AdamStout.com

Outlook's Social Connector Now Available for Older Versions of Outlook

2010-02-21T19:37:40-06:00-06:00

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.

Snowmageddon

2010-02-15T09:30:21-06:00-06:00

Yesterday Jenny and I were out and stopped by a local restaurant for lunch. It is obvious to me that we have now come to the time of Snowmageddon. Why else would you have a sign like this on your patio? As a native San Diegian, this is just not right.

After lunch we stopped by a nearby Home Depot. While shoveling the never ending snow the last week, we broke the shaft on our steel reinforced snow shovel so we decided to pick up a new one. The local grocery stores have been sold out for a while, but we figured that Home Depot may have gotten some new shovels in this weekend in preparation for the next round of snow next week.

Well, I was wrong, they didn't have any shovels but they did have a box of these upfront:

For those of you who want to see more of Snowmageddon, take a look at my photo album from the last week.

Stout Ale is in the Bottles

2010-02-13T19:30:00-06:00-06:00

As a Christmas present, Jenny got me a Home Brewing kit from Mr. Beer. I had mentioned in the past that I wanted to brew some "Stout's Stout" mostly as a joke (since I don't really care for stouts) but underneath that joke, I really did want to try a home brew. This kit was a great starter, it come with everything I needed and instructions on how not to screw it up. To the right you can see some of bottled beverages that were produced. Now we just a have a few more weeks to wait while the carbonation kicks in a then the Stout Ale will be ready for consumption.

Brewing is fun but what I really want to try is distilling. I'm not sure if it is legal where I live but after I do some more home brewing, I think I'm going to look into that. Have you had any luck with home distilling?

We took pictures from the brewing a few weekends ago along with the bottling from today.

The Snowpocalypse Is Here

2010-02-05T21:38:18-06:00-06:00

For those of you who haven't heard, the Snowpocalypse is upon us, we are supposed to get 20" to 30" of snow tonight. And on top of that there is supposed to be lighting.

This picture is from the Shopper Stopper we had last month but it should give you an idea of what is to come. Being from San Diego originally, this is all a bit to absorb but it was nice to get kicked out of the office at 2 and told to go home. I never got a snow day from school, so I'll take what I can get and enjoy it.

One plus side of this weekend is that I learned the term "snowtarded". UrbanDictionary.com lists the definition as, "Those who have no clue how to drive/function in the snow" and there is no better way to describe the people out here in D.C. This storm is bad, but it will be clear in a few days. There is no need to buy up a month of supplies from the store like people seem to be doing. These are the same idiots who don't realize you need to drive slower on snow regardless of teh speed limit.

I'm just going to try to stay home this weekend.

Annoying CSS

2010-01-24T22:35:37-06:00-06:00

I've spent the last few evenings trying to update the layout of my site to handle resizing better. Before it was hard-coded to be 972 pixels wide. This looked fine on my laptop (and I'm hoping on most other people's computer's) but since I bought I 24" wide screen monitor I realized there was lots of unused space that could really be used by my photo gallery. On the left, you can see what the gallery looked like before my changes. There was only a fixed number of pictures per row which once again was fine on my laptop but left a lot of unused space on larger monitors.

To my point, I tried to allow the CSS template to flow with the center expanding but I just couldn't get it to work right. I need to have three variable height columns to work but that just doesn't seem possible. This is the closest I found to what I wanted but it couldn't use a background image for the side columns (other than that, it would have been fine).

I ended up using the old borderless table technique. I wanted to stick to CSS only, but like I said, I don't think it is possible (I though you could use the new table emulation in CSS but that isn't support everywhere and is basically just using a table anyway).

Moral of the story, sometimes you should just use the simplest approach instead of wasting time trying to fancy. On the plus side, you see on the right the same photo gallery as on the left but now it is stretched out and can take up more of the screen space which is a good thing for the galleries that have hundreds of pictures as well as when viewing all the photos with a certain tag (which is a recent feature added to the gallery).

What does love really mean?

2010-01-20T07:06:15-06:00-06:00

I'm not going to go into detail about ho much spare time I have, but yesterday I was reading a dictionary and came across an explanation of why we use the word "love" in tennis to describe zero points.

Although after a little more research this seems in doubt, what I read was that love is an Americanization of the French word "L'euf" meaning egg (which is what a 0 kin of looks like right?).

Even if it didn't come from the French, people seem to agree it is from Americans mispronouncing the original (which is also perhaps Dutch).

