Deb-Tech

I enjoy a good movie as much as the next guy, but does everything have to be a movie these days? I’m tired of clicking on a link to what I think is a news story or tech article and discovering that instead of the written word, it’s a video “feature” or a webinar. Those have their time and place, but most of the time when I see that it’s video (and usually that I’m going to have to sit through a commercial before I can even see it), I just click away from it and never watch it.

This is especially true when I’m doing research for a paper or article or to troubleshoot a technical problem. Videos are good for demonstrating a long and involved “how to” process that might be hard to accurately describe without visuals, but they’re very, very bad for trying to find the answer to a quick question. You have to sit through the whole two minutes or ten minutes or thirty minutes to get the information, because if you try skipping through, you’ll probably miss it. You can’t easily “skim” as you can with the printed word.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I never watch video. Well done video can be far more informative than just words on a page. But in too many cases, the video element adds nothing – except extra time. I don’t need to see a talking head reading me what I could have read myself in half the time, or a series of PowerPoint slides consisting of the same words I could have read, much more quickly, in a text document. If you’re going to use video, use its advantages to give me something I can use. Demonstrate the product, show me the device in action, give me a live recording of the news incident taking place or at least its aftermath. If you don’t have that footage, forget the video and write an article instead.

Ads on a printed page can be annoying, especially if they pop up in front of the text I want to read. But I can usually get rid of them in a second with a click, whereas the video commercials drag on for 15 or 30 seconds, sometimes even longer. Never mind; I can check out several print web sites in the time that takes. Some will say it’s the price you have to pay for free content, and I understand that. And if I wanted to watch the video content, I’d be willing to pay that price (and do).  But when I don’t want my info in video anyway, I’m certainly not amenable to paying a higher price (in terms of my time, which is money) to get it that way.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned. I grew up reading books, and it’s still one of my favorite pastimes. I always preferred newspapers to TV news. Maybe young people today, who grew up with TV and then the Internet as their primary information source, can’t or don’t want to read anything. Maybe they have to see it in living, moving color to understand it. The world, as Roland the Gunslinger once noted, moves on.

But I do wish web sites would make a small concession to those of us who feel as I do: just give us a clue – an icon, a label – that a particular link leads to a video rather than a print article. Then I won’t have to waste my time clicking on it when I’m not in a “moving pictures” mood.

Am I all alone in feeling this way? Do you love videos and look forward to the day when written language disappears entirely? Or are there others out there who think there’s too much video for the sake of video on the web today?

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

For the past several years, we’ve been hearing about “The Cloud.” Before that, the same concept was called “Software as a Service” or SaaS. Prior to that, it was called “Application Services Providers” or ASP.

A rose by any other name smells just as good – or just as bad. Whatever it was called, the idea never really seemed to take off. Companies and individuals just kept resisting the urging of service providers to give up on-premise control of their data and applications, even if it did offer the potential to save money and headaches.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon and a number of other major players in the IT industry are now bound and determined to make it happen. And with that kind of money and influence behind it, the trend toward putting data and apps in “the cloud” is finally beginning to gain some momentum. However, based on my informal discussions with IT pros outside those big companies, there is still a pretty large and adamant resistance movement. In the parlance well known to anyone who has visited the Twelve Colonies, their attitude is “Frak the Cloud.”

The name might be a bit catchier than those that preceded it, but the image it conjures up for those IT professionals (and for many consumers, according to input from my newsletter readers) is not a friendly one. Rather, it’s the picture of a dark and ominous sky, filled with hidden tornados, ready to swoop down and wipe out everything they own. Am I over-dramatizing? Not really. Emotions about the cloud run strong. There are important trust issues at work. IT pros see it as a threat to their jobs, and home users see it as an attempt to wrestle away what control they have left over their data, their software and their computing experience.

Here’s what Kelly H. had to say:

“I'm quite leery of clouds as well, not because of the storms they produce, but because of how quickly they dissipate! One minute they're there, and the next they're gone--or at least changed somehow. I cannot see trusting my data to a cloud. (I don't always trust my own computer!)”

A name change isn’t going to fix all that, but it might help.

Sure, it’s boring, but why not just refer to it as “online services?” Drop all references that make people think of big, scary storm clouds that obscure their views of their data and apps. “Online” is familiar, comfortable, a good thing. We all “go online” every day and we’re able to do enjoyable things there. “Going online” is a far happier idea for most people than “moving to the cloud.”

Last week, Steve Ballmer said Microsoft is betting its future on the cloud. If they’re really serious about selling it to everybody else, I think they should abandon that name, maybe even stay away from “services,” too, since for most of us that sounds like something we’re going to have to pay – and pay, and pay, and pay – for. It makes you think of your water bill or your electric bill, costs that keep going up and up and make you feel frustrated and helpless when you try to deal with the disinterested bureaucrats who represent those services to the public.

How about “the online software experience?”  Or even use the “Live” moniker, which has nice connotations. Just quit talking about the cloud – and you’ll stop scaring away a good portion of your market.

 
deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

In the 90s and the first decade of the new millennium, email discussion lists were a big part of my online communications. I belonged to a mailing list for current and former police officers, several lists for writers, several lists for IT pros, and a couple of “sub lists” made up of select friends from one of the larger lists. I still belong to most of those lists, but the traffic on many of them has died down to almost nothing. That doesn’t mean I’ve lost touch with the other list members, though. In many cases, we’ve just moved our communications venue to a new place in cyberspace: the social networks. 

Prior to the SN phenomenon, I spent an extraordinary amount of time sorting and reading and answering email. I had Outlook set up to filter list mail into separate folders to keep my lists straight. Now I still get a lot of mail by most standards, but most of it is business email or messages from a few friends who don’t do social networking. The casual conversations, especially group conversations, now take place primarily on Facebook.

I think one of the biggest appeals of social networking is convenience. Once upon a time, when something interesting or exciting happened in my life, I might write a long email message about it and then copy and paste and make minor changes to that message to send to several different lists. Now I tend to be more succinct – I summarize and post it once to my Facebook status update. There it’s available to all of my friends: my police friends, my writer friends, my IT pro friends, my family members, etc.

Certainly the social networking sites create an environment that’s different from that of a list, particularly a small list that’s been around for a long time. A couple of my favorite mailing lists had been going strong since the mid-90s. With only 10-20 members, we’d gotten to know each other very well. The relationship between the members there was certainly more intimate than the one I have with my 200+ Facebook friends. But that level of intimacy wasn’t always a plus, either. Conflicts arise, resentments smolder, as in any close, long-term relationship. In fact, I left one of those lists because of an ongoing problem with one particular list member whose histrionics came to dominate every discussion. I had left the list before because of her, but had returned because I missed the other members. This time, almost all of those other members were my friends on Facebook, so I didn’t have to give them up in order to remove this negative influence from my life.

I have a little more sadness, though, about another of my long-time lists. Several of its members have joined Facebook, too – but several others haven’t. We’re all “old folks” (at least according to the under-30 crowd) and some of them just don’t want to learn new tricks. Some are already overextended with jobs and family and existing forms of online interactions and don’t want to add another one. I’ve remained on that list, but the discussions there have dwindled over the last year. Those of us who are on Facebook keep up with each others’ lives there, and even though I try to post regularly to the mailing list, too, it’s often as an afterthought. Just as robbers go to banks because that’s where the money is, I go to Facebook first because that’s where so many of my friends are. 

But having so many of the people in my life all together in one virtual place can be a challenge, too. I have to think more carefully about what I post. Whereas I wouldn’t think twice about dashing off a gruesome joke on the small list of cops/ex-cops, I can’t tell that same joke on FB because there are people in my feed who wouldn’t understand it, who would be offended or grossed out by it. It can be interesting, crafting posts that will be equally acceptable to my colleagues in the IT world, my law enforcement contacts, my old school buddies, my cousins (including the “once removeds”) the aunt who helped raise me, my former inlaws, my own kids (and even some of their friends), the Mayor and other political figures in my city, the breeder from whom I got my puppy, and various and sundry readers of my writing and others I’ve met somewhere (in real life or online) along the way.

Some folks think social networking is a waste of time. It can be – as can any enjoyable activity if you do too much of it. But it’s no more of a time waster than email lists (probably less so, since it’s more efficient) and it’s certainly less of a waste than watching a mindless situation comedy on TV. Tom used to say he saw no business value in social networking. Then he came back from this year’s MVP conference and said (as he is wont to do from time to time), “You were right.” He described how many of his colleagues there told him that they had enjoyed keeping up with what’s been going on in our lives, how they felt they knew him better, as a real person and not just as a “persona” with whom they do business.

Networking is, after all, what social networking is all about. And our methods for networking have evolved and continue to do so. Years ago, business and personal relationships were often forged at conferences or parties or “get-togethers” at churches or clubs. As the online community came into being, we moved to chat rooms, IRC, and email discussion lists. Web boards offered another way to meet people and talk about common interests. Now social networking sites give us a richer experience, where we can interact with more people and also easily share photos and videos, join groups, and also send messages or chat one-on-one. As one type of activity becomes more popular, others tend to decline in popularity. There’s only so much time in the day, so we give up one thing to spend our time on another. Email is by no means dead, but the discussion list is slowly being abandoned in favor of more web-centric technologies like the SN sites. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Probably neither one. It just is.  I only hope my holdout friends join Facebook (or the Next Big Thing) eventually, because I would hate to lose touch with them just because of a change in communications trends.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

I know this post will probably hurt some feelings and make some people angry. So be it. It’s a subject that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, and it’s time I got it off my chest.

At the last MVP Summit I attended (2009), I couldn’t help noticing how many of my fellow MVPs were carrying iPhones. Not just carrying them, but showing them off - “pushing” them, more or less. Trying to make iPhone converts out of the rest of us. Sure, it’s pretty and it’s “cool” and as with all Apple products, having one makes you appear (to some people) to be one of the elite. Even some Microsoft employees had them.

Anyone should be able to buy and use any (legal) product he/she wants, of course. But it bothered me a little. There we all were, being honored by Microsoft for our contributions in making Microsoft products better, making those products more accessible to the tech community. The company was spending a decent amount of money to put us up at nice hotels, feed us some great food, host dinners and parties and show us a good time. They opened up the doors to us at Redmond and gave us access to “insider” information that’s not available to the public. Seems like the least a person could do is leave the iPhone in the pocket or bag for the duration instead of trying to drum up business for the competition.

