Despite all the horror stories I've read, and everyone's boo hoo attitude about Windows Vista. Hanselman talked me into it.

I'm kind of going about this backwards, I should explain I have a new laptop, and should have reviewed that, and then told you about Vista, but instead, I'm kind of backing into things. The primary reason for choosing Vista 64 bit was that this system has 4GB of RAM installed, GeForce 256MB graphics card, 7200 RPM drive, and a T7500 Core Two Duo processor. I wanted to take advantage of all this great hardware, without having to run XP.

I'm using a DELL XPS M1530 Black Laptop, and although DELL won't even support Vista 64 I'm running it. Kind of scary, but I've got it all working except for one feature, bluetooth, and I haven't even bothered trying to get bluetooth up because I frankly don't even care about it. I have to admit that Vista did most of the work, it located all the correct 64 bit drivers for all my hardware. I had to go and find a few applications, but as I type this I'm a happy camper.

Here's a snapshot of my Windows Experience Index.

And here's the details of how I got this score.

Well there's more coming about this in a future post, but the new Dell XPS laptop that I am now using has LoJack.

We'll track you if you steal it. :) It came with it for a year for free, not sure if it's something I will use or not after my 'free' year is up. But here is what the web interface looks like. I hope I never need to use it.

During the Xbox live outage fiasco over the holidays, I have learned a few things.

The Settings blade in the Xbox live menus has a very handy Xbox Live test. Running the test will allow the Xbox to check every setting and networking option that the console needs to communicate with the Xbox live service.

What I found when I ran mine, was that everything was working, but my NAT settings were testing as 'Moderate'. Sometimes Call of Duty 4 worked for online play over live, and sometimes it didn't. I could connect and play with one friend, but not others. My friend suggested to port forward some of the settings through the firewall. I gave my Xbox a static IP address and did the following.

The ports the Xbox requires direct communication over are:

• UDP 88
• TCP 3074
• UDP 3074

Call of Duty Requires these ports to be open:

• UDP 20500
• UDP 20600
• UDP 20610
• UDP 28960
• TCP 28960

Setting these up on my router and then trying to connect with friends that I was unable to previously INSTANTLY fixed my issues.

So about a month ago, I eagerly called the Verizon FIOS customer service number as I'd heard people at work were getting FIOS TV. After a few phone calls with Verizon, the install date was setup, now all I had to do was count the days that I'd have to wait before becoming a Comcast FREE household.

The Install
I had an annoying window of 9-5 to wait for my install. The morning of the install, the Verizon guy called me and informed me I was the last install of the day, and he seriously doubted he'd be there before 5:00 PM. I said no problem, and went off to work. I returned home around 3 PM just to be sure I wouldn't miss them, especially if they were running early.

At about 4:30 PM "Brandon" called me back to let me know the Verizon provisioning system was having trouble adding the new Verizon set top boxes, and we could reschedule, or he could come and do the install, but there were no guarantees. I convinced him to come and do the install anyway, he said he was close to wrapping up at this current job, and would be over soon.

At 7PM I was starting to get stressed. Did he just blow me off? What was going on? He showed up at 8PM and looked tired. Apparently the demand for the service was beginning to take it's toll on the technicians, he didn't complain, but started unloading his gear from his van. I showed him the location in the garage where the old Comcast cable modem was, and explained I'd like the new Verizon gear to go there.

He was elated to see, power, cable, and data all in one place, and explained this install would go fast. He started by going outside and hooking the fiber to the ONT (Verizon box) on the outside of the house, and then poked a piece of coax through into the garage. We mounted the new actiontec router (required for FIOS TV) and I did all the networking stuff to make everything else work.

He installed the downstairs set top box, a multi room DVR with HD viewing and recording capabilities. We then went upstairs and installed the basic set top box upstairs. He didn't think the boxes would provision, but decided to give it a try. It worked! The install was done. I must say that the level of communication, attention to detail impressed me. It was almost 10 o'clock now so I went to bed.

The Viewing Experience
Let's just start by explaining that with my Comcast digital service that I paid close to $100 a month for, I hated it. Sure I had HBO and tons of channels, but I'd say that a good 50% of the time any given channel would display a banner that said "Please wait - available shortly" or something to that effect, and the channel would never load. It was on the more obscure kid stuff, and higher numbered channels, not ones I watched a lot, but still very annoying.

Verizon FIOS TV? Not a single issue. Every now and then I'll see some compression artifacts in HD, but I saw worse in Comcast's. The big pros for me switching to Verizon FIOS TV were to:

1. Improve my service.
2. Dump Comcast.
3. Lower my monthly expenses.
4. Unify my internet and television serives again.

I'm happy to say that I've achieved all of my goals.

The user interface for the menus is polished. It does not look like a 2 year old designed it like Comcast's does. The menus are crisp, well organized, and thought out. From the main menu, you can do it all, On Demand, Pay Per View, DVR, or simply just browse channels. The buttons react semi-quickly. There is a small annoying lag that happens, but I can live with it, and it's really no different than Comcast.

