The Trellis Conference Movie 2012

With the Gardening Scotland event in Edinburgh beginning on Friday, it's great to have uploaded the Trellis 6th Annual Conference movie to YouTube.

Here's the link:



Check out the Trellis stand if you're going to Gardening Scotland!

The Trellis Conference Video Shoot

Yeah, that was a day-and-a-half, the 15th of March. Genie and I turned up at Perth Concert Hall with our video cameras and filmed all we could of the Trellis conference, given that some of the workshops overlapped and we could only film in one place at any one time. Even during the breaks we were still filming, as part of the brief was to show how people network at these annual conferences. Hardly time to grab a bite to eat or visit the loo.

We didn't do bad, though, considering that Genie was also having to zoom off for photo shoots and perform other functions befitting a Trellis employee. What helped enormously was getting a good quality MP3 of the sound taken off the mixing desk during the speeches and presentations from the resident sound engineer, and my Roland 05 audio recorder saved the day during the workshops in the afternoon. I was also given all of the Powerpoint presentations from which I could make my own slides for the editing stage.

We were both absolutely knackered by the end of the day but came away from Perth Concert Hall with not only sufficient footage for the main Trellis movie (which is currently awaiting approval) but also for a number of related movies that cover individual presentations and workshops which are already on YouTube.

It's great to work for the good guys. Trellis is a charity that supports therapeutic gardening projects throughout Scotland, and regardless of the fact that my partner Genie works for them part-time, I'm really happy to be associated with Trellis through my work. They are very groovy people and deserve our support.

And here's one of the offshoot movies that I really like. There's a Camphill community nearby (Corbenic) so I know something about their work and have been involved with them to some degree over the years I've lived in Scotland. This movie shows Ian Futter's presentation about his work at a Camphill community in Aberdeen which I find really inspiring.

Error Code 0x80080005

I'm a Mac user but use a Dell PC laptop (Windows 7) for testing. Recently it slowed right down and when I tried to run the Maintenance Wizard I got the error code 0x80080005.

I could no longer get online with the Dell and troubleshooting the internet connection gave me the same "unexpected" error, so I looked it up on the Mac. Apparently the code meant I had a system-level problem. I ended up downloading a program called "Errorend" and then transferred it to the PC laptop. It took ages to launch the program as the laptop was really on its last legs, but it did launch eventually. It scanned my laptop, found almost 300 errors in the file structure, and then asked me to go online and buy the program in order to fix the errors...

Yeah, right. Sounds like a con, but I managed to get online again with the Dell (by resetting the router) and paid for the program's license. Lo and behold, the wee beasty worked just fine after letting Errorend do its stuff. Cost me less than thirty quid. My Dell is functioning normally again and that's well worth the spend.

There are many articles online which suggest that Errorend is a scam. Well, it worked for me!