Now I see MVPs writing articles and books and blog posts singing the praises of the iPhone, iPad, and other Apple “stuff.” And that bothers me, too. My reaction is similar, but not nearly as strong, regarding those MVPs who come out as public advocates of Linux. I guess that’s because, although many in the Linux community engage in anti-Windows rhetoric, there has been no concentrated, high priced, on-going formal advertising campaign spouting lies about Windows from that corner.  Linux is a competitor, but Apple is the enemy – they themselves made it so by declaring war on national TV with a series of commercials that are, I fully admit, extremely clever – but also embody everything I hate about politics: half-truths and outright falsehoods that focus on making the opposition look bad instead of telling the public about your own strengths.

Am I saying that, as MVPs, we should never be critical about Microsoft products and policies? Absolutely not. I have written things critical of Microsoft on many occasions – regarding Vista’s poor performance (pre-SP1) on laptops, the crippling of the GUI in favor of PowerHell in Exchange 2007, the bewildering omission of a utility to make Windows 7 Media Center .WTV files playable on Vista computers, the lack of a simple option to go back to the familiar menu system in Office 2007 without a third party add-on, and much more. But I try to keep my criticism constructive – and it’s paid off, I guess, because the company has, more than once, come back in the next version of a piece of software and made the changes that I (and others) suggested.

Back to personal brand loyalty: the first time I saw an iPhone, I thought it looked amazing – although, when I tried it out and found out more about it, I discovered it was lacking many features that were deal breakers for me. But even if the next generation sports a micro SD slot and has a removable battery and runs on the Verizon network and has all the other things I want in a phone, I won’t use one as my everyday phone (I’ll test anything). Because I’m an MVP; I specialize in Microsoft technologies – and that means I need to use those technologies on a daily basis if I’m going to provide support and help to others who use them.

I will even admit that I was mightily tempted by the Droid, and am even more so by the HTC Desire, both of which run Android 2.x. They’re very nice phones, and I love the GPS functionality. But I have stuck with Windows Mobile and I love my Omnia II. When the new Windows Phone 7 devices come out, I’ll be first in line to get one.

Am I biased? Sure – we all are. Anybody who says otherwise is either consciously lying or deceiving him/herself. Our opinions are formed by both our knowledge and our experiences. Microsoft has been good to me and for me in many ways. It was their products that really drew me into personal computing in the first place, and although it usually takes them three tries to get something right, when they do, they usually get it really right. I built a livelihood as a writer that was based on using Microsoft products and then I started writing about those products and became more successful than I had ever dreamed I’d ever be. I was a Microsoft advocate long before the company ever knew I existed or made me an MVP. Over the last six years as an MVP, I’ve worked closely with Microsoft employees and many of them are my friends. And now we are truly part of the Microsoft family, since Tom became a full time employee in December.

Maybe loyalty means more to me than it does to some people. It was always a big deal in my family. You stood up for those you believed in and you didn’t abandon them or stop believing in them when they made a mistake. You also didn’t pretend they could do no wrong; in fact, you did all you could to bring their mistakes to their attention and help them correct those mistakes. My dad worked for the city of Dallas for 32 years. There were times when he disagreed with management’s decisions, and he wasn’t shy about saying so, but he stuck with the job because, ultimately, he loved it. My dad also drove Fords. He had tried other automobile brands and found Fords to be more reliable and better suited to his needs. So he didn’t switch brands just because a pretty Chevy came along. Am I a lot like my dad? I hope so – that would be the highest compliment anyone could pay me.

I realize, in the current economy, some folks have trouble finding work. If you need to write about or otherwise endorse iProducts and Linux to pay the bills, I understand that. If you find that you like those products better than Microsoft’s, hey, I understand that, too. Different people have different preferences and I’m glad we all have choices. But if you’re going to be a public advocate for the competition, then maybe – just maybe – you shouldn’t be an MVP. To me, it seems pretty close to a conflict of interest for folks to get on the “inside,” attend events where they get access to NDA information, and then go out and endorse the competing products.

I expect an outcry. I expect to be called a Microsoft “shill” by those who didn’t understand a word I said above. I’ve been called that before; I’ve also been called a “Microsoft basher” on numerous occasions. As with the Democrats and Republicans, I figure if I can manage to make both sides mad, I must be doing something right.

So … are there any other MVPs out there who agree with me?  Or are you all full of righteous outrage at me for daring to suggest that you give up your iStuff if you’re going to call yourself a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional? I have on my flame-retardant suit, but I would really prefer reasoned arguments. Write to me at deb@shinder.net .

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

If your company’s users are using the Firefox web browser, be aware of a fake Firefox update that shows up when a web search is done for the latest updates. It is well done, closely resembling the real thing, but contains some misspelled words the wrong version number (it offers version 3.5 but the most recent FF update is 3.6). If a user mistakenly tries to apply the “update,” a toolbar ad will be installed that launches pop-ups.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=3212016

Okay, I’ve been agonizing for a couple of months over what new laptop to get. My Sony TX has served me well, but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. It maxed out at one and half GB of RAM (which was a lot back when I bought it) and more annoying, it only has built-in 802.11b/g. Our wireless networks are 802.11n now, and I really like that extra speed, so I got a PCMCIA (PC card) n adapter but it sticks way out on the side, looks silly and ruins the compactness of the little laptop. So I decided for the new year, I’d get myself a new one. The problem: which one?
My faithful little Sony TX, which I bought with Vista installed a few days after its release and on which I installed Windows 7 last year

The TX beside its predecessor, my Sony T that I bought about five years ago, and which still runs XP fine today, although it won’t handle Aero

NETBOOK OR NOTEBOOK?

First question I had to answer: did I want a netbook or a full fledged notebook? Price wasn’t a big concern, but size/weight was. I have been very happy with the Sony, which weighs 2.7 lbs. and has an 11 inch screen. My particular use for a laptop is usually at conferences, where I’m carrying it around from session to session all day, so I want as little weight and bulk as possible. Another top consideration is battery life. It needs to last all day at those conferences, without recharging. I could get close to 7 hours with the Sony TX, with a little tweaking of the power settings.

Now, when it comes to my desktop system, I want the fastest computer possible. I don’t care if it’s three feet tall and weighs half a ton. My old XPS certainly seemed that size, but that was fine. The new desktop is a little more compact, but it’s a screaming Nehalem with 12 GB of RAM. They have Nehalem laptops on the market now, but the ones I checked out got about 2 hours of battery time on a good day. They’re big guys, too. Nope, that won’t work. And if I need something powerful on the road, I have a 17 inch Dell that I can set up in the hotel room. The Sony replacement is primarily for taking notes, checking email, surfing the web, writing and reading Word docs, maybe viewing some photos or watching a recorded TV program on the plane.

Sounds like a netbook, doesn’t it? And with a good Atom processor, you can get some incredible battery run times. But I sort of kind of wanted a tablet. After all, Apple has everyone in a frenzy about tablets now.

TABLET OR NOT?

I had one of the early tablets, back in 2002 or 2003. I like the concept – especially for drawing diagrams or taking handwritten notes in an environment where you want to keep the computer low profile. In some meetings, it’s just too disruptive to sit there clacking at the keyboard, but a tablet is no more intrusive than a pen and legal pad.

That first tablet of mine was expensive (all tablets were expensive back then), around $1800. It was also heavy by today’s standards, around 6 lbs. But they’ve come down in price and weight since then. I knew I didn’t want a slate; as I said in my blog post where I shared my first impressions of the iPad, I want and need the option to touch type on a physical keyboard. If I were to get a tablet, it would have to be a convertible.

I looked at several of the new tablets. The HP and Dell models were nice but too big and heavy. The only currently available one that impressed me was the Touch Note, made by Gigabyte. The size is right – 10.1 inches. The specs are that of a netbook, but a higher end one: 1.66 GHz N280, 2 GB of RAM, 1366x768 touch screen, 250 GB hard drive. It runs Windows 7 Home Premium (not Starter) and has a 6 cell battery that will last around 6 hours on a charge. At $749, it costs far more than many of the netbooks on the market but far less than the Sony TX, for which I paid $2200.

Another “would’ve been a contender” was the Lenovo Ideapad s-130t. I saw the pictures of it from CES, and it looked pretty nice. Unfortunately, it’s not available to buy yet. I also really liked the looks of the Acer 1420p. This was the tablet that Microsoft gave away to all the attendees at the 2009 PDC. I loved that it would support up to 8 GB of RAM and liked the 8 hour battery life, but to do all that, it had to be a bit heavier than I wanted – almost 4 lbs. Still, I would have strongly considered it except that like the Lenovo, it’s not available yet. I also have no idea what it’s going to cost.

I could’ve just decided to wait and see what the market brings – but the market is always going to bring something better eventually so if you get stuck in that “wait ‘til something better and cheaper comes along” mentality, you’ll never buy. And I really was wanting to get a new device before the next conference I’m scheduled to attend: the MVP Summit in February. That limited my choices to those that are on sale now.

SMITTEN BY ANOTHER PRETTY FACE

As I looked at all of my options, I kept feeling myself drawn back to what seemed like the most impractical choice of all: the Sony X. It’s essentially a really expensive netbook – but oh, was it ever pretty. When it comes to portable computers, I am a sucker for slim. At one point, I even considered buying a Macbook Air and wiping out OS X and installing Windows 7 on it. That’s how smitten I am by a razor-thin computer. But the Air starts at $1499 and it only has one USB port and no flash memory card slot. And despite it’s thinness, it weighs 3 lbs., which is more than the TX. Oh, and if you want the model that has a 128 GB solid state drive, you pay $1800 (the $1500 model has a 120 GB SATA drive).

The Sony X is even thinner than the Air (1/2 inch, the same as the new Apple iPad) and it weighs an incredible 1.6 lbs. with the standard battery. It’s made of carbon fiber, so that even though it looks fragile, it feels strong. It has two USB ports, an SD card slot and a memory stick slot, a standard VGA out port (you have to buy an adapter to connect the Air to a VGA monitor) and an Ethernet jack (the Air apparently relies on wireless; there is no mention of an Ethernet adapter on its tech specs web site). And you get the same 2 GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD, GPS and built-in Verizon 3G card, all for hundreds of dollars less. Even better, I wouldn’t be giving my money to Apple.

