Seriously a long time since I posted last, but wanted to let you all know that I’m speaking at mLearnCon and it would be awesome if you attended my session or just said hello to me.

I am presenting on Creating Video Podcasts from Screencasts and Other eLearning Videos.

Here is a brief description of my session:

Would you like to take your screencasts and eLearning videos and make video Podcasts for easy deployment and viewing on mobile devices?

Participants in this session will learn how to create video Podcasts of screencasts and videos, and how to submit them to popular vodcasting services like iTunes. This session is not focused on a particular tool, but on how to format your eLearning content so it is readily available for mobile users.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to create a video Podcast feed
• How to format your video to play back on most mobile devices
• How to submit your Podcast to iTunes
• Things to watch out for

Audience: Novice and intermediate participants with basic familiarity with mobile devices and video

Technology: Screenr, videos from other sources, and emulators for the iOS (iPhone simulator) and Android devices

I hope to run into some of you, so feel free to make sure to say hello if you see me.

Way back in middle school my friend Ethan faced a really challenging problem.  See Ethan’s mom had a membership to Sam’s Club, and always did the shopping for the family.  Well, one day his mom went to Sam’s club and purchased a huge 1 gallon jug of peanut butter for the family.  The problem was it was CREAMY peanut butter and Ethan (like many people) hated creamy peanut butter.

Ethan voices his displeasure with the creamy peanut butter purchase

Ethan being really displeased with the purchase let his mother know that he wasn’t about to eat that creamy peanut butter and asked his mother to get him chunky Peanut Butter instead.  Well, after Ethan’s mom just bought a gallon of creamy peanut butter, she was not about to go buy MORE peanut butter.

Faced with this problem Ethan could have done many things…he could have refused to eat the peanut butter until his mom corrected the problem, he could have sabotaged the peanut butter, and he could have gone out and bought chunky peanut butter himself.  None of these solutions would have made both him AND his mom happy.

So what did Ethan do?

Ethan was smart enough to think outside the box and come up with a solution to the problem that made both him and his mom happy.  He was able to stick to his principles and not eat creamy peanut butter, and make his mom happy by not wasting all that peanut butter…Ethan bought peanuts to convert the creamy peanut butter to chunky peanut butter. Ethan ran to the store, picked up a pound of peanuts, crushed them up, and fixed the peanut butter.

So the next time life gives you creamy peanut butter, be like Ethan and make it chunky.

You can follow Ethan on twitter here (@ethang).

I just made a small donation to the Philippine National Red Cross to help the over 300,000 people displaced by Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines.  If you are interested you can make a donation directly to the Philippine National Red Cross here.

A couple of people who work for Articulate are currently displaced by Typhoon Ondoy, my thoughts go out to those folks and all those effected and we hope the floods clear up soon.

Folks tomorrow (9/16/09) is the last day that you can vote for Winston in the Boulder Humane Society Photo Contest, and I am offering anyone who votes and tweets about it a FREE Customized iPhone case.

Recession Cardboard iPhone Case

The case will have an ink paw print from Winston on the back.  This is the Recession Cardboard iPhone case recently featured on Gizmodo.

How do I win?

Step 1. Vote for Winston in the Boulder Humane Society Photo Contest

Winston's Photo

This is the photo of Winston, you can vote for him here.

Step 2. Tweet about it today (extended to September 16, 2009)

Send a Tweet about it using the #WinstonPotacho hashtag and link to this blog post.  Tweet should be something along the lines of:

I voted for #WinstonPotacho in the Boulder Humane Society Photo contest and won a Recession iPhone case: http://bit.ly/frH90

Remember, the #WinstonPotacho hashtag is important.  Anyone who votes and Tweets about it I’ll send you the luxurious iPhone case shown above.

That’s it, that is all you have to do.  I’ll contact you after I see the tweet and will get your address information so I can send you the case.

P.S. If you are wondering, if Winston wins he will be featured in the Boulder Humane Society marketing material.  We don’t win any actual prizes other than that.

Note: Thanks to everyone who participated, the voting has ended.  I’ll be sending out the cases shortly.  I’ll let you know if Winston wins.

Update: Winston unfortunately did not win. Thanks for voting anyway.

Winston

This photo I submitted for the Boulder Humane Society Photo Contest was nominated as one of the best three photos in it’s category (Best Digitally Altered/Artistic Image). The photo was taken with my iPhone 3G camera in Estes Park, CO of Winston at the age of 12 weeks.  Winston is a Brussels Griffon, and he looks like a cross between an Ewok, a Dr. Seuss character, and a Mogwai.

You should vote for Winston here.

If that photo wins it will be featured in the Boulder Humane Society marketing material.  I don’t think I actually get anything else out of the deal, but it would be pretty sweet to see him featured in their publications.

Update 9/18/09

Winston unfortunately did not win the competition.  Thanks to everyone who voted.

Ooops. Sucks for the Nationals that nobody caught this jersey mistake.

I now have 2 machines running Windows 7 at my house. Good news is that Articulate Studio ’09 works well on both. I haven’t done a full test yet, and Windows 7 is still in beta, so no official support yet, but so far I haven’t run into any Windows 7 specific issues. Anyone else eager enough to move beyond Vista that they are running Windows 7 beta?

Following up on the post Anti-Virus Programs suck…a customer of ours just reported that several of the files that we install in Articulate Studio ’09 is flagged as a potential threat by ZoneAlarm.  We protect our DLLs and EXEs so that other malicious people can’t come in and steal our code or make nefarious versions of our programs.  Doing this is not uncommon in the software world, many comapnies do this, including the anti-virus programs themselves.  Yet some anti-virus programs like ZoneAlarm flag any DLL that has been protected by obfuscation are flagged as potential threats.

So each time we get a report like this I spend a considerable amount of time contacting the anti-virus company and asking that they no longer flag our software.  In every case so far the anti-virus company has responded and identified that we were flagged falsely and they tell us it will be addressed in their next update.  Unfortunately ZoneAlarm gives you no way to contact the company unless you are a paid customer.  They do reference in one of their KB articles a way of reporting false positives (http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/support/hot-issues-vista-zonealarm-computer-security-suite.htm#6), however, the email address that they provide is no longer valid.

You would think that Anti-Virus software companies would start to realize that falsely identifying a legitimate program as a virus is almost as bad as not catching a virus.  In both instances a user is being prevented from doing legitimate work.

I would be interested to hear if people had recommendations for other anti-virus programs that don’t suck.  I use OneCare by Microsoft, and for the most part, it is pretty good…in the past I have had success with Norton too.

We have been working on an update to Articulate Studio ’09 for the last several months that addresses many of the issues that people have run into with our products.  Well good news, we released it today.  You can get the update here:

Studio Update 4

The release notes are also posted at the link above.  There were over 150 issues addressed in this update.  Wow!

I recently experimented with a new blog theme after a WordPress upgrade caused issues with my old theme. Well, the new theme was nice, but I got sick of it after about 2 days. Good news is they fixed the issue with my old blog style, so now I am happily back at my original south park styled theme.