Month: October 2004

2 Caption Templates for MS Producer

Posted on by

If you purchase the MS Producer resource disk available here HERE you will find it contains an example of a Captioned Video template, along with this white paper captioning in Producer (MS Word format)

I found the one captioning template on the CD (captioned video with fixed-size slides) was a good beginning but quickly realized I needed several others. I made two more, which can be downloaded below. To use these templates, unzip them, and put the entire folders into the Producer templates directory on your C drive.
Within Producer, they will show up within the Templates area as:

“Standard Captioned Audio – Resizable Slides” Download Zip File (36K)
and “Standard Captioned Video (320×240) – Resizable Slides” Download Zip File (36K))

Continue reading

CSS Border-top does not show in empty cells

Posted on by

In IE, borders created by styling a table cell with “border-top” attribute do not show up when used on a td tag, unless there is some content inside the cell, at least a non-breaking space. This is not the case in other browsers – the border will show up even when the cell is blank.

In the example below, there is a single table, with three columns and three rows, but only the first 2 rows contain anything. The last row is completely empty. The tag “td” has been styled with


border-top-width: 2px;
border-top-style: solid;
border-top-color: #003399;

Continue reading

What Caused the Flu Vaccine Shortage?

Posted on by

I did a little research into why we now only have two (no, make that one!) suppliers of flu vaccine for the entire US, and why that supply is available only through the government. If the authors quoted below are correct, perhaps current policy needs to be revised.

I’ve heard various politicians and administrators lately (most recently Tommy Thompson) telling us how the flu vaccine shortage is not a public health problem, and people questioning how dangerous the flu can be. I have to disagree with them – for anyone who has asthma or respiratory diseases, or simply doesn’t have a lot of defense against the flu, ithe possibility of getting a bad case of the flu can be a pretty scary prospect.

Continue reading

Can’t install OS X on a newly partitioned firewire drive

Posted on by

Since upgrading to 10.3.5 and Final Cut Pro 4.5 HD I have been having no end of problems with Final Cut crashing on launch (solved that one here) and with “log and capture” freezing toward the end of a tape.

I decided to revert to using OS X 10.3.4, and attempted to install it on a new 200 GB Firewire drive I had laying around.

I started up using the Panther install disk, then opened Disk Utility, and partitioned the drive. Then I opened the installer and attempted to install OS X onto it. However the three partition icons for that drive all had the little red “stop” sign over them, and selecting any of those icons got me this message:

“You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot startup your computer using this volume.”

Quitting the installer and then restarting it made it recognize the partitions as bootable, and the problem was solved.

Continue reading