Bnpositive's Blog

Do you like Windows and other Microsoft products? Do you complain about things not working the way you’d like? Do you actually do something about it like sharing your opinion?

Microsoft has setup the Windows Feedback Panel to allow everyday users like you and I an opportunity to provide feedback on what we’d like improved. The neat thing is that you really don’t have to do much other than just use your computer as you normally would on a daily basis.

Microsoft has created the Windows Feedback Panel Program to allow our customers to get more actively involved in helping to create the world’s best software. By participating in the program, you can help us focus our work on the features that you use most often, tell us where to simplify our software when it is too difficult and introduce new capabilities that increase your productivity. Basically, being a part of the Windows Feedback Panel helps us help you.

If you agree to participate, a small application is downloaded to your computer and this monitors your use of the system and what snags and problems you may run into regularly.

If you agree to join the program, a small amount of data will be collected using the Windows Feedback Panel software. That data will be sent to Microsoft so we can understand how your PC is working and how you are using Windows. This data is collected silently every time you use Windows. We use this data to help make future versions of that software better and more useful for you and others.

Get more information and sign-up for the Windows Feedback Panel.

I’ve had an eFax number for quite awhile now, and jFax is basically the same company and service just a different brand, now we can add faxZero to the list of facsimile resources.

With zeroFax you can send faxes for free, but they will include an ad on the cover page. There’s a limit of sending 1 document with a maximum of 3 pages. You can send up to two faxes a day for free.

If you’d like to pay for the premium option at $1.99 per fax, payable via PayPal, you get no ad on the cover page, a single fax can have up to 15 pages and you can have unlimited daily faxes. Much more features but $1.99 per fax seems a bit steep still.

This is an area where I thing a big player like Google, Microsoft or Yahoo could come in and let people add a local fax number to their e-mail accounts and include ads in the interface of their e-mail when a fax is received.

Reading through another old article at Forever Geek about Office 2007′s problems being sluggish, it makes me wonder if everyone is experiencing this type of bottleneck on speed when using the latest version of the Microsoft product.

Anytime there’s a question I’m curious about, one of the great things about this blog is that I can post a question to the readers and get an answer that my wondering ears have been yearning for. So, here it is, the latest poll.

Have you experienced a major speed issue since upgrading to Office 2007?

Gears of War is a game I’ve drooled about while looking at the back of the case in my local Best Buy. The graphics and game play seem intense. For some reason, my brother-in-law let me know that he purchased the game, but has yet to schedule a time to come over and play it together on my 36″ HD Sony Wega TV. He advised that he’d have to start late, after the kids were in bed becuase it’s a bit more dark and bloody than Halo.

And that’s where it stands, I’ve only read and heard about the game, I’ve yet to actually play it. Now for those of you that have played it and consider yourself fairly good at the skills you’ve obtained, maybe you should put an option in for the Gears of War Global Tournament, you could win yourself a trip to Prague.

Show the rest of the world exactly how good you have become. Sign up between March 29th and April 29th to compete on Xbox LIVE® against some of the best Gears of War® gamers in the world. You will participate in 3 vs. 3 or 4 vs. 4 ranked matches for four intense weeks of leaderboard play.

Register now to get in on the action. Prizes include:

Rank as one of the top 11 individual finalists on the global leaderboard and you’ll receive a trip for you and a guest to Prague.* There, you will compete against the best of the best in the Gears of War Tournament Grand Finals.

Be one of the top four finalists from your country and receive an invitation to compete in your nation’s 2007 World Cyber Games National Championship.**  

Secondary prizes include an Xbox 360™ Package (Xbox 360 Pro console, “Viva Piñata™” “Project Gotham Racing® 3,” “Xbox LIVE Arcade Unplugged Volume 1,” “Kameo” and a 12 month Xbox LIVE subscription), as well as “Gears of War” bonuses like shirts, faceplates, etc. 

Have you seen this site? It’s called MyHeritage and it’s a facial recognition site. Now it probably does much more than what I’m about to highlight, but I saw it on someone else’s blog and figured I’d try it out myself.

You upload your photo and it will compare your face to other celebrities and see who you come out looking like. Now, I’ve stated before that I think I look like a cross between Jon Lovitz and Wayne Newton, but that’s not real close to the results I got here.

No Jon Lovitz or Wayne Newton. Not sure about Howard Dean, but oddly enough I can see the resemblance between myself and Mike Shinoda and Adam Carolla.

Who do you look like?

A little bit of rumbling in the acquisitions department at Microsoft today. Or at least we can expect there to be with recent news stories about Microsoft putting its eyes on online advertising company DoubleClick. Could this be what Microsoft needs to help it put up a better fight against Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s online advertising revenue streams?