  
The Sony X: a laptop can never be too rich or too thin

Granted, the Air has a Core 2 Duo processor while the X has an Atom. But it’s a 2 GHz Atom, and when I tried the little machine out at the Sony Store, it was surprisingly responsive. And the downside of that Core 2 processor is that the Air, according to PC World, gets only about 2 and a half hours of battery life. That was a deal breaker, right there.

The Sony X, on the other hand, comes with an extended battery that adds only a few ounces to its weight, bringing it up to 2.2 lbs. – still substantially lighter than Air and still lighter than my TX – and provides an amazing 12 hours of battery life. Wow. That energizer bunny just keeps on going. And then there is that gorgeous Sony display.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

The practical side of me said to get the Touch Note. It cost hundreds less than the Sony and it’s a tablet. It has all the touch screen coolness. It isn’t as thin and light, but it’s certainly no heavyweight. It got outstanding reviews on Amazon. I was almost ready to order it. It made sense to save money and compromise a little on portability.

But then I would think about the X, about how it felt in my hand. It was like holding a sheet of paper. It was so thin that turned sideways, it was barely there. It was so light that I felt as if I were carrying nothing at all. And it was so pretty. Prettier than the Air, in my opinion. Another plus was that I could try it out at the Sony Store, whereas the Touch Note wasn’t available locally, as far as I could find. I went to the Sony Store to try it out one more time. There was no denying it. I was in love.

I had waited too long to get the blingy gold model (they’re all sold out, both at my local Sony Store and on the Sony web site), but the black one, with its carbon fiber finish and classy gold logo, has the look of a Stealth fighter. And if you face it edge-on, it almost disappears like a Stealth. It might not be practical, but I wanted it. Badly.

And I got it. Someday, I want a tablet – but I’ll wait until they make a tablet that I can really love. A tablet that’s as light and thin as I want it to be. A tablet that will let me work all day and into the evening on a single battery charge.  Maybe two years from now, when the Sony starts to get old, such a creature will exist. Maybe Sony will even make one themselves. Meanwhile, I’m pretty happy with what I got.

 
My little X, customized, upgraded, loaded up and ready to rock and roll

THE BOTTOM LINE

I’ve been using Sony laptops for a long time now. They always cost more, but the quality has been superb. I went laptop shopping with my cousin’s daughter not long ago, and she was agonizing over whether to buy the one that seemed like the best deal on paper, or the one that captured her eye in the beginning and kept her coming back to it. In the end, she went with her heart instead of her head – and she says she’s glad she did. I’m glad I did, too.

 
Note the credit card and camera lens cap sitting beside it, to give you an idea of how small it is. Also notice how tiny the power brick is – yes, that’s it at the top of the second photo.

In the next week or so, I’ll do a full review of it here. I’ve already upgraded the Windows 7 Home Premium OS that came with it to Ultimate, gotten rid of all the “crapware” (trial versions of Office 2007 and Quickbooks, Microsoft Works, Norton, etc.), customized my desktop and installed Office 2010. It’s running like a champ, and it’s the sexiest laptop on my block, by far.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

I’ll give Apple credit for one thing: they do know how to market a product. The hype has been swirling for months around their new tablet, and they unveiled it today in San Francisco amidst much hoopla. It was almost impossible to watch the event live on the web due to bandwidth issues; I had to switch around from site to site. I wasn’t able to connect at all to Apple’s own live broadcast on their site.

So it’s finally here and there was at least one surprise: it’s called the iPad instead of the iSlate. Well, that makes sense – sounds more like iPod, and as far as I can tell, that’s pretty much what it is, an iPod Touch on steroids. It doesn’t run OS X; instead it runs the iPhone OS, which has plenty of “apps” (many of which are completely useless) but isn’t exactly a powerful full featured operating system.

I’m sure the faithful members of the Apple Fan Club will all run out and buy one, but as for the rest of us … maybe not so much. You all know that I’m not much of an Apple fan myself, although I do have a Mac Mini that lives over in the corner of my office, which I use when testing hybrid network configurations and doing OS comparisons. But in order to put my own personal feelings about the company itself aside, I looked at the iPad and asked myself: If this were made by Microsoft and ran some flavor of Windows Mobile 7 but had all the same features (or lack thereof), would I be likely to buy one?  And the answer is still “no.”  I’m not planning to purchase its (so far) most high profile competitor, HP’s Slate, either.

There are quite a few problems, some of which apply to the whole slate-style tablet market in general and some that only apply to the iPad in particular. I had done a “quick and dirty” run-down of them here, but I’m removing that list and am going to do a more detailed and better structured writeup of it for TechRepublic, so look for my article, Ten Reasons I’ll be Passing on the iPad, at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1324&tag=content;leftCol 

Here’s the bottom line: I’m supposed to spend a minimum of $500 for a device that won’t fit in my pocket and won’t take the place of my laptop/netbook, with no way to expand the storage capacity, and I have to buy another data plan from AT&T in addition to my cell phone’s plan. That’s why I call it the iDon’tThinkSo. If you buy one, let me know how you like it.

Meanwhile, I’d rather spend my money on something like the Gigabyte Touch Note, which also has a touch screen, and has a real keyboard, runs a real OS, supports both 802.11b/g/n wireless and wired Ethernet, has a 250 GB hard drive but also lets you expand that with USB ports and a  4-in-1 memory card reader. Oh, and you can get it with built-in 3G, too (actually 3.5G HSDPA) – not to mention a removable, user-replaceable battery. And you can multi-task to your heart’s delight. And all this costs less than the 32 GB 3G version of the iPad. The Touch Note is just one alternative; we can expect to see a large number of new tablets coming out in the next few months. I suspect most of them will have more to offer at a lower price than the iPad.

UPDATE: At first glance, the iPad doesn’t have USB ports or a flash memory slot. Now I’ve been told that there will be a way to use USB and SD with the iPad – you just have to buy a bunch of extra dongles. Leave it to Apple to find a way to up their revenues even more by charging extra for all the things that come built into every cheap netbook. It reminds me of how annoyed I was when I discovered that I’d have to buy an adapter to connect my Mac mini to a standard VGA monitor. The Apple brand adapter was $30 – although I did find a third party version for $7. And then, after shelling out more money, you have to carry all these little gadgets around with you if you want to have a truly usable (well, at least slightly more usable) device when you’re on the go. iDon’tThinkSo.

 
deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

I’m all for helping the disabled, but has the ADA gotten completely out of hand?  According to this article, The Justice Department has pressured universities to stop testing ebook readers until they’re fully functional for blind students: Campuses ordered to stop using Kindle DX until functional for the blind.

I’m sorry, but this makes no sense whatsoever.  Ebooks obviously shouldn’t be the only format in which reading material is available, but they shouldn’t be banned because a small minority of students are unable to use them. That’s like saying that the universities cannot have stairs, because they aren’t functional for those in wheelchairs – instead of saying they need to have ramps/elevators in addition to stairs. Should they yank out all the phones because those who have hearing impairments can’t use them?

Sure, it might be easy for the ebook vendors to add a hardware button to activate text-to-voice, and they should certainly offer readers with that feature. But if it adds to the cost, should everyone be forced to pay extra for something many won’t use?  That’s like mandating that every two-story house must have an elevator.

There has to be some limit to the growing interference of government in all our lives, even when it’s for a good cause.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

If you sent me a Facebook friend request and I never confirmed it, that doesn’t mean I don’t like you. I have at least a dozen requests still sitting there, waiting for a decision. I haven’t sent them away into “Ignore” land, but I also haven’t convinced myself to confirm them. Here’s why:

Whomever you are, I’m flattered that you want to be my friend. However, unlike some social networkers, I’m not a “friend collector.” I don’t see it as a competition where the highest number wins. In general, I like people – especially those who like me. But in order to call you a “friend,” and allow you into my little cyber-circle where you can read about my daily activities and off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts and opinions, I need to know you, at least a little bit.

Unfortunately, I get quite a few friend requests from people I don’t know at all. Maybe you know me; maybe you’ve read my books or my articles or my blogs or my newsletters and you know what brand of computer I prefer and what type of cell phone I carry and you’ve read things I’ve written about my husband and my kids and my pets and that’s why you want to be my friend. But if I’ve never heard from you before (or even if I have, if it was a one-time email or it happened years ago), I don’t know that. I don’t know you and I don’t know why you want to be my friend – unless you tell me.

When I get a friend request that comes with a message saying “I’ve been reading your newsletters every week for the last five years” or “I loved your Scene of the Cybercrime book” or “I heard you speak at BlackHat back in 2002,” or something similar, that at least gives me a tiny glimpse into who’s asking to join my Facebook family. Even better are the ones that say “I used your study guides to prepare for my MCSE exams” or “I’m a former police officer like you,” or something else that tells me more about who you are.

When I get a friend request out of the blue from someone whose name I don’t recognize, I first click over to that person’s Facebook page to see what I can find out. If I see that you and I have a lot in common – you like the same TV shows and movies and books that I love, you admire the same public figures, you have many of the same hobbies and interests, you’re in the same business – I’m more likely to click that “Confirm” button. If we have several mutual friends in common, especially if they’re people I’m close to and whose judgment I know and respect, I’ll probably confirm you as a friend just because of that.

On the other hand, If your info page indicates that you have a strong political agenda and it’s the polar opposite of my political viewpoint, I’ll be a bit wary about adding you to my friends list, since I’ve had to “hide” a few folks like that in the past due to their constant postings of political diatribes against the principles that I believe in. Note that I’m not talking about a mere listing that you belong to a particular political party – I’m talking about those people who are obviously obsessed, whose politics permeate every category in their personal information sheets and who come across as extremists who won’t be amenable to reasoned, friendly debate from anyone who disagrees with them. I figure I’ll save both of us some grief if I just click the “Ignore” button on those requests.

If you give me no clue about why you’re friending me and your info page indicates you’re a single male who’s looking for women, I probably won’t be clicking your button. I’m happily married and not interested in that type of socializing.