Photo Gallery Update

2010-01-14T23:18:41-06:00-06:00

In April of last year, I migrated my Picasa based photo gallery to use Flickr instead. I like the Flickr's API much better than the crap Google offers for Picasa. In addition to the API Flickr offers unlimited storage of pictures for about the same price as a few GB of storage with Google (at the time at least). I believe they have since lowered their prices so you can get unlimited storage with Flickr or 80 GB with Google. If Google makes some enhancements to the API, I may end up switching back.

To the point, with nearly 70 photo albums, the Flickr API was a little too robust to use real time. To get around this, wrote a small MySQL database to cache all the data I need locally (still hosting the pictures on Flickr). This has greatly improved the load time of all the pages. For instance, the main gallery page now loads in .4 seconds instead of the 20+ seconds it was taking before. While the API had everything I want, not everything was in the right call, so I had to make several calls per page instead of just one large call to the API. This really slowed things down. Now I just call a single MySQL query (that still needs to be optimized).

I'm also taking the opportunity to clean up the accordion menu by switching from a one off script to a YUI based solution. This change will allow me to do some additional expansions in the future to allow for more groupings and possibly some more display options.

Let me know what you think

Google's Motives For Giving Away Internet

2010-01-12T10:54:33-06:00-06:00

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.

CNN Needs an Editor as Well

2010-01-11T18:25:02-06:00-06:00

Yesterday I pointed out that Reuters needs to get a new editor who can proof read their articles, it looks like CNN needs one as well. I was reading an article about Palin's new deal with Fox when I learned that the GOP had presidential primaries in 2009. I must be behind the times, I thought all the primaries were in 2008 when we had the general election for president.

Finding Duplicate Music and Pictures

2010-01-11T18:11:08-06:00-06:00

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.

Reuters Needs a New Editor

2010-01-10T21:49:06-06:00-06:00

I've had some free time on my hands and while I was reading the news at Reuters a couple of days ago, I read what had to be a typo. What "adversity" is a valid word, I have a feeling that Senator Reid has worked for his career to promote "diversity". This story was filed at 5pm on Saturday and as of now, it is still posted with the mistake. Apparently the author, Steve Holland, doesn't read the comments on his articles since there several people have posted this blatant error.
You can read the full article here.

Avatar is No Matrix, but still a "Must See"

2010-01-06T00:00:00-06:00-06:00

It amuses me how the news keeps reporting how much money Avatar is pulling in. A ticket for an evening showing of Avatar at my local multiplex is $14. This obscene price makes the total box office a little meaningless doesn't it? If you consider that Star Wars brought in $798 million, then the $429 million that Avatar has brought in after 4 weeks isn't too impressive. World wide there must be thousands of more theaters than there were 30 years ago and when you adjust for ticket prices (A little bit of research shows that the average ticket in 1977 was a little over $2), Avatar would need to bring in more than 4 and half billion dollars to be as popular as the original Star Wars. So until the news starts reporting the total ticket sales or adjusts for differences in price, I'm going to keep ignoring the gross sales.

As for the movie, the story was a little lacking (which apparently Cameron tried to make up for with length) but if you can get through slow pace and the unbelievable setup in the first hour, then you can sit back and enjoy the last hour and half. The is nothing mind blowing about this story like we saw in The Matrix, but the special effects are simply amazing. I saw it in 3D which looks amazing most of the time, but also hurts my eyes in others so while I can do without that, the computer animation is simply believable (not unbelievable like in the aforementioned Star Wars. You can't tell where the actors end and the computer begins.

It is expensive, but this is a movie you need to see on the big screen.

My New Kia Soul

2010-01-04T00:00:00-06:00-06:00

When we lived in Pittsburgh, we didn't need two cars so I left my Z3 in San Diego. Once we decided to move to D.C., we realized a convertible didn't make too much sense so we sold my car and just kept the Montero. Right before we moved out here, I got the news that I would be traveling every week so we decided to put off buying a car until I was back here driving to work every day.

As my traveling comes to an end, Jenny and I had to finally stop our procrastinating and buy a new car. We were looking at a used Honda Fit but it after looking around it looked like a new Hyundai or Kia would be cheaper. We were looking at a Kia Forte but the morning we were planing on going out for a test drive, I was looking at the inventory of a local Kia dealer and saw the price of a Soul. It was pretty comparable to a Forte so I asked Jenny to take a look. She liked it and after a test drive, we were sold (literally).

Since we were looking at new cars, I looked up the Costco Auto Buying Program. I had seen cars parked out in front Costcos for years and never though much of it, but I figured it couldn't hurt to see what the program offered. Basically, all you have to do is look up a dealer who participates in your area and tell them you are a Costco member. Then you get a price a certain amount below invoice with no negotiating. Based on the Edmunds True Market Value which tells you what people are paying for a certain car in your area, this is a pretty good price.

