Tagged: November 2006 Blog Posts

one of my favorite episodes from the office (us version) is when dwight receives a bobblehead of himself. well, you too can now have that luxury. www.whoopassenterprises.com delivers fully custom bobblheads at $115 (US) each. priceless. tags: the office, bobblehead, bobble head, dwight shrute

this past weekend was the american 'thanksgiving' holiday.  as is tradition with most, i too ate turkey for the holiday.  this one was different for us.  we decided to escape the normal family gatherings and stress of making food, cleaning, and having kids in non-kid friendly homes.  we took off for san diego, california on a whim.  i hate driving.  anything > 3 hrs sucks.  but i had my wife with me and we were able to finally talk about a lot of things -- something our normal daily lives don't seem to allow us to do.  it was great...

while reading my december issue of msdn magazine, i came across an advertisement that certainly caught my attention.  it simply had a picture of a toe-tag and the url was: www.is-the-grid-dead.com. looks like a component vendor about to announce something.  i honestly have no idea what it is, but they used good advertising to catch my eye among the other technical ads. tags: is-the-grid-dead, is the grid dead, datagrid

i'm trying to hold off installing itunes just for podcatching.  i tried pwop catcher, but it looks like the project has gone dark for a bit and didn't have what i needed. my friend turned me on to primetime podcast receiver.  so far it is okay.  it still isn't itunes, but i'm going to give it a whirl.  i've configured it to dump the podcasts/videoblogs into my Music\Zune folder so it will sync when i tell it to. that's all for now on zune for a bit (maybe :-) ).  i think i'll work on doing some development for some...

okay, so if you haven't downloaded it yet, why not?  visual studio tools for office 2005 second edition, aka visual studio tools for office 2007, aka vsto SE was released at devconnections earlier this month.  if you have a license to visual studio 2005 professional or a license to vsto 2005, then this is a free tool for you. how do you get it? go here: vsto se what is it?  it enables easy office development using visual studio.but hasn't this been around? yes, kinda.  vsto 2005 has been there and really did make things easy.  vsto se adds support...

okay, i forgot in my last post to correct something that i've been misinformed about: colors.  i was under the impression that each color had a personality.  well now that i participated in a social yesterday, i know that not to be true.  the black zune in the social was preloaded with the same videos, music, pictures as our brown ones.  i stand corrected and apologies for any misleading. okay, on to my video encoding.  i've been trying to find a good solution to getting dvd content onto the zune.  i was recommended to try three solutions: handbrake (now ported...

okay, so i've been beating up on the zune a bit, but i still like it.  i have to say there are definitely areas where it doesn't win over ipod (i.e., size for recreational usage, etc.), but there are definitely bigger ways (and potential) that it does. today i finally had a chance to play with the community features, when a colleage came over and asked if i wanted to 'join the social' (we had fun with that one when people asked what we were doing.  we were close to each other and while we didn't test the range, i...

join the community for the phoenix barcamp -- lots of good stuff boiling up there (and i'm pretty sure i'll be bringing some stuff to give away where i can!)...more details here http://barcamp.org/BarCampPhoenix tags: barcamp, foocamp, barcamp phoenix

from my previous post i made a comment about automatic sync (on by default) and not seeing an option for manual sync. rtfm for me.  it's there.  with the zune connected in the navigation area on the left, right-click the device and choose set up sync, and uncheck the automatic. tags: zune, sync

it locked up.  well, i'm not sure lock up is an accurate term as i still saw something going on, but maybe i was jaded by an animated gif :-0. here's what happened...i'm trying to test out the video feature a bit more, specifically movies, etc.  my goal was to put a new release movie on the zune.  my wife and i just watched the da vinci code (no i didn't read the book, but i really enjoyed the movie -- good suspense, good subtle action).  so i seeked out some dvd rip software to get a dvd to wmv...

well, i've been playing around with it for a while -- taking it everywhere trying to keep it out in the open to elicit responses.  people have asked/noticed (likely because of the brown) and the response has been okay to say the least.  "is that the new ipod" is the typical question.  "interesting" has been another, well, interesting response. i've managed to transfer 18GB of music to it from my itunes on my mac (i use mp3 format already) and it took a lot longer than i anticipated once they were on my machine.  the zune software (i'm going to...

saw this picture of michael jackson at the world music awards...and couldn't help but think he is wanting to become the crow:   tags: michael jackson

very frequently lately i've been paying attention to how organizations have been putting their brands out there via media (radio/tv mainly) and how they are driving traffic (if any) to their sites.  I've noticed a weird (to me at least) trend lately.  the use of myspace.com.  here's two big ones that come to mind that i saw recently: burger king and chilis. now both of these organizations have a strong brand and are probably widely recognized retail food chains.  but instead of putting burgerking.com and chilis.com on their tv commercials, i'm seeing myspace.com/burgerking and myspace.com/chilis.  now to me, the main...

