Microsoft TechNet Newsfeed Widget

I went to NYC for a few weeks recently. It sure was fun to spend my breakfast working furiously at my laptop in various wifi enabled cafes around Brooklyn.
Two that I can reccomend are Gorilla coffee in Park Slope

View Larger Map

and Atlas Cafe in the less hip area of Williamsburg.

View Larger Map
Before my trip I procured a nice new gadget. Its called the H4N handy recorder by Zoom of Japan.
Its not as small as I would like as I prefer to travel light. Literally one carry on was all I had for my laptop, gear, and clothes. But it does everything you could want in an audio gadget, well nearly.
It is primarily a field recorder.
Recording to SD flash memory. I used a handful of 512mb and 1gb chips I had for my canon e320. I plan on picking up some SDHC jobbers in the near future.
It works extremely well as a field recorder. I got some great snippets of subway noises, streetcorner preachers and some kickin tunes of some bands I saw, such as 5 dollar priest and Marcia Ball. In addition to that it can also be used as a plain old 4 track, think Tascam 424MKII. I have yet to explore this option as I have a perfectly good laptop with Twelve Tone/Roland's Sonar 7 producer. Who needs 4 tracks whenyou have unlimited!
This is also where the H4N does its big trick. It's also an audio interface!
I was skeptical of the utilityof this, but it works great in ASIO mode, even in Windows 7!
You can even record from the built in mics straight to Sonar.
Needless to say, this has replaced my blackberry 8320 as my new favorite toy.
If you are ever in NYC and are a camera, video, or audio geek, you sincerly owe it to yourself to stop by B&H. Fry's has nothing on this place for sheer geekery.

View Larger Map

7 7 7 7 7 7 more seven

Well windows seven definitely has drawbacks as well.
I had a hard time finding 'run', so that I could get to a command line. finally did a search for 'run' then pinned that to my task bar.
Not totally jazzed with how services works. While it is neat that Task Manager shows both processes and services, you are able to kill less of them. I am still trying to find a good resource on which processes I can nuke. I had this notebook down to 18 processes under XP. My desktop at home does great on 15 with XP pro. But it also has no wifi!
Wheras Win 7 has about 38-41 in most situations. Not killing me, but JEEEZ, this is a 2ghz core 2 duo, with 2 gigs of ram and a 7200rpm 200gig hard drive (not a bad notebook). And my ram usage is at 48%!
I also am pretty annoyed with HP. I had to print out a boarding pass formyflight to NYC today. The HP 'win 2k/XP/Vista' driver that I downloaded, all 100mb, returned an error that it could not function on this operating system! Well Sonar 7 (last years version) runs great, as does crusty old photoshop 7. Blackberry Desktop Manager 4.0.37 and Syncplcity are just peachy.
So I had to go install the HP driver (180mb!) on my Mac-mini and physically move the damn printer across the room.


On the plus side...
The task bar thing works great. Love the preview! You can even see a mini view of the video if you are watching youtube or adultswim. I must say I am really impressed with how well the graphics of the OS work. I actually get snappier smoother looking UI interaction than I did with XP on the same machine! Media Player 11 in Windows seven works rather well (comes with a DVD codec! unlike XP sp3!) Though the subtitle options and root menu optins are rather buried.
To access any real configuration options of media player you have to switch from 'player' mode to 'library' mode. Which is not exactly intuitive. This is a theme with Win 7. My Documents is all under 'Libraries' which is kind of an awkward word to me. Not that I have any problem with books! I just think it is an old fashioned armature to hang your media off of. A library is very linear and rigid. Digital media is not.

RC cola

Well I am really digging windows seven RC.
So far it is stable and smooth. Looks nice and seems like a big improvement over Vista if not XP.
I am in NYC for hte next 2 weeks so I am hoping this install doesnt give me any problems while I am on the road!

down with AT&T!

