I was just doing some research on Google and noticed that "Zune" was a popular search keyword. Perhaps not too surprising given the recent news of the problems Zune users have been experiencing.
15% of all searches conducted on Google during the time period were somehow related to the Zune music player. Makes you wonder how much traffic someone is getting that may have purchased the Zune keyword.
Three items on my will-purchase-sometime-in-the-near-future-hopefully list right now include an Amazon Kindle, a new Logitech webcam and the 120GB Zune.
Current 30GB Zune holders aren’t too happy right now as there appears to have been systematic failure of 30GB Zunes across the land recently. Microsoft appears to be aware of the problem, but no solutions are forth-coming yet from them.
Customers using the Zune 30 might experience problems starting their players. We’re aware of the problem and are working to correct it. The Zune Social might be slow or inaccessible. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!
I’m still moving forward with purchasing the Zune instead of a new iPod though. In fact, my wife offered me her iPod Nano since her new phone will serve as her music player of choice. I told her I didn’t want it because I didn’t want to have to install iTunes on my computer to manage the music on it.
Source: Zune’s Crapping Out Worldwide. MSFT Support on Vacation! – Dvorak Uncensored
I’m still amazed at the connections I’m able to make through the use of twitter. Perhaps the types of connections that impress the most are ones where I’m introduced to our assisted by a company that’s decided to use twitter as a means to connect with existing and potential customers.
That took place recently when I simply tweeted a statement about being warmed by a space heater in my office. Shortly after my tweet hit the Internet I was messaged by someone at Vornado that was on twitter and they asked what brand of space heater I was using.
I hadn’t really paid attention, but looked and noticed it was one by Patton, their direct competitor. After doing a quick search I can’t even find Patton’s website on the Internet, but here I am talking to someone from Vornado who’s interested in my experiences with space heaters and what I’m using.
After a bit of a conversation with me about what I liked about the space heater and perhaps what I was looking for, I was offered an opportunity to review one of their space heaters and they would be very interested in my experience with it, which I’ll share with you shortly.
Let me refocus on the power of twitter and similar social media tools currently available. Are you using them to connect with your potential customers? your competitor’s customers? your existing customers? I’ll tell you right now, just from the simple experience of meeting and chatting with this guy on twitter, Vornado is THE brand I now think of when someone mentions a space heater or other airflow devices that are similar.
UPDATE: Brian Cartwright, the person behind Vornado’s twitter activity was recently interviewed on the Pistachio Consulting website. He discusses how he got started on twitter for Vornado and what they’re goals are for its use.
If you’re interested in hearing about my actual experiences with the product Vornado sent me to review, continue reading.
Here’s another interesting story from Douglas Karr about a couple that met while chasin’ and fraggin’ each other on the various Halo maps online.
Desirai and John (aka SickNdehead and psychovandal) met on the battle fields shortly after Halo 2 was released. Talking incessantly over Xbox-Live led to an exchange of phone numbers to coordinate playing times, which led to spending more time on the phone than in the game. They started officially dating in March 2005 despite having never met, and that summer Desirai moved down to Florida, where she had both a new school and a boyfriend waiting. John proposed on their three year anniversary, earlier this year.
It makes sense to me, although it seems like most of the time I end up playing with immature, 12-year old sailors that just bust out the cheats and make playing online a less than heavenly experience.
Desirai and John aren’t going to Gen Con crazy with the wedding though. Desirai will be wearing a normal, white wedding dress. From the images and information on their website though, they’re really making the Halo motif a classy addition to the decor for this special day.
They’ve done some really cool designs for various items of their wedding, given the "ring" in Halo, I’d be very interested in seeing what their rings are going to look like, but I couldn’t find anything on their flickr page.
Source: Geeky Marriage Proposal: A Match Made in Halo
Official Website: A Match Made in Halo
Did you know that 2008 was a dual leap year? Probably not since I made up the whole "dual leap year" tag, but what I do mean is that we had a February 29th this year and we’ll also have an extra leap second added to our clocks tomorrow night.
The problem is that Microsoft won’t really catch up with that second until later.
It turns out the deal is that Microsoft doesn’t recognize (or ignores) the alert in the atomic time codes that says a leap second is being added to the time adjustment. When the leap second is added at 12:59:59 tomorrow night, Microsoft won’t catch it and will just adjust the clock on your computer the next time it syncs after tomorrow night.