8:00am: local Target opens (target had the best 'deal' in my opinion -- $249 w/$25 gift card, but Costco will likely have the best overall retail cost) 8:45am: i arrive at target to see how things are going.  shelves are empty, speaker accessories were empty...only thing there was the display for Zune (which was pretty decent).  wow, i thought, i can't believe they sold out. as i walked out of the store i made a comment to the person working the area: sold out pretty fast?...to my surprise (or actually my expected result when i walked in the store) he...

sun microsystems today made the first of a few announcements toward the move of java into the open source world.  i think for someone not too familiar with the open source world, but familiar with the technical religious wars between java and microsoft technologies, there may have been this assumption that java was always open source.  i know speaking for myself, when i was deeply involved in development and always heard the arguments of java vs. microsoft i certainly thought it was due to the open source nature of java.  since then i've become much more educated, but i still...

my compadre ai was hacking away on some linq/blinq stuff the other day (well last week or so, i took a long time looking at the issue myself because i was in vegas last week) and found that the default BLINQ'd site does not render well at all in ie7. well, it turns out the css isn't too friendly.  i initially put in the latest css adapter base into a BLINQ'd site and it worked fine, but paulita quickly pointed out a much simpler fix. she outlines it here: fix CSS for blinq'd sites in IE7 tags: asp.net, asp.net ajax,...

i've been experimenting developing windows vista sidebar gadgets lately.  one thing that is lacking is a core template for all things sidebar gadget (or at least i've not found one). i'll save my thoughts on developing a sidebar gadget for a 'part 2' post once i finish the simple one i'm working on (well, not 'simple' but simple enough with some different features). in the meantime, i've cooked up some sidebar gadget templates for visual studio 2005.  now keep in mind that sidebar gadgets don't themselves run c# or vb code, but they are HTML, Javascript, etc. files that interact.  so...

microsoft is hosting a contest for ie7 addon development.  all you have to do is create an interesting addon to submit and you could win: $2500 plus some tickets to MIX07 $2000, $1000, $500, Zune to learn how extensible ie7 is and some starting points, check out the ieblog article from ericlaw. here's more information from pete on the contest as well. tags: ie7, internet explorer, addons, contest, mix, mix07

shh...don't tell anyone...some sweet deals on windows mobile devices, including the new dash.. click here: super-secret-t-mobile-page Technorati tags: t-mobile, windows mobile, windows mobile 5, dash

so i've decided that i'm likely not going to see any sessions at devconnections.  i'm doing some major booth duty :-) -- but that's okay, the conferences are for the attendees to hammer on the microsoft guys anyway...i enjoy listening to the questions. today we have Greg Proops (who at least i know from the show who's line is it anyway? running around the conference and harrassing people.  okay, he's not doing much of that, but this guy is funny.  we had a chance to talk with him as well...he was pretty funny and asked us some great questions about...

it's true...windows vista released to manufacturing! read from the windowsvistablog.com: windows vista releases to manufacturing tags: vista, windows vista

following the rtm announcement of office 2007 (if you hadn't heard), the evening keynote at devconnections had ScottGu give the following announcements: ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007 note: this is being made as a free download to licensed VS2005 Pro users as well as VSTO2005 licensed users Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0 (Workflow) Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0 (WCF/WPF) .NET 3.0 Visual Studio 2005 extensions: SharePoint Services 3.0 lots of great stuff and i'm sure more to come this week! tags: visual studio, vsto, office, vista, .net, asp.net, ajax,...

it's been a few weeks since i've been on a plane...my last trip i had a bag big enough i needed to check anyway, so i paid no attention to the liquid restriction for myself -- although the warning signs were all over. well, the tsa has 'loosened the restrictions' on liquids.  again, i have to ask the question of what research/tactic/preventative mechanism is now in place that makes the tsa confident that the problem is solved?  i worried when they first made the restriction that it would not be able to be revoked.  well, i stand corrected (sort of). ...

i was mocking up a simple vista sidebar gadget to show a colleague of what a gadget is and he complained that it was "too wide" -- after i inquired further, he called me over to show me.  you see in vista, when you have Aero (aka "glass" effects) enabled, the sidebar is really seamless into the desktop (apart from a shadow on the right).  when you hover over the sidebar, it 'defines' itself and makes itself a little more visible...thus a small border/line appears.  see below: ...

have you noticed that the most popular sites/services are beta?  one of the biggest abusers: google.  recently, my local university changed their complete student email/collaboration systems to 'outsource' to google (gmail, google calendar, gtalk -- all in beta).  this university has a student population of 60,000.  instantly google grew their ad revenue by 60K users.  it was an interesting move i thought. but it got me thinking.  in my role, we look for early adopters as well, but it seems like at times to be a challenge.  in fact, the same university was hesitant to early adopt a technology we...

from the fedex site on priority overnight: Next-business-day delivery by 10:30 a.m. to most U.S. addresses; by noon, 4:30 p.m. or 5 p.m. in remote areas; by noon or 1:30p.m. on Saturdays. and: Saturday service also available for an additional charge. well, my phone died this week and verizon is shipping me a new one and i opted to pay the extra $20 for priority overnight, saturday delivery.  here was the status as of 5:01 pm: notice estimated deliver of 5:00pm.  yeah, it isn't here.  a call to them lets me know that it is likely still...

hey google, are you accepting terms and conditions on my behalf these days? when you go to ups.com and enter a tracking number, you must agree to the ups tracking terms and conditions before it will show you the status.  the terms read: ...This is a personal service, thus your right to use the Tracking Systems or Information is non-assignable. ... so in gmail, when it sees a message that has a UPS tracking number, it contains a link on the right side of the window giving you a direct link to the shipping tracking information without first...

my friends over at axosoft have just launched their beta of ontime 2007.  i'll let the video speak for itself, go check it out: ontime 2007 beta screenshots from a web app?  are you kidding me? tags: axosoft, ontime, clickonce, asp.net, ajax, asp.net ajax, atlas