whole woman village guide

Submitted by lanny on July 4, 2010 - 4:10pm
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hi everyone,
you may not have noticed that there is now a guide to the whole woman village.

if you go to the home page, (click on village center link at the top of this page and then the leave village link on the left side of the menu bar when you get to the village center) and look just below the "click here to enter" link below the village gate, you'll see a button that says "download whole woman village guide". click the button and you'll get the pdf document. this will give you an overview of what's in the village, what's open to the public and what features require membership to enjoy.

hope it is helpful.

all the best,
lanny (the DH and CTO of whole woman)

louiseds

July 4, 2010 - 10:50pm

Hi Lanny

There is so much new stuff to check out! Is the Guide going to be updated regularly?

I am wondering whether to just bookmark the URL, or save it as a document, or just keep it open in another tab while I am exploring? What do you think will work best for me, with my unbroadband connection?

Louise

lanny

July 6, 2010 - 10:55am

hi louise,

i will update the guide as new features are added. re your "unbroadband" connection, i would download it, because it won't be changing that frequently. i'll update it, for example when the tavern opens, but i won't update it each week when a new video is put up.

by the way, i'm curious to know how the video is working for you. all our videos are hosted by a global content delivery network (CDN). content delivery is essentially a parallel internet designed explicitly for delivering video and other content. the technology is very sophisticated and different than regular web servers. we've done this for a couple of reasons (and considerable expense). first, on a CDN the content is cached locally around the world. if you were watching video from our webserver, you would have to wait for the video to make its way from texas (where our server is) to your neck of the woods. most people don't realize that internet data is broken into "packets" which are sent across the internet and each packet may be routed in a different way. not a problem for email or even web browsers where timing is not critical, but for video, timing is critical and all the packets have to get there at the right time and in the right sequence or you get that annoying stuttering caused by latency in the delivery of the data. with the CDN, the video is cached in multiple locations around the world so there will be little or no latency.

second, the CDN allows us to offer so called adaptive bit rate delivery which means that the CDN reads the speed of your internet connection. once it realizes that your computer is connected to the internet through two tin cans and a string (lol) and then serves the video at a lower resolution to minimize the stuttering. so i'm curious how the video quality has been. people with higher speed connections should be getting higher resolution video. if you get a chance to try it out somewhere with a faster connection, i'll be interested to see if you notice the difference.

all the best,
lanny

louiseds

July 7, 2010 - 3:54am

Hi Lanny

I have watched all the videos now, I think. The stuttering is not too bad, as long as I don't want to watch it in one hit. I go away for half an hour and let it buffer away to its heart's content, come back and watch the whole thing from beginning to end in one hit. If I try and stream it, I get it in 2 second bursts. My connection starts off quite fast for each file I download, and gets slower and slower as the minutes tick by.

I will watch them again from the local cache and see if they are quicker to download, and also watch them on a machine that has 'fast' broadband, then report back.

I was interested to see that the workout video didn't have the Controls strip at the bottom. It looked nice, but I couldn't pause it, or adjust the volume. I had to watch it right through. I think it might be better to leave the Control strip there, like the other videos.

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply, Lanny.

Louise

lanny

July 7, 2010 - 12:38pm

i confess, we wanted to test the video without the control bar for aesthetic reasons. it does look better, but if it's not convenient, we can put the bar back on. sigh. art suffers from practicality...lol. thanks for the input.

lanny

alemama

July 22, 2010 - 11:30pm

when I play a dvd on my computer the control bar goes away unless I put my mouse over the image- then it pops back up

same for if I dl a movie

louiseds

July 23, 2010 - 1:39am

Some weird things have been happening. I think I am up for a re-install. Hold that thought.

melhop

August 5, 2010 - 9:54pm

I have watched and enjoyed the sewing videos in the past, but can no longer click the GO button. I can make a selection, but the GO button doesn't appear as it does in the cooking list. Also, the Lists hide behind the cabinet until I click the arrow and the lists move forward.
Melly

melhop

August 12, 2010 - 10:40am

I posted a problem to housekeeping last week. I wonder if I need to get a better version of something. Could you tell me what program I need for the videos in Christine's Cottage. I can access the food videos but not the sewing. They hide behind the cabinet.
Melly

lanny

August 13, 2010 - 10:17am

hi melly,

sorry for not responding sooner. i've been on the road.

i'm not sure what the issue is. i'll do some research on this today and get back to you. are you on a windows computer? can you tell my what operating system (xp, vista or windows 7) and internet explorer version?

we're a mac shop, and occasionally something that looks great in safari (the mac browser) behaves strangely in IE on windows.

sorry for the inconvenience.

all the best,
lanny

melhop

August 13, 2010 - 7:33pm

Lanny, we use windows xp.
Melly

lanny

August 13, 2010 - 8:56pm

i'll have a look tomorrow. we still have one xp machine in shipping. be aware that microsoft as of july no longer supports xp or provides security updates.