The one catch is that you have to buy a car on the lot and can't order one. Not a huge issue, but while I wanted a car that was metallic gray, the only one that they had in stock which the options we wanted was in Alien (Kia's name for metallic green). As you can see based on the picture to the right, that is the one we got. This happened to be the color that Jenny liked the most so it worked out well for us.

While we haven't had it long, I'm pretty happy with the Soul so far. Having built-in BlueTooth is a great feature and while I'm not sure I'm going to pay $15 a month to renew the XM, it is a nice feature. If I was driving more than 5 miles to work, I would think about it some more.

Elementry My Dear

2009-12-25T00:00:00-06:00-06:00

A normal holiday tradition around here is to go see a movie while everyone else is home with their families. Apparently around here, that is a pretty common idea. We went to see Sherlock Holmes at a sold out theater. This just reinforced my rule about not seeing movies on opening day. Robert Downey Jr. was great in the movie but he would have been better if I didn't have to sit in the front row.

Downey does a great job of playing troubled characters. He added a great deal of complexity to the character that another actor might not have been able to. If you are already a fan, this is a can't miss. However, if you aren't a fan already, you may want to wait for this to come out on DVD.

I want to applaud the screen writers, Johnson, Peckham, and Kinberg for not being tempted to throw in a "Elementary my Dear Watson" (even out of context). I think back to the Get Smart movie that tossed (or perhaps forced ) in all the catch phrases at the expense of the movie. This was well done all on its own. I look forward to the sequel (which was certainly left open by the ending).

Helping Those In Need

2009-12-24T00:00:00-06:00-06:00

This year, Jenny and I decided to stay in town for the holidays instead of spending an obscene amount of money traveling just for a couple of days (I have very little vacation saved up). Since we were, here, we decided to do some good and volunteer somewhere. Jenny found this great organization for us to volunteer with called Miriam's Kitchen.

Miriam's Kitchen provides healthy, homemade meals and comprehensive case management services to homeless men and women in Washington, D.C. You may have read about them after Michelle Obama volunteered serving food with them earlier this year.

I was very impressed by how well the operation was run and how much the people there cared for guests. I look forward to working there again and encourage anyone else in the area to see what they can do for those in need whether with Miriam's Kitchen or with another organization helping those less fortunate.

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Bad Movie

2009-12-16T00:00:00-06:00-06:00

Nothing much to do here in Texas on a Wednesday night so I want to dollar theater. I had already seen most of the movies there to tonight was Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant. For a dollar, I'm still undecided if it was worth it, but for any more than that, it certainly isn't.

I'm a big fan of John C. Reilly and although he did have some good lines delivered in his typical over the top style, he couldn't make up for a weak plot.

Not much more to say about this. Since it is already at the dollar theater, you probably won't have to time to catch it while it is still in the theater, but don't worry about that. And if you miss it on DVD, you'll be ok too. If you see it on cable next year and have nothing better to do, sit back and enjoy.

Time for Zombies

2009-12-03T22:09:39-06:00-06:00

Hooray for the dollar theater near my hotel. I was bored tonight so I decided to go catch a movie. I had heard some mixed reviews about Zombieland, but for $1.75, it can't be that bad, right? I'm not big on horror movies but the comparisons to Shaun of the Dead as well as having Woody Harrelson gave me enough incentive to go see it.

To the point, I thought it was great. The appearance of Bill Murray really put it over the top for me. It isn't the best movie ever made, but it was very enjoyable for the 88 minutes it ran. The Texas and Redneck jokes at the beginning were especially great since I saw this while in Austin.

I'm still not sold on Jesse Eisenberg though, he always seems like he is playing Michael Cera's character. The only other movie I remember him from is Adventureland which was a painful 90 minutes and perhaps that just left a bad opinion of hm in my mind.

Anyway, if you don't mind some gore (well a lot of gore) and like zombie humor, this is a pretty entertaining movie.

What's a "Fromer"? Ask the AP

2009-11-14T13:04:00-06:00-06:00

I was reading this AP article and noticed that the AP is apparently making up words... If you look at the caption on the photo, it lists Palin and the "fromer" VP candidate. Seriously, that isn't even a word, don't they at least run spell check on this stuff?

Update: It looks like Google doesn't host AP stories for too long, but you can still the article on sites that publish it. Here AZ Central, still has the article with the typo in the caption.

BlackBerry 5.0 OS Update Helps a Lot

2009-11-05T07:59:56-06:00-06:00

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.

