The rest of October

Well, the web host transition mentioned last did finish. So far things seem to be going well.

Couple recent issues...

First is Kaspersky (the famed anti-virus program). Spent over $100 a couple months back for a 5-user license. We've only used 4, and for whatever reason it's decided we've gone over the limit, and disabled itself on one of the computers. No, not just disabled updates, but disabled the entire program.

Really classy behavior from something I dished out over a hundred bones for. It's been 5 days without an answer from them. Oh, except I did get a message on Monday acknowledging that they received the response, and I did get some of their spam just now (yes I know, I opted in, but it seems a little more like a slap in the face just now).

They've got until the end of the week. If they fix it, fine. If they don't (or I don't hear back from them by then), I'm uninstalling Kaspersky from the remaining machines and they'll get to deal with a credit card chargeback.

Either way I'm not renewing the subscription next year. Going free next time. Probably AVG or Avast. If a company's looking for an AV program, I'd suggest staying away from Kaspersky due to potential licensing issues (imagine if the AV failed on all the machines throughout a corporation). As bloated as Norton is, you have to give them credit - their corporate version doesn't require activation or anything, so it's immune to those problems. Then again, I've got my own set of Norton grievances. But I digress...


Next issue is/was CyberLink PowerDirector (which I actually mentioned last time). It was buggy and crashed sometimes - not the end of the world. Most recent issue now is that it won't start up at all - it crashes on start. Reinstalling, and manually cleaning the registry (then installing) didn't work. Neither did multiple restarts - it's boned. I have to conclude it's probably a conflict with something else on the system, but I have no idea what, since everything else is working fine.

Really, I haven't experienced a conflict with anything since Windows 95 came out and I had IRQ conflicts. I could reinstall Windows 7, and it would probably work, but seriously... a reinstall in under 3 months? And then hours to set up all the programs again? For one program that's fallen apart? No thanks. Besides, I'm sure Kaspersky would start flipping out on this machine too.

Since I've got another video that needs some editing, I looked around again:

• Adobe Premiere is just too involved. It doesn't have the same text or video effects as PowerDirector. Actually that's not entirely true - you can manually do both text and video effects that looks really amazing, but they're just so involved to set up. For a movie, definitely they'd be the way to go. For short 5-minute clips where you want something simple and eye-catching that only takes a minute to put together, it's not as consumer-friendly. Maybe Elements has some 1-click solutions built in, but I already took hours downloading the Pro demo. Don't have the time or bandwidth to grab Elements and see.
  
  In retrospect I probably should have grabbed Elements - I grabbed Pro because I generally get the highest version I can, put something together, and THEN see if I used any of the "pro/ultimate/etc" features. If I did, then I see what I can do without and step down to a lower/cheaper version. Really though, there's no way I could justify plunking down the money for Pro, so I should have just grabbed the Elements demo. Maybe next time.
  
• Corel Digital Studio 2010 on the other hand is too simple. It takes the 1-click part to the extreme. You plunk your images and videos in, choose whether or not you want background music, and it puts it all together. Nothing in the way of editing features (not that I could find anyway), and the interface is alarmingly simple.
  
  I think Corel Digital Studio is oriented towards the computer-illiterate. I mean, to be honest it would be an amazing program for a lot of people who just want to pull the home videos off their video camera and have them automatically arranged into a nice little video to share with their friends/family. It's obviously not what I'm looking for though.
  
• Pinnacle Studio 14 is the next I tried, and the one I settled on. It's very similar to PowerDirector, except things seem much smoother. I tried a few things that I thought might crash it, but it didn't. It seems to be very stable. It's also got some really cool effects available in the "Ultimate Collection" version (even the "Ultimate" edition has some neat stuff beyond what PowerDirector does).
  
  The issue was the cost justification. I've already blown the money on PowerDirector, and this is what the breakdown looked like for Pinnacle Studio 14:
  -Ultimate is $100 on the web from their store (so download + bandwidth also)
  -Ultimate is $70 from Future Shop (no bandwidth to worry about)
  -Ultimate Collection is $130 from the web-store and includes a content pack.
  
  Kinda a big jump to go from the $70 at Future Shop (where I get the actual discs) to $130 for the Collection on the web store. That's almost double the price for a few cool features, but as they say... "in for a penny, in for a pound". I went for it (saved $10 with a coupon code though) and it's downloading now. The Ult demo was 2GB, and the Ult Collection download is 3GB. Yum, 5GB in under 24 hours. There goes 10% of our monthly bandwidth.

So that's about it for now.

Oh, except that Coastal Contacts (information page link) was added to the EyeglassRetailerReviews.com website. I've bought contacts from ClearlyContacts in the past (the Canadian version), and their popularity seems to have shot up by about 1000% since they started offering glasses, so it's up on the site now.

Okay, now that's it for now :p