If you’re one of those folks who hides all his/her personal information from those who aren’t already friends, I totally understand why you do it, but without any information about you, I probably won’t confirm your friend request. Sometimes I might try doing a web search on your name (especially if it sounds vaguely familiar but I just can’t place it) to see if I can find out that way who you are. See, I’m looking for reasons to welcome you into my circle of friends – not for reasons to exclude you. But if I find nothing, I’m just not comfortable “flying blind” and bringing in a complete stranger.

I admit it: if I don’t have anything else to go on, I may base my gut feelings on some pretty arbitrary things, such as what part of the country (or what country) you live in. I’ve found people from some areas to be generally friendlier than others, or at least to have more in common with me. If you grew up in Texas, we have a common cultural heritage and I’ll be more inclined to take a chance on you – but I also have an instant soft spot for Australians and those from a couple of other countries. Of course, there are great people in every state and every nation, and I have friends all over the globe, so that becomes a consideration only when you give me absolutely no other information on which to make a decision.

The bottom line: if you really want to be my friend, unless you’re a relative or “real world” friend or someone I correspond with on a regular basis or someone who’s so famous I’m sure to know who you are, send me a little note and tell me about yourself and why you picked me to be your friend. Or at least make it easy for me to find out about you on your Facebook page or personal web site. Because if you’re like 95% of the people I “meet” online – wonderful, friendly, positive, intelligent folks – I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to be your friend.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

The rumor mill is abuzz with “news” of Apple’s tablet computer, which may or may not be called the iSlate and might or might not debut in late January. Proving once again that even those of us who don’t particularly like their products have to concede that they are masters of marketing, the company has scheduled an “event” for January 26 in San Francisco, and there is much speculation that at least one purpose is the debut of the new tablet.

I hope it’s true. Not because I want an iSlate – I imagine I would find it just as annoying as I find the Mac and iPhone – but because I’m hoping that if Apple is able to make the form factor into a best seller, other companies will play follow the leader and bring us more and better (and lower cost) tablet PCs running Windows, just as the iPhone spurred innovation on the parts of other mobile phone makers.

For years, I’ve longed for a small, light, reasonably powerful tablet that didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Heck, I’d be willing to pay a hand and foot to get the right configuration. My dream tablet is a convertible, about the same size and weight as my little Sony TX laptop but with the hinged screen. It would be able to max out at a minimum of 4 GB of RAM and have a decent processor (not an Atom). I don’t care about a built in optical drive but I do want an SD slot and at least two USB ports.

Given its rumored name and all the mockups I’ve seen, the Apple tablet won’t have a physical keyboard. That will keep it thin, but it will take away much of the functionality for me. I want to be able to use the device to take notes in meetings and I type far faster than I handwrite. Swype (the amazing text entry technology that’s built into my Omnia II phone) might help, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do 90 wpm with it so I want a real keyboard. But I want it thin – and the Macbook Air and the Sony X series have proven that’s doable.

Some say the Apple tablet will have a 10 inch screen; others say 7 inches. It will be interesting to see how that shakes out. I want something that’s easy to carry, but the screen needs to be large enough to make it worthwhile to use it instead of your smart phone. I’m curious to see if Apple will, in this tablet, correct the major flaws in the iPhone – the lack of removable battery and the lack of a flash memory slot. Those were big deal breakers for me when I briefly considered an iPhone, and the ability to add extra storage, especially, is even more important with a tablet computer. Some will say you can just store all your data in the cloud, and someday that might be a viable option, but I don’t believe we’re there yet.

Will the iSlate be more than just an overgrown, glorified iPod or will it be a crossover device that can be truly useful for business as well as an entertainment gadget? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Whatever is revealed in January, I have no doubt there are vendors already plotting and planning on how to improve on the concept, and that’s where my interest really lies.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

I’ve had my Omnia II for a few weeks now, and have had a chance to get thoroughly familiar with its many features. If it’s possible to be in love with an electronic device, I am smitten. Granted, I may be more easily impressed than the youngsters who grew up with amazing technologies and take them for granted. But I can also be pretty picky, and the Omnia II does almost everything I could ever want a phone to do, and more.

I say “almost” because, right off the bat, the first thing on my Omnia III wish list is a full GPS application like the one on the Droid. I have Google Maps and Bing maps, but they don’t give you full fledged navigation, and Google Maps has some difficulty finding the satellites if you’re indoors, a problem I didn’t notice when I played with the Droid. Other than that, I’m pleased as punch, and there are navigation apps that you can buy and install, so I’ll probably go that route (no pun intended).

Now for some of the things that I do like. First and foremost: Swype. It took me about 3 days to completely get used to it. Now I am “typing” (swyping) text in faster than I would ever have imagined being able to do on a phone, even with a physical keyboard, much less a virtual one. I continue to be amazed by its accuracy. At first, I thought I had to go slowly and be precise but I soon learned that you can veer all over the keyboard and as long as you’re reasonably close to hitting the right keys, this software will know what you’re trying to say. It makes writing a long email or blog post on the phone feasible and even fun. It’s inevitable that this feature will come to other phones soon – it’s so good that I think the folks who created it deserve to get very rich – but at least I can say I had it first.

Voice recognition was another happy surprise. I tried it on my i730 and i760 and never had very good results. Maybe it was my Texas accent, but those phones just never seemed to “get” what I was saying. The Nuance voice rec on the Omnia II didn’t even require any training. It’s easy to use and makes it much easier to make a call to one of my frequently called numbers. Voice commands include not only calling, but also sending email messages or text messages, opening applications, etc.

There were a few things that threw me at first because they work differently from the original Omnia. I was pulling my hair out, trying to figure out how to set the camera to default to still shots instead of movies. Then I RTFMed, and discovered the reason I was opening it in video mode all the time. With the first Omnia, you had to hold down the camera button to open the camera; with this one, a mere press on the button opens it – and holding the button down opens the video recorder. In addition, instead of using the large middle key on the front of the device to take a photo, you use the camera key itself. Makes more sense, but it took me a few minutes to figure out what I was doing wrong at first.

The camera takes decent pictures for a phone cam. It’s never going to replace my Nikon D300, but then it’s not intended for that purpose. Here’s a picture of our cat, looking in the mirror:

It’s good to have a camera with you on those occasions when you otherwise wouldn’t. I had to do some playing with the settings to get the best photo quality, and it does have quite a few configurable settings. I like the macro setting, and there are also “scene” settings for special exposure situations. Here’s an example of a photo taken with the macro setting (the business card):

Okay, here’s one more small complaint: sending a photo via email is more difficult than it should be. You can select a picture in the “My Pictures” application and, from the menu, choose to send it via Messaging or Bluetooth. However, selecting Messaging just brings up an MMS message; there’s no option to send via email. Why? 

I did figure out how to do it – you have to go back into the camera app, find the photo and send it from there. But I don’t understand why you can’t send it from the Pictures app.

I rarely ever use the stylus because I have semi-long fingernails (which also make it much easier to use Swype), but it’s nice to have one when you need it. The original Omnia came with a stylus but you couldn’t store it in the phone. They corrected that with the II, so now you always have it handy if, for example, you want to reboot the phone. You might be surprised to discover that doing so requires you to take the back cover off the phone. At first I was a little annoyed by that, but the cover pops on and off so easily that it’s really not a big deal. There’s a pinhole under the cover where you insert the stylus tip to reboot.

It would also be nice if you didn’t have to pop the cover to remove or insert a micro SD card; however, I do understand that design decision. I remember with the i760, I once popped the card out when I didn’t intend to and could have easily lost it if I hadn’t noticed. Unlike with the original Omnia, you don’t have to take out the battery to remove or insert the card.

Some users have complained that the Omnia II isn’t “simple” enough. I guess I don’t mind that. I like having lots of options, and different ways to get to the same place. I have my three home screens set up so that the main one displays my “Today” widget (which has the date, time and my appointments), the Favorites (photos of my most frequently called people that I can touch to call, text or send a quick email, my Weather gadget to display the temperature and weather conditions, the Bing widget where I can type in a search term without having to go through the menu to open the browser, and a link to the Facebook app for quick access to my FB page.

The second page has my nine favorite applications, including the mobile Office apps, calculator, voice recorder, quick memo and file manager. The third page contains my world clock.

I’ve also rearranged the main menu pages to put the apps I use more often on the first two pages, and removed the Verizon apps that cost extra (such as VZ Navigator, VCast and Verizon’s Mobile IM and Mobile Email services. The Cube, although it has a “cool” factor, is a pretty inefficient way to navigate so I don’t use it at all. I wish there were a way to change the right softkey on the home screen to something else.

All in all, I’m even happier with the Omnia II now that I’ve had the opportunity to get to know it better.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Just last week, I wrote an article for TechRepublic about some of the latest email scams that have been going around this holiday season. You can check it out at

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1227&tag=content;leftCol

Then just today, Tom got one I hadn’t seen before, that spans several categories. It uses the name of a federal government agency – the FBI, and specifically Director Robert S. Mueller III; it claims that you’ve won a “lottery, inheritance, government contract award,” and it even includes the Nigerian angle. Why do they do that? Maybe somebody, somewhere, would have believed this message if they’d stuck to the story about the $800,000 windfall being withheld by banks in the U.K.  But is there anyone who doesn’t immediately dismiss it as a scam as soon as they see the word “Nigeria?”

Here’s the full text of the message:

Do you see a few clues that this might not be completely legit (aside from the fact that the FBI would not be involved in tracking down foreign lottery winners or heirs, that is)?  Isn’t it interesting that this message was sent to “undisclosed recipients?” I guess there are lots of folks in this situation. It’s awfully nice of Director Mueller’s secretary to handle them all personally.

How about that phone number for the purported FBI contact: Why would it be in Spain? Isn’t the FBI a domestic agency? And don’t you love that email domain: fbi-agents.com (and of course, being such an informal agency, they would use their first names as their email account user names. Or is it his first name? Later on, the message calls him “Mr. Ferdinand”).  I particularly love that last line: “We advise that you stop further communication with imposters and forward any correspondence to the FBI.”  Sounds like an excellent idea – before you send “Agent” Ferdinand the $250.

Happy holidays and keep those cards and (scam) letters coming!

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Staying with Verizon Wireless was an easy decision. I’ve heard too many complaints from friends with AT&T, Sprint or T-Mobile about the 3G coverage, and been on the other end of their dropped or garbled calls. I’ve been with Verizon since leaving Cingular (AT&T) in 2002 and have never been in a place where I couldn’t get a good signal (granted, I don’t trek off into the wilderness much, but I do travel to other cities/states on occasion).

