I was first exposed to reality television because my wife watched some of the shows, and I occasionally watched them with her.

Admittedly some of them were pretty entertaining.

But after watching some of the shows for several episodes, I started to believe that many of the conflicts within the shows were contrived and started to wonder how much of what occurred on the shows happened spontaneously and how much was fabricated/scripted.

This year, I started watching CBS’s Big Brother 12 (the 12th season of the U.S. Big Brother franchise, a show that takes place in various forms in many different countries).

I was intrigued by what I believed was the concept of the show:  a group of people, sequestered in a house for a period of time, engaging in some competitions for rewards and punishments, eventually leading to one person remaining at the end who would win a substantial cash prize ($500,000).

There was assured conflict as the house guests lived in close quarters and betrayal as they fought each other to remain in contention for the grand prize at the end.

The house inhabitants are monitored at all times by numerous remote-controlled cameras (as well as Big Brother himself of course) and wear wireless microphones at all times (except while sleeping) so that all their conversations can be heard.

Video from those cameras is used on the televised episodes (that are broadcast three times a week; one of which is broadcast live) and are also available continuously (more or less – keep reading below) online as live feeds (for a fee).

I had previously believed that the entertainment of reality television contest shows resulted from selective casting in order to ensure personality conflicts during the course of the show.  (Putting certain personality types together invariably results in clashes.)

What I have found is although that’s true, it’s only part of the equation.

Because the Big Brother network televised prime-time programs present only an edited and very concise version of some of what occurs in the house I was interested in seeing more of the interaction between the house guests.

So I subscribed to the live feeds and got some interesting insight into the show that prime-time viewers miss.

As it turns out, the live feeds also served to confirm my suspicions that the content of reality television is deliberately manipulated.

After starting to watch the Big Brother live feeds I noticed occasional interruptions of the video which were filled by a logo screen.  At first, I assumed that this was due to technical glitches and buffering problems for the video streaming.

However, I found that the live feeds were turned off during game competitions (and are replaced with screens showing Big Brother past season trivia) and also intentionally interrupted at other times (sometimes for lengthy periods) by the show’s producers for a variety of reasons that further raised my suspicions.

A very few instances of the live feeds being cut were precipitated by legitimate reasons (for instance music from a commercial CD being picked up by the microphones the contestants wear; a possible copyright infringement).

But at other times the feeds weren’t cut as intended and revealed things such as the show’s producers telling the house guests to “do another take” (just like a scripted show).

Those leaks made it obvious there was more going on when the feeds were cut off than one might believe.

The house guests are also individually called into the “diary room” for confidential interviews and chats with Big Brother and its producers.  Some parts of these sessions end up on the prime time TV shows, but most of what goes on in the diary sessions is kept from the viewers, offering the producers plenty of opportunity for covert manipulation.

Additionally, the competitions themselves favor certain house guests (some are physical challenges and some are quizzes), and with careful selection thereof the show’s producers can guide the outcome to large degree.

For instance, this season just when it seemed like the house guests were ridding themselves of the season’s “showmance” (a romantic involvement during the show) couple of Rachel and Brendon by evicting them in back to back weeks, the Head of Household (HOH) competition was won by Brendon ensuring he wouldn’t be sent packing.

This also made it likely that he would attempt to exact his revenge on those who had just evicted his new girlfriend from the house.

The competition was a rope course, where the rope was tied around each players’ waist, then through a grid of other ropes in various knots along which the contestants had to untie the knots and carry the coil of rope as they went.

The event could have been won by anyone were it not for the fact that the rope itself was a heavy rope (made wet, and even heavier, by an artificial rainstorm and water under the course) that the smaller house guests would assuredly have had difficulty carrying by the end of the course.

Thereby this competition favored the physically larger and stronger house guests (like Brendon, Lane and Hayden who did in fact fare better than any of the other contestants).

Brendon’s victory ensured the show would be much more interesting, and although the competition wasn’t totally rigged (Brendon still had to complete the course before the others) it still implicitly favored some contestants over others.

