DVD Flick is a free, open source program that can take a variety of video files — AVI, MPG, MOV, MP4, FLV, etc. — and compile them onto a DVD that can be played back on any standard DVD player.

MSNBC reports on a fascinating study that, as the headline writer puts it, confirms that “meetings make us dumber.”

The study showed participants a soft drink brand and asked them to brainstorm for alternative brands. What they found was the that people asked to perform the task by themselves performed significantly better than people who were put into groups of three to tackle the task.

According to MSNBC,

“When a group gets together, they can miss out on good options,” study team member H. Shanker Krishnan told LiveScience. This could mean ordering from a pizza place advertised on television even if there’s a better option, or making a poor decision in the boardroom. “Whether it’s with family or a group of co-workers, we could very quickly fixate on things and all come up with the same options.”

. . .

The researchers speculate that when a group of people receives information, the inclination is to discuss it. The more times one option is said aloud, the harder it is for individuals to recall other options, explained Krishnan, associate professor of marketing at Indiana University.

Ah, yes . . . the joys of groupthink.

Source:

Meetings makes us dumber, study shows. Abigail Leonard, MSNBC.Com, February 22, 2007.

Barry McWilliams has posted a short, but helpful guide to effective storytelling for beginners, with links to other articles about the art of storytelling.

The Democracy Player folks recently released Version 0.9.5 of their wonderful application for downloading and watching Internet video. This is a very slick app, but if you’re like me you’ll need yet another hard drive to hold the increasing number of very well done video feeds.

I must have this Jinx.Com t-shirt,

This LiveJournal page is filled with very colorful paintings of traditional monsters of myth and legend, such as this Minotaur,

Global Rich List allows you to enter your annual income and it spits back where you rank globally. For example, my annual salary is just barely over the median U.S. income, and yet that is enough to put me in the top 1 percent of income earners worldwide.

I recently had a series of nightmares with NTFS-formatted hard drives failing because of corrupt master file tables. NTFS apparently has a lot of difficulty with lots (>1 million) of subdirectories and files (>14 million), as I find NTFS drives predictably fail when I approach such large numbers.

I downloaded, tried and even bought a couple NTFS recovery tools, and QueTek’s File Scavenger was hands-down the best program I found for WinXP.

Quite a few of the programs I threw at the recovery process simply choked on the huge number of directories and files — they’d reach a certain process in analyzing the hard drive and then fail. Others could handle the recovery, but were unable to preserve the subdirectory and file names, so I’d end up with thousands of subdirectories labeled Unkown4752, Unknown4753, etc, with files often also labeled Uknown573.jpg, etc.

File Scavenger was the only program I tried that was able to reliably restore most or all of the data, and preserve the file/directory name information. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough — if you’re trying to recover an NTFS volume, definitely give this a try. The demo version’s diagnostic tools are fully functional — you only have to pay if you want to recover more than one file per day, so at least you can download, install and run the program to see if it will recover the data you need before you pay the $49 fee to register the program.