(Not) Finding Windows 7 on Bing

2009-10-31T22:51:34-05:00-05:00

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:

As an addendum to the story, I order the Windows 7 Family pack from a vendor on Google Shopping and a day later received an email saying that the company didn't actually have the product and that my credit card would be refunded. Not related to Bing vs. Google, but annoying none the less. Moral of the story, make sure the company you order from has a good reputation or buy it in person (i.e. I saw the Family Pack at Costco today and although tempted to buy it, I'm going to try for a better price and no tax on-line.)

The Jeff Dunham Show is as Bad As it Sounds.

2009-10-25T22:15:08-05:00-05:00

According to Comedy Central, The premiere of the Jeff Dunham show had record ratings. I'm really curious how the second show does. There was nothing else on tonight so I watched a few minutes of the show. It would be mediocre for a comedy special (I'm just not sure that ventriloquists translate well to TV) but I just can't see how this will survive multiple shows. It really is the same gimmick over and over again. Face it if Brooke Hogan is your guest "star" then you have some problems.

It is pretty amazing how Comedy Central promotes things. They do a great job of building up interest for something before it premieres. However, the trend seems to be the more Comedy Central build something up, the worse (and more short lived) it will be.

Well, at least the pain will be over soon.

Go Joe!!! (Just not to the movie)

2009-10-20T21:30:17-05:00-05:00

Thanks to dollar movie night I finally got to see the new G.I. Joe movie. I've been waiting all summer to see this. I started traveling right before this came out and just haven't had time until now. Had I known how bad it was, I wouldn't have worried about it so much. At a buck, it was well worth the investment, but if I had paid full price I might have been a little more upset. Even Terminator 4 was better than this.

I'm not sure when Hollywood will learn that more (especially not better) CGI doesn't make up for a weak story. I appreciate that they tried to drop in the classic lines "Yo Joe" and the classic "Knowing is half the battle" but forced is a little bit of an understatement.

Why couldn't they just have a simple shootem up story? They tried to make this a little to cool. I would have preferred something a little more realistic (as much as it can be) rather than over exaggerated. This reminded me more of a live version of Team America rather than G.I.Joe.

How Long Does it Take Google to Process Street View Images?

2009-10-08T08:05:35-05:00-05:00

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

The World is Even Smaller Than Thought

2009-10-06T21:56:35-05:00-05:00

To follow up on my note a couple of months ago about what small world this is, but today I found this is even smaller than I thought. This evening I went down to the gym at my hotel (shocking I know) and on my way back up the steps I was passing a guy who looked real familiar. We both stopped at the same time with a "don't I know you???".

Anyway, as it turns out we used to teach band together and although he may not know it, he was one of the reason I decided to quit my job move across the country and get an MBA. He recently took a job out here in Texas and we just happened to cross paths.

I'm pretty amazed.

Budget FastBreaks Take Too Long

2009-10-04T23:05:19-05:00-05:00

I travel a lot for work. for the last few months, I have been flying to the same place every week. I stay in the same hotel (a Residence Inn, which I really like), flying the same flight (which is tolerable) and renting my car from Budget (which is progressively gotten worse). The past two weeks have taken forever to get my car. Here is the complain letter I just sent to Budget. We'll see how they handle this:

Why do I have a FastBreak account?

1) I have for the last 10 weeks or so using my Fast Break and although Avis has a sign up where people can see what car they have and can go straight there, I have to go to the booth, wait in line and find out what car I have. This is amazing since i have to go to the Avis booth to get my car.

2) Last week I rented a car (with FastBreak) and it was a horrible experience. Once I waited in line to find out what car I had, I went to the space (lugging my baggage) and there was no contract in it. Then I went back to the booth and although I just asked for them to print a new contract, someone went to look then looked at ALL the cars to find my contract. After about 20 minutes they came back and printed a new contract (for a different car). What a waste of time.

3) When I returned the car, I looked at the contract and the bill was twice what it is normally (each of the past ten weeks or so). It took about 20 minutes after I returned my car to get it straightened out. Once again, I'm glad I had the FastBreak to help me out.

4) I rented a car tonight and after waiting in line to get the contract (and waiting for about 10 minutes while they looked it up and printed it) and going to my car, I looked at the contract and found yet another rate on it (not as high as last week, but still way too much). I went back to the booth and after about another 10 minutes, I got the correct rate. Good thing I had Fast Break.

Please explain to me what FastBreak gets me and why I should ever rent from Budget again? This seems to become more and more of a problem and take more and more of my time. Since I fly in at 10pm or so on Sunday nights, I would really hope to save any time I can getting to my hotel. This concept seems to be missed by your company.