Author Archives: Robert S. Robbins

I am making some progress with my multimedia production plans. I have discovered that I can make my recorded voice sound better by lowing the pitch by two semitones. Apparently this is a common problem because there are various VST … Continue reading →

A new version of the Firefox browser is now available. Firefox 2.0 has a close button on each tab making it less likely that you will accidentally close the wrong tab. The search box displays a drop down list of … Continue reading →

Internet Explorer 7 is now available for Windows XP. I have switched from Windows 2000 Professional to Windows XP so I am using Internet Explorer 7 now. I have not noticed too many problems yet except for Macromedia Flash. I … Continue reading →

Today I received the 1 GB of RAM I purchased for my new DELL OptiPlex GX240. That gives it more memory than any other system I own. I used one of its 128 MB sticks of SDRAM in my old … Continue reading →

On Saturday I spent a lot of time experimenting and learning Cubase LE and Adobe Premiere Pro. With Cubase I concentrated on using the equalisers to adjust the sound of my recorded voice. I was able to get a slightly … Continue reading →

Now that I’ve moved to Windows XP, I’m trying to use SQL Server 2005 rather than install SQL Server 2000. Unfortunately SQL Server 2005 makes some things more difficult. For example, exporting a SQL Server database to Access 2003 can … Continue reading →

On Thursday I developed a web service to get the New York Lotto numbers. My web service is getting the numbers from a RSS feed because it is easier to parse XML than it is to find data in HTML … Continue reading →

Yesterday I got the DELL Optiplex GX240 computer that I bought on eBay. This will replace my old computer which I use as a spare computer. When my good computer crashed I discovered that my old computer was too obsolete … Continue reading →

My system crashed a few times with my USB thumb drive connected. The USB thumb drive was corrupted and now Windows XP and Windows 2000 insist the drive is write protected. I cannot copy any files to the USB thumb … Continue reading →

I got my computer to boot up on Monday. It turns out the power switch cable became dislodged when I replaced the IDE cable. So whenever I pressed in the power switch the signal did not reach the motherboard. Boy … Continue reading →

I got a new hard drive delivered by UPS today. Car Accessories.com ordered it for me. http://www.caraccessories.com It is a 250 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM EIDE hard drive. I copied my Windows XP operating system onto this new drive … Continue reading →

I am in the process of recovering from yesterday’s hard drive disaster. It is very upsetting to have another hard drive go bad when this already happened in July. I recovered most of my data and all client data. Today … Continue reading →

Unfortunately, the hard drive on my computer is going bad again. My computer froze shortly after I booted up this morning. When I rebooted I heard noises coming from the drive and got the blue screen of death. Fortunately, the … Continue reading →

Although it is fairly easily to get a single query string value, I recently found it was very difficult to get the entire querystring which I wanted to include in an error report. In order to store the querystring in … Continue reading →

I don’t like how my voice sounds when recorded with a PC microphone so I ordered over $500 of audio equipment. I bought a PreSonus Firebox 6×10 FireWire Recording Interface, a Shure SM58 Dynamic Handheld Microphone, a Sony MDR7506 Large … Continue reading →

Yesterday I spent the most time working on some complicated SQL queries. I learned how to use table aliases to reference the same table twice. My query was returning multiple records for a customer because some customers had multiple addresses. … Continue reading →

I’ve been spending so much time chatting with YouTube celebrities on Stickam that I’ve decided to put the time to good use and do some programming with the Stickam API. The Stickam API allows you to determine if a user … Continue reading →

Yesterday I visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum rather than hang around the National Book Festival. The 2006 National Book Festival was pretty boring. You could only buy books by the featured authors, stand in a long line to have … Continue reading →

Tomorrow I am going to the 2006 National Book Festival on a bus trip sponsored by the James V Brown Library. I will be out of town for the entire day and will not be able to get any work … Continue reading →

Today I received in the mail ASP.NET 2.0 For Dummies and Adobe Premiere Pro For Dummies. I like reading Dummies books because they are a good way to get an introduction to a subject without spending a lot of time … Continue reading →