Coincidentally earlier in the game Brendon had been complaining about other competitions (namely the surfboard and paint can “endurance” competitions) favoring the smaller contestants, and from comments made on the live feeds the house guests clearly understand and concede that Big Brother plays an active role in determining the outcome of the show.

Additionally, after becoming HOH, Brendon opened Pandora’s Box, and while he left the house for a period of time Rachel was allowed back into the house which created instant drama in conflict.

Then before leaving again she left Brendon a message written with pretzels telling him to evict Matt.

Although the other house guests believed this action to be a violation of the rules and complained to Big Brother about it, they were apparently told in spite of all the cameras that Big Brother simply hadn’t noticed the message.

Yeah, right…

By coincidence, at the time Matt happened to be holding a Diamond Power of Veto which he wasn’t planning on using.  When he was subsequently put up for eviction as a replacement nominee (due in part at least to the pretzel message), he was forced to use the Diamond Power of Veto, an action that made for more dramatic television.

Now lest you believe this is illegal because there are laws prohibiting the rigging of contest shows, it turns out that Big Brother isn’t considered a contest/game show at all which relieves its producers of any requirement to not affect the outcome of the “game”.

Unbeknownst to many, Big Brother is in fact classified as merely an “entertainment show”.

From CBS’s own message forums, from someone who contacted the FCC with concerns about the game being rigged (my emphasis):

Here is a copy of a response from The FCC: Thanks for contacting the FCC via the online inquiry form, with your inquiry (designated IC Number: 07-x1327xxxx), regarding the ”reality”show ”Big Brother.” We will close your inquiry IC Number:07-x1327xxxx with this response: A “game show” in which selected contestants (vs. members of the public) participate is governed by Section 509 of Title 47 of the United States Code (USC), and regulated by the Department of Justice. However ”Big Brother” does not appear to meet the definition of a”game show.” Rather, it is a ”for entertainment only” program,somewhat similar to professional wrestling in that it is a pseudo-contest in which the outcome is fully, or in some measure, predetermined

And that, pretty much says it all…

In addition, the Big Brother contestants are actually paid to appear on the show, outside of the various prizes offered in the game, including the grand prize.

That in essence, makes them simply paid actors (under contract), participating in an ad-libbed television show, with competitions carefully and deliberately selected by the producers to add drama and interest.

Personally I would think it would be a lot more entertaining if the producers of these shows merely carefully cast its participants and just let things play out naturally, but the ratings might suffer.

So to ensure the ratings stay high, the producers instead take an ongoing active role.

There are a lot of reality competition shows that take the same tact.

But it also leads me to the conclusion that the other types of “reality” shows are also manipulated to keep the ratings high.

That’s not to say the practice doesn’t result in entertaining television.

Maybe this is all pretty common knowledge as well to those fans of reality television who’ve watched enough to become wise to what’s going on.  And it’s likely most of those fans don’t care either.

Regardless, the shows certainly aren’t forthright about what they really are.

Because there’s constant intervention by the show’s producers’, these “reality” TV shows are hardly reality.

I can’t recommend that for everyone, but I still think the UAC is a nuisance; especially since there isn’t any quick way to create a list of known programs that bypass the UAC (a white list).

Some people are working on programs that create a white list for the UAC and I tried the UAC Trust Shortcut but couldn’t get it to work.

There are a couple of ways apparently to manually create a white list for the UAC, including this multi-step process.  This is another method using the task manager to do the same thing.  (I haven’t tried either.)

One of the problems in disabling the User Access Control (UAC) in Windows 7 is that after doing so the sidebar and gadgets become inaccessible.

But there is a registry entry you can make to allow access to the gadgets with UAC off.

1. Open the Registry Editor, or regedit.exe. You can search for regedit in the Start Menu.
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Sidebar\Settings
3. Right-click and create a new DWORD (32-Bit) Value called AllowElevatedProcess.
4. Right-click AllowElevatedProcess and click Modify. Set the value to 1. Close the registry editor. Your gadgets should work with UAC off now.