Pay Per View
We have not tried the Pay Per View yet, but I have browsed the titles. The prices range from 2.99 - 4.99 depending on how new the title it. The nice thing about viewing the titles is you get a thumbnail of the box cover. Why doesn't Comcast do that?

DVR
The DVR is great. Is it as good as TIVO? No. Does it do most things the TIVO DVR does in respect to recording shows, series, etc? Yes. The user interface does well in it's searching, but if you're looking to get rid of your Tivo and be just as happy with the Verizon DVR, think again. I got rid of two tivos for the Verizon DVR, and while everything works as it did before, we can see shows etc. I do miss my Tivos. However, getting rid of my two Tivos saves me $20 a month. The DVR cost is about $10 so in essence I'm saving $10 a month.

We also have the multi room DVR capability. So one DVR, and any of the other TVs (1 in out case) can access it. If it's a non HD TV, it can only access the non HD content, makes sense to me.

Guide
The guiide is great. You get a little PIP window in the top right corner of what you're currently watching, and as you page through the channels, the expanded channel you are looking at on the guide appears a bit bigger with the channel icon and art (nice touch). You can go forward up to a week (or more possibly). You can also click the guide button a second time for a smaller view, it's one I don't like and don't really use.

On Demand
Almost identical to Comcast's. You can get some free on demand movies and shows in this section. Not much more to say here.

Conclusion
Hands down the best TV line up and package I have ever had. At the cost of $42.99 a month, add the multi room DVR capabilities, HD content, and HBO, and we're setting right around $75 a month. Comcast used to cost us $95 a month plus $20 a month for the two tivos. $115 a month total, versus $75 a month. That's a savings of $40 a month, which coincidentally is the cost of our internet access. So for the cost of Comcast for a month we now get TV and Internet for that price. I'm liking that.

Here's a network diagram of all our stuff now for the geeks out there! :)

Trillian is notorious for doing things like this:

So the window is off the screen, no way to drag it back. Did you know you can right click the item in the taskbar, select "move" and then use your arrow keys to bring it back down into a state where you can use your mouse? I never realized that the "move" feature on the context menu (right click) of an application in the taskbar allowed you to move the window with just the arrow keys. Very cool.

I like to be proactive about things. There are times that I have to send someone an email on a certain date, or remind someone of a certain thing on a certain date, typically in the future. Well when I know about these things I've used sticky notes, calendar remidners, and other seemingly stupid ways to remember to do something. I was poking around OutLook today and figure out I can set a date to send a mail. So a colleague asked me to remind him of something on Dec. 4th. Well I'll be traveling for work (I'll have my computer with me) and may not be in the mindframe to remember to send him an email.

So I've composed the message that I need to send, and then clicked the 'options' menu item. Under the 'Delay Deliver' item on the 2007 Outlook Ribbon, I then chose:

   Do not deliver before: 12/4/2007 11:40 PM

I know I'll be in the office then, and my machine will be running so the mail now goes into the outbox, but sits there until then. So at 11:40 (ish) it will be sent out, no need to remember!

Make sure you realize that you must have OutLook open and be connected to the exchange server for this to work.

In the spirit of my previous post, and related to it indirectly, I've had an excellent experience with a company called Zagg. They manufacture screen protectors for various hand held and electronic devices. If you've ever used screen protectors from other companies, it usually goes something like this:

• Install the screen protector
• Become frustrated at how stupid the installation is
• Start over
• Try again
• Be somewhat satisfied with your install
• It moderately protects the screen for some time
• It's sometimes annoying and you wish you hadn't done it
• It eventually becomes too annonying and you remove it  ... or
• It falls off

But the Invisible Shield products from Zagg are a different story. They supply a liquid you spray on both sides of the film, and a squeegee. You put this 'wet' film on your device, position it, squeegee out the liquid, dry it off, and it stays on. I had the last one on my iPhone for over 5 months with no problems. No peeling, no annoyances. They guarantee it for life too. If you scratch, scuff, or ding it, they'll replace it for FREE. I don't think there's any way you can though, I've never seen a screen protector, or anything like this that is as good as Invisible Shield.

So where does the customer service come in?

Well my iPhone needed to be replaced. So I just swapped it out for a new one, without even thinking about the screen protector. (whoops). So I emailed Zagg and explained my situation, I really only needed a new protector, and not the squeegee and spray, as I had some left. I wanted to know if I could just purchase the film. They replied by saying they'd just send me a new kit, no charge, 2-3 day express mail too. Crazy good customer service.

Here's another cool thing... Got a device that's not listed on their web site? Just provide a link to a photo (so they can see the device), measurements of the screen, and the make and model of the device you want a protector for, and they will custom fabricate you a screen protector. Very nice. I just purchased an alarm for my truck, and the key fob has a digital display that's plastic, and I was worried about scratches. So I ordered the Invisible Shield custom cut to fit it.

If you're considering protecting a device with a screen, check these guys out, I like to support great companies!

So last week the IT guys told me I'd be getting a new machine, and I'd need to surrender my old one when they gave me the new one. Well, that doesn't work. Especially when you're in the middle of development of projects. So after cutting through all the red tape, I was able to keep my 'old' box for a few weeks. I'm going to throw down some of my thoughts about transitioning to a new machine, and some things to think about that will help you.

