Tucker Brennan

Bringing out the serious TShirt artillery for #sixers game 6. (Taken with instagram)

Microsoft Fix It Center Pro is a web application for Windows Live users that is aiding users in the identification and troubleshooting of PC issues. Windows users should not confuse the service with Fix It Center Online, which is in fact a desktop application for Windows that can analyze and repair computer issues.

Fix It Center Pro has several features that can be used to diagnose certain PC issues.  Users who log in to the service with their Windows Live ID for the first time see a short introduction on the page, before they can start using it.

• Scan your system to identify and resolve specific problem areas by using targeted Analysis
• Find the most suitable content, tools, forums, and help to address the symptom that you see, or the task you are performing, using Guides Search
• Track research that you are doing on technical issues as Work Items. If you cannot solve a technical issue on your own, click the Escalate button to turn your work into a Support Request
• Track your existing Microsoft online Support Requests, or create new ones in Support Requests.

The ability to submit support requests, and to track requests linked to the Windows Live ID are noteworthy here. All you need to do to submit a new support request is to click on Support Requests, and then on the new button to start the process.

Here you select a Microsoft product and support category, which sometimes may result in solutions displayed directly on the screen. When you select to go forward, for instance if the suggestions were not related to the issue, you are asked to pick a support options. If you have a professional support license, or software assurance license, you can make use of those. If you do not, you select that you do not want to use a professional support license or contract.

If that is the case you can select to a paid callback option, or the free post to forum option. If you select free and forum, you are automatically redirected to the related support forum where you can ask your question.

You find all of your support requests listed in the Fix It Center Pro, which can be quite useful to keep an overview of all of them from one interface.

Next to support requests, you can make use of the guided search feature which basically asks you to pick a specific product, for instance Windows 7 Professional, to pick a topic. Topics may then link to a support forum, or a download on Microsoft Download.

Analysis is another feature the site provides to its users. It basically links to programs that you can run locally to analyze the PC, a feature or program.

Work Items finally allow you to document your efforts or attempts to troubleshoot a specific issue. You can escalate the issue at any time from here as well, which is identical to filing a support request.

Quite possibly the very first sketch of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — drawn by co-creator Kevin Eastman — is up for auction. From Eastman:

“Late in November 1983, (co-creator) Peter Laird and I were sharing a studio (our living room) in Dover, New Hampshire. One work night, in an effort to make Peter laugh, I drew a sketch of this character I called a ‘Ninja Turtle’ and threw it onto Peter’s desk. He did laugh, and did a version of his own — to which I needed to take it one step further, and did a pencil sketch of four different Turtles, each holding a different weapon — and gave it to Peter, who wanted to ink it in — and when he did, he added ‘Teenage Mutant’ to the ‘Ninja Turtle’ part of the logo, and we both fell off our chairs!

The next day, we both looked at the drawing, and decided that we really needed to come up with a story about how these characters came to be — and began to hammer out the story details. Deciding to make it an homage/parody to some of our heroes and inspirations (and dedicating it to them) we worked through the winter of 1983-84 and, after finding a local New England printer, we borrowed money from my Uncle Quentin and we printed the first 3,000 copies — premiering the book at a local Portsmouth comic convention May 5, 1984.

“From that day forward, and for the next 30 years, the TMNTs became a worldwide phenomenon (cartoons, toys, and movies) that even to this day we still try to completely understand — and it all started with this drawing.”

Bidding, which starts at $6,000, ends May 10.

[bestweekever]

Jimmy Fallon - Slow Jam The News with Barack Obama: Late Night with Jimmy Fallon by latenight

Coming late May, Nikon is to release the new WU-1a adapter to add transfer support and remote control ability for Android devices and your DSLR. With the dongle, you can easily snap a photo with your powerful lens, then transfer the image wirelessly to your smartphone for easy uploading to Facebook or Instagram. While that notion could possibly disgust professional photographers, it is nice to see Nikon embracing the social aspect of photo sharing that is taking place in the world currently.

In addition, you can use your Android phone as a live view display, as well as a shutter trigger, which could come in handy for folks. The adapter will cost $60 and is only compatible with the D3200 so far, but we expect there to be more cameras supported in the future.

Via: Nikon

Cheers Nas!

Besides being the Puff The Magic Dragon Passover, April 20th is particularly notable for two birthdays that will always live in infamy around these parts: Adolf Hitler and Fenway Park, the home of the Bahston Red Sox. The NY Post celebrated the latter of the two in true NY Post-style with the loving above front cover today. But some are questioning whether the Yankees and Red Sox even have a rivalry anymore. [ more › ]

Hepcat (I Can’t Wait) Conan O’ Brien Show sometime in the late 1990’s by truedestony1

Ben Lapps playing Going to California by whitespaniards

Second City! (Taken with instagram)

A 9 year old boy - who built an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto part store - is about to have the best day of his life. Help Caine’s Scholarship Fund: http://bit.ly/HDFdu7 Caine’s Arcade Online: http://on.fb.me/Iaeuke http://bit.ly/HDFdu8 Credits: Directed by Nirvan http://bit.ly/Iaeukf

Aziz Ansari’s 50 Cent Grapefruit Story: Dangerously Delicious Exclusive Preview by OfficialComedy

Surprised the Mets are #1.

Animated Sheet Music: “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane by dancohen

MAD MEN: THE GAME by TheFineBros

For more than three decades, veteran music journalist Pete Frame has specialized in creating fantastic Rock Family Trees that map relationships between musicians and bands. In the comments on my post yesterday about our Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree, commenter Preston Sruges pointed us to Frame’s family tree of New York New Wave, featuring the likes of Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and The Ramones. Frame has posted more than 2,000 (!) of the trees on his Family of Rock site — from Art School Dance to Seattle: Grunge to (one of my faves) the Velvet Underground. He has also compiled them into a series of books and releases prints too. They remind me of Fluxus artist George Maciunas’s incredible “Expanded Arts Diagram” that mapped the avant-garde scene of the early 1960s.

Sara Robinson’s written an excellent piece on the productivity losses associated with extra-long work-weeks, something that has been established management theory since the time of Ford, but which few employers embrace today. Americans are working longer hours than they have in decades, sacrificing their health, happiness and family lives, and all the data suggests that those extra hours are wasted — resulting in hourly productivity losses that offsets the additional hours worked. Everybody loses.

It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits — starting right now, today — is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing…

By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.

Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers’ Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. “Throughout the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,” writes Robinson; “and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.”

What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day. Likewise, the overall output for the work week will be exactly the same at the end of six days as it would be after five days. So paying hourly workers to stick around once they’ve put in their weekly 40 is basically nothing more than a stupid and abusive way to burn up profits. Let ‘em go home, rest up and come back on Monday. It’s better for everybody.

Yes, you can squeeze out some extra productivity with sporadic overtime pushes in the busy season (though the returns diminish — 80-hour weeks aren’t twice as productive as 40-hour ones), but if you turn “sporadic pushes” into business as usual, you’re just paying for the same work to take place over more hours while destroying your workers’ lives. You may not care about the latter — not if you’ve got five more applicants lined up to take the jobs of the workers who drop at their desks — but even so, why pay more for less?

Bring back the 40-hour work week

(via Beth Pratt)

(Image: Luigi Antonini speaks with a foot-sore picketer during the Dressmakers’ strike for overtime pay, as supporters look on., a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from kheelcenter’s photostream)

20 Years Ago.