I’ve also been with Samsung for many years. My first real smart phone was the i730, then I upgraded to the i760 and then to the original Omnia. Each one was better than the last – but a lot has happened in the smart phone market since I got that Omnia. The iPhone had a lot to do with that, and even though I don’t like Apple (My dislike is more for the company’s attitude than for its actual products), I have to credit them with starting something good that has flowed over to other phone vendors.

 
My first three smart phones (L to R): Samsung i730, i760 and Omnia

I enjoyed my Omnia and I had been looking forward to the Omnia II for a while, but this time there was a lot of competition out there. Verizon and Motorola dropped the Droid on us over a month ago, amidst a super hyped up ad campaign (those commercials were excellent, BTW), and it was tempting – especially since, at that time, Verizon still had not committed to a release date for the Omnia II or even confirmed that it would be running Windows Mobile 6.5 instead of 6.1. I hadn’t been very impressed by the Android phones I’d seen previously, but Android 2.0 looked pretty sweet. I journeyed down to the Verizon Store to try it out for myself and I have to admit that I came close. The GPS with Google Navigation was the feature that almost won me over. I liked the idea of a slide-out physical keyboard, too.

On the other hand, I guess looks do matter. I just didn’t like the squared-off form factor and the phone didn’t fit in my hand as comfortably as my Omnia. Performance seemed pretty good but the interface was nothing special. And I have a certain loyalty to WinMo, after all these years. I decided to wait. The Droid would still be there later if I didn’t like the Omnia II.

In the meantime, I started hearing about the HTC HD2. Its screen is even bigger than that of the OII and the SenseUI looks great. And it’s a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, so no loyalty conflicts there. The problem: it’s not slated to come to the U.S. until sometime in 2010, and it’s not been announced yet which carrier will get it. Did I want to wait a few more months, and then find out it was only available on T-Mobile (which has great prices and nice phones but absolutely lousy coverage/service in my home area)?

Nice as the HD2 looks, I decided to take the plunge now and go for the Omnia II. After all, it’s not like I would be spending $600 for the phone (as I did for my i730). The Omnia II is priced at $299 with a $100 rebate and the “new every two” program gives you another $100 off, for a final price of just over a hundred bucks with tax. I pay twice that for the monthly cell phone bill.

The Omnia II was released last Wednesday and on Saturday, I was back at the Verizon Store. I played with it, compared it to the Droid, and found that I really liked it. The touch response was great – orders of magnitude better than the first Omnia’s – and the new TouchWiz UI made it an experience similar to, but IMO better than, that of the iPhone. I was ready to buy.

Unfortunately, they had none in stock. I had them call three other stores in neighboring cities, with the same result. I guess I should have gotten there on release day; either these were selling like hotcakes or they didn’t get many in inventory. I went ahead and ordered the phone online (there at the Verizon Store) and saved $20 by doing so, but in return I had to deal with my thwarted desire for instant gratification. I was assured that the phone would be delivered to my doorstep this Tuesday.

Sure enough, Fex Ex showed up at the house bright and early yesterday, with a little black box for me.

 
The Omnia II comes in a nice little black box

What else do you get with it?  There’s a USB/miniUSB cable that plugs into a wall charger (you can also unplug it from the charger and use it to connect to your computer), an in-line mic adapter for 3.5 mm headset, and three CDs: The user manual, a “companion CD” that includes the Getting Started Guide and the software for ActiveSync 4.5 and Windows Mobile Device Center, and the software for V Cast and VZAccess, as well as a little “Tips, Hints and Shortcuts” booklet.

You get a few accessories with the Omnia II

Other accessories, such as car charger and vehicle mount, are available from Verizon, from Samsung or from third party vendors.

It took a while to charge up the first time, over an hour – but I’ve been using it extensively yesterday and today and still have over 60% battery left. You can greatly expand the available storage (there’s 8 GB built in) by adding a micro SD card. I got a 16 GB card from Amazon for under $50 and popped it in. Like with the original Omnia, you have to take the back cover off to insert the micro SD card. Unlike with its predecessor, you don’t have to take the battery out to put in the micro card.

Before I put the card in, I copied some of my favorite songs onto it. Then when I put in the card and powered up, Media Player informed me that new media files were detected and asked if I wanted to update the library. Press a button, wait a minute or so, and all my new songs were available. One thing I really like is that the new Omnia has a standard 3.5 mm headset jack so I don’t have to keep up with an adapter to use my Shure earphones. The sound through them is great. It’s not bad using the phone’s speakers, either; this Omnia has stereo speakers instead of just the one.

The Omnia II is a little bigger than the original Omnia – that was necessitated by the 3.7 inch screen. It doesn’t really feel bigger in my hand or in my pocket, though. It’s still sleek and comfortable to work with.

The Omnia II, on the left, is slightly bigger overall than the original Omnia, and the screen is substantially bigger

The most outstanding feature on the Omnia II is that screen – the gorgeous AMOLED display. Photos don’t do it justice. Watching a video on it is a fantastic experience. As you can see, I’ve already customized my home screen:

I love the Omnia II’s bright, vivid AMOLED display

Another big advantage that the Omnia II has over the Omnia is its customization. For example, I liked the “widgets” bar on the left side of the screen, which introduced with the original Omnia, but I didn’t like being stuck with the widgets that came with it. With the Omnia II, you can get rid of widgets you don’t want and you can download more widgets – many of them free – from the Widget Store. My favorite widget (which has a permanent place on my main home page) are the Favorites widget that let you put the pictures of those people you most frequently contact on your home screen, where you can simply tap the photo to bring up links to call or send mail or a text message.

I also like the “Smart Memo” widget. If I want to make a note of something, I can just tap it and open a new memo where I can handwrite or type my note.  Microsoft OneNote (Mobile version) is also installed along with Mobile Word, Excel and PowerPoint, if you prefer to use it for notes. As I happily downloaded free widgets (calculator, unit converter, and so forth) and arranged them on my home screens (with the Omnia II, you have three home screens you can scroll between), for the first time I began to understand the appeal of the iPhone and its App Store.

Of course, the Omnia II is first and foremost a phone, and that’s something that iPhone users say is not one of their device’s strong points. So I was eager to make a call and see if the voice quality was as good as with my original Omnia (which was always excellent). I could tell no difference with the Omnia II. The phone dialer keypad is bigger and more responsive, making it easier to dial numbers, and there’s a Favorites link on the dialer screen, too.

Setting up my Exchange account took only a few minutes and email works great. It’s easier to read due to the bigger screen and bigger default font (you can change the font size if you think it’s too big). Since email is one of the primary uses for my phone (more so than making voice calls), I was happy to see that the interface is great and easy to use.

Web browsing also works well with both Opera and IE Mobile. I’m one of the few people in the world who prefers IE over Opera, and I do wish I could figure out how to set IE to be the default browser. But both are quite usable, although that is one area where I’ll admit the iPhone excels.

I haven’t had time to play with all of the applications that came with the phone – there are six pages of them – or install many of my own. I’ve worked some with Swype and found it surprisingly accurate, but I need to practice a little with it. I’m eager to try out speech recognition and download Google Maps to see how it works with the GPS; the Verizon Store rep told me he was “95% sure” that the GPS is unlocked and the specs say it has both assisted and standalone GPS so it should be.  I’ll be checking out those features and more in the upcoming days, and I’ll blog about them in Part 2 of this post.

Meanwhile, first impression is a good one. I think I’m going to enjoy this phone a lot.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

I was notified back in October that, as a Windows 7 Launch Party host, I had been automatically entered into a contest and had won a free Dell laptop. I was wary of the initial notification since I get scam email all the time, but after checking with my MVP lead and discovering that it was legit, I was curious to see what I’d won. Well, it was finally delivered yesterday and I’ve been playing with it this morning.

It’s an Inspiron 1750 – a honkin’ big thing (much too big to sit on my lap) with a 17 inch monitor, but noticeably lighter than our 17 inch HP “tank.” I like the finish: a glossy piano black cover that’s very classy looking and a nice brushed gray with black keyboard that includes a number pad (as most of the 17 and 18 inchers do, but I’m used to small ultracompacts that don’t).

It has a 2.10 GHz T4300 dual core processor and 4 GB of RAM and came with 64 bit Windows Home Premium installed. It also came with the ugliest Dell wallpaper I’ve ever seen and a slew of software “extras” (i.e., crapware) that I didn’t want. The first thing I did after the setup was change that wallpaper; the second thing was to remove the McAfee Security Suite that started driving me nuts right from the beginning. Thank goodness there are better behaved AV solutions like VIPRE.

I haven’t had a chance to run the battery down yet; according to Windows, it has 4 hours and 39 minutes remaining with a 95% charge. If that’s accurate, that’s pretty good battery life for a laptop its size.

It took way too long to get booted up at first, but that’s not because of Windows or the hardware; it’s all those “extras” Dell installed. I’ve been steadily removing them. One thing that I did keep was the one year subscription to LoJack, the anti-theft service.

For now, I’ve kept the odd little Mac-like dock at the top of the screen, too. It actually sort of serves the purpose of a separate quick launch bar, something that you can’t do in Windows 7 (you can add the QL bar to the taskbar, but – as far as I’ve been able to tell – there’s no way to detach it and make it its own separate toolbar). You can add your own shortcuts to the dock, so I’ve customized it and I actually like it.

Once you cut through the unwanted programs, free trials and so forth, performance is pretty good. Of course, I haven’t yet installed much software of my own, but I think it’s going to be a pretty useable computer. It’s way too big for me to serve as my only laptop. But I can see taking it on trips, along with a smaller machine. I prefer my tiny Sony for carrying around at conferences, in meetings, and so forth. But I often find myself coming back to the hotel at night and having to do more complex work that requires me to research the web while working on a Word document, for instance, and a large screen and better keyboard would definitely be welcome then.