There are plenty of websites documenting how to manually enter the registry fix as above, but I didn’t find any that included a registry (.reg) file to avoid having to go through the tedious process of navigating through the registry and making the entry manually.

So I created the file so that you can simply double click on the file and have the registry entry made for you.

Download the registry fix here.

(If you’re wary of downloading .reg files as well you should be, after downloading it simply right click on the file and select “Edit” and you can view the file, noting that it only contains the above entry.)

Make sure you make a registry backup (create a restore point) before you make the registry change!

One of the new receivers is a VIP612 DVR model.

My previous receiver had my Monsoon Multimedia Hava Platinum HD box hooked up to it.  Monsoon’s Hava line are competitors to the popular Slingbox Internet/network devices that allow one to view and control one’s TV remotely.

After I positioned the infrared (IR) emitters for the Hava in front of the new receiver, I ran the Hava setup, trying to change the Hava box infrared remote control codes for the new receiver, choosing the remote codes for the VIP622 receiver since the VIP612 wasn’t in the selection list.

But I couldn’t get the Hava remote control to work with the new receiver.

Initially I thought maybe the VIP622 remote had different codes than the VIP612, but after running through the manual codes, trying each one and finding none that worked realized I had another problem.

First I screwed around with the positioning of the IR emitters for the HAVA that are placed in front of the receiver IR port and didn’t have any success with that either.

I did some Internet searches on the problem without success, until I remembered the likely solution to the problem.

When I had set up my old Dish 510 receivers years before with the Hava, I remembered that the Hava IR remote controller only works if the Dish Network receiver remote address is set to number 1.

Sure enough, after changing the new receiver remote address to number 1, my Hava remote control functionality worked again, using the VIP622 remote codes for my VIP612 receiver.

Because of that, it’s not a very good lubricant at all.

(From Wikipedia):

The “WD” in WD-40 is actually an abbreviation for “water displacing”.  The formula was designed to get rid of water and prevent corrosion and was first used on the exteriors of Atlas rockets to prevent corrosion.

The formula in WD-40 is mostly solvent (50%), with some mineral oil (%15) as well.

From the WD-40 website:

Known as “the can with thousands of uses,” WD-40 protects metal from rust and corrosion, penetrates stuck parts, displaces moisture, and lubricates just about anything.

However, the lubricating component of the formula, mineral oil (also known as baby oil) of the type used in penetrating formula is low viscosity that won’t last long in many applications.

Also, because of the solvent in the formula, if it’s used on something with another type of lubricant on it, it likely will dissolve/remove the existing lubricant, which may or may not be desirable.

It’s thus usually best to re-lubricate with the same type of lubricant that was originally used on the part, instead of using WD-40 for that purpose.

And according to many online message threads frequented by auto repair aficionados, apparently there are much better penetrating lubricant products to free stuck/rusted bolts and nuts as well.

Mechanics seem to prefer Kroil, even though that’s apparently only available for purchase through industrial vendors or direct from their website.

Others swear by PB Blaster, Liquid Wrench or Corrosion X.

Regardless, as it turns out, if you do use WD-40, it turns out it’s not a very good or long-lasting lubricant.  As for penetrating lubricants used to free/rusted stuck nuts and bolts the “experts” also seem to prefer other products.

Overall, WD-40 is a pretty mediocre lubricant because it’s mostly intended to displace moisture, and I can only attribute its popularity for that use to good and/or misleading marketing.

On July 17th I placed an order for a pair of shoes.  I received an email confirming the order.

Then a couple days later I received the following email (my emphasis):

20-Jul-2010

Dear …,

Great news, your order is on its way.

Order number XXXXXXXXX has shipped containing item(s) listed below.

Orders with multiple items may ship separately. We will send you a ship confirmation for each shipment to keep you updated on the status of your order.

I had actually ordered two pairs of shoes in two separate orders.  It was the prompt processing of the one order that called my attention to the other order.

One pair of the shoes arrived on Thursday, July 22nd.  When the other pair didn’t arrive, I checked the online shipping status at the UPS website, which showed the shipping status as “Billing Information Received”.

