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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 try to do a lot of home based projects.   Everything from painting, to building, to stonework and cabinetry.   I collect a few tools to do these jobs but you can never have enough of certain things.    Here are a few items I need to round out my tools for the projects I currently have on my list to complete:

• A high quality stacked dado set
• Cyclone dust collection system like this one or this one
• Larger band saw 14″ w/a 2HP motor
• Shelves, shelves, and more shelves
• An extension table for my JoinTech SawTrain system

In August of 1990 we moved to this home in Hope, New Jersey.   At the time we were told the house was about 100 years old.   After 15 years in the home we decided that it was time to move on to a slightly larger home and the house has now been for sale for a while.  Anyone interested should look on the Burgdorf website and cross linking this post on several historic home sites.

As we lived there we cleaned, upgraded and restored many features of the house and over time discovered that the home was significantly older than we had thought.  Although I haven’t dome complete deed and title search on the home I can tell you based on construction and details uncovered during restorations that the home dates back to at least 1816, but I am sure that the core construction is significantly older than that.  

I think sometimes that I have too many interests…   Anyway on the home theater from here are the top three things I am looking for…

• Nice Home Theater Receiver with upmixing to Component or HDMI.   It must have home network MP3 streaming capability.   It should have some DSP optimization tools.
• A HD display capable of 1080p and at least 56″.  Top considerations are Samsung thin DLP, Sony XSRD.
• The last item doesn’t exist yet.   I want HD Tivo for DirecTV.

Not to much

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!

Chris Angel the illusionist swallows a coin that is marked by an observer and then cuts it out of his arm.   What devilry is afoot here?

I think fake skin and rare earth magnets are definitely involved, but how does it get from inside his mouth to inside the fake skin pocket?

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.

My daughter showed me two videos by a ban called Ok Go on YouTube tonight.   An interesting band..,   I couldn’t get too much information on the band, but they were on Letterman on August 29th and the Video Music Awards last night.  If you’re interested the band has a website.

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.