All in all, it’s a decent computer. It’s not the one I would have picked for myself, but for the price (which of course is not “nothing” since I’ll have to pay taxes on it, but will end up being about 33% of the retail price of $750, or less than $300), it’s a darn good deal. So – thank you, Microsoft and Dell.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Facebook has more than 300 million active users worldwide. That makes it a great resource for social networking – but it also makes it a very attractive target for scammers and hackers. If you're a Facebook user, be aware that a number of exploits have surfaced this past week, attempting to take advantage of the inherent trust that many users exhibit toward email they receive from the social networking service. I received two different attempts to scam me under the guise of Facebook, in my email Inbox.

One was pretty obvious to anyone who’s been around the ‘Net for a while. It shows “Facebook” as the sender but a check of the mail headers shows that the Reply To address is somewhere in Germany:

Another clue is that the message was sent to a user account that doesn’t even exist in our domain. Scammers and spammers often do this, using a shotgun approach by sending mail to hundreds or thousands of names at a particular domain and hoping some of them will be legit user accounts.

The message itself contains instructions that should immediately make anyone suspicious. It claims that you need to submit a new account agreement to Facebook – by unzipping an attached file and running agreement.exe.

Now if Facebook did decide to require you to agree to new terms, they would almost certainly send you a message with a link to their web site, not an executable file to run. Only the least tech savvy users will fall for this one – but there are quite a few users among that 300 million who are not all that tech savvy. I, of course, immediately scanned the attachment with a virus scanner, and found that it contains a virus called VirTool:Win32/VBInject.gen!CN. Luckily, most anti-virus programs that are up to date will be able to detect it.

The second scam attempt was a lot more subtle and thus a lot more dangerous. You're probably used to getting email notifications when your friends comment on your status updates or send you private messages, and you may click on those emails automatically to take you to your FB page. A few days ago, I received several messages that purported to be from Facebook, saying "Caroline sent you a message" (or some other name – I actually received three of these claiming I had messages from three different names).

However, I immediately noticed that the link in these messages was not the usual multi-line URL that begins with www.facebook.com, but instead the domain was www.facebook.montadalitihad.com . Hmmm … . I typed that into a browser that was sandboxed in a virtual machine for just such purposes, and discovered that I got a page that looks like the normal Facebook log in page. Obviously the point of this phishing scam is to get you to type your Facebook username and password in so someone else can use them to hijack your account.

Another clue that something’s not quite right is that only a first name is given as the sender of the message; a real Facebook notification generally contains first and last name in the subject line (with just the first name in the body of the message). And another subtle clue is in the disclaimer at the bottom, which says “This message was intended for You.”  In a real Facebook message, it says “This message was intended for <your email address>.”

These are differences that the typical user is likely not to notice. Even if you’re pretty technically inclined, you might be in a hurry or just not fully paying attention, and click on that link. Watch out for this one if you routinely respond to email notifications from Facebook by using the embedded links. Better yet, just wait until you log onto Facebook in your browser and check your messages then, from within your page.  If you aren’t sure whether a message is legit, check your Facebook Inbox. These scam messages, of course, won’t be there.

Facebook is a great site, but as with any other Internet technology, it pays to use it carefully.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

It’s been a busy free weeks. One thing that has occupied way too much of my time: my decision to give Linux one more try. Over the years, I’ve tried installing various distros, from Red Hat to SuSE to Mandrake to Xandros and a few others I can’t remember off-hand. I tried installing on the bare metal, on older computers, on newer computers, in virtual machines. In each and every case, either the OS wouldn’t install at all or it had serious problems (such as inability to display correctly) that resulted in my saying “to heck with this” within a few days.

This time, I hung my hopes on Ubuntu 9.10.  I’d heard that it was “better” and “easier” and very Windows-like. Maybe this was the Linux that would finally work for me. Well … not. The first few attempts to install in VMware 6.5 failed completely. It went through the installation process but upon reboot, just stuck there and wouldn’t do anything. After paying $99 for VMware 7, I was able to get it to install and get to a desktop and actually click around to some applications.

I wasn’t particularly impressed. It seemed functional, but certainly not as elegant as Windows 7 (or, for that matter, OS X). But then, you get what you pay for and I didn’t pay a dime for it. So okay. I messed with it for a couple of days. Even something that’s as simple as a couple of clicks in Windows – installing the VMware tools – requires opening a terminal and using the command line to uncompress a file before you can install it. Sheesh.

This morning, I started to play with it again and discovered its Internet connectivity was gone. It had also slowed down to a crawl. No problem; I’ll reboot. That always fixes a general slowdown in Windows (although my Windows machines never just up and lose their connectivity on our gigabit wired Ethernet network). Oops, bad decision. The reboot hung up on the splash screen, and the VMware capture the mouse pointer and held it hostage. Couldn’t shut down or close the VM because when you tried to click something outside the VM, the mouse jumped back into the VM. Now I’m not blaming Ubuntu for that (other than for hanging in the first place). That’s a VMware problem. But it was frustrating. Luckily you can use keyboard shortcuts to end the VM process in Task Manager and kill it without having to do a hard reboot of the whole system.

However, this rant isn’t about the stability of the Ubuntu OS. I’m willing to accept that Linux just hates me and thus I have problems with it that others don’t have. I know people who seem to have the same relationship with Windows; everything they try to do results in error messages and mysterious freezes and hangups that don’t occur when someone else performs the same task on the same machine. What this is about is something that I noticed on one of Ubuntu’s intro screens during all this.

The sentence that jumped out at me said something like “We believe software should be free.” And I started thinking about the utter absurdity of that statement. It’s fine to believe that people should be able to give away the software they write if they want to. Of course they should. Just as an artist should be able to give away his/her painting, or a lawyer should be able to take on a case pro bono or a doctor should be able to forego billing a patient. It’s your work product. You should be able to do whatever you want with it.

But to say software “should” be free implies something entirely different. It says a programmer should not be able to profit from his work (or even recoup the costs incurred in doing it). It’s like saying food should be free – and shame on grocery stores and restaurants for ever making people pay for it. Actually, that makes more sense because food is a basic human necessity, while computer software, despite its seeming ubiquity, is still not essential to life.

The problem with working for free is that there are only two groups of people who can do it on a full time basis: those who are already independently wealthy and don’t need any more money, and those who are being supported by someone else (parents, spouses, the government). Otherwise, the “free” work gets done by amateurs who are doing it part time, just for the love of doing it. That sounds all nice and cuddly, but what it translates into is no quality control and no accountability.

If I’m injured and bleeding, I prefer to be treated by a full time doctor, not an amateur. If I’m on trial for my life, I want the best attorney money can buy, not the one who dabbles in criminal defense as a hobby, even if he/she doesn’t charge me anything for it. Free software is fine to play around but if I have to depend on it to get my work done, I’ll take commercial software any day. And I’m obviously not alone in that opinion, judging by the fact that even though it’s free, Linux is still way down there in single digits for desktop market share, and currently has less than 15% of the server market (IDC, 2009). Businesses don’t trust “free” and in fact, those varieties of *NIX that are used in business are the ones that come with paid support contracts that make them similar in cost to Windows and Apple products.

I know this will make some of my friends who are Linux fans mad, but I’m giving you the perspective of someone who is used to using Windows – which is the perspective of most computer users. Going from Windows to Linux is just not something most people would do if Linux weren’t free. For some, especially in today’s economy, price is what matters most and they’re willing to put up with the increased difficulty to save money. And that’s cool. Everything is a tradeoff and there should be alternatives. It’s when people start trying to turn it into a matter of right and wrong (“software should be free”) that I get annoyed. I could look at Apple’s model and say “software should be free to run on any hardware and not tied to the software vendor’s machines.” But I won’t, because Apple should be able to price their product the way they want. As should everybody else.

That’s what “free” is really about.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

Our Windows 7 party was yesterday, October 22nd, and we had a great time. I was up at 5:00 a.m., getting everything ready.  That entailed setting up the Windows 7 Media Center (taking it back to basics so I could demonstrate how to change and personalize things) and getting the food and goodies ready – including creating a “Happy Birth Day to Windows 7” cake.

We had snacks and drinks ready as people started to trickle in, and we nibbled and hung out by the pool for a while until all the guests arrived.

Once everybody got there and we got things rolling, I didn’t have time to take any more pictures, since I was doing the demos. We had a good mix of people who are already using 7 and friends and family members who had never seen it before. First I showed them the cool touch features on the kitchen computer, then I showed them how to organize music, photos and videos and how to watch and record TV on the main Media Center PC, including a short tutorial on how to get free HD (Clear QAM) channels even if you only have basic cable and how you can watch Internet TV even if your Windows 7 computer doesn’t have a TV tuner.

The real hit of the party, though, was the Microsoft Trivia Quiz that I made in PowerPoint. Everybody really got into figuring out the answers to Microsoft and Windows related questions, and with fifty questions, we went through four rounds and handed out prizes (both the prizes that Microsoft sent in the party pack – Windows 7 deck of cards and puzzle – and extra prizes that I got, including 4 GB USB sticks).

To those who didn’t show up: You missed out on all the fun!  And to those who were there, thanks for coming and for making our Windows 7 Launch party a big success!

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

We liked our HP IQ 775 TouchSmart kitchen computer but it was an older model and supported only single touch. Now Windows 7 is here and with it, multi-touch. Add to that the fact that we’ve been having intermittent but increasingly frequent video-related crashes recently, and it was time to replace it. When HP made us an offer we couldn’t refuse (several hundred dollars off the regular price) on a new IQ800 series model, we took the plunge.

Here’s a visual comparison of the two:

 
The old TouchSmart                                

 
And here’s what it’s been doing lately

 
This is what it looks like from the side/back

Here’s the new Touchsmart (note the sleek, thin keyboard and the thinness of the whole package:

 
The new TouchSmart

Big, beautiful and oh-so-sleek 

 
Here’s the HP MediaSmart interface

For a full review of the new TouchSmart, see the October 15 edition of Win7News, at www.win7news.net

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

I get a lot of good information from ZDNet and they have many IT journalists I respect and trust. That’s why it concerns me when they seem to be perpetuating “scaremongering” stories that are inaccurate or at least incomplete. Today I received the email shown below, one of ZDNet’s regular newsletters:

If you click on the graphic to enlarge it, you’ll see that it’s dated today (October 8) and you’ll also see a followed link titled “Windows 7 zero-day reported.” Naturally I clicked that one first, to see what this new Windows 7 vulnerability was. Well, happily, there wasn’t one. The link took me to an article that was posted a month ago, about the (by now infamous) SMB2 vulnerability. That article claimed that this was a “flaw in Windows 7” that could allow an attack which would cause a critical system error (BSOD).

