Space for thought

A second look at the version number of the installed version of Windows Live Photo Gallery, and confirming from the installed updates history, it turns out I do have the very latest update as described in the KB article 955359. I still have the problem with WLXQuickTimeControlHost misbehaving.

So I decided to try the next best thing - KB 944563 describes how to manually disable QT support in WL Photo Gallery.

This seemed to have worked successfully. So problem solved. For now.

Our little baby girl is four and a half months old. Time flies really quickly. It feels like yesterday that I held her in my arms in the operating theater. My wife had to have a C-section (it was scheduled on advice from the Ob Gyn). The next few weeks were tough with wife recuperating in bed, newborn baby, and my almost-7-yr-old son jumping around everywhere at home. But in retrospect, it was 'character-building' as Calvin's dad might have said. I am lucky enough to have my employer provide 4 weeks of paid parental leave, and I made good use of them. Those first four weeks flew by like greased lightning. And then I was back to the grind at work. Luckily wifey recuperated nicely and was up to the task of taking care of both kids by the time I had to get back to work. We were enormously thankful to all our friends and neighbors who helped us out with copious quantities of food and support.

Baby development happens slowly but steadily and it just creeps up on you. Looking through my collection of photos and videos it is apparent how my little girl has been changing in shape, size, and behavior. She has been flipping on to her tummy for a few weeks now, and tries to crawl. She smiles, gurgles and coos and tries to communicate with us. Most of all she seems to pay attention to my son, and often chuckles and laughs out loud when he does some antic to amuse her. None of my pathetic attempts to raise the same response seem to work ... she looks at me with wide eyes and a mild expression of alarm, as if wondering if my sanity is questionable.

I use Windows Vista Home Premium on my home laptop. At some point I installed the Windows Live Photo Gallery tool to manage my photos. It's quite similar to Windows Vista photo gallery (which is built into Vista) with some added features to publish photos directly to email/blog/etc. Now at some point I found that browsing the folders with pictures became rather slow. TaskManager showed the CPU pegged at 50% with a process called WLXQuickTimeControlHost. When this problem happened again, I just killed the process using TaskManager and carried on. This fixed matters temporarily. I vaguely wondered if QuickTime was the problem, or Windows Live Photo Gallery was.

For a few weeks I paid no attention to the problem - but kept using TaskManager to kill the process. Finally I decided to check into this. Searching on the internet showed precious few relevant results. From the name and location of WLXQuickTimeControlHost.exe I guessed it was a problem with Window Live Photo Gallery when it was trying to use QuickTime for something. Trawling through a few links I finally found the following:

1. This blog post seemed to describe the same issue: MP4 File Problems 

2. KB Article 955359 described the problem and pointed to a fixed version of Live Photo Gallery.

3. Found another earlier KB article with a temporary fix to disable the QuickTime hosting.

It was somewhat painful and useless trying to search in Vista Forums or Windows Live Forums for information on this problem. It was well nigh impossible to even locate a forum for the windows live photo gallery. Too many things are called confusingly similar names.

I'll try updating Photo Gallery and post the results.

I found this draft lying in my Windows Live Writer, no clue how long it has been there. Obviously, it's been months. Just publishing it as is.

This is a theme I've idly considered in the past - how to make money from nothing? Well, there's no such thing as a free lunch obviously, so is this something that is feasible? Here are some thoughts which crossed my mind.

Credit Card Arbitrage:

How does that work? Well, it goes something like this: credit card A offers you a balance transfer at a low or zero fee, with zero % APR for say a year, or 18 months. This is essentially free credit for a year. So apply for the card with a fairly high credit limit, and transfer say $25,000 balance to the card. This is like getting a free loan of $25,000 for a year. Invest the money in a risk-free, interest bearing account like a money market account, which can yield 4.5% APR or more (used to be higher, but the Fed has been lowering short term rates for a year now).

The mechanics of pulling this off require a bit of careful orchestration to ensure you can actually use the money. Some credit cards will only allow balance transfers to certain kinds of accounts. I believe a home equity line of credit, or another credit card account where you don't incur costs to take money out of the account, should do the trick. Secondly you have to be careful to pay the money back to the credit card in time - missing payment can attract high interest costs and the net result might be a loss. Lastly, you cannot use the credit card for regular purchases, because typically the card will allocate monthly payments to balance transfers or other low APR balances before it posts against regular purchases with high APRs.