Don't just toss your old machine out. Do the project in parallel. Had I turned in my machine when they simply dropped a new one off at my desk, I would have been "down tools" (an expression my Dad uses) for about two days.  Not to mention if my projects needed something, my new box would not have been setup correctly to respond to emergencies. So my old laptop was set aside, and kept running, it was great to be able to refer to it for settings, and other issues too.

There are two things really to have to do in migrating to a new computer, install your software and transfer your data. Both may seem really simple, but there are a lot of 'gotchas' to worry about. I'll address both items below in the following two sections.

Installing Software.

Think of your new computer as a brand new house. You don't have a pile of junk mail sitting on the table, hell, there's not even furniture in the place. So don't just move everything in right away, wouldn't a nice book case be better than the cinder blocks and 2x4's? Did you really ever use the Tiki bar that someone gave you years ago? The first thing I did was made a list of all the software I had installed on the 'old' box, and started trimming out things I hadn't used in 6 months or more. There are a few ways to accomplish this, I intially found a VBScript I ran to outoput a list of all the installed software, but then found this great free utility: MyUninstaller. It's an exe that run, nothing to install even. It will list every single item that is installed on your computer. You can even export the list to a text file, and bring it into excel, and do your evaluations there! Be realistic, there are of course programs that you have to install, but in reality, less is more. Don't try to get by with no Word processor, or no music software, but is that one time use utility worth installing? MyUninstaller works way faster than the Windows one, and provides a ton more information in an easy to read and use format.

Don't forget about utilities you use that are plain executables that don't have an install/uninstall associated with them. A good way to keep track of these is to create a 'tools' folder and dump all your stuff in there. I have a ruler tool, the MyUninstaller, and some utilities I've written to do stuff I need to do for my job. Just don't forget about these guys, as it could take a while to find them.

Once you're done installing all of your software, update update update. Get on Windows Update and start the service pack installations. You may find that you have to do this several times, or even before all of your software is installed, but now's the time to get it ALL on there.

Moving Data.

Hopefully, if you're organized, your data is all in once place. It's probably in your my documents folder. But there are a lot of other things to remember to grab while you're copying those files to your new environment.

1. Your Desktop - There's probably stuff sitting on your desktop that you'll want to move. If you keep shortcuts there, as long as your new programs are installed to the exact same locations, they should work. Files, and other stuff can be found in the Drive:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop
2. Outlook PST Files - Do a local hard drive search for *.pst and make sure you copy any of the PST files you may want on your new machine. Also setting up email on your new machine is easily facilitated by keeping your old box up, so you can get the settings off of it.
3. Bookmarks/Favorites -Your bookmarks are something that make you productive (hopefully) make sure you go to the Drive:\Documents and Settings\User\Favorites folder and copy these to your new machine in the samme location, now is a good time to go through and clean house on those as well.
4. Misc - Critically think about other things that may be in other places that are important to you. Again, this is why you should run both systems parallel for a few weeks before committing to the new one.

Transition.

Once the new system is setup, and you're 'confident' that you're ready to be on the new system, turn the old one off. Keep the old system handy for a week or two, and if you have the means, backup the old system entirely.

Apple usually makes this stuff simple. The 1.1.2 Firmware has been out since yesterday, and iTunes STILL does not know about the new firmware release. I found a link on engadet where you can download the actual firmware. After downloading the 160MB file, and sticking it on my desktop, you'd think a simple double click would start the update.... nope. Double clicking the file opens iTunes, but then it sits there and does nothing. Dang it. Here's how to get that file working... <shift> <click> the "Restore" button in iTunes, it will give you a file dialogue to choose a file, then simply locate the file and click OK.

NOTE: Doing the update this way required me to restore my iPhone to factory default settings during the upgrade, when I chose to restore from my last backup, it applied the 1.1.2 firmware, and then restored my phone from said backup. It took quite a while and I am now syncing all my songs and movies back to the device, doing the update this way, will RESET your phone to factory settings. But as long as you have a recent backup, it should not matter.

My good friend, Scott (a Type I diabetic) is trying to raise $50,000 this year to fight diabetes. Now that he's working for Microsoft, he has all kinds of cool contacts, like people that will help him rent out Vancouver's Cinetopia and let a bunch of geeks come play Halo 3 on their 50 foot tall high definition screens. I'm in.

Your $25 (or preferably more) donation goes straight to the American Diabetes Association and gets you in for a night of Halo 3 in Hi-Def! Five hours of gaming, can you take it? To sweeten the deal, I'll state that I'm terrible at this game, so if you want to come an 'pwn' me... it won't be hard.

Here are the details:

• When: Thursday evening, October 11th, 7:00 - Midnight
• Where: Cinetopia - Map & Web site
• Register: http://iammasterchief.com/ with the RSVP code "FIGHTDIABETES"

It should be a blast. More details on Scott's site.

I purchased the device from Newegg for just under $200. Seems like a good deal, and I'm impressed with the manufacturing of the device, the thing is heavy and it's solid. It comes with USB, CAT5, and power cables, pretty nice for the price considering when you buy a printer, you don't even get a USB cable.

The NAS drive arrived around lunch time today. I was working from home so that I could sign for it when it arrived. I immediately took it out to the garage, and put it with all my networking gear. I unboxed it, plugged in the CAT5 and power, and went back inside. I sat down at my laptop and ran AngryIPScanner, looked for the new device, and opened up Internet Explorer and connected to the IP address over HTTP.

There was a page with an administration link, and a list of all the current shares that were setup. I clicked the administration link, and was challenged to enter security credentials, a guess of admin/admin and I was in. First order of business, change the admin password. Then I renamed the device "NAS". So now all my network devices can see a 'thing' called NAS on the network. It even picked up DHCP, DNS, and the gateway all automatically, nice.

I created three shares initially in the the LaCie interface, itunes, photos, and misc. I then terminaled into my desktop machine where the majority of my media and photos are. I mapped a drive to the NAS itunes share, and after entering the userid and password, I was connected. I started to copy all of my itunes and photo files to the respective shares on the NAS, I did the same with my laptop.

I copied Gigabytes of data to the device, it pretty much finished around 4:00 PM. So the copy process of almost 50GB was not too slow really. Here are some screen shots of the device's user interface, it's not glamorous, but it's clean, and makes sense.

Impressions
The thing just feels good when you hold it. Like it's really solid and engineered well. Setup took me less than a minute. I'm going to post more about the details of the device in the coming weeks. My plan is to put all of our media onto it, music, photos, movies, etc. Thus having an entry point for all computers on my network to access said data. I'd also like to create some sort of automated backup to it as well.

I have not installed the LaCie software yet, but I'm curious what's on the disk, so I probably will. More on that in a later post. So far, I'm totally stoked for the amount of money I spent, for what I've actually gotten. How often can you say that?

Screenshots of the User Interface (web based from the device)

Here is the status screen that shows the shares, and what services can connect to them.

Network details

Disk usage metrics (just after I started copying to it)

Service status screen

Our fax/combo/laser printer device finally canned out. Since my wife is doing a part-time teaching gig, we needed to have a reliable printer so she can print out her class materials. Looking at laser printers, I found that color laser has come down to a price point that is very affordable. So after a little research online, I'm giving the Brother HL4040CN Color Laser Printer a shot. The c|net review alone sold me on it.

So in my research of Color Laser Printers, I've determined the following factors to be things to consider if you're thinking about getting one.

• Cost
• Toner Replacement Cost
• Speed
• Duty Cycle
• Features
• Quality

There are HP color laser printers in the $200 - $300 dollar range. Sounds tempting, but look into the toner replacement and feature set, and you'll quickly read horror stories of $500 toner replacement costs, crummy quality, long print times, and lame features.

I think the Brother printer we've purchased does a good job in all arenas. The printer itself is normally priced at $400, I recently saw it with a $100 mail in rebate, and decided the barrier to entry was low enough to take a shot. After playing with it in the store, looking at the demo pages it printed, I brought the 65lb. beast home.

It actually looks better aesthetically than the previous printer, takes up about the same amount of space, but is realllllly heavy! I opted to purchase a spare black toner cartridge because the sales person said the toner cartridges it came with are only 1/3 full, I'm not sure I buy that, because I can't find that documented anywhere, so part of me feels an upsell to pad someone's commission.

Cost - for a standalone laser printer, it's not the cheapest, but throw in color and the features that it has, I think it's a great price. Throw on the $100 rebate, and now you're at $300. According to c|net you can probably find it online even cheaper, just make sure the rebate will work! We needed it right away, so I couldn't shop around too much.

Toner Replacement Cost - Black Brother Toner was $52 for a cartridge that will do roughly 3000 black/white pages. The color toner cartridges, a bit more at roughly $70 per color, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Compared to other manufacturers, this was one of the cheaper toner replacements.

Speed - I was shocked when I printed some of the first pages on this thing. While I have not timed it, pages come out WAY faster than I would have expected. Black and white only come out almost instantly. I printed a full 8 x 10 photo, and it took less than 20 seconds? Compared to some of the HP printers I saw in the store, this thing is blazing fast.

Duty Cycle - The duty cycle for this printer is something crazy like 35,000 pages per month, not something I probably need to worry about on any printer I would have considered.

Features - The printer has some nice features that others in this price range don't have. My favorite is Network printing capabilities. Just plug a network cable into it, and connect to the built in web server to configure it for network printing. Sweet. The model above this one has wireless capabilities and duplex printing, this one has 'manual' duplex printing, meaning you flip the page and press a button. Another nice feature is an LCD screen that has the toner levels displayed so you can always see where you're at. The last thing that's kind of cool, but a tad gimicky, is a USB port allowing you to plug a flash drive/memory key and print PDF or photo files off the device, with no computer interaction. It will even print a file manifest of what is on the key/drive, kind of cool. 64MB of onboard RAM, wow, my last multifunction printer had like 4MB? It also has a nice flat paper tray that accommodates up to 250 sheets of paper, no lame standing paper slot.

Quality - Black and white text is sharp, clear, and easy to read. I have not seen any random artifacts around the page anywhere. Not much more to say. Color printing is great too, I printed a "Webkinz Adoption Certificate" for my daughter from her Webkinz site, and it looked exactly like it did online. The colors are pretty close to what you see on the monitor, and are solid, I have not seen any patches that are lighter/darker. Printing an 8 x 10 photo on copy paper looks a bit more 'yellow' than the original image, and you see some banding effects, but this thing is not designed to print photos.

So far I'm completely happy with the purchase. We'll see what happens as the supplied toner starts to run low.

Just dial 1-800-466-4411 and you're connected to the Google voice search technology. Just say your city and state, and then say the name of the place you're looking for, or a category like 'Home Improvement Stores'. The Google voice search service will repeat all of your input so you know it's correct. Once you've decided on a match, or if it matches your criteria exactly, it will connect you to the business/person for free. You can just say "SMS" or "Text Message". Before I could even put my phone down, a SMS message was delivered with the following information:

"Bethany Village Grill"
503-533-7736
4876 NW Bethany Blvd. #L1
Portland, OR 97229
Google Map Link that linked it to a map!

Sick of getting spam, here's a few things to try.

• If you run your own domain, turn off your settings to allow *@domain.com email to go to a single box.
• Remove text that contains your email address on your site, and consider changing it to be "user at domain dot com".
• Consider creating a windows live or Gmail account to use for sites that require registration. Once you've determined if they are trustworthy, change it to your 'good' email address.
• Double spam filter your email. The email from my site goes through my ISP's spam filters, and then Gmail picks it up from my inbox there, sure, it's a few extra minutes to get my mail, but then it goes through Gmail's spam checks. I think I get maybe one to two spam messages in my inbox per week. This also allows me to have a single point of presence for all of my mail, not to mention the hard disk space I'm saving by using Google 2.8 GB of online storage. I've set it up this way for close to six months, and I've only hit 5% of their allotted storage space.
• If you are getting a lot of spam from reliable companies, unsubscribe from their notices, they have to provide a way for you to opt out of their requests. Be careful though, a lot of spammers use this feature to fish for email addresses, so while it's ok to tell Macy's or Nordstrom to stop sending you junk, I'd be weary of BigOffers.com.
• Use Gmail's Report Spam feature in the web based email.
• If you're using Outlook, use it's built in Spam filter capabilities.
• Only give your email address to people you want to receive email from.
• Spammers use name lists to guess at common windows live, yahoo, and gmail accounts, when possible, add something that won't allow your name to be 'guessed' (jsmith89@gmail.com) . It's kind of cryptic, but yet another effective preventive measure.
• If you're getting more spam than good email, it might be time to retire that address and start clean.
• Don't get caught by a phisher either.

I've switched my RSS feed to point to feedburner. Sorry for those of you that have 'subscribed' to the original feed.

Please update your RSS readers to point to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/johnbatdorf

Thanks

So if you're away from your music, or just looking for a change... check out Pandora. It's awesome, you can start by choosing a song, artist, or genre, and they will play songs based on the type of music you like. I created a 'station' called "Green Day Radio". Since I'm such a huge Green Day fan, it's fun to hear other artists (as well as Green Day) that have similar sounds.  If you're not digging the track they are playing, skip to the next. Very cool, and very good sound quality considering it's all streaming over the internet through your browser.

You can see some of the other stations I created below: U2 Radio, Barenaked Ladies Radio, The Crystal Method Radio, Galvanize (Chemical Brothers) Radio, and of course the Green Day one. Very cool site. It's kind of creepy how good of a job they do of matching other artists to the stuff you like.

I just checked and this works in Safari! With an unlimited data plan, it will be interesting to see how this is going to work on the iPhone.

I just downloaded the (free) Opera Mini ver. 4.0 Beta. Just direct your mobile device to http://opera.mini.com/beta/

There are various options to get the download on to your device. Once you've installed it, it will go through, run some tests and determine how your mobile device accesses the Internet. I really think Opera has figured out the mobile stuff better than anyone else, we have yet to see how it will work on the iPhone, but Opera's implementation is similar from what I've seen from iPhone's Safari so far.

You can enter an address and a full version of the page is pulled down to your mobile device, you can then move a small box around to areas you'd like to zoom in on. You can click links, and use most sites just as you would from your desktop. I've already noticed that YouTube does not work in the Opera Mini, but even if it did, I can't imagine wanting to use it, or wait for video to download.

It will let you bookmark your favorite sites, so you don't have to type them in every time. Another thing that is nice is that it keeps a history of the sites you have visited, so if you didn't bookmark it, and you have not browsed a bunch, you should be able to quickly find other sites you've visited.

When I initially set mine up, I got a message about a failure to connect. I closed the application and had to launch it a few more times before it finally got through it's setup, but hey, it's a BETA right?

For the die hard RSS person, Opera Mini will even handle RSS feeds. It's a very nice browser, and I'd bet you that it's better than anything that is on your mobile device today. Check it out.

I thought that this was hilarious:

But seriously, Apple announced the actual battery statistics for the iPhone.

Now I realize that these are probably the BEST circumstances for battery life, like if you were in a vacuum in space? But, it's encouraging to see that it will have a decent amount of battery life.

Standby time 250 hours.
Audio play back 24 hours.
Talk time of 8 hours.
Video play back of 7 hours.
Internet usage of 6 hours.

The screen is also going to be comprised of some form of glass surface, rather than plastic. This will hopefully be a good thing to prevent scratching and provide better clarity.

AT&T Stores will be closing @ 4:30 PM until 6:00 PM on the 29th of this month to prepare for the rush of people going to purchase a phone. They plan to stay open till very late in the evening to support the demand. We'll just hope that they have enough phones to go around.

I'm planning to go to the store around 3:00 ish... if there is a HUGE line, I'll be leaving, if not, I'll probably wait the three hours.

Today, my machine seemed slow. Not the normal slow, but excessively slow. Our IT department does a good job at what they do, however, I think there's a lot of overhead in some of the applications they've chosen to make their lives easier. I understand, it's a tradeoff between keeping our systems functioning, and them having time to deal with more critical business issues.

It just seems ridiculous that opening IE takes so long, or typing in Visual studio has laggy moments. I opened up my Task Manager, and went right to the Processes tab. "AeXRSAgt.exe" sucking up 168MB of precious RAM. What the hell is that? For a moment, I'm worried. Did I get some spy-ware on here somehow? Do I have a virus.... hmm.

A quick trip to http://www.processlibrary.com/ and type the process name into their search. It tells me they have not reviewed the security implications of this process, however, it's author is Altiris, Inc. That's our backup software. It runs all the time continually backing up my  laptop. It has saved me once or twice, but I start to ask the question, "Is the data loss I could experience worth taking the risk of not having this software?" My source code is all backed up in Subversion, so what am I really protecting?

The really important stuff in My Documents is project documentation, and once it's been client approved, it's stored on an extranet.

I understand why they want to have this software, I just wish I could work without it sucking up all my resources. I just looked again, and it's calmed down, but between that, virus, and other IT mandated software, I'm guessing I give up at least a quarter of my available RAM at any given time.

Sigh.

I'm very intrigued about the impending iPhone release from Apple. I think they've gotten it right, it's being dubbed as a phone on your music player. Most people with music capabilities on their current phones can be described as a music player on their phone. One device that does almost everything typically has been a huge failure, but I think Apple has a lot going for them.

Here are some of the reasons I'm interested, and possibly will get an iPhone close to it's release (if possible without standing in line, etc. etc.).

• iPod - Movies and Music.

Sure, it's only 8GB, blah blah blah. I've only got about 15 GB on my current 30GB iPod. I'm ok with keeping my favorite music, photos, and movies on the device. It's not like I'll be crossing the Sahara with this thing. One very nice feature I've read about is letterboxed movies, if you prefer to see them fill the screen, just double tap the screen and the iPhone will resample the video on the fly. Pretty slick.

• User Interface and Design

I love the fact there there are a minimal amount of buttons. The UI can adapt to almost any situation due to the touch screen interface that Apple has developed. The designers they have really do a great job in bringing revolutionary products and interfaces to the market.

• Email, Web, and Voicemail

Sure, it's NOT 3G, but AT & T is promising to beef up their Edge network (hmm can't seem to find the supporting link for this at the current moment) to support faster data transfer times. A full version of Safari on the phone will be sweet. And now with Safari support for Windows, we have a great sandbox to develop AJAX and other web technologies targeted for the iPhone. (And we can test it out on our Windows dev boxes too...) Shiny.

The voicemail is a first as well. Seven voicemails? Skip to the sixth without having to listen to the other five!

Recently I've setup all my email to go through Gmail. I'm very hopeful that Gmail will develop some sort of push technology to address instant email and synching for the iPhone and other mobile device users.... it's got to be coming... right?

• Technology

I'm a total geek. Just the small touches they've added to this phone, like the fact that when you talk on it, the screen turns off to save battery life, or that when you tilt it to landscape it in turn adjusts the screen to that orientation is wonderful. I recall way back in the day having a Casiopeia running Windows CE and to adjust the screen sizes and orientations, required a 3rd party software package I had to pay for!

Now I'm really not an Apple FanBoy, I swear. It took me a long time just to get an iPod. There are several things I'm not excited about in this phone, or things that could be serious deal breakers for me.

• No support for 3G, what the hell? We're on the crappy AT & T Edge network that they are supposedly revamping.
• The soft keyboard is kind of scary from what I've heard so far. If I can't type an email, or web addresses, what's the point? I'll be trying this out in the store for sure before I drop that much cash.
• The hype. Can you imagine how hard it's going to be to get one of these on June 29, @ 6 PM? Let me just say this, there is no way I'm camping out for this thing. I might consider going a few hours early to 'wait'... but I'm not a huge stand in line, or crowd kind of person. So is this going to be like a 6 month Xbox wait?
• No telenav, or GPS integration?
• The price. Let's face it, very expensive. But I supposed if you have a $300 ipod, and a $150 cell phone, plus something to browse the web or do email, or whatever, you're getting close to their price point. And early adopters just pay to be in the game at the beginning.