Well, sort of. Later reports on this vulnerability – and there were many – revealed that although the Windows 7 Release Candidate is affected, the RTM (final code) is not. But that little detail is not in the linked article. So I can’t help but wonder how many people read this and thought that the version of Windows 7 that’s going to hit the shelves October 22 is going to come with this security flaw?

I don’t have an issue with ZDNet printing that story on September 8. No one had the full information at that time. But I do think it’s a little irresponsible to send out an Announcement on October 8 that links to that story when there are dozens, maybe hundreds of updates that tell the real story.

One more nit to pick here: The linked article notes that the vulnerability also affects Vista, but the ZDNet Announcements newsletter calls it only a “Windows 7 zero-day.” Technically correct, maybe, but completely misleading in that it makes it sound as if this problem was introduced in Windows 7 and is unique to that OS. Whomever let this one get through needs to be a little more careful. I knew when I clicked on it that this was a non-issue for users of the final Windows 7 code, but that doesn’t mean the average reader will.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

I thought I’d recycle this old piece that I wrote for Swynk around ten years ago – with a few updates and additions to bring it into the 21st century.

This month brings another traditional holiday celebration, and with it another opportunity for IT pros to ask in puzzlement: "what's a holiday?" Sure, we're vaguely aware that most of our friends and family members who chose different careers have days on which they actually don't work – a concept we find intriguing, if a little frightening.

Some of us (this does not include Norm the Neonatal Nerd in the next cubicle, who has "Born to Network" tattooed across his left hand) even have childhood memories of engaging in celebratory activities involving egg-laying rabbits, turkey and dressing dinners, and fat men with white beards wearing red suits. These activities were performed manually, without a shred of electronic data passing across a cable or circuit board.

Most of us, though, have repressed those memories and can't imagine doing something that has nothing to do with bits and bytes -- and calling it fun. However, since all those around us are going to be dressing up in strange clothing and gorging on candy all evening a few weeks from now (something we do every day), it seems only fair that we come up with a way for high-tech workers to have a happy Halloween, without giving up our gadgets and gizmos. Thus, we offer here a few suggestions for celebrating:

1. Get a copy of Ghost. No, no, not the movie – the venerable Symantec software package. Create clones of all your Windows machines. Imagine these clones taking over the computer world, replacing the DNA of perfectly good UNIX computers and evil Macs with their own. Even destroying their own ancestors, wiping out all remaining NT workstations and Windows 2000 computers. Slaughtering millions of XP machines and devouring the Vista operating system that spawned them.

2. Pre-order a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. You know you want to. Seven might be determined to make you part of the Collective, but who can deny that it’s mightily attractive? Just look at that beautiful interface and those Borg implants. Just don’t look at the price tag – that might be scary.

3. Having hardware hassles lately? Soundcard suddenly stopped working? Getting memory errors? Intermittent problems with your USB devices? It might be evil spirits at work. But if you're really, really brave, on October 31, at the stroke of midnight, open up the case and venture into the frightening tangle of wires and jutting circuit boards inside, in search of the dreaded Socket Creep. Sometimes add-on cards will slowly rise out of their slots just like the undead rising from the grave. Don't be afraid to take action. Slam them back into the holes where they belong. You'll be glad you did.

4. Find some thick coax cable and make a vampire tap into it. Enjoy the thrill of that first byte. And if you have any idea what I’m talking about, cringe when you realize that means you’re about as old as one of the undead.

5. Go phishing. Who knows what you might catch: celebrities’ passwords, Congressmen’s credit card numbers, the mothers’ maiden names of thousands of ordinary people. You might even get arrested and thrown in jail – another fashionable Halloween tradition.

6. Just stay home and watch the SQL. Bad Halloween movies are always worse the second time around and this is no exception. See an innocent child table get run over by a database engine, because of a corrupt driver who failed to merge (because he was distracted from fantasizing about an OLAP dance and hoping to have a one-to-many relationship).

7. Lock your doors and Windows, and if you must go out, be on the lookout for the Bare Metal Hypervisor. It’s big and bad and it’s planning to take over your network and turn all your operating systems into virtual machines that do its bidding. If you find yourself unable to function from the fear, practicing Xen probably won’t help.

8. Visit an Apple store. Watch all the Pod people wandering about, eyes glazed over, wires dangling from their ears, unable to communicate and oblivious to their surroundings. Hear them chant their mantra: “There’s an app for that.” Watch them mindlessly shell out big bucks for under-powered anorexic laptop computers that look so fragile a strong wind might break them in half. Warning: Don’t feed or try to pet the Leopards and Tigers (and watch out for the Cougars if you happen to look like the “I’m a Mac” guy).

9. Dig up an old copy of SATAN. Sure, it’s ancient technology but hey, the life of a network administrator is already hell anyway, so what do you have to lose? The System Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (http://www.porcupine.org/satan/) may have been superseded by newer, cooler and even scarier security tools, but none of them give you quite that same thrill of living dangerously (although I know people who might argue that using security products from certain vendors does involve selling your soul to the devil).

And the number one way for IT professionals to celebrate Halloween:

10. Turn green. Everyone will applaud you for being in step with the latest environmental mandates, and no one will know the real reason for your sickly pallor is that you overindulged in too many (software) suites.

 
deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

I loved the Tablet PC concept from the very beginning, and I bought one of the first generation convertible tablets, a Toshiba running Windows XP Tablet Edition. Overall, it was a decent little computer but it had several drawbacks: it was too heavy and too thick to be used comfortably in that way, and the price was way too high. When I got a new portable, I opted for a regular laptop form factor – a Sony VAIO ultra compact – instead. When I replaced that one, it was with yet another Sony. I’ve often said that if only the VAIO’s screen would rotate and lie down, it would be the perfect portable computer.

Alas, Sony doesn’t seem interested in making that dream a reality. And in fact, they appear to have abandoned the TX model entirely. Now my choices are:

• The super tiny 8 inch P series – which I’m utterly attracted to but don’t think I would like much for getting real work done; the screen is just too small and although I’ve tried one out and found the small keyboard to be very good, I’m not sure I could ever grow to love that J mouse pointing device.
• The 10.1 inch W series, which has the right size and weight and a touchpad, as well as a good price, but unlike the TX doesn’t have a built in DVD drive, and worse, only has 1 GB of RAM.

A problem with both of these is that battery life is only 4 hours or so, not nearly enough to get me through a day at a conference. I really would prefer not to have to spend my lunch hour hunting down an outlet to recharge my battery.  If you want more powerful specs and better battery life from Sony, at a higher price, you have to go up to a 13.1” screen and 3.3 lbs. Granted, it’s only a bit bigger and heavier than my TX, but I really don’t WANT something a bit bigger.

That means that, for the first time in a long time, my next laptop probably won’t be a Sony. What will it be, then?  Once again, I’m taking a look at Tablet PCs. The whole touch screen idea has come a long way since I had my Tablet back in 2003. Multi-touch technology has increased the flexibility of Tablets. Handwriting recognition has improved significantly. More applications are now “pen-friendly.”  But most of the existing Tablets I see don’t impress me. They’re still too big, too heavy and/or too expensive.

Fujitsu makes an 8.9 inch Lifebook (the P1630) that intrigues me. At 2.2 lbs., it’s just about the size and weight I’d like, but costing $1899 with only 1 GB of RAM, a 1.2 GHz processor and an 80 GB 5400 hard drive, it’s way overpriced. Flybook makes an attractive 8.9 inch touchscreen Tablet with a dual core processor and 3 GB of RAM – but its wireless card doesn’t support 802.11N and at $2589, it makes the Fujitsu look inexpensive. Of course, HP and Dell offer Tablets, but none of those have that special something that makes me say “wow, I have to have that.”

There’s been plenty of hype recently about a Tablet from Apple. If it does in fact exist, I’m sure it will be very pretty, like other Apple products. I’m also sure I won’t want it, just as I don’t want a (very pretty) iPhone because of all the deal breakers like no SD card slot and no user removable battery and the prohibition on getting applications anywhere except from their own App Store.  But this week, I saw something that has all the “wow” factor of an Apple product and it’s from … Microsoft. The Courier is just a prototype at this point, but what a sweet one it is, at least at first glance. It opens like a book with facing multi-touch screens and appears to feature a very jazzed up variation on OneNote. Watch the video here and see if you’re as impressed as I was:
http://www.physorg.com/news172999824.html 

Much as I like what I see, I still have questions and concerns. The lack of a keyboard bothers me some; I like the idea of being able to make quick notes in handwriting but for longer blocks of text, I can type much faster than I can handwrite. I’m also wondering if that notebook interface is the whole thing. Will this thing run Windows as the underlying OS?  Can I install other applications, like Word and Outlook and my photo editing software?  It has wi-fi connectivity, but will it have a built in camera and microphone for video conferencing? Can I plug in a USB keyboard and external monitor? What are the tech specs? Will it be powerful enough to serve as my primary portable computer? I don’t want to have to carry around two different devices (three if you count my smart phone). And if not, is it going to be cheap enough to make it practical to buy both it and a full fledged notebook?

Lots of questions and no answers yet. But I’m still interested. According to all the reports, though, the Courier probably won’t be available for a while. In the meantime, would someone please make a nice, ultra compact, powerful convertible Tablet PC for under $2000? I just might buy it. Until that happens, I’ll stick with the VAIO TXN, which is now running Windows 7 and works pretty nicely.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

The concept of thousands of private launch parties all over the world to kick off the Windows 7 release was a splendid idea. Techie folks who have been running the beta, RC, and RTM can invite their friends over to see the new OS in action. Microsoft supplies party favors and gives the party hosts a licensed copy of Win7 for their trouble. People get together and have fun and Microsoft gets some free publicity.

As with so many things, it’s in the execution that things get bogged down and the problem is … outsourcing. Instead of handling it themselves, Microsoft offloaded the launch party organization to House Party, Inc. I knew I was going to have issues with this site when I went to sign up and saw that they were asking for my full date of birth – on a site that did not use encryption. Hello, Identity Thieves!  I used a fake birth date but how many people just put their real info out there to be transmitted across a non-secure connection?