The DoubleClick brand, AdCenter, hasn’t been much of a competitor to the big boys, but a buyout from Microsoft could be what both companies have needed to get a little bit further up the ladder of online advertising. Supposedly, the price tag of $2B from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman may be a little too high in my mind considering they just paid a little more than half that a year ago for the same company. Is it worth that much?

What would it mean for Microsoft though?

If Microsoft were to expand its business by buying DoubleClick, this would not be its first acquisition in the field. Last May, it bought Massive Inc., a specialist in placing advertising within video games, and also DeepMatrix Corp., a Web analytics company, intending to incorporate their activities into its adCenter platform.

Selling advertising “is clearly core to what Microsoft does online. For MSN and related properties, advertising is the key revenue stream, and DoubleClick would be a good fit,” said JupiterResearch’s Elliott. However, Microsoft has also put a great deal of effort into developing its own system, and so could go it alone, he said.

Is that what Microsoft wants to do? They’ve already got their own platform they’ve been developing. Is buying a competitor’s options to further strengthen their unit the best move? I think it probably would be. There’s obviously economies of scale, but I don’t think the $2B asking price is quite there yet.

It’s just so hard to figure out nowadays. Now, $2B a few years ago, you could have done much more with it then. Now it’s just a drop in the bucket. Who are we kidding? If someone walked up to you and said “Here’s $2B. Use if for your business.”, would you buy DoubleClick if you were Microsoft? I wouldn’t, not without a bit of shopping first.

Sources: DoubleClick eyes sale, talks with Microsoft, Microsoft Buying DoubleClick?, Microsoft Woos DoubleClick

I just received an e-mail from the gentleman that runs the Mission Grounds website. He had contacted me about providing a link to his site on the Christian Music Fan site, but I decided I would highlight it here as well.

It’s a fairly simple story, they work with local coffee growers to provide a great coffee delivered to your door and the money that’s raised is used to help with children’s mission organizations.

What We Do: We offer gourmet coffee in simple bags that will make a difference. You have the opportunity to purchase an exceptional bag of coffee at a great price and help a child at the same time. We currently have no overhead to speak of and 100% of our profits go to support children missions. Since we are a Non-Profit Corporation all of our proceeds will go to other non-profit mission organizations.

What a great opportunity for churches to give back to the world around them and do nothing different than what they’re already doing… purchasing coffee. Most churches I know have full-time staff members that probably have a coffee pot in the breakroom going all day. Other churches probably have coffee in their Sunday School rooms or for fellowship time between services. Give Mission Grounds a try and purchase an order of coffee from them and see if you’re satisfied.

Let me know what you think about Mission Grounds Coffee and Ministry.

Through a variety of events where I live and actions taking place in our public education system, I’ve found myself in the middle of quite a dramatic series of political actions and lawsuits with regards to public education.

Due to this newly sensitive issue in my life, I’m beginning to pay even more attention to public education events and news that come across my computer screen. Today, it’s an effort called the “Pledge to America’s School Children” that I believe is a grassroots campaign started by the National School Board Association.

The efforts appear to be getting all congress members to sign the pledge and show their support for continued improvement of public education in America. Reading the pledge itself gives you an idea of the efforts they’re undertaking.

This pledge represents my commitment to ensure America’s schoolchildren receive the highest quality public education and make certain that my schools continue to fulfill their essential role in our communities.  Through my efforts in Congress, I pledge to actively support and collaborate with my local school boards to promote excellence and equity in raising student achievement.

As a Member of Congress, I pledge to work and vote to:

• Improve the No Child Left Behind Act to give my school district(s) better measures for student and school performance, and the support needed to close the achievement gap.
• Help my school district(s) meet the needs of students with disabilities by supporting the funding goals of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA).
• Support school readiness programs for children entering kindergarten in my school district(s).
• Help my school district(s) to attract, train and retain highly qualified and effective teachers.
• Help my school district(s) to provide all students with 21st Century skills and knowledge, including math, science and technology.Signed: _______________________________________________

You can visit the website to see who’s signed the pledge for your state. I can tell you right now, that nobody in Indiana has signed it yet. That doesn’t make me feel very good and I’ve already started doing what I can to bring that to my neighbor’s attention.

Are you interested in learning some more skills with regards to Visual Studio? Microsoft may be offering something you’ll be interested in pursuing further then.

Welcome to the Beginner Developer Learning Center – a centralized learning environment specifically targeted to beginning programmers. Here you’ll find a rich array of learning content that starts with the very basics, and guides you through step-by-step to becoming a fully-fledged developer!

No experience or programming knowledge required – so dive right in!

These are exactly the types of resources I like to take advantage of, the only problem for me is that it still requires me to find time in my standard 24-hour day to squeeze it all in. Saving this one to my resources though, hopefully I can peck away at things little by little and pick up some additional skills and options along the way.