As you can see in the image above though, I can’t connect to the time.windows.com website URL to update my time anyway. Makes me wonder if their working on a fix right now maybe even though their Knowledge Base Article 909614 states otherwise.
Does anyone really care though? Are you going to stress out over it? If you’re Microsoft maybe you can smirk and know that at least for a little while you can really claim you’re a step ahead of Apple on something.
Hat Tip: Douglas Karr at Marketing Tech Blog
Awhile back I came across an article from PC World where they listed their Top 11 Lame Blogs.
From Kim Kardashian to Wal-mart, PC World doesn’t pull any punches on their critiques of these 11 blogs. Be sure and go read what they say about them so you can either be sure to surf away from them, or like a wreck on the interstate perhaps even look closer!
If you’re a blogger yourself you can take PC World’s comments as a way to improve your own blog’s performance and readership.
Maybe you’d like to avoid the messes altogether though and just laser target your surfing habits to some really great blogs. If that’s the case, Blog World Expo has just released their list of finalists for the 2008 Weblog Awards.
The Weblog Awards finalists are grouped into categories like Best Individual Blogger, Best Humor Blog, Best Liberal Blog or Best Conservative Blog. They’ve even got best blogs listed for a variety of geographic areas and regions.
I’m sure there’s at least one, if not a dozen blogs that would capture your interest as a reader.
One of the problems we’ve been running into recently is that in an application we’ve developed for a client in Access, the form sizes are continually being forgotten. From what we’ve researched it appears that the issue mentioned in this comment on this post are what we are experiencing.
We’re developing the application in Access 2007 and it’s being saved to and deployed on Access 2003 desktops.
I’m curious if anyone else has experienced this and perhaps has come across a work around. We obviously don’t want to revert to an older version of Access 2003 as our development platform and the client is probably not going to upgrade everyone to 2007.
Here are some of the suggestions that were received in comments.
Any other suggestions out there?
One of the gifts I received this Christmas was Guitar Hero – Aerosmith edition. I must say it is quite entertaining to play and I just finished beating the game on easy level, so now it’s time for medium and bring on the blue notes.
Continuing the ongoing discussion that’s already been started here is whether or not it’s appropriate for younger audiences like my 9 yr old son and 6 yr old daughter.
It was about a year ago this time that I wrote that post so my kids were a year younger as well. I don’t want to say that one year makes that big of a difference, but it may also be the fact that this is the Aerosmith version and maybe not so "extreme" as the full-blown Guitar Hero III version. My brother-in-law got the standard Guitar Hero III version, so I’ll have to check it out a little closer to see about the differences across the board. He also mentioned that there were some "censoring" options in the settings which I haven’t seen on my version.
What’s everyone else’s experience with the differences in these two versions?
On a side note, we also got Rockband for our Nintendo Wii. The quality of the guitar between the two games is big in my opinion. Compared to the Guitar Hero Gibson guitar, the Rockband Fender really feels like a toy in your hands.
Just how powerful is that Facebook addiction of yours? Maybe taking a look at it from the eyes of these two guys.
This was one of the popular videos that was shared among some family members this holiday season. The video is from the Rhett & Link team of online comedy geniuses. They’ve got loads more videos on YouTube if you’re interested.
One of the pieces of software I hadn’t yet reinstalled on my laptop since my reformat was Audacity from Sourceforge. This is a great, powerful and free piece of software that allows you to do audio editing on your own.
I don’t know about you but most of the time when I’m looking for something pretty specific on the Internet I usually just try typing the domain name, so in this case I just tried typing www.audacity.com thinking that would take me where I needed to go. It didn’t.
The www.audacity.com website belongs to a company named "Audacity, Inc." and according to the first line of their website:
We DO NOT Make Audio Software
I just downloaded a new app for my mobile phone called Kinoma FreePlay.
Without Kinoma FreePlay, your smartphone is just a phone. With Kinoma FreePlay, it’s a mobile media powerhouse. Kinoma FreePlay is the world’s first mobile media browser—it’s everything you need to find and play video, audio, and pictures, whether the media is on your phone, on your home PC, or on your favorite web sites.
I’ve been playing around with the SkyFire browser on my phone lately since the mobile version of Internet Explorer on my phone is just about useless for any site that’s not specifically developed for mobile phone use.
I’m just hoping this install works okay on older versions of Windows Mobile. I’d love to upgrade to version 6, but that’s not available on my phone hardware it appears.
