Reserved Parking for November

Hey, I won a reserved parking spot at work for the entire month of November. Cool. I should take this opportunity to go out to lunch everyday, since I will always get a great spot when I get back. Too bad I am a cheap skate and bring my lunch most of the time.

Media Player 11 is Available

Why do I care? