Just upgraded to a business account with Comcast for my home internet (around $90 per month). I went with a business account because the upload speeds are faster and I get static IPs with it. They also have a promotion going now so the install was free and the monthly cost is reduced. I did have to sign a two year contract, but that's okay.

With DSL, I was getting about 4800kb/s down and 600kb/s up. This was as fast as DSL would go with AT&T unless I switched to U-Verse. But I didn't want U-Verse. The TV channels and DVR don't meet my needs (missing HD channels and only 1 HD channel at a time) and the DSL is only marginally faster. Plus I haven't heard great things about it.

With my freshly installed Comcast cable I'm getting, wait for it, 17500kb/s down and 2700kb/s up! Holy cow poo! They promise 16000kb down and 2000kb up and to my surprise it actually seems to be faster. I haven't hooked it up to my network yet, but that's what the installers speed report said on his laptop. I'll let you know how fast it is according to www.dslreports.com when I hook up the LAN to it.

I can't believe how fast this is. And because I've switched to Vonage for my home phone, Comcast + Vonage is much cheaper than ATT DSL + Phone. And the speeds are a bit mind boggling.

Here is my DSL speed report:

Now, some stuff annoys me. I'm annoyable. Maybe easily so. Ask anyone. But there's a scale. For example, getting a bowie knife thrown at me, Alanis Morissette singing about ironic incidents that are about as ironic as a plucked nosehair, or getting pooped on by a bird as I was leaving to photograph a wedding - these are annoying. Teeth grindable. Kitten throwable, perhaps. But the picture below, however, represents an annoyance so epically annoying that I personally called Condoleezza Rice and asked her to have an f-15 fire a sidewinder into a Smucker's grape jam factory storage vat's ass. Boom! Splat! (Martha, ya'll git me a spoon!)

This annoyance comes from the Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh My Day application. It's part of Entourage, an application close to my heart, since I worked on it for so long entire species of insects evolved into sentience and then killed themselves with Carbon Dioxide emissions and political correctness pamphlets. Now, you may be asking. Um, why is that annoying, you grumpy nut-job? I mean, besides the Barney inspired, nauseous inducing color scheme? (Hello! The grape cool-aid called. She wants her color back! (Yes, the cool-aid is a she. Move on.))

Ok, here's a clue. I didn't run My Day. Ever. Never wanted it. (Ok, maybe I opened it once, screamed, ran out side and blew up my neighborhood's power transformer with Coke and Pop-Rocks to cut power to my computer). But today I simply installed a update from Apple on my Mac Pro that required a restart. This annoyance foists itself on me every time I restart. Yes. Foists. Look it up, you curmudgeon. The picture was captured from my desktop about twenty seconds after the restart. The first thing I did was open the preferences.

Get it yet?

My fix for this? Compress the MyDay.app in the Microsoft Office 2008 folder with ZIP. Delete original. Go to my happy place. Breath, Mike breath.

One last thing. My happy place does not have purple anything. Even the lollipops, jawbreakers, and bubblegum are confused by the word purple there. Because they've never heard the word before. Purple! Huh! Whu? What is the word you are speaking sir, is it Mikelish? (My happy place, my language). Clearly, they don't have to run Entourage. Which I do. Entourage, Damn your purple Barney hide!

I just reviewed the Amazon Kindle over on my Fiction Blog. Check it out, here!

Microsoft is (attempting to) buy Yahoo in a hostile takeover!? Holy Crap. $44.6 Billion? Am I the only one who finds this to be mind boggling? I'm brain boggled. Perhaps this is why MSFT is current down a few dollars to $30.44. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Looks to me like HD-DVD just lost the war. So maybe it's time to buy a Blu-Ray player. Maybe the Panasonic DMP-BD10AK. Seems to be getting good reviews on Amazon.com. Some people are buying Sony PS3s and using them. However, I hate Sony. Can't give them my money.

Any suggestions?

I've been waiting for this. Apple announced their new MacPros. Yay. I priced one out. Are you sitting down? $6500 with a 30" cinema display (which I really want). $4600 without the display. Ouch. Ow. Ouchy. Retch. Whimper.

I need a new computer. My home built PC is getting very long in the molars. My MacBook Pro is awesome, but is a bit slow for doing lots of photo stuff, especially with the files from my new 12.3 megapixel Nikon d300.

I'll have to really think this over.

