well, it's been a while since the phoenix installfest and i've been behind on a few things.  on 20 dec 2007, the arizona user group communities hosted the phoenix installfest in tempe, arizona.  special thanks to a lot of people, but namely scott cate, spike xavier, lorin thwaits (cameraman), steele price and my comrades rob bagby, eric strait and dan willis. 

tempe center for the arts was our host venue for the night.  i personally thought it was a kick arse venue even if the food was not the greatest (blame me for that, but you shouldn't complain, it was free ;-)).  a lot of work went into organizing that event down to the wire and i was glad to see over 200 people show up.  i wish we could have hosted more, but we were limited by the venue!

at the end of the night, a lot of people stayed the entire time, a lot of great prizes were distributed and best of all, the attendees walked away with a copy of visual studio 2008 for thanks in being a part of the user communities.  if you aren't a part of a .net user group in your area -- find one and get involved.  participate and be active.

we shot some video from the event and i put it up on silverlight streaming services for you to see.  it doesn't auto play so after the initial buffering, hit the play button:

thanks again to everyone who showed up and hopefully you had some fun in tempe!

it could be that december sucked and i was bored, or it could have been the pain killers, but i have found that the recent freecreditreport[dot]com television advertisements have been hilarious.

caveat: i am not promoting the service and i actually don't necessarily agree with it (as i think there is too much fine print involved and it isn't really 'free' but that is beside the point, this is about the commercials.

their latest one had me cracking up as the guy singing the jingle in what appears to be somewhat of a red lobster type restaurant ("they say a man should always dress for the job he wants, so why am i dressed up like a pirate in this restaurant"):

the previous one is about his girlfriend with bad credit ("so now instead of living in a pleasant suburb, we're living in the basement of her mom and dad's"):

there is another one about a new car, but i don't find that one as amusing.  the agency behind these is the martin agency.  who are they?  well, they are behind some of the more successful broadcast media campaigns around:

• spiketv and the CSI campaign (the humorous ad showing a guy being dumped and he's telling the killer about all his mistakes)
• geico -- they brought geico the gecko, as well as the advertisements featuring celebrities helping tell customer claim stories and the cavemen commercials
• 'virginia is for lovers' campaigin in 1972, which apparently is still going strong.
• wrangler
• launched the UPS 'brown' campaigns

seems like a pretty talented agency balancing their abilities to serve different mediums as well as creative abilities catering to both the stiff corporate customers as well as enabling companies to see some humor in their own brands or bring something catchy to their advertising.

anyhow, nothing of significance here, just a random thought and appreciation for the creative talent.  i wonder what the martin agency could do for microsoft?

incidently did you know that the mac vs. pc ads (their agency is TBWA\Chiat\Day) are market specific?  check out the ones from the UK and Japan has some, but the link is bad now and i don't read japanese...but they featured a popular japanese comedy duo in their advertisements.

in searching for a past post on10.net i noticed they got an overhaul on the user interface.  i also noticed some great new content just this week.  today i was able to learn about:

• new battery rules for travel
• problems with xbox live from major nelson over the holidays (maybe that was my problem)
• how to use a windows mobile device as a wireless router (although i'm not sure why, it is interesting)
• viigo - a free rss reader for windows mobile (and blackberry)
• anagram - a tool for outlook to create contacts/tasks quickly based on content.

if you haven't been over to on10.net in a while, check it out!

for some reason my xbox live wasn't connecting for the longest time, which is fine as sadly i rarely use it.  but with my new love for guitar hero 3, i wanted to see if there were any new/free tracks i could download.  i suspect my problems are with using OpenDNS as since i started using them i noticed the problem.  anyhow, it started working again so i was able to take a look.

i noticed a free 'holiday' track of we three kings that was available for download.  it's a pretty good track for GH3 as well as a nice twist on a holiday classic.  after playing it i wanted to see if the guitar track itself was available for download on iTunes (i think it is great how the GH3 site integrated with iTunes so people could immediately navigate to the tracks on the game).

well, it wasn't available, but i researched and found the composer's site, steve ouimette.  what is interesting to find out is he's the same composer who created 7 other tracks for GH3 that you would have thought were just created by the original artists.  from steve's site i learned that he created: Rock You Like A Hurricane, School’s Out, Barracuda, Talk Dirty To Me, Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll, Hit Me With Your Best Shot, and Mississippi Queen, and the electric version of The Devil Went Down To Georgia.

in a QA post he talks about TDWDTG track...i particularly like the question of "Isn’t it blasphemy to destroy a classic song like TDWDTG?"  interesting stuff to learn about some of the history behind the music of games, etc.  glad to have found steve's site.  reminds me of some of the discussions with steve ball and the audio behind operating systems...but admittedly this is funner.

from the geniuses who determined that only a one quart bag full of 3.5 oz liquids is permitted, comes new rules about bringing lithium-ion batteries in united states travel.

what seems odd to me is that the restriction is on checked baggage and not carry-on luggage per se.  from the site, it indicates that a spare battery is something not installed on the device.  and if you wanted to bring a spare lithium ion battery along, you have to put it in your carry-on luggage as putting it in your checked luggage is forbidden.  what?!

what concerns me (as i don't believe this will affect my day-to-day travel...i don't travel with spare batteries that much.  but i've recently gotten some camera equipment that has a lot of batteries: 2 for the camera, one huge li-ion for the light equipment.  and the bummer is that all of it won't fit in a case that is carry-on size...so it has to be checked.

so now the question becomes...what happens when you leave your luggage with TSA to be processed and you walk to your gate...do they make a discovery of a battery and then decide not to send your luggage?  take out the battery and replace it with a note "sorry, we have your battery now"?

brilliant.