Bnpositive's Blog

The advertising for Microsoft’s new Sync product in Ford vehicles has been pretty strong since the Thanksgiving holidays where I believe it debuted. I’m sitting in my living room and there’s a PC Magazine with a Sync advertisement on the back cover.

I’m sitting here watching the New England Patriots go for the perfect season and saw perhaps one of the funniest TV commercials I’ve seen since my Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl earlier this year. There’s a FedEx Kinko’s commercial that’s pretty funny as well though.

I immediately had to do a search for it to see if I could find it on YouTube. Success!!!

Back to the Microsoft Sync product, I don’t see it becoming much more mainstream until you can start getting it in car stereos other than those installed on the assembly lines in the auto factories.

I’m continuing to learn more about Vista as I play with my wife’s new laptop and help her figure out some things. Because of that I decided to click on a link titled “Windows Vista: Top 10 Things You Can Do“.

So far I haven’t really had any problems with Vista, but after reading through their Top 10 list I’m struck by the fact that the majority of the items are able to be done without Vista.

• Find files with Instant Search. Can basically do this with the Google Desktop or Windows Desktop.
• Open apps thumbnails with Windows Flip 3D and hovering on the taskbar. Although I can’t ever figure how I do it, I know I’ve done something similar to this with my mouse on this XP machine. It doesn’t dynamically scroll through the open windows, but it’s close. The taskbar thing is new, but with the other, not that big of a deal in my opinion.
• Keep photos organized with Windows Photo Gallery. Although not a Windows feature, my preferred method of photo organization is with Picasa2.
• Create a movie with Windows Movie Maker. Easily already achieved with Windows Movie Maker downloaded on an XP machine.
• Organize your music with Windows Media Player 11. Another readily available application for Windows XP.
• Tab-based browsing with IE7. This has been available since Firefox, but also readily available with IE7 downloaded on any computer.
• Record TV with Media Center. Introduced with Windows Media Center and considered quasi-standard with Vista. Other options external to Windows available for XP users.
• Media extender. For me this should be wrapped up into the previous option. Basically taken what you’ve recorded on your Vista machine and watching it on your TV with a media extender like the Xbox 360.
• Windows Sidebar. Keeping things easily accessible. Easy with Vista, but capable with Google Desktop.
• Parental controls. Simply, blocking sites from specific user accounts and blocking computer availability with a calendar and timers. Made easier with Vista.

Five features easily available with a simple download to your Windows XP machine. Two features that are easily achieved with simple 3rd party downloads. The remaining features are also achieved with downloads with a little more work and configuration.

I don’t think Vista is a lemon but with so much time between operating system releases, you’d think there would be a little more impacting and unique with the Vista OS.

With that being said though, what drastic development feature would be that earth shattering to end users? Will we ever see a drastic change like that which was seen from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95?

Source: Windows Vista: Top 10 Things You Can Do

After surfing around the Microsoft website this evening I found a link to download a training kit for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. I’ve downloaded Visual Web Developer 2008 and have been meaning to get some time invested in teaching myself more about the differences between it and Visual Web Developer Express 2005.

I’m not sure how much this will help since it’s focused on the actual VS2008, but we’ll see.

Here’s a link if you’re interested yourself.

My wife and I came home this afternoon and started flipping around the channels on TV. We came across a special about the funniest TV ads of 2007. After watching it for awhile they showed the URL of www.veryfunnyads.com where you could go watch all the ads online.

It’s too bad they didn’t provide the option for embedding the ads themselves. So much discussion about people not watching ads anymore because of TiVo and DVR functionality. Here’s an opportunity for people to watch them over and over and share them with everyone through viral video and they don’t make it easy.

I believe my favorite ads were the ones for FedEx Kinkos. My favorite foreign ads were from Hydro Energy about young engineers.

Received this today from a friend via e-mail. A few of these are pretty funny and definitely cause you to ponder.

• Life is sexually transmitted.
• Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
• Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.
• Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day, teach a person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks.
• Some people are like a Slinky .. Not really good for anything, but you still can’t help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.
• Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
• All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
• Why does a slight tax increase cost you $200.00 and a substantial tax cut saves you $30.00?
• In the 60′s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
• We know exactly where one cow with mad-cow-disease is located among millions and millions of cows in America but we haven’t got a clue as to where millions of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located.  Why don’t we put hate Department of Agriculture in charge of immigration?

