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A couple of months ago I downloaded the public beta of Office 2010.  Overall it seemed fine although it was difficult to see what was really changed.  Most of the apps looked essentially the same as in Office 2007 except I did notice that Groove was renamed to SharePoint Workspace.  It seems to work the same (with some small enhancements) but overall, it looks the same to me. 

The one exception to this was Outlook 2010.  It didn't sync correctly with my BlackBerry so I couldn't use it for long and had to revert to Outlook 2007, but the one feature I really liked was the Social Network integration.  This is similar to how smart phones sync with Facebook (and how Linked In should) so the profile picture and phone numbers stay in sync with what your contact has listed on the site.  This is a great feature to help ensure you don't have stale email address or phone numbers which both seem to change a little too often now a days.  In Outlook 2010, Microsoft allows 3rd party developers to create connections between Outlook and what ever internet service they want to help sync the information. 

This integration is made most obvious through the "Person Pane" (see to the right) in an Outlook mail message although you will see it when you open a contact directly as well.  This single feature would have pushed me to upgrade to 2010, but Microsoft did something unexpected that will make me rethink that...

They released this feature as a free add-on to older versions of Outlook.  You can download the beta version of Outlook Social Connector which works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 (and of course this is built into Outlook 2010).  Once you have the Social Connector installed, you can get the connector for LinkedIn from their site for free as well.  You can expect that a connector for Facebook will be forthcoming after the release of Office 2010 (or perhaps even earlier), but for now, I'm happy with LinkedIn since those are the contacts I'm not concerned with anyway.

If you have traveled through any airports lately you may have noticed that several airports have free WiFi (through January 15th) thanks to Google (via what appears to be a partnership with Boingo).  It is interesting to me that included on the list of airports Google is providing WiFi for is San Diego and Pittsburgh both of which already had free WiFi.  I've only traveled through a few of the airports on the list where I've tried to use the internet, and although I know Dulles (Washington, D.C.) and Austin do not normally have free WiFi, my sampling shows 50% of the airports already had free WiFi.  It is also interesting that while Google is getting a lot of press for this "benevolent" action, there are others (like E-Bay) that are sponsoring free internet in other places but not getting much press.

A few weeks ago, I was traveling through Austin and when I connected to Google's sponsored connection and got a clue as to why they are really doing this.  Here is a screen shot of what I saw:

While at first this looks like a normal Terms of Service agreement that you have to click on to get onto a public network, it really is a way to grab some more market share for Chrome.  While people are just trying to get on-line in a hurry, they are going to download Chrome because they think they need it to continue onto the internet.  I almost clicked on it and I'm a pretty technical person, I would love to see how many people Google tricked into downloading Chrome and having it automatically become the default browser.

If GMail didn't make Google Evil, Chrome certainly did.

On a side note, while trying to find the list of airports that Google is providing the WiFi for, I searched for "google free internet" and came across Google's free at home internet, TiSP.  If you search either Google or Bing you'll see this comes up first.  So while Google is Evil, at least they have a sense of humor.

A couple of months ago I bought an Iomega ix2 Network Attached Storage device.  While Iomega's name isn't what it was back in the day of the zip drive, since they are now owned by EMC, I figured the quality must be ok.  Overall, I think I got what I paid for, but the drives are a little slow when serving pictures and music.  It works fine for my back ups, but I think I'll buy something a little faster next time to at as a home media server.

The major thing I wanted to accomplish with my new shared storage was to get all the pictures and MP3s that I had on my laptop, desktop, a my wife's desktop into a central location that was backed up and accessible to all the systems.  The Iomega NAS worked great but once I got everything in one location, I realized that I had a lot of duplicate pictures between the three systems I merged together.  I started looking into writing an application to help de-duplicate the files but before I got too far, I took a look at what freeware was out there. 

I tried a few of the applications out there, but quickly settled on Duplicate Cleaner.  It is a nice little app that quickly searches your directories for duplicates based on different (and configurable) criteria.  While there were some other apps the specialized in images and others in music, this handles music, pictures, videos, and documents.

The guys at DigitalVolcano really saved me some time compared to writing something and I appreciate they didn't try to charge me $50 for something I only need to use every once in a while.  Some of their other apps on the site seem a little odd, but what ever floats their boat.  This one is a nice light weight app.

Earlier this week I plugged my BlackBerry Storm into my computer to charge it and I was prompted to upgrade the new 5.0 BlackBerry OS from the 4.7 version I was currently running.  I haven't been to thrilled about the speed of my Storm or the stability of it so I figured an upgrade couldn't hurt.

I'm pretty impressed.  Highlights include:

• Stability - It has only been a few days, but I haven't had any crashes (which seemed to happen about once a week before).
• Speed - Switching between screens is faster now
• Looks - While not super important, the transitions look better than they did before
• Gestures - I haven't played with this too much but scrolling is much better.  It looks smoother and is more sensitive to your speed (particularly in scrolling).  This may have been iPhone inspired, but better is better.

I believe that the OS is the same as what is shipping on the new Storm 2 which seemed a little better than my original version when I played with it at the store.  The new Storm has Wi-Fi which is something I would like but I'm not sure it is worth the extra $150.  I was leaning toward it though based on the more stable OS.  Now that I have the new OS on my old Storm, I'm thinking the $50 price tag on the old Storm is pretty good.

If you haven't upgraded your Storm, I recommend doing so ASAP.  One word of warning, it took a while to do the upgrade (about an hour) but I think most of that was due to my internet connection and the download of all the packages.  The installation itself though did take a decent amount of time so don't do it right before you need to leave.

Recently I was trying to track down the best price on the Windows 7 Family Pack so I went to the shopping section of my preferred search provider, Microsoft's Bing.  I figured on Bing, Windows 7 would be something that is easy to find.  It was pretty amazing to me that I couldn't find the Family Pack at all.  For those of you haven't heard, Microsoft is offering a 3 license pack for Windows 7 Home Premium for a MSRP of $150.  Since the standard upgrade price is $109 or so, even if you only plan on using two licenses, this is a GREAT DEAL!!!  This is a pic of the box to the right so now you know what to look for.


When I search Bing shopping this is what I got:

Interesting, when I searched Google Shopping (Froggle I believe is the name) I quickly found what I was looking for:

Q: How long does it take Google to process StreeView images?

A: About two months

As I mentioned in August, when I was walking my dog on a Friday afternoon, I saw this funny looking car with what looked to be cameras sticking out of the top.  When it got closer, I was able to read the Google logo on the side.  It is interesting that it takes Google so long to take a picture from a camera and get it on the web.  One would think they would be more efficient that that.

Here is the proof I'm not lying.

View in Google Maps

For the past two years, I've had a Motorola Q from Verizon as my mobile phone.  It has served me well but I've had more and more problems charging the battery so I decided it was finally time to get a new phone since my "New Every Two" kicked in recently.

With my Q, I was able to get a smart phone that could sync with Outlook without a data plan, but Verizon has realized it makes A LOT of money on data plans so that is no longer an option.  That being the case, I decided to upgrade to a phone with a data plan.  There were a couple of options I liked but upon the suggestion of the sales person, I went with a BlackBerry Storm over a Windows based phone. I liked Windows Mobile, but it hasn't been trouble free and I wanted something that worked well this time since I would be using it for other things besides just the phone and calendar.