RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

Why is Avatar one of the highest grossing movie of all time? I believe the use of high quality 3D special effects is the answer, not because of a compelling story and great acting. I don’t know firsthand because the Bow Tie Cinemas projector malfunctioned when I went to see it over the holidays. I got a refund instead of seeing the movie. [Update: Finally saw Avatar. Story is a rework of Custer's last stand with environmental consciousness overlaid.  3D is ho-hum. CGI fantastic!]

Movie theaters have long been a test bed for new technology. Wide screen video first graced movie theaters in the late 1920s, but fell into disuse in the depression. It was revived in the early 1950s to compete with TV. 3D was introduced about the same time. I remember watching a 3D horror film in the 1950s. I wore cardboard glasses with one red-tinted lens and the other green-tinted. The movie was awful. The 3D effect was not good. 3D movies disappeared shortly afterwards. Hollywood recently revived 3D, using newer technologies to provide people with a reason to go out to the movies. If you have a good home theater, why pay $10 or more to go the movies?

Sound systems in most movie theaters are far superior to home setups. Theaters have many high quality speakers. The surround system is tuned for the theater. Surround sound premiered in theaters and has slowly made its way into home setups. Stereo systems gave way to 5.1 systems. Some consumer electronics manufacturers have pushed 7.1 or 7.2 systems to sell more speakers and related equipment. But there is no 7.1 standard.

Most home setups are acoustic nightmares. The rooms are asymmetric with windows on one or more sides. The room may not have four walls and may be opened on one or two sides. Often the seating area is not centered in the space. The surround speakers are hard to wire because they need to be placed at seated ear level on the sides of the seating area. Running these speaker wires is difficult. Wireless speakers exist. They have issues and are not really wireless. They need to plug into nearby A/C power outlets.

Tuning a surround system used to be a time-consuming chore, requiring experts with special equipment. Fortunately, that is no longer the case, most new audio/video receivers come with an inexpensive microphone and built-in hardware that lets you tune the surround system in 10 minutes, without needing an expert. Audyssey is the company that makes that possible.

Tomlinson Holman is the chief scientist at Audyssey. He is also a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His name may be unfamiliar. He is the “TH” of THX. He was the first to refer to surround sound as “5.1″ because “5.055″ didn’t have marketing appeal. (The “0.1″ is for the low frequencies played on the sub-woofer.) He thinks the next step in audio is to 10.2 surround sound.

The 10.2 system adds two more front speakers, to the right of right and left of left. The system adds a rear center speaker. Two front speakers, near the ceiling, sit left and right, high above the plane of the others. The left sub-woofer serves low frequency sounds for the left side speakers and the right does the same for the right side. The high speakers allow a movie to produce the effect of sound moving up or down. Imagine the effect of a space shuttle launch with those speakers in place.

Wiring one of these setups would be worse than 5.1. The back of a receiver is cramped now with 6 sets of wires. But tuning this would be simple with new Audyssey chips. And once we get holographic image displays like in Star Wars… we will be entertained.

On New Year’s eve I mistakenly uninstalled WordPress from this blog thinking I was working on WHIT.tv, the What’s Happening In… Telecasts, another site I own and manage. I wanted to change the WHIT.tv WordPress installation from the single user version to WordPress MU (multi-user) since WHIT.tv will host a series of Internet video shows, with multiple contributors. The first three shows will be What’s Happening in Fashion, What’s Happening in Gardening, and What’s Happening in Rolling Sculpture. I am working on launching the website and the shows.

How did this happen?
I pay GoDaddy to host both sites. They have great service, good prices and reliable hosting. They also have one of the most confused and confusing websites in existence. I went to their website, logged in and clicked on hosting under the My Products section of the home page.

This is what I saw:
I clicked on the second Manage Account link, the one for WHIT.tv. I was then taken to the Hosting Control Center v2.10.0 Home page, where I clicked on the Your Applications button. I navigated to My Applications – WordPress (installed), and clicked on the link to uninstall the application, thinking I was on WHIT.tv and only WHIT.tv, since the initial link I clicked on was to manage the WHIT.tv account. I was mistaken. I was on both sites and I had clicked on the wrong link, unknowingly uninstalling WordPress from RHFtech.com and not WHIT.tv.

I called GoDaddy and told them I had just deleted several years worth of work and that I needed them to restore the site. They said they could do that for $150. I gave them my credit card number and authorized them to restore my site, figuring I would save several hours worth of headaches in trying to restore my site myself from my backups.

GoDaddy tried and failed. After a week’s worth of attempts I asked for a refund, which is under review at GoDaddy. [Update: GoDaddy refunded my money.]

This morning I searched for how to restore from a backup. Yes, I have many backups as I am pretty good about that. First, I had to install the phpMyAdmin plugin into the WordPress installation. That took a minute. I then followed the instructions at WordPress.org Restoring Your Database from Backup. It took me a couple of minutes to follow those instructions.

And now this blog is back to the way it was before the New Year’s eve massacre. I am thankful that I backup regularly. I am thankful that my Google search found Restoring Your Database from Backup. I wonder, why couldn’t GoDaddy do this?