best,
lanny

melhop

August 13, 2010 - 10:07pm

Thank you for the response. What do you recommend I do instead of xp?
Melly

lanny

August 15, 2010 - 12:01am

hi melly,

i went and took a look at the foyer page on internet explorer and sure enough, it's screwed up. i'll work on it in the morning to see if i can fix it. it's annoying to think that i'll have to keep a windows computer in the shop just to make sure that the pages we build look right. sigh. but that's life in a windows dominated world.

regarding your operating system, widows 7 is the current version from microsoft. however, i'm told it needs 4 megabytes of memory to run properly which many older computers can't support. if you have someone who helps you with computer matters, you might give them a call. at some point you may just need to upgrade the whole system. if that's the case, of course, we recommend getting a mac. :-)

i'll leave a post when i've solved the problem.

cheers,
lanny

melhop

August 15, 2010 - 1:37pm

My Nephew is a computer analyst for Eli-Lilly Corporation taking care of mac applications all over the world. My son provides computer tech support for Western Illinois University, big PC users to interface so much information. You should hear their conversations.
Melly

lanny

August 15, 2010 - 10:50pm

hi melly,

all better! sorry it took so long. i really should check these pages on windows just to make sure.

regarding your computer, it sounds like you've got lots of horsepower available to you knowledge-wise so ask their advice. from my standpoint, once an operating system is no longer supported, you need to change platforms, either upgrading to a newer version of windows or going mac.

i'm a relatively new mac convert (about 2.5 years). i had a couple of clients who bought iphones when they first came out and really liked them. when my cell died, i thought, what the heck and bought one. i had been reading in interface and interaction design at the time and the iphone blew me away. it was clear that apple has forgotten more about user interface and interaction design than microsoft (by and for geeks) will ever know. so when my ibm thinkpad died, it was off to the apple store for a macbook pro. it was a bit of an adjustment but absolutely no regrets. so now we have almost all macs and an apple xserve server. once you've had a taste of apple (no pun intended), you'll never go back to windows. they also have great support by people who speak english, know what they are doing and are totally professional in the unlikely event that you will need support (be sure to buy the applecare support and extended warranty option if you go mac).

i had bought christine a mac some years ago because she is way not technical and she has loved it from the beginning. just bought her a newer macbook pro earlier this year since her older model wouldn't support the new operating system version.

as i mentioned in an earlier post, the problem with upgrading operating systems is that in the three, four or five years since you bought your computer, the new ones are so much more powerful, have so much more memory and much bigger hard drives, the software guys take full advantage of the above, which of course keeps the hardware people happy since people have to keep upgrading. as i have often said, you don't buy technology, you marry it.

at any rate, thanks for the heads up on the video menu. any time you run into something like that, it's best to email me at webmaster(at)wholewoman(dot)com (trying to befuddle the spammers who send robots out to harvest email addresses), since i don't check the forum that often and have to rely on christine telling me that someone needs to talk with me.

at any rate, keep us posted on your computer situation and let us know what you come up with.

all the best,
lanny (DH & WW CIO)

louiseds

August 17, 2010 - 8:27pm

Lanny, I believe MS are still supporting XP itself. They are just not supporting Service Pack 3. But I can't really see the point in having XP if they aren't supporting the last big upgrade.

One day somebody will steal my computer. At that point I will go Mac, promise. This rebuild was so much cheaper than a new machine I couldn't justify going Mac. I have used Mac at Uni, where we had both operating systems for different parts of the Uni. I do like Mac.

For those considering changing from XP, just do it. It is much easier than I thought it would be. Don't be scared of Microsoft's big blurb about it being so different. It is not. I was up and running smoothly in about 24 hours of getting used to it. And it has some neat features, like the new search everything with one search feature. And it makes nice soothing noises too. It sounds like a fairy. ;-)

L

lanny

August 18, 2010 - 12:21am

hi louise,

i got a call from direct from microsoft about three months ago to let me know that xp was no longer going to be supported as of the end of july, meaning no further security updates (the primary concern). xp is a bit of embarrassment to microsoft at this point since many people were actually hoarding copies they bought just before microsoft quit selling it a year or two ago because no one wanted to upgrade to vista. vista is a huge resource hog and beyond security conscious to the level of paranoia. it has been generally reviled since it's introduction four or five years ago. clearly MS wants everyone to upgrade to windows 7, but (i have been told) you really need 4 gigs of memory to make it sing and a lot of older systems (particularly laptops) max out at one or two gigs. windows 7 will probably run on two but i wouldn't bet on one.

so the technology cycle goes on and on. now we have more processing power in our cell phones than the early mainframes. who knows where it will end.

cheers,
lanny