SomeGuyWithA.com

People are finally coming to their senses about the nature of Google.   A nice article over on Softpedia about how many internet and software companies are realizing that Google is trying to run the internet the way many people thought that Microsoft was trying to run the computer industry 10 years ago.

Last week, David Pogue of the NY Times wrote an article on a new service called GrandCentral.  After reading the article I went right over to their site and signed up for the beta (for free).  After just one day, I have to say that if you have more than one phone, this service will forever change your life, even if it winds up costing $14.95 per month afterwards.

Grand central provides you with a telephone number that you can give out to anyone to call.   When someone calls this number any or all of you phones will ring.  All calls go to a centralized voicemail box that can be listened to from any phone, the web, or email.   You can customize features by one of four groups, friends, family, work and other, or you can customize at the individual caller level.   Feature that can be customized include: Call blocking, voice mail greating, phones that will ring, what the ring-back tone is and more.   Voice mail messages are stored indefinitely, and HERE IS THE KILLER FEATURE - Ever listen to someone on you home answering machine before you picked up the phone?   Well you can do exactly that with GrandCentral.  Press 3 when they call and they go to voicemail and you can listen real-time to the message as they leave it.   Press * anytime during the message and you can pick up the call.

 Walking into the house on a GrandCentral call that came into you cell phone?   Press * to transfer it to your home phone.

Right now the numbers are only in a limited number of area codes, but there are enough that anyone on the left or right coasts of the USA should be able to get one close to their home.

 This is a great brilliant idea.   Be sure to check it out.

I saw an editorial on InfoWorld today that said some people are getting paid [up to $100/hour] to search the internet.   The gist seems to be that some people are inherently better at getting results from search engines and Tom Sullivan postulates that one possible reason why is tacit knowledge.   I have to say that I can support this observation based on my experience.  My friends have always asked me technical questions that neither they or I knew the answer to because I have had consistently better ‘luck’ in getting results from internet search.  It hasn’t mattered whether it was a development question, network, systems or problem resolution. I could never figure out exactly why this is, we all use the same search engines, and we all have worked together on the same types of projects and in similar areas of IT with similar backgrounds.

One of the only difference I have ever been able to identify has been that I may have a vocabulary and general breadth of knowledge that exceeds most of the people I know. I find it interesting that there may actually be a ‘career’? as an internet searcher. Please tell me where to sign up!

The Visual Studio team has updated the TFS (Team Foundation Server) Administration guide as part of a great commitment to keeping the documentation up to date.   My biggest concern with these updates is that there is no simple way to see what has been revised beween releases.   In the meantime, I am going to try the file comparison tool in Visual Studio to see if I can determine what has changed….   What do you think?

Unlike all of the highly touted features of Vista like UAP, Glass, IE7, and Speech recognition, one of my favorite and IMHO most useful features is probably staring you right in the face and you may not have even known it.   Its called the Vista Audio Mixer and it allows you to customize the relative volume of every application running on Vista.  Before you can use it, however, you have to turn it on as the default in Vista is for sound to work just like previous versions of Windows.  This is easily done just by clicking on the volume icon is the task bar and select the box that says use audio mixer.   Once this is done, the next time you lick the volume icon you will see a separate slider for each application that it currently running.

What does this do for you?   Well if you are like me you run many application and some might have annoying sounds (like a game) and not give you an easy way to control the sound level (other than the general windows volume).   With sound Mixer you can turn down those annoying sounds of cards shuffling in Hoyle’s card games to a whisper and still hear the general effect while listening to Baroque Guitar in Media Player at full volume.

It may not seem like much, but it is a great little feature that make Vista a pleasure to use and explore.   Now if they could just make the user interface consistent, and get more complete and available drivers for 64 bit all would be right with the world.

Anyone that’s done system administration or application troubleshooting on Microsoft Windows platform anytime in the last 10 years has heard of SystemInternals or even if they haven’t they’ve benefitted from the work that Mark Russinovich and David Solomon have done.   And, unless your head has been in the sand for the past 2 months you know that a great advocate of the users of Windows systems has been absorbed by the collective.  A lot of people are still speculating and sysinternals has some answers about whether this is good or bad for the Microsoft consumer.   In the past I’ve learned a lot from Mark’s posts on his blog, and while I’m generally of the mind based on many past experiences, that this is not entirely a good thing.   Only time will tell.  While we’re waiting to find out be sure to read his first post at Microsoft.

Can you remember the last time you actually thought that Microsoft was actually doing something cool? Well according to an article on SlashGear We might be seeing technology like this within the next year. Cool indeed! Imagine the practical implications and what this could to for the sex/porn/webcam business medical and healthcare fields.

Well this is pretty cool, I’ve just installed Windows Live Writer beta and am making this post using its nice WYSIWYG interface.   This is a winning app.   It allows posting to multiple blogs, automatically detected the blog software for each type, and displays your post using the style indicated by the blog.   If you change your theme, the interface changes to support it.  It also has built in spell checking support for image uploads and mapping. 

I highly recommend that anyone using other free blogging tools at least take a look at this software.

I’ve been using Vista Beta 2 and its interim CTP releases as my primary OS for about 2 months now.  It looks like MS is going to ship another beta a release candidate of Vista soon.  This despite the two post Beta 2 interim releases which were still not as baked (IMHO) as any previous OS’ beta 2 I’ve used.   I do have some perspective on this as I’ve been beta testing MS development tools and OS’s since NT 3.0.   I’m a big fan of Vista overall, but relative to what it is promising the product just isn’t ready yet.  I can’t help but think that the Windows group’s definition of Release candidate is somehow out of line with the industry.  Foisting a build that isn’t truly ready for real world apps Allowing us the privilege of using a complete more usable build is a something I am really looking forward to.  

. A picture of a picture of me with my team beloved RedSox World series trophy.