John’s Technology Blog

On Saturday, I had received an email-advertisement for an online e-card generator hosted by jibjab.com.  It is a holiday ecard named “elf-yourself”. You upload photos of you and family and friends. You then stick your uploaded faces onto their website and they transfer them to a bunch of dancing elves. You can select the type of dance that the elves perform. In the background there is a holiday jingle to wish your recipient a happy Christmas.

After I successfully made the ecard, I showed it to my children. My 10-year-old daughter wanted to make one of her own. I helped her load the pictures onto the computer and she skillfully cropped the faces so they fit well on the elves. She was so proud of her newly created e-card that she posted it on our family blog.

When I first watched her e-card it was very cute and I told her she did a good job. Later that day, she tried to show the card to one of her friends. However, we found that the e-card would not load properly. It almost appeared as if the e-card had expired.

The next day I received an e-mail as well as a comment from that blog post. People were upset by the content of the e-card.  I loaded the blog post up into my browser and sure enough I found the content of the card to be different than what my daughter had originally created. In fact, it was somewhat obscene. It was definitely inappropriate for a 10-year-old girl as well as all of her friends that she sent a card to. In the place of her card, was a Valentines Day greeting — a striptease that someone else had created in jest for a friend.

Somehow, the unique key associated with my daughter’s card expired early (within the day) and someone else’s card took the newly available key. Thus, the card that we intended to share with everyone else no longer existed — instead they would receive a card that was definitely inappropriate and offensive.

Luckily, jibjab.com allows you to purchase your flash file (e-card) for about four dollars. This way you can ensure that the card you made is going to be the card that your recipients receive. I am not angry at jibjab.com for this mixup – I am sure was just a random technological foul-up. But it has taught me a lesson — as long as your information is hosted by someone else, on someone else’s server, you can never truly be sure of it’s presented result.

So, don’t thow out the paper greeting cards just yet — ecards may look fancy and fun, but you just never know what your recipient will end up seeing!

I have read recently that if you buy a Johnson and Johnson rectal thermometer and take out the instructions from the box and read them carefully there is a notice that in small print says:

“Every Rectal Thermometer made by Johnson & Johnson is personally tested and then sanitized.”

When your own job get’s you down, think of this J&J claim and then put on your rose colored glasses and discover the silver lining to your own job – be grateful you don’t work at Johnson & Johnson’s rectal thermometer quality control department!

Google — one of the most cutting-edge companies in the technology world has been investing a lot of time and effort in Apple’s iPhone — yet another one of the most cutting-edge companies and products in the world today.

It appears that Google has been doing a lot of research and development with regard to voice transcription technology. I am a huge fan of voice translation — notably since I am writing this blog using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to facilitate my writing abilities. I am always amazed at the progress of voice translation has experienced over the past five years.

Google has introduced quite a number of voice translation applications with regard to their popular online web search. One of their well-known services Google 411 allows you to call Google and ask for typical 411 directory information such as movie locations and showtimes.

It appears that Google has gone the extra mile with the iPhone. They’ve created an application for the iPhone wherein you just say what you want in the iPhone browser returns the Google results just as if you type them in the search bar. It’s quite impressive technology, and though I do not own an iPhone (that is another blog in and of itself) I would really be interested to see how useful this new app can be.

Check out for yourself in the following video by Google:

Or visit the this link.

Ok…so no, this is not about putting your new 52 inch LCD tv into a steel reinforced concrete vault with 10 inch walls buried 30 feet under the ground to keep it from melting down in a nuclear Armageddon.

We had a problem with one of our LCD tvs at work. This TV acts as a dashboard monitor in the hallway. It displays all of our program statistics to help us know if we are on track or not. It is set up to display firefox in full screen mode.

Lately we have been noticing some “Burn In” on the monitor. In order to save it from utter screen etching doom, I used the scheduler in Windows XP to do the following.

6:30PM – Kill the firefox dashboard
7:00PM – Start the screen saver
5:00AM – Start up the firefox dashboard – killing the screensaver

There were a few tricks I had to do in order for this to all work properly.

1) KILL FIREFOX
Create a job in the scheduler program. In the run field, type

taskkill /im firefox.exe

Set the scheduled event to “Run only if logged in”
Set the schedule for this event to be just before you start the screen saver.

2) START THE SCREEN SAVER
First of all, in order to start a screen saver from a command line, you need to use the “-s” option when calling the .scr file. For Example:

c:\windows\system32\sstext3d.scr -s

However, you cannot just use this string in the RUN field of a new scheduled job. You must create a batch file (in my case go.bat) to do this for you. I created a go.bat in my c:\windows\system32 directory. That go.bat contained the screensaver call outlined above.

Set your schedule for the screensaver sometime after you kill firefox. Don’t forget to set this task to run only if you are currently logged in.

3) START FIREFOX
In order for this task to work properly and to kill the screensaver, you need to ensure that this task is set to run if you are currently logged in. Also, you need enable the checkbox: Wake the computer to run this task. This will stop the screen saver.

I just had our dashboard set as the default bookmark for firefox. Thus, when this scheduled task launches firefox, it goes right into the dashboard.

For those interested, you can play with the files I created by downloading this zip file:
burn_in_protection