JEEEEEEZ! I finally got my blinkin blackberry. I went over to Verizon. AT&T has managed to completely alienate me as a customer. I will never as long as I live pay for anything from AT&T. I could not beleive that after UPS lost my phone they expected me to pay for another phone! then wait 30 days until they would refund me for the first! When it had been 2 weeks since I lost my original phone I just caved and went to Verizon. I must thank the very attractive young lady that waved my fees and everything after she heard my story about AT&T. To top it off my bills with Verizon are going to be cheaper for the same exact plan, and they have a faster network!
The EVD A and EVD 0 are much better than whatever AT&T's 3g was getting me on my last phone. AT&T is WEAK!
The phone I got looks exactly like the photo below, but it doesnt say t-mobile.
I mean really what kind of nerd has no communicator?

Blackberry withdrawal.

Lost my blackberry the previous weekend. I ordered a shiny new berry from AT&T. It is still not here, though I paid for 2 day air. Somehow UPS lost it. Or I am thinking, someone that works for UPS is less than scrupulous. I am finding it difficult to cope with my connectionless status. What will my friends do without constant updates on my status? How can I take sly photos of wacky server install hijincks?

Super duper

Wow, super busy lately. Lots of work with my day job, lots of projects going on in the evening too. I also have suddenly sprouted a social life somehow. I think it is a side-effect of me being on Facebook all the time. (which is a side-effect of my day job providing a service which interfaces with facebook) . I need to get whatever version of roundup you use to nip that in the bud.



Most interesting thing I have seen recently is a ruggedized Dell notebook. I have seen a lot of Dell notebooks. Hundreds? Maybe thousands. It seems that whether I am working for a biotech, a startup, a bank or a gvoernment agency, Dell notebooks always abound.

This I have never seen.

It has those kind of twist locks like you see on ATA flight cases for all the user accesible compartments like ram, HDD, CPU etc. On an IBM these would be the FRU access areas.

The dock is the regular Dell dock, with a space station latching mechanism to connect to the armored exterior of the Dell.
It is heavy too. I am guessing 12 pounds?
You could definitely stop a bullet with this guy.

Forced Furlough

I had a double feature again on Friday. I think I am going to start calling them "frightful friday" or something. Sure it's nice to pay most of my bills in one day. But OTOH I leave at the crack of dawn and get home past dinner time.
In the morning I started the first phase of a 6 phase project. This large institutional client was having budget problems last year, then one of their cash cows quit on them. When we showed up there was not a single person there, save the security guard.
They are enforcing forced furlough days to save money. Concurrent with this they have just undertaken a 2nd round of layoffs. A little birdie tells me that they are considering a 3rd round of layoffs.
So it's one of those blood on the floor environments. You move Jane and Dick and Harry to the third floor. and Sally and Joe and John go into storage!
Got that all done and swooped off to the city for my 2nd gig. Answering emails for the swell kids at Syncplicity.com check out their website, they have real neat service.

and the honeymoon is over

Well I have been digging around with Win7 a lot. The windows experience index give me a measly 3.0 score! I have a lot of ram, fast hefty hard drive and a decent processor.
2gb corsair ddr2, hitachi 7k200 200gb SATA II, and T7200 core 2 duo mobile (2ghz). Not the latest, greatest but not a freakin PIII either!
Well I get nothing higher than 5.1 on the individual scores. And my hard drive, which was the top of the heap for notebooks last year, scores a measly 3.0.

I went back and turned off all the crazy eye candy in an effort to improve my score. While this goosed up my video scores, it leaves the UI looking very win2k. I would think that they could have made a sub-aero interface that wasn't so ugly. Maybe something more monochrome a la Mac OS system 4.0?

On the plus side the wireless connectivity is better than win xp. And windows expericen score aside my mere GMA 950 does okay with the aero stuff turned on.
Though every 15 minutes or so I see a little video gremlin hiccup. I attribute this more to the beta runtime aspect.

se7en? 7even? seve7?

Well I just installed Windows 7 on the old laptop.
So far it is pretty snazzy. Like it better than Vista.
Somehow it is able to see more wireless access points than my XP install does?
How do they do that?
Creating a dual boot was super painless. I didnt even have to format the partition I chose. I will be bombarding it with applications this week to see what breaks it.
On the downside it hates my laptops video. Intel GMA945 or whatevs. I get a 2.0 score. Which on the win 7 experience rating means my overallscore with a core 2 duo, 2 gigs of ram and a 7200 rpm 200gb drive is a...2.0.
Weak with a side of weak sauce!
I will try turning off a bunch of stuff to see if it makes a difference. but so far Win 7 is faster than vista given the same hardware. Even with all the candy turned on it runs okay.