Come join me if you can at the Beginner Developer Learning Center.

I’ve been using Office 2007 now just about exclusively since the initial beta versions have been available for use. I will say that I love the new versions of each application. Similarly to other users, I still find myself searching through some options to find the task that I’ve done before, but am only doing for the first time in 2007. However, more frequently, I find myself making use of a new feature I’d never used previously because of the ease of use in the new version and the fact it wasn’t buried in multi-level menus for me to find it.

One thing I’ve lost touch with a little bit in my usage over the past year or so though is that it is a little bit slower than previous versions. Some things take a bit longer to fire up, but once they’re rolling, I believe things work a little faster. It all seems to come down to personal preference though again.

David Szpunar a network and systems manager at a large church has similar experience as well. This recent blog post by him gives a nice overview of his experience so far with the application and whether or not he’ll be migrating their entire user base to the new version anytime soon.

My one complaint? Office 2007 is S-L-O-W. My laptop is a Centrino Duo 2.0 GHz machine with 1 GB of RAM (running XP Pro). Opening OneNote, Word, and Outlook 2007 along with Firefox and Thunderbird works, but it takes a while to get them all open. Or if all of that except for Word is running, and I open Word, it takes a while to get there. Office 2003, on the other hand, pops up and down very quickly for the most part. 2003 has its moments, to be sure, but 2007 is just consistently slow to get going, and sometimes slow to catch up. And it’s not just because I occasionally have over 100 tabs open in Firefox, either! (I try not to do that too often :-)

David? 100 tabs open in Firefox? Please tell me you’re exaggerating a wee little bit there. I can’t even imagine having that many open windows or things going at once and I consider myself a fairly skilled multi-tasker.

I’m proud to say that a recent news article has left me feeling very good about the educational heritage I have through my alma mater, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, and it’s sister schools. Specifically, MidAmerican Nazarene University in Olathe, KS has made me proud.

Olathe, Kansas–During a day and a half of meetings with a group of gay-rights activists traveling the country to battle discrimination on college campuses, MidAmerica Nazarene University (MNU) accomplished its goal of communicating the love of Christ to its visitors without approving of the lifestyle they have chosen.

The gist is that a gay-rights group called Soulforce, travels by bus to various Christian campuses in order to have a discussion and point out the faults of the way most “Christians” handle gays and the homosexual lifestyle. After being blocked and having arrests made at other schools like Notre Dame and Wisconsin Lutheran, MNU chose a different approach and welcomed the group with open arms.

“We viewed this as an opportunity to listen to where they’re coming from and share the love of God with them,” said April Hansen, MNU’s director of public information and on-site coordinator for the visit. “We disagree, but there’s no reason to be afraid to talk to each other, to dialogue, and express Christ’s love, even in our disagreement.”?

And there was a much different response from the Soulforce group as well.

“When you told us you were offering Christ’s love to us and that you wanted to listen to us, we kept waiting for you to say, ‘but?.’ and then share your condemnation,” the Rider said. “You didn’t do that. Thank you.”

and

One of the Equality Riders wrote in his blog after the visit, “I know many, if not most, of the students differ with us in their views on homosexuality, but we were able to share fellowship. They truly modeled a Christlike response.”

Imagine that, inviting dialogue and having respect for others as individuals. Seems like that’s exactly what Jesus did. Nobody was condoning or approving of the lifestyle, but they also weren’t doing any more damage by erecting walls and harsh feeling between members of both groups either. Thank you MidAmerican Nazarene University for making me proud.

Deb Shinder, editor of WXPNews points us to an article by George Ou at ZD Net that talks about the potentially similar experiences people can have between Vista’s new security approvals and OSX processes as well. We’ve become all too familiar with the antics between the two given the latest PC vs. Mac commercials to have hit the small screen. But as Deb says, is one kettle calling the other black?

George informs us that UAC (User Account Controls) have existed in Apple and Linux for quite awhile now and that any operating system with security concerns being addressed should function this way.

As you can see, Mac OS X actually requires you to do MORE work by having you type in the administrator password, whereas Vista (for the primary user running as a limited admin) only prompts you to click Allow. So if we really wanted to make the Apple commercial accurate, there should be a second security guard that makes “Mac” recite a series of letters before he gives the OK to proceed. What we have is another case of deceptive advertising. Vista UAC really isn’t that bad. This is something that Mac OS X and Linux users have been living with for years, and it’s something that Windows Users need to get use to for their own protection.

Does this change anything with Apple? I don’t think so, I believe they’ve always been much more about the image and experience associated with using Apple computers than the actual technological differences between Apple’s and PC’s.