I waited patiently until July 27th when I sent an inquiry about the status of the order.

I received the following reply from Sears.com (again my emphasis):

Thank you for contacting Sears.com regarding order # XXXXXXXXX.

We appreciate that you chose us for your online shopping needs!

Your order shipped did ship on 7/20/10 and is currently, your shipment is on its way to our UPS Direct Ship Hub located in your local area. Please allow between three and five business days for the UPS website to update. At that time, UPS.com will also indicate an expected delivery date for you. This process was developed to ensure our promised delivery expectations.

As soon as your merchandise arrives at the UPS Hub you will be able to visit www.ups.com and track your shipment progress.

We are here for you; please reply should you have any further questions.

We’re here to make everything easier. Take our survey to tell us how we’re doing.

Too bad I didn’t bother to take the survey, but I wasn’t annoyed (yet).

According to the email I just needed to wait a day or two more.

So I waited the five business days and yet the UPS shipping status failed to change, remaining as “Billing Information Received”.

So I sent another email inquiry, and received the following smarmy reply that instantly annoyed me.

Wondering about your return? We are pleased to inform you that we have received and processed your return. Your credit has also been applied to your account.

We are very sorry that we were not able to meet your need with this purchase. Our Personal Shoppers would be delighted to assist you with any of your shopping needs. They can be reached at 1-800-290-8390 and are ready to help.

Sincerely,
Imran Jooma
Senior Vice President, e-Commerce

The only problem is that I wasn’t wondering about my return.  In fact I hadn’t even asked for a return.  So I fired off an email demanding an explanation.

Here’s what I finally received from Sears.com:

Thank you for contacting Sears.

We appreciate your concerns regarding your order, XXXXXXXXX. We apologize for the miss information you have received regarding the return and cancelation of your order.

I have reviewed your order and show that the item you are interested in is unavailable and we have been forced to cancel it. When reviewing your order we has found that your order had not shipped due to being unavailable.

Occasionally, demand for our hottest items surpasses our supply. When this happens with items that are not discontinued, our stores may be able to issue you a rain check. This rain check allows you to purchase the item at a later date for the original the sale price. At this time, we do not issue rain checks online.

Well, at least it was an explanation.  Finally…

But the explanation came only after my demand and after several meaningless emails that clearly were written without anyone taking the time to actually examine the details of the order itself.

I wouldn’t have been nearly as annoyed had they actually looked into the order initially instead of giving me the run-around and wasting my time.

And why bring up rain checks at all if you don’t offer them?!

The bigger problem of course is that they only discovered that my order hadn’t shipped when I inquired about it.  What kind of order fulfillment system do they have that can’t realize that 10 days after an order is made that the item is unavailable?!

How long were they going to let the order sit without being filled?  When, if ever, were they going to tell me it had been delayed?  Why would they send out an email telling me the item was shipped when in fact it hadn’t been?

I have to wonder how long it would have taken for Sears.com to realize the item wasn’t in stock if I wouldn’t have made inquiries.

Regardless, between the lack of genuine attention in response to my queries, and their failure to even realize the item they said had shipped but apparently had never even been processed (besides charging me for it, that is) demonstrates they (still) have some serious problems when it comes to both order fulfillment and customer service.

It’s not exactly official, but should also surprise no one: According to a new study the psychological profile of iPad owners can be summed up as “selfish elites” while have-not critics are “independent geeks.”

Read the full article at Wired here.

Also, another report states that Apple has more software security vulnerabilities than either Microsoft or Oracle.  Who would’ve thunk it?…

The latest data shows that Apple has surpassed Oracle and even Microsoft with accounting for the most software vulnerabilities, though the No. 1 ranking is related only to the number of vulnerabilities–not to how risky they are or how fast they get patched.

Finally, here’s an article on How Steve Jobs Became Jesus Christ Technology.

As you’ve already noticed, this blog/website has undergone a face lift.

I made the change for a couple of reasons.

