Destination Imagination Global Finals 2010 kicked off in high style on Wednesday night with a special performance by Mae! Over 13,000 teams competed for a coveted 1,031 slots. Competition is underway and concludes Saturday. The excitement from children bubbling with enthusiasm for creative learning and problem solving is so contagious you can’t help from singing along, tapping your feet, and getting into the pin trading business. Below is a clip from last night’s opening ceremonies!

To kick off our new partnership with Destination ImagiNation, we’ll be exhibiting at the Innovation Expo, a portion of DI’s year-end Global Finals celebration event. The event is closed to the public, but we are looking forward to meeting all of the lucky attendees.

In the spirit of previous tech support posts on this blog, part of our exhibit includes Q&A sessions with answers to participants’ nagging technical problems. We’ll record those sessions and post them right here. We’ll also have stories and pictures throughout the 3-day event, so check back to see what the DI community thinks of Fwd:Vault!

I am proud to announce that Destination ImagiNation, Inc. has signed on as Fwd:Vault’s first partner. “DI” is an international non-profit, recognized worldwide as a leader in teaching teamwork, creative problem solving, and imaginative outside-the-box thinking. Annually, their programs touch some 20,000 volunteers and 100,000 participants.

From an announcement to their core volunteers:

We know that teams generate a fair amount of digital information over the course of a program year, doubly so for our regional and affiliate volunteers. Until now, the requirements of available data storage services were simply beyond our support capacity. Fwd:Vault works without any software or hardware, making it easy for the entire DI community to implement and use.

Every DI participant, volunteer, and supporter who signs up for a Fwd:Vault account will have a portion of their subscription donated directly back to Destination ImagiNation, and I’m really excited for the opportunity to provide direct financial support to such a worthy institution.

The geeks behind Fwd:Vault understand that computers are practically a foreign language to “normal” people. That is the idea behind our backup service, after all.

So anytime we come across information that easily lifts the fog surrounding the rest of your computing experience, we love passing them along.

Today we’ve got an article that reveals 10 concepts about your PC that you may not understand. If you want to know about that extra software that comes preinstalled on your new computer, or what parts to bring to the repair shop, read on.

I never remember to defragment my hard drives, but scheduling the task doesn’t work. Invariably, I am either in the middle of something, or the computer is turned off.

Instead, I use a nifty program called MyDefrag to defragment all my hard drives whenever the screensaver kicks on. By using the screensaver as the trigger, it ensures that (a) the computer is on, and (b) that I’m not using it. When I’m ready to go back to work, just shake the mouse like you would to stop any other screensaver, and back to work you go; the defragger will pick up where it left off next time. Perfect!

Installation is pretty straightforward, it even asks you if you want to set the defrag process as the screensaver…

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The only thing you have to watch out for is how the program sets up the scheduled task, if you select the option (see image above). It brings up a command prompt asking for your Windows user password. The command prompt is the classic white-text-on-black-background text-only interface that usually scares the crap out of regular users.

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Just enter the password of the username listed, and hit enter. If, like a lot of people, you don’t have a password set, just hit enter and you’re done.

Once the installation is complete, the only change I needed to make in the default installation was to max out the delay between complete defrags. By default, the defrag screensaver will run if a complete defrag was performed over 4 hours ago. That’s pretty hardcore, so I upped the setting to every 24 hours. Right click on the desktop, choose “Properties,” then click the “Screensaver” tab…

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Note that the defrag screensaver may still come on more than once in a 24 hour period, but only until a single defrag is performed completely.

Also don’t be alarmed when you see the defrag for the first time. It displays the usual colorful lines representing the sectors on the disk, but does so in full-screen mode (it is a screensaver after all). Upon seeing it for the first time, several of my friends were afraid that my computer had died. Just keep it in mind the first time it runs, you may even want to use the screensaver “Preview” option (from the screen pictured above) to familiarize yourself with the look of it.