If you enjoy science, and I do, you’ll probably be interested in Popular Science magazine’s guide to the year in science for 2008.

You’ll get to read about stuff like:

• jellyfish
• Olympics
• the future
• the new Internet
• illegal activities

and more!

Your Guide to the Year in Science: 2008 by Popular Science

Here’s a cute picture of my kids from last year. We were in Chicago’s China town getting a bite to eat and came across this statue of Buddha in a storefront doorway.

Those are just some cute kids. I think Buddha may need to invest in a training bra as well.

One upsetting bit from this holiday season was that even when we got our Xbox 360 back in time for 360 related presents to be purchased, Guitar Hero III was not to be one of them.

The single reason why was some of the suggestive content on one of the levels. I consider myself pretty laid back when it comes to exposing my kids to a variety of things and themes. We try to my 8 year old that he’s going to come across things we don’t think are appropriate but we’re not going to shied him from everything so he’ll learn how to deal with it appropriately.

Regretfully, Guitar Hero III has deemed itself not appropriate for my son at this age. I found out that there’s one level in the game you have to go through that has lots of satanic, hardcore, blood drenched themes and I’m just not willing to expose him to that in the form of entertainment through an Xbox game.

After reviewing the game on the Xbox website and seeing some more of the screen shots, I was confirmed in my decision. I also saw that the game does have a “T(Teen)” rating for lyrics and mild suggestive themes. The official Teen rating states:

Titles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older. Titles in this category may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood, simulated gambling, and/or infrequent use of strong language.

Granted my son has a number of years before he reaches the age of 13. Even then though, is that the age I want to expose my kids to “entertainment” that contains the items mentioned in the rating?

I’ve been saying for awhile now that with the technology available with multi-track audio and storage, why can’t game developers make “safe” versions of their games that are accessible by turning off various options in the configuration on the unit? It seems to me they could sell a ton more games if this were an option.

Can anyone tell me if the earlier versions of the game have this same issue, or have they gotten a little more “teen” with each version.

How’s everyone else feel about this?

I’ll be getting more and more familiar with Windows Vista from here on out. I bought my wife a new Toshiba laptop for Christmas and it came installed with Windows Vista Home Premium.

I’ve actually had no problems getting started with things and preparing her laptop. By preparing her laptop I mean deleting the stuff she won’t be using and cleaning out all the other stuff that’s just bloat ware.

I’m sure I’ll be answering user questions from her on a regular basis. That should help because I’m normally asked for help from my boss who’s also running Windows Vista Business on a Toshiba laptop.

I won’t be attempting to cover Vista anywhere near the level that Milo is covering it over at the Windows Vista Weblog.

Here’s a couple of janitors and a friend with a video camera that have too much time on their hands. A friend is fairly positive that this was photo-shopped.

I received the e-mail below on Friday regarding the problems with OneCare saying it’s expired when it clearly hasn’t yet.

To our valued Perpetual BetaTesters; 

Due to a temporary glitch with our billing system, a small number of valid OneCare subscriptions were inadvertently  marked as canceled.  According to our records, your account was one of the ones affected and therefore, you  may have received an automated e-mail notifying you of the cancelation.  

Our sincere apologies to you for this inconvenience – we would like to assure you that we’re treating this as a high priority issue and working on a fix to correct your account status as soon as possible.  Please rest assured that during the time your account is in a canceled status, the PCs covered by your subscription continued to be serviced and protected by OneCare.

Thank you,

Microsoft Billing Technical Support and Windows Live OneCare

First, I think it’s odd that the e-mail above made it out of Microsoft when cancellation is obviously misspelled above.

I sure hope they get this fixed soon. I just uninstalled McAfee from my wife’s new laptop and installed OneCare. I’m also waiting to see if one of my clients has had any problems with the machines at his office that have OneCare installed.

Still working on my update problem.

I just followed the instructions suggested by Microsoft, which was to make sure Windows Installation 3.1 was installed. Did that. Re-ran update.

Still no success.

Arrgggghhh!

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please feel free to share.