This morning, I got the email notifying me that I had been chosen as a “finalist” to be a party host. To be confirmed, I had to complete a list of things: Sign in to the HouseParty site and set up a party page, invite 9 guests, upload a headshot of myself and “at least 3 photos of your choice,” post a comment on the party blog and cast a vote in the first party poll. The problems started with item number one. The link to the HouseParty site just gave me an error message. I finally got onto the site the old fashioned way (through its front page) and after waiting minutes for it to load, was able to sign in. However, in the middle of completing the information form, the page timed out and I had to start all over again. Then I got the part where I could invite guests. I looked up and typed in all the email addresses, and when I hit the button, got another timeout message. Couldn’t go back to the previous page. Had to close the browser and once again, start over. I had similarly exasperating experiences when I tried to upload photos, with it taking several tries before it “took.”

Finally I have all the requirements completed (I think). I realize the site’s server was probably overloaded from all the Win7 Launch party hosts trying to get in and get everything done (because the notification tells you that in order to be approved, you must be “among the first finalists” to complete the tasks. But if this service isn’t able to handle the load, it should not have taken on the job. It took me more than an hour and a half of my time to do something that should have taken no more than ten or fifteen minutes.

Thank goodness I’m the one who is organizing the actual party – not House Party, Inc. Perhaps it will go a little more smoothly than the sign-up process did.

LATER: As if the above weren’t annoying enough, I now find that when a guest responds, the House Party site can’t be bothered to tell you in the email notification who it was or what the response was – you’re required to go back to the site to find out (see below):

Grrrr.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

All of us who aren’t oblivious – or too young or old to care – have opinions about current events and the issues that are in the news every day. Most of us who belong to social networking groups have yielded, on occasion, to the temptation to post a link to a news story about a political issue or personality, to make a comment in a status message about our approval or disapproval of a proposed piece of legislation or a candidate for office, or at the very least, to click the “Like” button when someone else, braver (or more reckless) than we are, posts such a political statement. Some of us have gotten into political arguments with friends of friends, people we don’t know at all and would never have interacted with otherwise, through the magic of the friend feed.

And that’s okay. Politics is a part of our lives and for many, it’s an important part. Our beliefs are part of who we are – but (for all but the obsessed) it’s only a part. And it’s important to remember that, especially in an environment that’s as diverse, dynamic and potentially volatile as a social network.  This is a “place” where we often mix co-workers (and bosses), clients/customers, family members, old college buddies and miscellaneous people we know or who know us (or think they want to). My social network includes my most intimate and longstanding of relationships, such as my spouse and children and the aunt who remembers when I was in diapers, along with professional colleagues from both IT and law enforcement, and a healthy dose of fellow writers in all genres. It also includes some of my neighbors and local government representatives,a sprinkling of “fans” whom I don’t know but who faithfully follow my career and comprise the audience for the books, articles and blog posts I write, and a few folks who barely know me but whom I admire and am honored to have on my friends list.

Some of these relationships, such as those with the people I’ve worked with to try to make our city better, have politics as their very foundation (or at least started that way). Some, such as those with people I met on writing lists or photography forums or those I work with on tech projects, are based on mutual interests that have nothing to do with politics. There are folks I’ve known online for years and gotten along with famously, and then learned by happenstance that they absolutely loath anyone who would vote for the party I usually support (oops; I guess that’s me). There are others with whom I’ve tip-toed around all political issues, assuming for whatever reason that they belonged to the opposite camp, and then discovered to my delight that they had been doing the same with me and that our political beliefs were almost identical.

Politics doesn’t just make strange bedfellows; it also makes for strange behavior. They say politics and religion are two of the discussion topics that can destroy a friendship, and for some people, their political stance is their religion. I enjoy a good political debate now and then among friends – when I can be sure I’m with someone who won’t take it personally or make it personal. But occasionally I encounter someone who purports to be my friend but takes every opportunity to make disparaging comments about everything that I believe in, and every subtle or not-so-subtle attempt to respectfully disagree or even to change the subject fails to get the message across that I don’t appreciate having my opinions and beliefs trashed. I am not talking about the occasional exuberant post when your candidate wins or your bill passes. I’m not talking about honest explorations of hot-topic issues with the goal of understanding how those who are different from you formed their opinions. I’m talking about a constant barrage of negativity about the other side. I’m talking about when politics is all you can talk about. Hey, that gets old even when I agree with your politics. And I’m talking about taking your politics to a personal level.

You’re probably wondering what inspired this little tirade on this particular day, so I’ll tell you. And I’m sorry if I embarrass someone (though I’m not about to name names) but I consider the behavior completely unacceptable, especially in a semi-public “place” like my Facebook page. Last night my husband and son took me out for a delightful belated birthday dinner. We had a wonderful time. And I posted about it in my status update. This morning, I got up to find a comment from a “friend” – lecturing me about my choice of entree. Informing me that it “wasn’t a good choice if you care about the species” and including a link to some environmentalist propaganda to educate me about the error of my ways.

I don’t want to get into the whole eco thing with those reading this. Whether or not you believe in all the tenets of the conservationists (as for me, some I do and some I don’t) isn’t the point. The point is that this was posted on my status update, which is visible to everyone on my friends’ list. It’s like walking up to someone at a dinner party and, in front of everyone she knows, chiding her for what’s on her plate. It’s not the same as taking one aside and making your pitch on behalf of the poor fish in private (which can be done on Facebook via the private message function). It’s not the same as whether or not the bass are being overfished and whether legislation should be passed to protect them. It didn’t do a thing to save the fish I had already eaten.  It’s just rude.  It’s also counter-productive because it doesn’t win people over to your cause; it makes them resistant to it. Remember the old admonition: “It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.”

I realize, though, that there’s another reason this particular comment rubbed me the wrong way. This is a “friend” who has never posted anything on my wall, since sending me a friend request some months ago. I have some other friends who occasionally lecture me on politics but I just shrug it off. Why? Because those people really are my friends. Those are people who wished me a happy birthday on Thursday, who sent me condolences a couple of weeks ago when I posted about two deaths in the family, who sent supportive messages when I posted about Tom’s plane being “lost in the ether,” who click the “like” button when I post photos of my cats or my latest remodeling project. They’re involved in my life, so they’ve earned the right to tell me when they don’t like something I said or did. They don’t stay silent for months and then pop up only to lecture me and try to make me feel bad about what I had for dinner and turn my happy, celebratory mood sour. Their politics may be different from mine, and they may sometimes let me know it, but they don’t throw it in my face.

So go ahead and post about politics if something comes up that’s so compelling you feel it’s important to let others know where you stand. I’m not asking you to do otherwise. Just realize that if you want to be someone’s friend, that involves a bit more than just swooping in to criticize when you see that person do something that isn’t politically correct.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

So you installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate and you’ve been happily running it and have it configured exactly like you want it. You can keep using it until March 2010 (or June if you’re patient enough to put up with the shutdowns every two hours that will start in March), but sooner or later, you’ll have to give it up and go with the final code. You can, of course, just start over from scratch and rebuild your empire manually. There’s a certain satisfaction in doing that – but these days, many of us just don’t have a lot of extra time on our hands, and we would really like to have a way to preserve some or all of the configuration tweaking we’ve done.

There are two ways, one of which is officially supported by Microsoft and one of which isn’t. I’ve tried both, on two different Win7 RC machines. I described my experience with the Easy Transfer utility in an August post to the Amazon End User blog. This is the method that Microsoft recommends. You create a .MIG file that holds user data and information about your OS and application settings, do a clean install and then restore the information from the .MIG file. It’s pretty straightforward but it has some drawbacks. It takes quite a bit of time to run the Easy Transfer wizard on the old installation, install the new instance of the OS, install all your applications again and restore all the settings. I also ended up with a corrupted Outlook profile, which may or may not be attributable to the Easy Transfer process. Creating a new profile fixed the problem, but it was a bit of an annoyance.

So when I decided to take my Dell XPS from RC to RTM, I thought I’d try the unsupported method. Now, realize that if you go this route, you’re on your own when it comes to troubleshooting problems you have with your new Win7 installation. Since I’m not one who ever calls tech support anyway, that wasn’t an issue for me. I figured the worst that could happen was that it wouldn’t work, and then I’d just wipe it and do a clean install and start over. This method is a true upgrade, which not only preserves your data and settings (without having to take time to restore them) but also keeps your applications intact so you don’t have to reinstall them. If you have lots and lots of apps, or some for which you’ve lost the product keys, this method might be worth a try.

Because Microsoft doesn’t want you to upgrade the RC code, the Windows 7 installer detects when you’re running it and doesn’t give you the option to do an upgrade installation (you can do an upgrade if it detects that you’re running Vista SP1 or above). The trick is to fix that prohibition. To do that, you have to first extract the Windows 7 RTM ISO file to a folder. Then follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the sources folder.

2. Find the file called cversion.ini.

3. Open it in Notepad.

4. Under [HostBuild], change MinClient=7233 to MinClient=7000

5. Save the file.

6. Create an ISO file and run setup.exe

You will now have the option to do an upgrade installation. Select this option. I started the upgrade installation and then went off to do some chores. When I came back a couple of hours later, it was at the point where it asks for the product key. I entered the RTM key and it quickly proceeded through the final stage. I had a tiny scare when, at the end of the installation (after the “preparing your desktop” message), I got a black screen with the mouse pointer fully moveable, but no desktop. I rebooted, logged on, and my desktop loaded normally. My wallpaper, icons, gadgets, etc. were all in place. All of my applications worked flawlessly, including Outlook. I’ve been using it now for a couple of days and have encountered no problems.

I can’t promise that the RC to RTM upgrade will go this smoothly for everyone. Again, I stress that it’s a non-supported method. But it seems to have worked like a dream for me, and saved me a good bit of time. For step by step instructions and screenshots on using this method, see

http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-upgrade-windows-7-rc-to-rtm/ 

After fighting with the Logitech software all morning, I finally uninstalled it. Then I decided to try another program that I already had installed, for doing screen captures. It’s called Debut and it’s free from HCH Software (there is also a paid Pro version that has additional features).  Turns out the camera works beautifully with this software, which records in .wmv, .avi, .asf, .mpg, .mov and several other formats.

It causes none of the problems that I had with the Logitech program. The video picture quality isn’t quite as good, but I can live with that.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com