And that is Blaze Media Pro (and it is even prettier than Quintessential Player - and that is a really good-looking media player).

Enough of multiple programs hogging your precious disk space. This powerhouse does it all. You can convert, edit, record, burn, rip, and play on one single interface to your heart's content. There's even a cool video editor where you can merge audio and video, capture video, as well as play with its full extraction and editing functions.

Other neat stuff I found useful on the fly are the MOV converter, video encoder, extracting audio from video files and saved as sound files, extracting video screens to image files (that beautiful smile wasn't lost, baby!), and the fact that you can easily burn your DVD software on that same program.

And believe me, that is worth every penny you pay for this if you're running Vista because everything on Vista is slow! (Tempted to get the Asus Eee but that's another long story for another post.)

Every conversion combo I have ever Googled is here. Check out their homepage for their full list. I'll bet you $5 the ones you need are covered. I sure wish I hadn't spent all that time downloading media apps for that one video extraction or one quick edit. Now that I've found it, this one rules it all.

(Now to spend the next couple of hours uninstalling the previous 10 media programs I installed...)

Tempted by my BFF Shen who runs her own empire figur8 on her very own domain host, I decided to try setting up my very own on my 2 currently existing domains with Wordpress, which I had heard rave reviews about. While Wordpress has its own recommended list, I wanted to also see what else was out there.

Now Atspace, with whom I had hosted for free with had been very good to me the past few years. While offering ad-free domain hosting, they unfortunately did not support Wordpress integration if I wanted to meddle with a Wordpress blog. Their customer service was a bit sketchy when I asked for help as well so I decided to look further.

In searching for web hosting over the past few years I have always looked for information aggregators and reviewers. One I would highly recommend is Web Hosting Geeks which boasts a strong brand (albeit a rather power-hungry looking geek attached to a server - don't we all wish), a good clean text-based design - loads fast on mobile, and great information design.

The first two are no-brainers. Any designer/front-end developer team can come up with that. But offering a crisp short blurb placed in the highest real estate zone of your webpage, which tells your visitors what you offer, using gray text instead of black to vary emphases, plus giving them what they want, namely, the best ratings and reviews of a web host - what they came here for - is hands down, great information design.

Too many websites hide this crucial information behind too many clicks stealthed behind what they think people want to see - gaudy Flash start pages and/or relevant/and/or irrelevant images. In this age of mobile surfing, people want the information they seek quickly and I for one, who spends most days and nights surfing on my mobile, loathe the "roll-eyes waiting time" (I can roll my eyes several times waiting for the page to load - yes and on broadband) of webpages on mobile.

Web Hosting Geeks cleverly implements peer-based web hosting reviews, promising unbiased reviews and on the landing page, the most highly recommended rating is reflected with a percentage. They have also included some useful web hosting articles for those who want more information.

Fabulous clean design for the geek in all of us. Two thumbs up.

So your computer's dead in the water and using your brother's computer to Google for solutions doesn't help, what do you do?

When there is no solution, it is time to call for professional computer technical support.

So stuff the hardware bits back into their casing, make a coffee, and wait for them to arrive. Fret not, these guys know what they're doing. They're the pros after all.

Technorati: computer technical support