Valle De Bravo

I just got back from a vacation trip to Mexico.  Friends ask me where we went and I tell them Valle De Bravo, and they say huh?  Valle De Bravo is to Mexicans as Napa Valley, or Martha’s Vinyard, or Florida is to Americans.  It’s not Acapulco, or Cancun but they don’t call Valle De Bravo the “Little Switzerland” of Mexico for nothing.  Many wealthy Mexicans, including several ex-presidents have vacation homes here.  Why you might ask?  Well you can checkout this short slideshow for some of the reasons.  Oh yeah, I was also born there.

Deleting Premier Elements Projects

I use Premiere Elements 3.0.  I’ve created many projects to edit footage from my DV camera.  I just discovered that PE creates cached media files, autosaves and other files that take up a lot of space!  Incredibly, PE doesn’t give you a way to delete projects you have saved so these extra files accumulate on your hard drive.  I found this thread on how to delete a Premier Elements project. 

You go to where your project files are being saved and delete the folders:

Adobe Premiere Elements AutoSave
Adobe Premiere Elements Preview Files
Encoded Files
Media Cache Files

Backing up your data

I have friend shopping around trying to repair his laptop that crashed.  He needs a new hard drive and needs to recover important data from it.  Best Buy quoted him $300-$3000 to recover his data.  Why even GIVE an estimate?  Jane's Mac mini recently also crapped out and I'm having her 80gig HD replaced and data restored for $200.

My friend asked me if I back up my data.  I told him "sort of".  I HAVE backed up my important documents, photos, and music to an external hard drive but it's been over a year since I've refreshed it.  I do have some redundancy in that some of my files are copied onto my other computers.  I also have a copy on my website.  But still, I'm exposed and need to take my backup process more seriously.

Coincidently, I read this recent post at Phanfare.com.  It advocates backing up your important data to a location somewhere on the Internet.  But I've read horror stories about that solution as well when a customer lost all their photos from a service.  Personally, I would advocate backing things up on two different external sources at home AND online somewhere.  I plan to use an external hard drive and a second computer for redundency for important files.  I'll keep some files on my website.  Photos, Video and Music presents a bigger challenge because they take up so much room and the process of uploading is very time consuming.  I'll use a combination of DVDs and external HD for those.

To recover data from a bad HD, here is some advice:

wikiHow

Backing up data from your Mac
Mail – mail data is stored in the foldersw ~/Library/Mail/POP-….
AddressBook – select all your contacts and select File…Export vCard.  This will create a file a .vcf  file.  You can then download and run this A to G program to convert the file to a comma seperated file (.csv).   This file can then be imported into Gmail.  To restore, you can export back to a file that AddressBook can  import.

Working with Windows Driver Kit and Visual Studio 2008

I had an occasion to try to build a sample app that talked to an HID (Human Interface Device) USB device.  I downloaded the latest WDK and attempted to build it with VS2008.  I got an error stating that _In_out_ was undefined.  This thread was the most helpful but was not specific enough to help me.  I figured out a fix which I posted to that thread.

I simply renamed the file C:\WinDDK\6001.18001\inc\api\sal.h so that it would not be found, and the version provided by Visual Studio 2008, C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\include\sal.h, gets used.

Customer Service

Eric has a posts about Absurd Customer Service.
In larger companies, support is hit or miss.  With smaller companies there is a good chance you will get the best support you’ve experienced.  At DVFilm, if there is a serious problem with our software we are even able to release an update within a few days of discovery.  We also do our best to respond to all support requests within 24 hours but often response within just a few hours.  I know for me, there isn’t a better feeling than sending a support email and getting a response within minutes!  We use Google Mail so that multiple people can monitor the support emails.  The threaded structure of GMAIL, the labeling, search capability, and the client notification tool makes it ideal for support.  One thing I wish worked different, however, is how Google keeps track of the last account signed in.  We have multiple accounts in various Google properties, such as GMAIL, Blogger, Docs, and I want to be able to login to one account without changing the currently logged in account in all the other services.