail parties, getting along with their parents, etc.
I was very serious about opening these sites until more than a couple people mentioned that the parody might be lost on some people and the FBI would probably pay me a visit. That didn’t sound like fun to me, so I never went live with them. I DID however have logos created for them – and here they are as proof of some of my incredibly bad ideas…..
Oh, and if anyone ever questions your IQ – just say to them: “Yeah, I’m not the sharpest burrito in the elevator.” That will usually keep them busy thinking for a while so you can get back to work.
I’ve added Favicons to my websites to decrease the error logs from browsers trying to find the file. I looked online but could not find any downsides to having one – except for some people who didn’t care for it aesthetically.
ABOUT FAVICON IMAGES
A favicon (short for ‘favorites icon’), also known as a website icon, a page icon or an urlicon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon, and many recent web browsers can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser’s URL bar, next to the site’s name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page’s title in a tabbed document interface.
The original means of defining a favicon was by placing a file called favicon.ico in the root directory of a webserver. This would then automatically be used in Internet Explorer’s favorites (bookmarks) display. Later, however, a more flexible system was created, using HTML to indicate the location of an icon for any given page. This is achieved by adding two link elements in the <head> section of the document as detailed below. In this way, any appropriately sized (16×16 pixels or larger) image can be used, and although many still use the ICO format, other browsers now also support the animated GIF and PNG image formats.
Most modern browsers implement both methods. Because of this, web servers receive many requests for the file “favicon.ico” even if it doesn’t exist. This may annoy web server administrators by creating many server log entries, and unnecessarily loading the disk, CPU, and network. Another common problem is that the favicons may disappear if the browser’s cache is emptied.
Originally, Internet Explorer only used favicons for bookmarks (for instance MSIE 6.0), which created a minor privacy concern in that a site owner could tell how many people had bookmarked their site by checking the access logs to see how many people downloaded the favicon.ico file. However, since newer versions of Internet Explorer (e.g. 7.0) and most other browsers also display the favicon in the address bar on every visit, this is becoming less of an issue.
For the archives, my favorite Cybermonsters pics. Yes, I am Cybermonsters. If you are a fan of Admiral Ackbar, check out my Admiral Ackbar Funny Photoshop Images.
A few readers have entertained themselves here with translating my binary code posts, and recently my posts in Japanese. However, I’ve also been working on a new hip hop translator and I think it’s working quite well. Let’s try it on a recent post in one of my forums.
yo i feel u admin homie g…ima post a thread of sum picz wit me and mah boiiz flashin our booz and all dem fine ladiez im rollin wit, then ima out yall, gotta some real shit in life to deal wit, gotta go to tha toilet yall, so peace, one, cyaz….itll be a while, ill keep u posted…
ohh shit that reminded me, im go be all cool and key up all my shit for ma battlez…
TRANSLATION:
Greetings fair administrator. I too have such sympathetic emotions such as yours expressed. Soon I will use Photoshop to optimize some .jpg’s or .png’s of my fraternity brothers and I courting ladies whilst partaking in summer recreational activities. But then lickety split I must hasten back to my studies and freshen up.
Darnitall. It’s been reminded to me that I have forgotten to work on my poetry writing in the style of Emily Dickinson for the upcoming essay contest.
Let’s send a little Google love to The Conway Muse. The Muse is one of the favorite hangouts for local artists in the Skagit County, Island and Stanwood areas. Some of my favorite late night jams have been up there. But the exciting news is that soon they will be open to the public so everyone can experience the magic.
My favorite part about The Muse is the wide diversity of people present. I have never seen a wider diversity in any other setting. Everyone who hangs out there has one thing in common: a passion for the arts (or is dating someone who’s passionate for the arts!).
Muahaha! My friend from the Great White North just sent me this. Now you need to realize that I recently posted an entire gallery of Happy Bunny graphics, and also conducted Brigadoon (including bagpiper) wearing a kilt – So this is all that craziness combined. Thank you!