Advertising on the Internet:

Easy money, claim a lot of spam emails. Used to be that back when the Internet was just beginning to boom, there were companies paying out money just to click on advertisements. Sounds strange today, but that's what happened back in the heydays of the net boom. The next wave was the democratization of the advertising market via programs like the Google AdSense. Now if you have content that is interesting to someone, you can monetize that interest by offering up advertisements right next to your content. You pocket some money from ads, and Google gets a cut. I don't know of other quick ways to monetize your content if you are a small player.

Blogging:

Apparently part time bloggers can make decent money off blog advertisements. Correction: That is wishful speculation on my part, in hopes that blogging will add a new income stream for me. In reality if you have something interesting to say, even if it is a very niche audience, you may have some chance of making some money off it. On the other hand, this expectation leads to a proliferation of bloggers all wildly casting about to blog about something interesting, and there is an explosion of "commenters" who just post a link to a news article (published by traditional media) and add a very shallow comment - if you are lucky  that is. Then someone else cross-posts to the blog post, and so on.

Anyhow, Live Spaces doesn't really have an easy way to add ads, I don't think. There was a BrightAds partnership to offer ads but apparently that's been killed. There goes my easy money :-(

We are waiting for an arrival. ETA is April 28. Person in question is the new addition to our family. The ticks on the clock are going slower than ever...

My wife's tummy is big, like she has a basketball inside it. The little girl inside has elbows, knees and uses them quite forcefully at times. It's amazing to see the bumps and movements inside her belly. My son and I gawk in wonder, and wait for the time when the little one will be here.

What a zen moment - I finally realized one of the behaviors that I exhibit (quite often, if not most of the time) actually has a name for it: yak shaving. Apparently the term originated in MIT, but I just found out from these links, quite accidentally today from an email that someone in my work group sent out:

From Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that.html

which linked to http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/03/05/yak_shaving.html

Take a look at those links to find out what it means, if you don't already know. It was quite revealing to me. My wife is always after me for my yak-shaving ways of approaching tasks that need to be done. I've actually gotten better at not shaving the yak these days. What it takes is a few times of get-it-done-right-now successfully, and you're on your way to building a new habit (of not yak shaving).

One of the commenter's on Seth's blog entry referenced quite an excellent quote:

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." -George S. Patton (from http://engineer2entrepreneur.typepad.com/engineer2entrepreneur/2005/03/the_time_is_nev.html)

Aside: Incidentally I purchased and read Seth Godin's book The Dip some time last year. It is sort of intellectually appealing but actually deflated a lot of my interest in Seth's thinking - I felt it did not have a lot of real practical value, instead it was seemed a sort of armchair pontificating that is reserved for those who have little better to do. The book is actually quite tiny too, seems like material that would have fit a magazine article expanded out into a little book.

Till recently I have not owned any gaming device, and not played XBox, Playstation, or Wii (any versions of those devices) except for two or three occasions when I tried them at a friend's place.

Lately my son has been asking me to get him a gaming device (no doubt inspired by the sight of such things at his friends' places). I considered buying an XBox 360 or a Wii. The Wii was not available anywhere except expensively bundled with various games which I did not want to buy. The XBox 360 was available at our company store, or so I thought, until I went to purchase and found the thing out of stock. Thankfully I was spared further brain-racking on this account, when an old friend offered to give us his old XBox (the vintage one, not the 360) and I accepted the offer since it was a great way for us to figure out if gaming is something that fits into our life.

So I got a XBox Halo edition, 3 games (Fusion Frenzy, Project Gotham Racing 2, Halo), and several controllers wired and wireless including a steering wheel. Only 2 of those controllers actually seem to work, but that's more than sufficient for us!

I was actually surprised by how sharp and smooth the graphics are on these by now vintage box/games. I enjoyed PGR2 a good deal on trying out a couple of races. Fusion Frenzy is something my son likes to play, I haven't taken to it much somehow. Haven't tried Halo yet as it is rated Mature. Looking forward to more gaming. Lego Star Wars is a game I intend to buy.

Update: I purchased Lego Star Wars today. It seems pretty good, and suitable for kids as well as adults (or me anyway!).