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Berlin Wall Video Responses, Copyright and Background Information
How to Turn Paying Customers into Pirates
I want to use my registered copy of Babylon 7 Pro, including the additional professional dictionaries ???Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus???, ???Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate?? Dictionary and Thesaurus??? and ???Britannica Encyclopedia??? on my new Dell laptop with MS Vista (and soon on Windows 7). This is not much to ask for you would think. Hey, I bought this stuff directly from the author of the software and paid good money for it. I entered all license keys yesterday and everything was fine. Today all keys are gone and except for one that unlocks one of the three additional dictionaries, none is working anymore. When I entered the codes again, I received the message that I must have made a typo or something. I didn???t make a typo, thanks but no thanks. I went to their web site at Babylon.com I used the online form to retrieve license keys that they have created for this purpose I guess, enter the captcha code and my email address and submit the form. The form neither returned an error nor acknowledged the input telling me that new and valid license keys will be send to me again. Since I also did not get an email yet, I assume that it did not work as it was intended (hint: this implies another suggestion for the folks at Babylon). This is not the first time that I had to contact them about this. I lost count of how many different license keys I got from them for the same[…]
Michael Dell Gone? Dell Starts to Suck Now too!
Michael Dell, the entrepreneur who founded the computer retailer “Dell” and built it into a multi-billion dollars business must be gone from Dell. Once a poster child for customer centric marketing, web site performance enhancement making it better converting and more user friendly at the same time. Dell computers might not be the best computers on the planet in regards to their quality, but the company always made up for it via their customer support and service. It seems that the drive to improve on things stops after an order was placed and hopefully starts over after the computer was shipped to the customer. That is what I hope, because my experiences after I placed my order for a brand new Dell Studio XPS 16 Notebook on August 11, 2009 (17 days ago) things started to become really bad. Flashback I had serious issues with my computers to say it mildly. A series of hardware failures combined with the support that I paid for but never got, because the company who purchased the business from the retailer where I bought my previous notebook went out of business, 2 weeks before my hardware problems started. After all this misfortune I finally decided to buy another Dell. I purchased multiple Dell computers in the past and was overall happy with them and the service provided, if I had a problem with the machine. I thought that my string of bad luck had an end, when I saw that there is a great[…]
The Berlin Wall – August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989
I wrote in the past already two blog posts about the subject of the “Berlin Wall“, which accompanied videos that I created using moving and photographic images from those historic events. See The Berlin Wall – History Lessons Learned and The Berlin Wall and the Walls Between Us I created four versions of my “Berlin Wall” documentary already and also another short video that only depicts the events from 1989 that lead to the collapse of the East German regime. I am still not happy with the last version of it and still work on a version 5 of it. I gathered a lot more video material and found better quality sources for video images that I already used in the previous installments of my documentary. Also See Version 4 of my Video “The Berlin Wall – Lessons Learned” at Archive.org Special Video “Moments in History – The Fall of the Berlin Wall 1989” at Archive.org I also gathered some more historic facts and created a time-line for me to guide myself in my project. I came to the conclusion that it probably makes the most sense, if I split up the documentary into multiple segments, rather than creating one long video as I did for Version 4 (which is over 30 minutes in length). I am still undecided, how I am going to present the facts from the time line below; written narration or voice overs where I record myself and talk about those facts. An audio narration is[…]