Few good links I've received from friends:
- Interesting satelite images of Earth;
- New way how to discover / browse music - http://www.musicovery.com/
- All Web 2.0 sites directory, implemented Web 2.0 way
- On-line media conversion tool. Great for converting MP3 to ringtones :-)
- If you fly often, the SeatGuru will help you choose good seats and avoid bad ones
- interesting slow motion videos - http://www.redlake.com/gallery/videos/RDT.aspx
- animated knots
- nicely done Web2 (laszlo based) tool for selection of matching colors
Using PocketPC with Windows is very easy, assumed that you are using Outlook. Synchronization is straightforward, works out of the box. If you are keeping your contacts in other software than Outlook, you can often find 3rd party software that does the synchronization - or at least provides the plugin. The selection of the solutions is fairly large.
On Mac, you are in similar situation if you want to use Palm based PDA. With Pocket PC synchronization, selection is limited. For direct synchronization between Mac address book and iCal, you have basically 2 options (or more precisely, at least two options): PocketMac or The Missing Sync. Both will do the job, but the Missing Sync seems to be more modern: it supports Intel processors on Mac side and Windows Mobile 5. Also the Web site of the Missing sync has more professional, Mac-like look. I found the review of both, but little bit dated ...
On my way home from the office (yes, I know, technically it was Sunday) I stopped at my favorite Chapters store just to check what is new. First stop is always magazines, partially because it is right next to the entrance, partially because it is on the shortest path to Starbucks counter inside Chapters. For many years, there used to be two shelves with computer magazines. Now there is only one. And half of the magazines are about Photoshop, iPods and digital gadgets. Not that there was anything wrong with Photoshop and iPods - I love my iPod and have deep respects for Photoshop capabilities (albeit I can hardly use the Elements). What I miss are good old fashioned developers mazines which have dimisnished almost completely.
Weekend time again. As few times before, here are few discoveries from the Web:
Google is pushing Internet Explorer 7. Their own version, using new Internet Explorer Administration Kit. It is not really different version - just configured with Google as default search engine and Google toolbar. Nothing that little more experienced user would not do himself. I am not sure how successfull this will be - but I am pretty sure that this was not what Microsoft had in mind how this tools should be used for.
It is this time of year - Christmas parties. It looks like the number of parties we go to every year increases - did not figure out yet which function it is, let's hope it is not exponential. This year, the number was four. First was traditional Christmas party at Peter's place. Second one - which I unfortunately missed - was a gettogether of Montage/Allstream alumni. I was sick and in bed - sorry I missed this one. Hope that there will be more opportunities for meeting during the long winter that is still ahead of us. Third party - "the party" - is Thinknostic Christmas Party, this year happening at Steve's place. And the party marathon will be closed by tomorrow's Tirestamp party at Sean's.
Thought of the day:
... Too much to learn. Too much bandwidth crowding the channels of communication. We can’t listen fast enough. We’re left standing on our tiptoes all the time
Greg Bear, The Darwin's Radio
This does not sound very optimistic, which is quite representative. I am down with bad headache, cannot really think straight, spending time sleeping, reading a book (above) and surfing the Web.
I found out that I made it to Ottawa Blogger's list and learned a new word: splogger
As I mentioned yesterday, my expectations regarding Office 2007 were fairly low. I am not a big fan of office application suites and for most of my editing I am using either on-line tools (like Google docs or Writeboard) or Open Office. True, neither of them has the smoothness and fine polish of Microsoft Office 2003, neither has all of it's features, but - let's face it - I barely use maybe 10-20% of Word or Excel capabilities anyway. For which reason, I am not willing to pay premium just for improved user comfort.
Today was a big day in Ottawa Microsoft community. The Congress Centre was hosting large event - simultaneous launch of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange server 2007. Because I have almost registered about two months ago, I attended the event. The "almost" means that I tried to register right after receiving MSDN Flash email, but many people must have been faster - I was put on waiting list on two of the 3 tracks (Developers and IT Pros) and before I could even try to register for the third track (Business), everything crashed, Web site hang and I have never heard back from them, nor received any email. Until yesterday, when an automated voice reminder service managed to catch me by phone in underground garage under Brookstreet Hotel, and delivered first part of reminder - telling me that I was registered to attend something ... Too bad it did not tell me to what, when and where did I registered, before it broke off and I lost the signal. But I deducted that the only reason to call me would be a reminder of the Launch and after logging on to My Events, voila - the ticket was there. So I went. It was a tough decision, whether to sacrifice full work day and possibly evening ping-pong at Igor's - but - what the heck. Microsoft does not produce new releases that often so going away once in 5 years should be OK. And now I am glad I did go.
My daughter's music CD for her skating short program got badly scratched and because it was the last-but-one copy (as skater you need many copies, in case you loose/forget/scratch/misplace it), I was confronted with the task to create a new copy. Rather than starting Nero on Win-XP notebook, I have decided to learn (finally) how to do it on Mac. It must be simple, intuititive and much easier than on Windows. Right ? Wrong ! To my big surprise, there was no easy, idiot proof, very obvious way mac-ish drag and drop way how to acomplish it. It was not exactly hard either, but it actually took consulting the omniviscent Google to find it out. To save the search for the next time, I'll write it down. Here is what you have to do:
Yes, I know, the title sounds like oxymoron and to certain degree, it is. What it should maybe say is Person who should have been celebrity ...
I am not going anywere close to movies or entertainment industry with this. There are more than enough sites, blogs and gossip channels out there that look at life of movie stars or singers. I will stay within the world of computers and technology, which has its own heros and celebrities, albeit known in smaller groups. In "real world", pretty much everybody knows Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Steve Wozniak. They have made the headlines many times. Fewer people know names like James Gosling, Anders Hejlsberg, Bill Joy, Dennis Ritchie, Guido van Rossum, Guy L. Steele, Richard Stallman....