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Out with Victoria to the Apple Store.  She really wants a Mac Book   Sure they’re cool.   But the form factor, battery, software costs and the lack of universality of it still really bothers me.  The proprietary nature of their hardware really forces a conformist attitude as much as they are considered “Artistic” and avant guard – Think quite the opposite is true.   PCs can be customized in their configuration in an almost infinite number of ways, but with a Mac – what you buy is what you get.

I just returned from a 10 day vacation from modern civilization in northern Maine.   No TV, Radio, Internet or Cellphone.  Simple life simple meals and good friends.   Less than 3 weeks ago I attended Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference where the conference give away was “Laptop Koozy”   At most a $10 item – that for my $2000 conference – This at a conference that was Microsoft’s most well received event of the year – At the time I said to myself “this is the worst conference bag I’ve ever received at ANY conference.”

Today while catching up on the news I read that at PDC which concluded on Friday Microsoft gave every attendee a free laptop with a touchscreen display.   This at conference that touted more vapourware than any since the 2003 conference (which interestingly enough was the last PDC I attended).

I’m not sure how anyone else feels about this, but I am deeply offended that Microsoft has treated the SharePoint conference attendee base this poorly.   I’m not really sure how to react to it yet other than thinking this is a huge slap in the face.

Thoughts anyone?

PS:  I guess if I had gone to PDC I would have a matched set

Its been a long time since I posted anything anywhere but a lot has changed and some developments have started me thinking that it is time to start expressing opinions about these changes.  Here are some of the things that are making me think this way.

• Windows 7 and the Vista Marketing Fiasco
  • Cool little things about Microsoft Products
• SharePoint and Office and why these are great together and what does this whole social networking thing offer to business anyway
  • Scripting
  • SharePoint implementation and the unexpected acceleration of adoption
  • Governance why is something so important so difficult?
• Google
  • Some of their recent announcements (OS and wave) What’s hype and what’s not
  • Should anyone be concerned about privacy with Google
  • Dependence on Google as  a single source provider?
• Apple Zealots and the iPhone
  • Why does everyone think that there wasn’t a mobile platform before Apple
  • Security and Viruses
  • Why Apple is great for the industry
• Cloud Distributed Computing – Why the word cloud is so appealing is beyond me and why I avoid it.
• Just cool stuff

I’m planning on writing some longer articles over the next few weeks and a few short blurbs as well.   I want to seriously start writing again and rebuild some communication skills that I haven’t exercised as much as I should recently and see what happens.

I think I’m also going to make an investment is some video equipment to do video blogging like Mike Gannotti.  With more than an hour a day in the car, there’s no reason to waste that time.

I’ll probably highlight some of the blogs I read on a regular basis as well.

This is a a tall order and I hope I’m up for it.   Let’s see what happens

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.