As you may or may not be aware, what we're doing with these blogs and profiles here on Bakersfield.com is getting a lot of national attention.

As I talk to more people about it, I'm hearing the following phrase more and more:

"If you can do this in Bakersfield, you can do it anywhere."

One person preceded that with, "No offense, but ..."

So what do you all think about this statement? Does it speak highly of us and how innovative we are, or is it a slam in disguise? We need to come up with another city to use as an example, I think.

On the flip side, I have also personally received e-mails from people as far away as the UK saying that they want to visit or move to Bakersfield because of the interesting people who live here. And how do they get to know those people? Through your blogs and comments, of course! You all are famous.

OK, I just have to say -- no matter where you're originally from, how long you've lived here, or what kind of climate you like  -- it is too dang hot for words to describe! Am I the only one who walks outside and wonders if someone set off an atomic bomb? I take a breath and the air the comes into my lungs is like the air in a sauna.

 

If I walk anywhere outside, I'm like a fountain of sweat 10 minutes later. For the first time in my life I'm bringing a stick of deoderant to work to apply liberally between outings. I'm sorry, but that's just too hot!

 

How do you deal with the heat? Post a comment here.

A group of good friends just banded together to get me a Video iPod. They must have been reading all of my posts about getting TiVo shows onto my Treo smartphone and felt sorry for me or something. (It's actually a little more complex than that, but I won't get into it in this post).

At any rate, I've been playing around with it and iTunes this weekend. I ran into a problem with the audio track in videos and traced it to QuickTime 7.1, which is required for the latest version of iTunes. iTunes 6 or higher is in turn required to use all the features on the Video iPod. And to complicate matters further, you can't even use the latest version of iTunes without QuickTime 7.1 since it installs them together.

Videos were playing fine, but the audio tracks were choppy. After about five minutes of playing any video in iTunes or QuickTime -- including any QuickTime movie, such as a movie trailer from a web site -- the audio would kick in a-a-and i-i-it-w-w w-wo-would s-so-sound l-li-like t-th-this. It was beyond annoying. QuickTime movies, and all videos played in iTunes, were useless on my computer.

I did a little research and found this help discussion on Apple, and it solved it for me:
http://discussions.apple.co...

To be specific, I did the following:

1. Right-click on the QuickTime icon in the Windows taskbar.
2. Choose QuickTime Preferences.
3. Select the Audio tab
4. Next to "Rate," set it to 44.1 96 khz
5. Next to "Size," set it to 96 khz
6. Click the Apply button
7. Click OK
8. Go to either iTunes or QuickTime to play a Video.

The exact settings may be different depending on your sound card, so if that doesn't work play around with different combinations of Rate and Size and see what happens.

If you have this problem and this solves it, please post a comment here. Also, let me know if you find other solutions or have tips for optimizing audio and video in QuickTime.

Hi folks,

By popular demand, we now have a Last 50 Comments page. It's a way for you to stay on top of discussions. This is just a stopgap measure before we launch a much more robust way to track comments and discussions all over Bakersfield.com.

If your primary way of interacting with blogs is via comments, this should make it that much easier. You can find a link to the page at the bottom of the list of recent comments on What's Hot Now (which you can get to by clicking the People tab or link above). We hope to add permanent navigation to the top of every blog and underneath the People tab soon.

If you're working on a long blog post entry, you may want to save draft copies. This will make sure that your content isn't lost in the event that your Internet connection goes down. Here's how to do it:

1. When your writing a blog entry, look at the bottom of the screen for a Save Draft button. Click it. It will be saved on our servers, but won't be visible to anyone but you.
2. When you're ready to continue writing, sign in and click on the Edit My Content button that shows up in the row of buttons on the left. You will also see this button in the My Stuff box on the right.
3. Click "Blog Posts" that appears under that button. Find the entry you were writing and click Edit, or Post to My Blog.

Just like with anything else you do on a computer, it's a good idea to perform incremental saves every 15 minutes or so -- especially if you're spending a lot of time on something.

Hi everyone,

Some users had trouble signing in to read stories and post entries and comments on blogs this morning. The underlying problem was identified and fixed, and we will be putting changes in place that should prevent this from happening again.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Thanks to those of you who notified us of the problem. We consider you partners with us in the effort  to make Bakersfield.com more interactive and participatory experience, and we really appreciate all of your help. And of course, we love seeing your posts and comments!

If you encounter any other problems in the future -- or you just have some ideas or feedback -- please feel free to contact me or post a comment here. I'll look into it immediately.

Dan Pacheco
Senior Manager of Digital Products
The Bakersfield Californian