So with that all said, I'll be there at some point, hands on, considering a purchase. If the rumors of 3-4 million units at launch are true, it should not be too bad. I kind of doubt that there will be that many... I can see Apple wanting to create a huge demand by introducing a small amount of units into the market.

Discuss, tell me what you're impressions are.

Any time I can use an online service to replace a program that I have to open from my computer, I'm interested. Hello Google Reader. I've been using a really decent RSS Aggregator called SharpReader. SharpReader is decent, but I've noticed it's quite the memory hog sometimes. I like having a list of sites that I track, and being able to go to that list and see what I've read and what's new is important. The big problem I've had with SharpReader too, is that the changes are isolated to the computer where you're reading from. So if I have SharpReader on a machine at work, and read a blog during the day, that night SharpReader at home on my laptop has no clue. Google to the rescue, their in-browser RSS reader is the bomb. I can list ALL of the RSS feed in one UI, or I can read them by feed. As I scroll past each article, it marks them as read, ahhhh. If a quick scan of the titles renders nothing I want to delve deeper into, I just click a mark all as read button. Nice and clean. And since it's tied to my google account, when I get home from work everything is as it should be (synchronized is the wrong word - but it's like that). I can even track my RSS items right from my google homepage. I can now uninstall SharpReader and get 30MB - 60MB of RAM back.... sweet!

One of the biggest frustrations I have with IE 7 right now, is that I can't move the "refresh" and "stop" buttons. They are hanging out at the end of the address text box, like a couple of uninvited party guests.

Who had the brilliant idea, that these buttons needed to permantently live there? Does someone out there know how to move them? I want them by the 'back" and "next" buttons!

I'm working on a .NET project w/ a friend, and I intitially thought FolderShare was the for sure way to go. So after setting up a new foldershare instance with my friend, I realized, (duh) that there are files we don't want to just blindly copy back and forth. There is no way in foldershare to exclude a file from a share. My friend Scott said "Dude, it's FOLDERSHARE, not FILESHARE" thanks Scott. But he suggested using Subversion. We use it at work, and I'm not opposed to using it, but I did not want to pay for hosting and did not really have a server (publically accessible) to set it up on.

Scott said there were some places that would host subversion repositories for free. So we found https://OpenSVN.csie.org/ It looks like a site I would probably design (read bad). So it must be good? :) We created our project, set it up to use only HTTPS and even created two user accounts that can access it.

Installed Tortoise SVN 1.4 and bam! Connected! So we now have version control, as well as a place we can work out of. Too freakin' cool.

Here's the free way to do it.
http://www.engadget.com/2005/10/18/how-to-get-tv-s...

After reading all the steps involved with this approach, I opted to spend $25. And while the transfer process of transfering a show from your tivo to your computer is painfully slow... I tend to move the shows off my tivo to my computer while I sleep.

The upside is you can set it to automatically create portable versions whenever you transfer shows to your computer. So when I wake up in the morning, all my iPod files are ready to by synch'd.

I just upgraded the blog to Das Blog 1.9!

I'm also giving the Windows Live Writer a try, it seems really cool so far (this is my first post with it).

I'm totally sick right now, and have been home with the kids all weekend, my wife was at the beach with friends. I'm glad she went, but I can't wait for her to get back.

Transferring a DVD onto a video iPod should be a simple task. I figured it would be easy, slap a DVD in a drive, and say copy to iPod? Ummmm no. Not even close. After following about 10 different sites advice on how to do this, and after installing god knows how many programs, I think I've finally found a good way to do it.

It all started off with either getting all audio, or all video. Once I finally got both audio and video onto the iPod, it was way out of sync. It was so frustrating to finally see the movie start, and progressively get out of sync towards the end.

So I spent $45 on a program that seemed to do it well (at least the demo 5 min did it well). It sucks. Don't buy IMToo DVD Ripper Platinum, it sucks. In theory it would be good, pop the DVD in, choose the platform you want to export to, and that's it. But the audio is off majorly. I checked with their tech support, and they gave me several different settings to try, all of which did not work. I'm gonna have to get a refund.

The following details are my best guess at this stuff so far, and a combination of programs that I've found helpful and that work well. The great part is they're all free.

• DVD Decrypter
  Although this program is 'gone' there are still plenty of places you can download it. The software will decrypt the copy protection on your DVD, and allow you to copy it to a .VOB file to your hard drive. To copy just the main movie off the DVD (and not all the menus, etc.) select "Mode" and choose "IFO". In the Input section, open the first tree option and find an item w/ the length of the movie (typically the first item) and select it. Now just click the DVD > Hard Disk button. It takes a little while but it's ripping your DVD content to a .VOB file on your hard disk.
  
  
  
  Pay attention to the following settings below: Make sure that File Splitting is set to "None" so you get your .VOB in ONE file, instead of 1GB chunks.
  
  
  
  
• DVD Shrink
  Very similar to DVD Decrypter, but a better UI.  The same kind of deal here, put your DVD in, if encrypted it will present you for the region of the DVD, choosing the correct region will allow Shrink to remove the copy protection. Open the "Main Movie" folder, and choose the longest title (usually title 1). Then click the backup button and viola! a .VOB file is written to your hard disk.
  