SQL S3rv3r

Well it looks like SQL is all the rage these days right? So I think I am gonna leapfrog a few tests and take one of the SQL Server tests, either
70-431 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 – Implementation and Maintenance or
70-445 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence.


Yeah I know dry freaking stuff right?

Well the true nexus of geekdom is going out of business. Stacey's bookstore on Market in downtown SF. I have been nerding out here for years. They have/had an aggressively well stocked computer book section up on the 2nd floor. Heck they even encourage loafing, loitering and just plain reading the stuff in the store. There is/was even a nice reading area up with chairs and junk. Wait, what did you say? Barnes and Noble does that too? Well Stacey's is/was over 80 years old. And the point?! Well the books are %50 off. So I can save like $30 on the study materials for my $125 test...

MCP!

There is this certification exam I meant to take (and pass). But I kept having scheduling conflicts. I would book an exam at the Prometric testing center. Then work would come up. Sure it's important to get certified. And lord knows, I am certifiable! But income trumps all, so I have been canceling and rescheduling over and over. I procrastinated one last time in mid February. I rescheduled via the Prometric website, then I went into my outlook and made an apointment for the new date, Thursday the 26th
Then the day before, I remembered that I had a test coming up and had forgotten to study, so I went to the Prometric website and clicked on "reschedule". The webpage informs me that I have no tests to reschedule. Uh oh. I have been here before! That means that I have less than 24 hours until the test. It's not booked for Thursday, its booked for Wednesday! Well I had to go in and take the test anyway. I was pretty bummed. I had convinced myslef that I was going to fail no matter what. So I may as well take it and just get over my mental block. The picture above is poor depressed me. Dragging my worthless carcass up the elevator when I really just want to get a pint of ben and jerrys and cry. Boo hoo. Little baby.

I actually passed. Not with a spectacular margin, but passed nonetheless. Not bad considering I hadn't cracked a book for a month!
Well I'm an MCP finally. I had been planning on taking this test (70-270) since last year! Now for the rest of the MCSE panel.

Relocation Inundation

I forgot to mention one thing from the move on the previous Friday.
While eating pizza I noticed the strangest thing. In addition to the usual amenities of a high flying company in the Bay Area (fancy coffee machines, sub zero fridges, Herman Miller Aero chairs, integrated AV systems)
they had a freakin hotline to the Kremlin! Well maybe not the Kremlin, but a red phone, with the words "for disaster use only!" labeled to the handset. Maybe its a hotline to Homeland Security?

F R I D A Y FRIDAY friday

Well friday wasn't so bad after all.
My support job was normal. The meeting got pushed off. The 70 workstation move turned out to be mostly comprised of multi system users. So it was really about 25 users with 70 odd systems. Had to educate a few peeps about labeling KVMs and multi monitor setups. Also had to parlay with some movers.
But they were NORCAL who are generally pretty professional and straightforward about these things.
At least it wasnt another game developer. Those guys will have 2 or 3 PCs and 2 or 3 game systems and a home theater setup. In a cubicle.
We had pizza from Pizza Orgasmica.

l e t s g e t t o z e r o

I spent today trying to get the queue down to zero
You start at the top and work your way down.
The problem is, that by the time you are finished, another batch of 10-15 issues has come up in the meantime. Well the more I answer the more I learn. And knowing is half the battle...
Tomorrow I have 4 hours of customer support at the startup. Including a meeting with the development team lead.
Which is then followed by a 7 or 8 hour IT relocation job. Sounds like it's some kind of financial institution. I have been forewarned that I will need a valid photo ID for admitance. Luckily the evening gig is just a block or two from my day gig. I better get a good rest tonight and eat my wheaties.
I am broke right now, but in a few weeks I'll be way ahead of my bills.