First, as it’s summertime and I’ve been busy with other projects I’ve neglected my blogging here a bit.  The new format makes it much easier to see the latest entries and when they occurred (which lately is weeks apart…).

Additionally I’ve always felt that the blog entries ran together a bit when presented in the normal weblog format.  By breaking up the entries it adds organization and makes them easier to digest.

I looked for an online magazine format to use, such as they use on some of my favorite geeky sites, like Gizmodo, Blorge, and Lifehacker.

This task was made quite easy with the flexibility of my blogging software, WordPress.

All that was needed was a new theme, and once I found one that had the desired format, it was simply a question of starting to customize it to my own tastes.

That’s one of the best things about WordPress: it’s highly customizable and has lots of free plug-ins and themes out there that make it relatively easy to make one’s blog look and work the way one wants.

It’s still work-in-progress, but what do you think of the new look?

This entry was inspired by both the video below, and the fact that a friend at work just had his Windows notebook croak on him and replaced it with an expensive Apple MacBook.

Apple makes devices that are artfully styled, and some of their software and interfaces work quite well.  The iPod interface for instance, is genius.

On the other hand, Apple products are generally more expensive than its competitors, and these days often aren’t leaps and bounds easier to use than other competing products.

A large part of Apple’s success is its ability to generate buzz for their products, and they successfully market them to a particular audience that has very little or no interest in researching or understanding the underlying technology of modern electronic devices.

There are lots of people who don’t want to understand or know anything about their phones and computers; they just want to be able to turn them on and have them work.  They don’t care about things like processor type and speed or screen resolution.

Apple’s marketing has in fact always downplayed and masked the underlying technology that intimidates and frustrates so many.

That’s the genius of Apple marketing of course.  They appeal to a technology-averse audience; in fact they sell the idea that being techno-ignorant is hip and cool.  Scared of computers but want one anyway?  Get a Mac!

Apple doesn’t have to compare their devices’ specifications with the competition because what’s inside isn’t important to their market audience.  They are then left to simply pitch the idea that their products are easier-to-use, cooler, better, more innovative, or unique (even though they may not be).  Apple can simply say its devices are better, and its target market might very well believe it.

Its market is willing to pay extra for even a perceived advantage in ease of use of the product; not necessarily an actual advantage.

The Apple target market buys based on the allure of stylish and easy-to-use devices.  They don’t care about what’s behind the shiny cover; they just want to buy the device, turn it on and have it work.

It reminds me of a story I heard while I was in college.  I had a friend who worked as a stereo salesman who told me of a customer who bought a stereo receiver, took it home and plugged it in, only to return to the store the next day with the receiver, complaining it didn’t work.  The customer said it failed to produce any sound.

The salesman asked what kind of speakers the customer had connected to the receiver.

To that the customer replied, “Speakers?…  Doesn’t the sound just come out of the slots in the top of the receiver?”…

It’s not unlike the people who could never figure out how to set the clocks on their VCRs, which blinked “12:00″ forever, and also rendered the VCR useless for timed recordings.

I won’t go as far as saying that Apple’s target market is stupid, but they’re definitely self-admitted techno-dunces that are more often than not more interested in the color and styling of their electronic gadgets than what’s inside.

And as for the quality of some of Apple’s products, between the problems with signal reception on the new iPhone 4 depending on how one holds the phone during a call, and the subsequent discovery that the formula used to display the signal strength on all iPhones was wrong, I think they speak for themselves.

I certainly can’t see myself spending a premium price to own an Apple product (but then I’m one of those geeky uncool Windows/PC/Android types too).

These days particular cell phone models (like the iPhone) are limited to particular carriers, and I’m not going to change my cell phone provider based on a particular phone model they offer regardless.

As for computers, if I were in the market and competing items were priced the same I would certainly consider an Apple model, but then I would “look under the hood” too, and that’s when I would likely be disappointed in what I found inside.

(Language in the following video NSFWp)

(Note:  the synthesized/robotic voices in the video are generated through the program that makes animated movie clips that can be found here.)

