pinnacle

You might think you’d reached the pinnacle of your career when you became colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King’s Guard, but not Nils Olav he’s been knighted this week as well!

You may wonder why I’m even bothering to comment on this subject! Nils Olav is a penguin!

According to King Harald the Fifth of Norway, Nils as a penguin:

“in every way qualifed to receive the honour and dignity of a knighthood.”

How did all this come about?

It all started when Norway presented Edinburgh Zoo with it’s first king penguin in 1913, the year of it’s opening.

In 1961 a lieutenant from the Norwegian King’s Guard, Nils Egelien was in Edinburgh for the Military Tattoo and became interested in the penguin colony at Edinburgh Zoo. When they returned in 1972 the unit adopted the penguin and named him Nils Olav, in honour of Nils Egelien and King Olav V of Norway.

Nils Olav was given the rank of lance corporal, and has been promoted each time the Guard returns to Edinburgh for the tattoo:

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• 1982 – Corporal
• 1978 – Sergeant

Unfortunately Nils Olav died shortly after his promotion to sergeant, and his place of honour was taken by Nils Olav II, a two year old near double, who continued his rise through the ranks:

• 1993 – Regimental Sergeant Major
• 2005 – Colonel-in-Chief

Clearly he is the first penguin to hold this rank in the Norwegian Army!

It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it… I recently had the pleasure of producing Siân and John’s Wedding DVD. By all accounts it looks OK – personally I can see all the mistakes I made in it…

Anyway I bought Pinnacle at the time, and after a few issues we had great fun editing the video down, but the most amusing thing I found was that they sent me a green sheet with it… Obviously to play with their green screen feature, I had a little go with the this (the feature – not the sheet!!) during editing and planned to have a proper go some other time (time is somewhat of a commodity these days!!).

This has motivated me some more, it’s the story of how 4 guys with a few props, a green sheet and some time on their hands – managed to create the look of a full scale movie…. Take a look it’s great…

Much as I’ve posted a lot more recently I haven’t done a roundup of what’s popular and what’s not on this blog for sometime! For the first time rather than just using my internal stats packages I’m going to use Google Analytics for this purpose.

My most popular post over the last two months happens to be one of my most recent ones on the song “I fought the Lloyds” by Oystar, closely followed by my discussions of St Pancras, Traffic and Passion, and my new HTC Trinity / SPV M700.

Google and Yahoo are still number one delivery mechanisms into the site, but 115 visitors in the last two months have actually typed “skillett.com” into their browsers – accident, popularity or snoopers – who knows!

The top search keyword fits exactly with the top post “I fought the Lloyds“, is clearly going to be exceedingly popular in the coming six weeks as it races to head for a number one spot in the chart – now that would be fantastic wouldn’t it?

On the technology and gadgets side of things a lot of people are looking for information about the SPV m700, MyMobiler, or Orange software packages and Tariffs. People are also curious about my Pinnacle Studio problems with Blue Screens of Death (thankfully this was resolved when I turned off hardware acceleration)

At the web and server end of the blog, there’s a lot of discussion about CSS styles (removing unused styles), convert2maildir (mbox to maildir) and mytop. Outlook Error codes seem to be one of the biggest hitters still as people suffer so many problems, personally I’ve switched to Thunderbird and wouldn’t switch back – the only problem is the lack of syncing ability in Thunderbird.

The interesting and often laughable keywords that have brought people here are “does keiron love”, “early daze, Swindon” (they’re actually quite good), and “hospitals are sued by 7 foot doctors”.

Interestingly the BlogRush widget has delivered 11 visits (it’s only been installed for one month), and they stay on the site for just 17 seconds (that’s far lower than the site average of 1 min 25 seconds, and very few of them visit more than the page they land on! Not sure whether I’ll be keeping BlogRush going forward based on that.

Another interesting couple of months at skillett.com!

This is an update to my earlier discussion about Pinnacle Studio 10.5 continually crashing! 

Below is the mail I sent to Pinnacle about their Studio product on Wednesday

Hi,

I recently downloaded the Trial version of Studio 10.5 from the Pinnacle website on the recommendation of a friend. I love it, the interface is slick and easy and it seems really easy to use – yet it crashes, and crashes, and crashes (time and time again).

I read that version 11 has increased stability and is probably a good thing, but no trial is available…….

So… Foolishly (or so it would seem) I go out and buy the Studio 11 Ultimate edition – yes, all £69.98 of it! I put two clips together – put a fade between them and what’s the first thing I see, that infamous blue screen of death again. I reboot, apply the patch to 11.1, I edit two different clips – fade them together, hit the preview button and blue screen of death again. I’ve currently rebooted my laptop 8 times tonight (unintentionally) and haven’t dared load studio whilst I right this email……….

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!

I also posted it to their support forum where several users have tried to assist, but the FAQ Pinnacle referred me to during their live help discussion seems to have helped!

I was bordering on going out and buying a brand new desktop (something I will probably do in the not too distant future anyway!), but a few simple steps seems to have solved the problem (touch wood!).

1. I upgraded my video drivers.
2. I “Windows Updated”
3. I disabled Hardware Acceleration and Background Rendering

All in all that seems to have done the job, I spent a happy hour editing yesterday evening without a single problem, even getting on to using the green screen capabilities of Pinnacle 11 (Hey I have to – they sent me a green sheet to play with )

I’m trying to edit some video, and on a recommendation I’m having a play with Pinnacle Studio with a view to buying it.

I’ve installed the trial version 10.5, but it keeps crashing, I can only do so much before it bombs out with a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death for the uninitiated!).

If anyone has any ideas/recommendation/whinges – please shout. I love the interface, but stability is abysmal!!

I’ve done some reading, and version 11 seems to be more stable for some people – but can I really warrant £60-£90 on a product that some people rave about and others hate?