If you need an external drive enclosure that supports data mirroring, the Drobo looks like a very nice unit. Though for about a hundred more, you can get an HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server with a 500 gig drive (which is an unbelievable deal, imo).

The Drobo seems very expensive for an external drive enclosure, especially for something that doesn't have ethernet. It definitely is a very sweet design though. I like the form factor and the red/yellow/red lights to let you know it's failing.

I'm looking for something I can copy all of my data to and leave somewhere offsite. This is a bit expensive considering I'd have to fill it with big hard drives as well. Probably if we're $300 I'd just buy it. I've bought random other external enclosures that are half the price and they've all sucked.

For example, I bought a Venus DS3R a while ago. This is actually a very nice enclosure except for one problem. This enclosure promises hardware RAID support. You choose how you want this configured with a small dip switch (which you can't reach with your fingers) so I was using a small screw driver to toggle it and it broke within about fifteen minutes of opening the box (and I was very gentle). I never did get hardware RAID to work. I ended up using the Mac OS X software RAID which worked fine (though it was very slow) until it completely failed and I couldn't even load up the individual partitions (also called slices) to recover my data. Luckily it was all backed up on my server, but now that enclosure is sitting on a shelf with 2 perfectly good 500 gig drives in it. I'm probably going to buy the Media Smart server above and throw them in there.

Anyway, the moral of the story is a) you get what you pay for b) don't use the Mac OS software RAID.

I'm still not happy with my backup story. Still working on it. I'm terrified that my house is going to burn down or that I'll get burgled and loose all my pictures. With only a couple exceptions, my pictures are almost the only irreplaceable items I have. I'm determined to get this solved so I just don't have to worry about it.

If you use a non gmail address with gmail IMAP or POP email, watch out for the smtp server. It sends your mail from your gmail account only - it doesn't honor the "from" header in your email. For example, I have everything setup to send mail from greentongue.com just fine but when sent through gmail's smtp server, it shows up as from my gmail account. That's bad. I don't understand why the server would do this, since I already have to log in with my gmail account credentials.

So I guess I'll use a different smtp server for now. Maybe I'll log a bug with gmail or something.

Google rolled out Imap support for gmail recently. It works great so far. I'm using Mail on Mac, Thunderbird on Windows, and of course my iPhone.

A couple of things:

1. Imap itself seems to be SSL only (which is good), so be sure to set your incoming server port to 993. Some clients don't do this automatically when you click the SSL box.

2. Smtp is also SSL only, so be sure to set your port to 587.

3. Here's how to set your reply address to your custom domain on your iPhone (can't do it on the phone).

4. Set your root path to "[Gmail]" in your advanced settings (no quotes). Note this appears to be case sensitive, at least on the iPhone. This is also the "path prefix" or "Imap Server Directory" and can usually be found in an advanced tab in the various email clients. This will pull you subfolders up next to your inbox.

So you'll have :

Inbox

Drafts

Trash

All Mail

Sent Mail

Spam

Starred

Instead of:

Inbox

[GMail]

Drafts

Trash

All Mail

Spam

Starred

 

I'm forwarding my personal email to gmail and it seems to be working fine. As of 24 hours ago, no spam in my inbox!

In the past I've been using a "third" party imap provider. But that costs money, and I've been having problems with their anti-spam support.

Seems like Google is getting this right. Nice.

This is definately going to be the last straw for me going completely HD. I need to find an affordable solution though. If I have to go to Comcast, fine, as long as I have a decent way to do multiroom HD. I *want* a Windows Media Center setup so I can use my Xbox 360s as media extenders, but the whole cable card plus WMC situation is completely out of control. This would cost me *thousands* of dollars and makes me feel, ahem, bent over a table. I don't think I can do this on principal. We'll see.

Here's the thing though. CSI would be cool in HD. F1 in HD would change my life.

Article about Speed TV going to HD

 

Here's how to behead that loud-mouth Outlook reminder from hell. Go to Calendar->Current View->View->By Category (this is Outlook 2007). Proceed to remove head from neck with your Toledo Salamanca sword.  Also be sure to delete the offending reminder from the category list. Wait for the quickening to lift you into the air. Scream in agony and pain. Clean up glass from blown out windows. Clean sword on kilt. Talk to your dead friend, Ramirez. Write an email. Go wander the hall. Talk to your coworkers about the latest episode of Heroes. Silar is the new Spock.

 

 

Holy mother of [insert preferred diety here], clearly I need to stop working in program "" (can I alt-tab to it?), and allocate more space for my thread data. Now is this a binary blob, serialized objects, or is it a key value pair dictionary? 

On second thought, I've got your thread data right here, pal. Patooey! 

Thanks for clearing that up. My course of action is now clear. I should have know this already, the problem is obvious.

Rumor has it that we will soon get Microsoft Exchange support for the iPhone. Boing! Say what? This is a shocker to me, but evidently Apple may be licensing the Active Sync protocol. Nice.  

I will say, though, that the last bit in the article (the "Update" part) makes me wonder if the author has it all wrong. She clearly doesn't understand that Mossberg was referring to IMAP support, which, is not, I repeat not, Exchange support (for one thing IMAP is only e-mail - no contacts, calendar, tasks, or Internet worms). 

So here's your grain of salt. Right here. On this big ol' shiny Steve Job's reality distortion field platter.

If this is true, wow. If not, meh, it's still a wicked cool phone.

All windows mobile and no usability make Mike a psychotic boy.

The only thing that kept me from actually throwing it out my car window was the five bills I paid for it on ebay. That may not hold me off for long though, the way things have been going. I better get into a Cingular/ATT/WTF store as soon as I can and buy the cheapest replacement I can before I destroy the retail value of this thing. I might still do it on principle. If I had a wee bit more cash on hand, there'd be some smashing. You'd better believe it.

You may be wondering what it did to nearly send me over the edge.

Let me elaborate.

I was driving down a wide slow street. Windows down. Sunny and warm out. I made a call but got some voicemail and immediately hung up. Or attempted to. Instead, it prompted "press center button to unlock". So I pressed the "center button to unlock" with every expectation of imminent call termination success. I grumbled, sure, but so far just a couple of extra key presses. Really a bit more of an existential bother than an actual one. So, then, the phone unlocked, I pressed the hang up button. Again. And got prompted with "press center button to unlock". Again. I think people on the sidewalk ducked, put their arms over their heads, and looked around for a foxhole to dive into.

Unlock, hang up, curse, unlock, hang up, curse, unlock, hang up, curse. An infinite loop of insanity. Meanwhile virtually every curse combination I could invent, screaming pedestrians, dogs yelping, car alarms blaring, low flying aircraft, eighteen wheelers forced off the road into watermelon stands - all recording live to voicemail.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to call the Vatican.

In the end, I rather energetically tossed the phone on the floor of the car. 

At a stop light I reset the phone after recording a few more choice morsels to voicemail.

But I thought about it. I truly did. The window I mean. I thought long and hard about the window. Open. Right next to me.

May god have mercy on your soul, phone.

Move your cursor to where you want to start typing. Start typing. Notice the cursor doesn't disappear and will actually get in your way visually. Like your mom walking in front of the pre-Tivo TV, right when the good part is happening. Mom! Get out of the way! Down in front!

The cursor should never get in your way. This frequently leads to me slapping the mouse to just move the cursor out of my way as I'm typing. In fact I do this all day long. I could argue that this is worsening any repetitive stress on my wrists. Windows is actually physically damaging me here.

BTW, The Mac OS X does, in fact, get this right.

Select a word of text. Press the left arrow. The result is the cursor ends up at the end of the word. Not at the beginning of the word.

Wrong.

Note, this doesn't happen everywhere and seems to be fixed in some of the newer applications like Office 2007. But this should be baked into the OS and not left up to the developer anyway. Which I view as second, and probably, larger failure. You can try it now in the address bar of IE 7.

For the record, the Mac OS has always nailed the landing on this one.

A while ago I installed Office 2007 on Windows XP (in a Parallels disk image so I can run Windows word on my MacBook Pro, but that's a different story) thinking I'd need to use it eventually and that I'd install it and have it ready for that day. I spent like an hour or more getting my XP install all ready to go with Office and a few other things. The day has come when I needed to use it. I assumed it would be ready to go. My. Mistake. It's taken me about ten minutes to actually get Word 2007 to launch. Here's the quick story: it's Father's day and I have a very limited amount of time to work on a couple of documents for work that I'm a bit late delivering. I'm in Paso Robles visiting B's family. B is going to Target in an epic quest for Laundry detergent. Or something like that. In the meantime, I'm sitting Starbucks, cursing my slow connection, and I start up Windows Word by double clicking the document I want to edit. Did I mention that I have a specific amount of work to get done in the specific, and small, amount of time I have? So a giant window pops up. What the hell? Something about "Installing blah blah blah". It changed after a while to "Installing other stuff, blah blah blah". After a while, another alert popped up "something really important isn't installed, should we install it?" Um. Hello? This is just goddamned mind boggling. Like I'd choose anything else. There might as well be only one button: "Yes you would, stupid user." So I click it. What I am doing to do, choose no? Choosing no is like an old western where the hero is tied up and blindfolded in a saloon with a barrel of TNT. The black hats light the fuse, run out, jump on their horses and gallop away in a cloud of dust firing their guns in the air and screaming "yipee-kie-aye!". The hero hears the fuse hissing. He's tied to a player piano. The barrel is gonna blow. He doesn't know when. Just that it will. So for the love god, don't let your mouse finger slip and choose no. There will just be smoking crater left and you'll have to repave your machine and any machine within wifi range. Meanwhile I'm sitting here inventing new obscene combinations of curse words. This took about ten minutes. I think Microsoft is a great company. But stuff like this blows my mind. I just can't understand why anyone would think this is acceptable. My guess is that the installer was taking too long to run and that this is the fix. The installer runs for ten less minutes. Let's just fix this by deferring everything we can until the user launches the application. There's probably a ginourmous "first run" spec. I can just visualize how this happened. The thing that remains obvious to me is that the customer experience was not THE top priority. Something else was. For the love of God, why?

Below are links to two little scripts that insert or change registry keys in Windows itself (sigh, don't get me started) which undoes two IE 7 interface, um, enhancements. As far as I can tell, both these scripts work as advertised. Which makes me dance my happy dance (you don't want to know, it involves a Nerf catapult and soccer cleats).

To use these scripts, unzip the files and then double click them. You'll get a  warning, something along the lines of "Holy crap! You fool! Your computer is about to explode! Click OK or RETRY or CLICK THIS LINK TO ORDER NEW UNDERWEAR". After you order your new eatable long johns, just let it do its thing.

Note that if you install these and your computer does explode, then, well, you're on your own. I'll pretty much be like, "um, what registry keys? IE 7? Huh? Ten minutes to Whapner. About a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars."

• Script One: remove the "are you sure you want to drag this picture to the place you just intentionally dragged this picture to, and by the way, yes, we know that IE 7 is the only browser that has this feature and, yes, we know that you can't turn it off, dialog".
• Script Two: put the IE 7 menubar back where it belongs. Above everything else. Not in the middle of your sixteen spyware and search engine toolbars. Above your sixteen spyware and search engine toolbars. Again, where it fricking belongs. A big thanks to Omar "I change diapers in my office now" Shahine  for this one.

You're welcome. Hopefully I've helped make IE 7 suck a bit less.

My Vista machines at home won't go to sleep. This is a new problem. Maybe an update broke it? I scrutinized the advanced settings in the power control panel, and the settings are correct there. For example, the multimedia settings indicate that the machine can sleep. Anyone know what's up? Anyone else having this problem?

thanks

Ever have a moment when the silence of your office is disturbed by your Windows machine just grinding away on its hard drives for no apparent reason? No amount of quitting applications, cursing, begging, and staring at the various tabs in the Windows Task Manager gives you clue to what's happening? Not sure what the heck is causing it? This is driving me a bit apeshiznit. It's definitely worse in Vista, BTW. I probably wouldn't mind or even notice, but my drives are noticeably loud when they enter this 'wtf is my machine doing' mode. I'm so tempted to go out back to my breaker box and just flip them all the hell off so I can sit in my house and just bask in the absence of harddrives acting out some sort of frenetic caffeine high. Jeez.

Here's how to find out what your machine is doing.

1. Down load "process monitor" here. This is a  free tool from the Sysinternals folk (recently bought by Microsoft, btw). They make some very outstanding tools. Check out some more here.
2. Extract it into a folder somewhere appropriate. (I use a folder called "Sysinternals Tools" at the root of my C: drive.) Note the application is called "procmon.exe".
3. If you're running on Vista, go to this folder. Right click the application. Go to the "Compatibility" tab. Click the "run as administrator" checkbox (this is so it has permissions to sniff around in your system).
4. Launch the application.
5. You'll see a massive amount of stuff start scrolling by, but what we're interested in are files. So let's filter out everything else.
6. Choose "filter..." from the "Filter" menu.
7. We're going to add two rules here.
8. Click on the top left popup menu and choose "operation"
9. Leave the middle pop as "is"
10. Choose "read file" from third popup menu
11. Click the "add" button
12. Repeat steps 8 - 9
13. Choose "write file" from third popup menu
14. Click the "add" button
15. Click ok to close the filter edit window

You should now see a bunch of stuff happening in the main window. These are all file reads and writes. Prepare to be shocked. I was.

Some things I've learned.

1. The clock widget in the Vista sidebar does not cache its clock graphic (wtf?). I turned it off, cause shiznit like that bugs me.
2. Computer Associates  eTrust antivirus has 3 services that continually run, even if you quit the application. And they are very aggressive. Anti-virus software good. Services that continually read from your harddrives when you don't want them to, bad. I disabled the services with Autoruns. Note, you'd have to be pretty stupid to disable your antivirus software like this. Guilty as charged. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, I'm a trained perfesshunal.
3. Outlook is a very busy application (no surprise there). I basically consider Outlook as a necessary evil in my life. But I digress.
4. Windows Messenger is a very busy application (somewhat surprising to me).
5. The Vista Search indexer is very busy. Sigh. Does anyone know if there is a good way to schedule this better? I basically don't want it to index within like ten minutes of my latest keyboard or mouse activity. Keep my computer quiet when I'm around please.

What I want to learn:

1. Every day at midnight, the grinding starts. I suspect either the Search Indexer or eTrust. We'll see tonight.
2. Some of the entries are not very understandable, like this one (anyone have a clue?):

276092 2:04:15.2887771 PM svchost.exe 1116 WriteFile C:\Windows\Prefetch\SEARCHPROTOCOLHOST.EXE-AFAD3EF9.pf SUCCESS Offset: 0, Length: 47,060, Priority: Normal
276139 2:04:15.4285546 PM svchost.exe 1116 WriteFile C:\Windows\Prefetch\SEARCHFILTERHOST.EXE-AA7A1FDD.pf SUCCESS Offset: 0, Length: 14,216, Priority: Normal
278337 2:04:24.6788616 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\INDEX.BTR SUCCESS Offset: 2,023,424, Length: 8,192
278339 2:04:24.6789638 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\INDEX.BTR SUCCESS Offset: 2,555,904, Length: 8,192
278341 2:04:24.6790130 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\INDEX.BTR SUCCESS Offset: 2,220,032, Length: 8,192
278343 2:04:24.6790627 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\OBJECTS.DATA SUCCESS Offset: 20,496,384, Length: 8,192
278345 2:04:24.6791074 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\INDEX.BTR SUCCESS Offset: 1,753,088, Length: 8,192
278347 2:04:24.6791535 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\OBJECTS.DATA SUCCESS Offset: 20,414,464, Length: 8,192
278362 2:04:24.6805665 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\INDEX.BTR SUCCESS Offset: 1,884,160, Length: 8,192
278364 2:04:24.6806059 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\INDEX.BTR SUCCESS Offset: 8,192, Length: 8,192
278366 2:04:24.6806517 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\INDEX.BTR SUCCESS Offset: 2,408,448, Length: 8,192
278368 2:04:24.6806847 PM svchost.exe 1136 ReadFile C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository\INDEX.BTR SUCCESS Offset: 2,424,832, Length: 8,192

This is an article about the different blogging hosts, for example TypePad vs WordPress. It's geared toward Mac users, but it's helpfull no matter what platform your going to blog from.

 Check out the list here. 

This bugs the ever loving snot out of me. Go type in a domain without the suffix into the IE address bar. Example: “Amazon”. This fails with the a “website can’t be found error” because “http://amazon/” isn’t a valid address. Well, duh, you piece of stinky guano. Why not add the dot com automatically? Like Safari does? We. Have. The. Technology. What IE wants you to do here is type the name and then hit control-enter. This fills out the www and dot com and this works. But god help you if you hit control-enter and you already have the domain suffix or www prefix entered. You’re like to get “http://www.amazon.com.com” or “http://www.www.foo.net.com”. For phuck sake what decendant of Albert Einstein thought up this feature? Mr or Mrs Wedumb? I think so.

Note that in order for you get sucked into this feature poop pit, you have to turn off searching from the address bar in the advanced preferences (don’t get me started on scrolling lists of checkboxes and radio buttons). Hate the searching. Never gets it right and it destroys whatever I’ve typed in. Ninety percent of the time it’s a typo and it goes to the wrong site or gives me an error, but either way it destroys what I’ve typed in the address bar. Which makes me want to snap someone’s neck like one of those long matches I light my barbecue with. Ok, maybe that’s a bit on the violent side, but come on. Who designed this? Mr or Mrs Weannoyu? I think so.

Safari does this right. If you type in “amazon” - it’s going to add www and dot com. And it’s not going to add it twice. And if either the prefix or the suffix is there already, it’s not going to flap it arms and run around the room screaming like a monkey shot with a pellet gun. Yes, IE 6 sometimes acts like a monkey.

Sigh. These things bother me.

I’ve notice this lately. Every time I go to run QuickTime in a webpage, I get alert in the picture below. Three guesses why this is the lamest alert ever and the first two don’t count. I guess if I don’t want to run the ActiveX control in the webpage, I have to go to the Task Manager and force quit IE. Sure, that’s reasonable. But, hey, it’s better security, right? Sigh.

http://categoriz.com/

BTW, I was trying to wrap my head around all these sites and my head exploded. Kapow.

It’s a bit old, but here is a great article about Web 2.0 by Tim ‘Reilly.

I know there is a lot under the hood that is important. Security. Rss. Speed. Blah, blah, blah. But. I. Just. Don't. Care.

I think the user interface is abominable. Horrible. Worth of designer jail. I can't find the damn refresh button. Does the addresses bar really need to be 80% of the width of the window? I want the menu bar back where it belongs - ABOVE everything else. I hate the new back forward buttons in the top left that I can't get rid of. I can't believe the menu bar is hidden by default. Who in the heck thought this was a good idea? I want the refresh and home buttons back where they belong. I want the new tool bar thingy that is pinned to the lower right of the menubar area gone. I don't even really understand what this thing is. I want decent preferences, not a humungous scrolling list of checkboxes. I especially hate that I get a confirmation alert when I drag an image from a webpage to the desktop (to be fair, this showed up in one of the IE 6 security updates, but this truly, absolutely, tragically, drives me absolutely batshit).

I actually sent all this feedback to the team months and months ago. I basically got a pat on the head in return. A "run along, we know what's best". Yeah right. They didn't seem to give a fig.

I do like the tabs, that I'll say. I like how easy it is to make a new tab and I like the close box for the tab right there on the tab. The tabs I like. Put them in IE 6.

I predict that IE 7, if it is really released as is, will make Firefox users out of a lot of people who are basically indifferent to browsers today. This is mostly me. I generally give software the benefit of the doubt. Until it pisses me off. I gave IE 7 the benefit of the doubt. Now it's pissing me off. Personally I don't really give a flying pigs rump about the browser. I care about the pages I go to. But when the browser start getting in my way, well, I'll just go use something else to show me my webpages.  

Here's the thing. The entire world is used to browsers as they are. Are they broken? Certainly things can be improved. But we (Microsoft) are falling into the trap we always fall into. We're forcing ourselves on our users. Now, this would be entirely different if I could switch all the new crap off. I can't. At least I don't know how to.

I think we're making a big mistake with the new UI. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll grow to appreciate it. I have a reasonably open mind. But I kind of doubt it. I don't think I stick around in IE 7 long enough for any hidden goodness to wear off on me. I just don't care to relearn my browser.

And I'm a sophisticated user. I know for a fact that IE 7 will confuse the hell out of someone like my Mom.

I love Microsoft. But sometimes we just don't get it. This is one of those times, imho.

Now I'm interested to try out the new version of Office. And Vista. Oh boy, cross your fingers. Hopefully the IE designers haven't "influenced" those products too much.

Sorry if this steps on someone's toes. I'm just calling it as I see it.

 

Wow, check this out. Some retailers are selling Macintoshes with Windows preinstalled on it. I think hell has officially frozen over.

I have my eye on a new MacBook laptop when the next generation comes out. I love Apple hardware, but my life and job require Windows. Though if I had a nice machine to run OS X on, I would. For some things.

 

 

Here is a list of Windows keyboard shortcuts. How many do you know already?

This is an interesting description of why Wininternals is suing Best Buy. Basically, Best Buy is stealing from them.

Boot Camp reveals that OSX is slower than Windows.

This is interesting, though if you read between the lines, you release that this was a very unscientific test. Could there be other factors? What other software is running on OSX? Is XP a totally clean install? Maybe its an issue with the game itself?

So, I say this is interesting, but I take it with a definite grain of salt.

 

Survey after survey shows that whether you measure your productivity in facts researched, alien spaceships vaporized, or articles written, adding an extra monitor will give your output a considerable boost — 20 percent to 30 percent, according to a survey by Jon Peddie Research.

The Virtues of a Second Screen - New York Times.

 

I’ve been using BlogJet for a while to post to my blog.

Overall I find it to be useful but I think it has problems:

• Spell check doesn’t check post Titles (this is bad)
• Spell check has the worst dictionary known to mankind. I’m constantly using words that it doesn’t know that I think it should. This is just lame because it’s just a list of words that could be updated.
• Spell check isn’t very good at figuring out what word you mean when you spell it wrong
• Spell check “ignore all” does the wrong thing. It basically terminates the spell check. What it should do is ignore all misspellings of the current word.
• I think the purchase price is too expensive at $40. I hemmed and hawed for a while before buying it. I think this is a $20 program. If it was, I would have bought it a while ago without even thinking about it.
• When entering a post, setting the category via keyboard is a pain in my rump. Tab to box, down arrow to bring up menu, down arrow to category, space bar to set check box, press return. Gah. Tabbing into the box should at least bring up the menu. Then I should be able to type the category I want, select it, and hit return.

Here’s a couple feature wishes:

• I *really* wish it had inline spell check (red squigglies)
• I think it should save local copies of every post. I just lost a entire post for some reason when I posted it and had to retype the whole thing. Maybe the user could configure it to save x number of posts. Like five or so, that way if something goes wrong when you’re posting you have a backup. Basically it would automatically save a draft. Posting safely, i.e. no chance of losing what you’ve written, is kinda the whole point of BlogJet, so I think more “safety” features are needed.
• I’d like to be able to post pictures to smugmug with BlogJet when I enter a post. Maybe a plugin architecture could be added for people to make their own dlls for uploading binary content to arbitrary servers. That would be pretty sweet.
• “BlogJet This” for FireFox (maybe this already exists)

So I’m on the fence. Don’t know if I would recommend it. I would if it were cheaper. I would if some of the spell check issues were improved. I would if I felt like it was nearly impossible for me to loose a post. I’ll continue to use it, but it could definitely be improved.

 Edit: “BlogJet this” for FireFox does, in fact, already exist.

We now own www.mikeandbunny.com and our pictures are now at pictures.mikeandbunny.com. I ended up ponying up the big bucks for the pro account on smugmug so I could do this. Sweet. Now I just need to figure out how to point www.mikeandbunny.com to my fluidhosting server. This is more complicated than usual since I’m using a cname (alias) to point pictures.mikeandbunny.com at our smugmug pictures, which means I’m using the godaddy dns servers instead of fluidhosting’s. This is a bit confusing and trial and error is a pain in the rump because it can take like two days for dns changes to take effect. D’oh. If only I knew somebody who has done this already… ;-P

 

 

Apple has released a beta of Bootcamp which is software to allow you to run Windows on your Intel based Mac. This is huge, and I still only sort-of believe it. Is this a prank? Are we being punked? Does this mean I can have an Apple laptop running XP (or Vista)? Oh my goodness. I just looked out side and for a moment I couldn't see much of anything due to the multitudes of flying bovine. I hear the prince of darkness just bought a parka from REI, seems his crib's a bit chilly these days. And all my universal remotes are fully programmed. Okay, one of those just is too unlikely to be true. I'll let you guess which one. My future laptop choices are sure looking up!

 

Interesting facts about domain names.

I just bought a new mouse. It has sweet mousing skills. Seriously it’s Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 Pro .Net Edition with Useless Default Zooming Technology. Okay, I added everything past the 6000 there, but jumpin jehosophat whose in charge of naming this stuff? Why the 6000? Why don’t we just start using Guids to name our products, that’d be about as memorable. So let me start again.

Good news everyone, I just bought the new Microsoft A5234615-12C6-4a03-A86A-38DDDBCDE604. It’s sweet. It’s got a laser (with double finger quote, ala Dr. Evil) so it’s action is the best action I’ve experienced. Action. There I said it again. I’ve actually uttered embarrassing grunts of pleasure when mousing with this thing.

One thing though, I just don’t get the zoom feature that replaces the default “forward” behaviour of the front side button. This seems like a cool feature, but the default behaviour? WTH? Is this what passes for feature discoverability? Annoy the user? Beat him about the head and neck with said feature? If so, mission successful, I’m quite aware of the feature. Sigh. Quit fracking with my buttons!

Anyway, the new mouse is much better than my previous mouse, the Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 .Net pro edition with Random LowBattery Notification technology. Yes. Much better action. Hee hee.

Let’s hope they’ve improved on the Random LowBattery Notification Technology because I’m left with a pile of batteries that may or may not keep my pen light shining brightly. Nobody knows.

So, in conclusion, thumbs up on the hot mouse action.

So I repaved my WinXP machine at home last week (more on this later). I reinstalled everything and all was well. Except on thing. I couldn't see my second WinXP machine with my machine. I also couldn't see our laser printer (which lives by itself on our LAN). It was weird, the second computer could see my machine just fine. I could also connect with mine to the second machine via its IP address (\\10.0.0.15\foo). After several hours of twiddling settings, changing ip addresses, computer names, and workgroup names, I realized my computer's Subnet mask was set to 255.255.255.248 instead of 255.255.255.0. Foul, foul, filth, foul! That was a lot of rebooting for no apparent reason. :-P WTF is up with Subnet masks anyway? Just another fricking settings to f-up. Ah well, at least it's working now.

Use FireFox? I do.

Quick Online Tips: 50 Best FireFox Extensions for Power Surfing

There’s a lot of cool stuff on this list. A personal fave, I’ve got to say that Greasemonkey is pretty damn cool. If you like Flickr, there’s a lot of scripts to make Flickr’s UI less annoying.

This post is a warning sign on the virtual highway of computing life. It's for those attempting to stay in the fast lane while driving a creaky and leaky Windows XP. I think I just got passed by a lime green 1973 pinto, and the old lady driving it gave me the finger.

Anyway, I came very close to shoving a sharpened pencil in my eye tonight. Just to take my mind off the pain.

Here's why:

Did you know that if you hold down the shift key when you click on a folder, while you're in the "explore" view, and you're viewing that folder's contents as thumbnails, that the Windows explorer will NOT show the file and folder names under the thumbnail? The shift key actually toggles viewing the file names on and off. Gah. Sputter. Cough. Choke.

Did your further know that if you hold down the shift key and double click on a folder, while NOT in the "explore" view, that the Windows explorer will open a new window into a "explore" view, showing the contents of that folder? Gah. Sputter. Cough. Choke.

If you're like me, experiencing this results in the public broadcasting of an embarrassingly large quantity of loosely related short nasty words, the throwing of small meowing kittens, and a spree of Teddy bear strangling.

Woa unto those who don't know about the thumbnail view shift key toggle, um, eff-up, because this the type of thing the sends people to rubber rooms, drooling on themselves, mumbling about conspiracies, and giggling inappropriately at people getting hit in the crotch during dodgeball.

All I knew was that my file and folder names disappeared for no reason that I could possibly reconcile with my tenuous grasp on reality. I searched options boxes, menu items, and various other nooks and crannies. There's even a obvious "choose details" dialog box. Seems like a likely place for this sort of thing. Hey, the first item is "Name". Aha! Wait, it's checked, and keep waiting, because I can't click on it or change it, yet my file names and folders are still not visible!

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!
Meeeeeeoooooooooow...... thump.
Meeeeeeoooooooooow...... thump.

Holy fracking sheepdip! I must have a virus or spyware, or my disk is corrupted! Maybe I'll have to repave my machine. Mike makes a sudden embarrassing, involuntary, and quite rude sound and then bolts from the room, only to return a few minutes later with a nice pair of freshly laundered big boy pants.

Also try this. Go to a folder with lots of folders in it. Open it all nice and fresh and don't do anything to it. Now hold down shift key and double click the last one. Ha ha, you just opened all the folders in the window into their own separate windows. See, if you want to double click a folder and have it open in its own