iPod Nano

I am a gadget freak and I have to say that one of the cooler devices I’ve gotten in a long time is my 2GB Nano that I received for Christmas.

I got a gift card to the Apple Store and dealt with the hordes the day after Christmas to buy the black 2GB Nano. I was thinking of getting the 4GB version, but I want the Nano for exercising, using in the car for podcasts and bringing along on long trips – a day’s worth of music and even more time for podcasts should be plenty. I also plan on getting the 5G iPod eventually to replace the laptop on vacations – transferring digital photos to it would make it possible to ditch the laptop on long trips.

The best part about the Nano I have seen so far is the way it handles podcasts. I have a 1G iPod(I think I was also the first evidence of the ‘Halo’ effect – I had to have that iPod, so I also bought a Lampintosh.) but it doesn’t have the podcast handling that the Nano does. I like that I can subscribe to podcasts, play them, link back to the Powerbook we have now and then it downloads the updates to the subscriptions. The only change I would make is to allow you to play podcasts like a playlist – just keep going without having to go to the main menu.

Well, off to take care of the boy, he’s waking up!

Go ‘Clones!

My beloved Iowa State University Cyclones play TCU today in the EV1.Net Houston Bowl!!

I have to put a plug in for them and say, ‘Go ‘Clones!’

Best of luck to your teams and enjoy the holiday weekend!

Microsoft Time

So, while I’m up early watching the boy, I thought I would share a funny story from my early days at Microsoft.

They have a lot of internal catch phrases and sayiings – like ‘drinking from the firehose’, ’sell the app, secure the stack’, and ‘the meeting will happen on Microsoft time’.

I learned early on that ‘Microsoft Time’ could mean a lot of things – meetings start late, customer activity took such precedence that internal meetings (even mandatory ones) were an afterthought sometimes. I even saw a note sent out by a program manager once advertising the baked goods and drinks he would have at a meeting to entice people to show up. It worked.

Another interesting thing about Microsoft Time was that so many smart and dedicated people work there they can often do things in half the time you might expect – I once saw a ‘buddy fix’ created by a software engineer during the time they were flying to a customer site – from start to finish, the code was modified, reviewed and delivered all in about 3 hours – not something you should try at home, but this was a mission critical app that needed to be fixed YESTERDAY.

This has changed much over the years – internal meetings that are mandatory are now looked at more seriously and fixes and technical publications take longer for legal review and technical review, I think sometimes that the reviews and internal focus has fundamentally changed the way the company deals with customers in such a way that they are just evolving to the next IBM, but we’ll see. There are still a lot of smart, energetic people there trying to change the world.

Happy New Year!

Well, Happy New Year all!

The wife and I are hosting a New Year’s Eve party tonight – pomegranate martinis are the featured drink until 8 or 9PM, then it’s off to the next door neighbor’s house. If you’re going to attend, the secret drink is out now, but shhh – don’t let Melissa know I told you.

What a great year this should be – moving on from Microsoft and heading to a small start-up, Compellent Technology.

However, Microsoft technology will be with me for a long time and I do hope they get out of their ‘funk’. Tonight the main entertainment will be the Xbox 360 running Media Center photos with song lists playing in the background – photos from the year, including some from Microsoft events and parties with friends. We didn’t travel a lot this year, so there won’t be a lot of photos – Melissa had Rowan in July, so certainly nothing wild and crazy.

Here’s to all of you out there – Have a Happy New Year and see you in 2006! May your road go ever on and no doors block your way…

Taking Back the Web

Check out Mitch’s post on taking back the web.

Some good thoughts on technology and where we’re headed.

Media Center and Xbox 360

I was involved in a lot of Media Center Beta activity while at Microsoft and one of the coolest things that we did during that time was add HDTV tuners to the system. While I think Media Center has a long way to go in terms of ease of use and stability – changing a video driver on a consumer device? Not a good idea for Joe User – I do think that the Xbox 360 and Rollup 2 update for Media Center 2005 is one of the coolest things ever done.

I’ve got an Xbox 360 that I got on December 10th and it’s running my main floor living room’s media activities. We can watch recorded High-Def content, listen to iPod and WMA device music, watch movies, play games, listen to the radio, view thousands of photos and listen to all the MP3s I’ve ripped over the years and put on the Media Center through it. While it’s not the quietest machine in the world when playing games, it drops the fan noise significantly when playing movies or running the Media Center Extender that’s built-in. I’ve got in connected over an 802.11a wireless network and it works flawlessly with some very rare wireless interference. I also have it located in a totally enclosed cabinet that was originally designed for the Media Center PC itself so it completely blocks the noise. The cabinat has built-in slots for ventilation so while the noise is stifled, the heat isn’t stifling. I believe the Media Center was about 30-40 degrees hotter than the 360, so it has plenty of cooling room in the cabinet and the wireless controllers make it un-necessary to expose the IR port(now if someone would just make an RF wireless media remote).

I’m surprised that we have been using the 360 about 70% of the time for media of some kind and 30% for games – it works so well and is so quiet that the wife hasn’t even complained about having to use the controller for media viewing.

The First Shall be Last

So, my first blog entry is on the last day of my employment with Microsoft. Technically, my last day is 12/31/05, but nothing happens on New Year’s Eve, unless of course you were at Microsoft on 12/31/99, which is another entry all to itself.

So, ‘Hello’ and thanks for checking out my blog.