(Most of that was admittedly my fault of course, but that fact didn’t make it any less annoying…)

My desktop machine is the PC that I have running RAID 1 (mirrored) drives.

The problem with RAID drives is that they have to be initialized as RAID drives.  You can’t initialize a drive as non-RAID, put data on it, then convert it to RAID later.  When you initialize the drive as RAID all data on it is lost.

Too bad I forgot that when I started the project…

I bought two 2 TB drives to be put into a RAID 1 configuration, to replace the two 1 TB drives I had already installed in a RAID 1 configuration that were getting full.

I thought about creating a RAID 5 array but as I wasn’t looking for increased performance decided to stick with my RAID 1 configuration.  (I had run a RAID 0 (striped) drive configuration a while ago and couldn’t tell the difference in performance anyway then.)

At first I forgot about having to initialize a drive as a RAID drive, so I initialized one of the new 2 TB drives in Windows 7 and simply used Macrium Reflect Free Edition to write an image to it.

I discovered Macrium Reflect last year when I was cloning drives.

Drive imaging programs won’t let you write an image to the same drive you’re going to write the image to later (although you can write to a separate partition on the same drive).  That means you need two new drives (or at least one new drive twice the size of the drive you’re copying) to copy/clone an existing drive; one to write the image to, and the drive the image will be written to.

After I created the image of the original drive with Macrium Reflect on one of the new 2 TB drives I wrote the image on it back to the other new drive with Macrium Reflect again.

But when I tried to boot Windows 7 off the new drive it wouldn’t work.

I got a “windows failed to start”, “file:\windows\system32\winload.exe”, “status 0xc000000e” error.

It didn’t matter anyway, because as I mentioned, the drive wasn’t initialized as a RAID drive to begin with, so once I did that the data on the drive was lost.  Duh…

So I started all over.

I could of course run the single RAID drive as a “degraded” RAID array so that I could use the other to write the image to (once the second drive was added to the degraded array it would rebuild the array, mirroring the files to the other drive), but instead opted to create the RAID array first with both drives, then create a separate partition for the image on the same drive as the image would be written to.

My logic was that I would save the time it would take to rebuild the array this way.

This time I decided to try and use the Windows 7 backup utility.  But after running overnight I realized it had locked up on me without finishing.  Had it worked I’m not sure I would have gotten the desired result anyway, so I certainly wasn’t willing to waste the time trying it again anyway.

So I went back to using Macrium Reflect again, writing the original drive image to a partition spannning half of the new RAIDed 2 TB drive.

Then I restored the image to the other half of the new drive.

Unfortunately I was to discover this to be a painfully slow process.  Because both partitions were on the same drive, writing about a 1 TB image from one partition on the drive to another on the same drive took about 20 hours!

In retrospect it would probably have been a lot quicker to write the image to one of the new drives, and restore the image from it to the other drive running as a single degraded RAID drive.  Then I could have added the second drive to the RAID array and then let the RAID rebuild the array in the background.  If I ever do this sort of thing again I’ll have to try and remember to try doing it that way.

Once that was finally done, I tried to reboot onto the new drive again and experienced the same error.

In order to restore the system files, I had to boot off the Windows 7 install disk (a Windows 7 repair disk will work too) and do a repair installation, which made some changes to the drive, and then reboot on the install disk again, which made some more changes.

Once that was done I was finally able to boot off the cloned drive.

After I had successfully booted up Windows 7 I ran disk management (Right click on computer | Manage | Storage | Disk Management).  There I was able to delete the partition on the drive containing the drive image, and then resize the other partition to span the entire drive.

I’ll give Microsoft just a bit of credit for finally adding a partition resizing function into the Windows 7 operating system, but it would be nice if they would have a clone drive/replace drive functionality built in as well.

I’m still stuck with my Windows 7 installation on the D: drive (when I installed Windows 7 it preserved my Windows 7 RC1 installation on the C: drive) too, but I don’t believe there is an easy fix for that, save for a complete operation system install.  Although I contemplated doing that, that’s a project for another time.