Samuel's Blog

Kevin Blyton recovering from heart surgery

Kevin Blyton, Managing Director of the Capital Radio Network, is recovering from multiple bypass surgery in a Sydney hospital.

Best wishes to Kevin for a speedy recovery.

Samuel

December 5th, 2008 at 01:26pm

For Dinner

A dinner suggestion from a kid in Michel’s Patisserie Weston yesterday:

Ice cream soup with chocolate sauce.

Sounds great, I wonder what vegetables will be included in the soup.

Samuel

December 5th, 2008 at 01:14pm

QuickTime Confusion

Last night when I went to open iTunes, I was greeted by a rather annoying error stating that iTunes could not be opened due to a “detected” problem with QuickTime. Apple recommend uninstalling QuickTime and then installing it again under these circumstances, but that sounds like a bit of a “we don’t know, but this might help” solution to me.

Considering that nothing had changed since I used iTunes about 24 hours before receiving the error, I figured that I would see if I could sort the problem out myself before resorting to a reinstallation. I remembered that a few hours before the error I started loading a large MP3 (Samuel’s Persiflage #8 to be precise) in Firefox, but cancelled it by closing the tab it was in when I realised that for one reason or another, Firefox was insisting on downloading the full file before letting the QuickTime plugin play it, which is a change from its previous behaviour of letting the QuickTime plugin play the file while it is downloading.

My thought was that, possibly, a QuickTime process was still active and was preventing iTunes from loading QuickTime properly. I couldn’t see any QuickTime processes in the Task Manager, so I tested the theory by launching QuickTime from the start menu…oddly this resulted in an installation wizard, which produced the following rather insightful message:

I somewhat nervously hit “OK” and watched the progress bar indicate that the setup routine was doing something, although I haven’t the faintest clue what it was doing as I wasn’t prompted with a Windows UAC “Are you sure that you want to grant this program permission to do stuff?” message, which indicates that no changes were made in the Windows or Program Files directories.

Once Setup finished, QuickTime loaded, and iTunes was able to work. It’s beyond me what that was all about, but at least I didn’t have to waste time going through Apple’s website to find the somewhat hidden standalone QuickTime installer.

Samuel

December 5th, 2008 at 09:56am

And another three weeks of radio

As I noted earlier this week, from the 15th to the 19th of December I will be working for 2QN and Classic Rock in Deniliquin.

As it happens, 1WAY FM’s breakfast host James Scott will be taking leave for four weeks starting on the 15th. Obviously I won’t be in town during the first week of his absence, however from the 22nd of January until the 9th of January I will be in town and filling in for James. This will include Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day.

So, it’s a week of news in Deniliquin, during which I will be taking unpaid leave from my “day job” in Canberra, and then three weeks of Breakfast on 1WAY FM, which conveniently coincides with shifts which don’t occur during the morning at my “day job”.

I might be pushing myself a bit to cover a breakfast show and maintain my “day job” for those few weeks, but I think it will be fun. I’m considering putting in for leave for late January or at some stage in February anyway…but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Samuel

1 comment December 5th, 2008 at 07:15am