  
  
  Pay attention to these settings: Uncheck Split VOB files, it's easier to work with one file.
  
  
  
• Jodix Free iPod Video Converter
  The UI is not all that clever, but this FREE program converts your .VOB files into .mp4 (iPod video format) and it works really well. Just load your .VOB file into Jodix, and answer a few questions, choose the resolution you want, and this little gem generates a .mp4 file you can add into iTunes and then sync to your iPod.
  
  

I won't go into all of the other programs I tried that did not work. The programs noted aboveseem to do what I want. I've ripped five movies, all with perfect success.

I think this is based off of the http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ site, but the UI is nice!

http://www.speedtest.net/

Check it out!

WHEN YOU PURCHASE APPLE PRODUCTS.

Yeah, that's right. What am I talking about? Well my iPod Nano died, a few months short of the 'one year' warranty. The screen went bad, like tons of other Nano owners. I was relieved to find that I had all the original packaging, and the receipt.

So a trip to the mall was in order. We arrived at the Apple store, to be greeted by a friendly salesperson that informed me I needed an appointment to meet with a 'Genius'. I had called earlier and explained my plight, why didn't they tell me to go online and schedule an appointment!!!!????

Anyways, I was able to get an 'appointment' about 1/2 an hour later, so I sat at the 'Genius" bar, and watched a few sessions of people trying to understand the complexities of their apple hardware (read sarcasm).

There were quite a few people with broken iPods, and not just Nanos either. One guy had his iPod go bad, and they informed him it was under warranty, but he had to pay $29.95 for shipping and handling to replace it. I was confident that I would not have to pay this, after all I had a receipt, and all, this guy had nothing but a broken iPod.

So it was finally my turn, after close to 45 minutes, they took my iPod, and tried all the fruitless steps to revive it as I had done. They finally agreed that it was a hardware problem, and would replace it, for $29.95.

I was furious. But I kept my anger inside, and tried to rationally explain to the guy, that this seemed like extoriton. If you ask me, $30 seems like the amount most people would pay to get a new iPod, any more, and you're risking some really mad people.

Several other people were there, and they all thought this seemed like a shady business practice.

Come on, face it. Apple knows I have no choice in the matter. Am I going to throw my busted Nano away over $30? Hell no. And that's where they know I'll pay the blood money.

I think it's a SHADY business practice, and I'll be looking forward to Microsoft's iPod Killer, whenever it comes out some day. I'll certainly think twice before making another Apple purchase in the future.

Rant over.

Ok, I'm just not suprised any more, I'm excited, just not suprised. Google has release a new 3D modeling program callled Google Sketch Up, for a novice like me, I'll check it out, I can think of some good uses for it. The program claims to let you model anything (simple) even your house, and add it to google earth. Crazy, amazing.

http://sketchup.google.com/product_suf.html

Ok, I did preface this whole thing by saying I had not researched it much, but talk about feeling stupid when I saw this in my wireless router settings:

Yeah, that's right. Just tell it not to be a router... and it won't! Geeeeez what a bonehead. So changed that, and assigned all my wireless devices 192.168.1.x addresses, and presto.

The XBOX now sees my desktop PC. Next trick? Figure out how to get Windows XP Media Center edition. Probably not going to happen for a longgggggggg time.

Ahhhhhhh one network. All my machines and devices can talk to each other. I can transfer shows from tivo box to tivo box now too... cool.

I'll start this post by saying, I have not googled this yet, nor have I really applied a ton of effort to solve this problem. I figured that someone may have had experience in doing what I'd like to do with my home network.

With a bunch of different devices that need TCP/IP internet connectivitiy, and some different hardware mixed in, I'm challenged to solve this problem. Any help from anyone would be great. I'm really looking for the settings I'd need to input into the two routers, specifics.

So the problem is I have two routers each on their own network, a wired 192.168.1.1, and a wireless access point 192.168.2.1. Now you may ask, why not just have a wireless network? Two reasons, reason 1: Where my cable modem is located is probably the worst place in my entire house as far as wireless coverage goes, reason 2: I needed more than 4 ports on my router to plug into.

So my solution at the time was an 8 port wired router, plugged into one of the ports a fair distance away is my wireless router, in a location that services my wireless devices as I needed. See the diagram below, and please post any ideas/solutions you have.

Again, the goal is to get all the devices on a unified network 192.168.1.1, while still allowing my wireless access point to hand out addresses as needed to devices that connect w/ the proper WEP and security credentials. If you have any ideas on what I can do, please post specifics in the comments section!

Thanks!

(Click Image for larger version)

Ok, so this may be something everyone knows, but I just found out today. VNC has had the ability to do this from day one, so it's weird there is not a menu command for it using Remote Desktop.

I was terminaled into a server today and needed to change the password on my user account for that machine. (Windows 2000). So I really wanted to do a "CTRL + ALT + DEL". When I would do that, I of course would get the dialogue for my machine, not the box I was termed into.

Press "CTRL + ALT + END" that brings up the dialogue for the machine you are terminaled into.

http://support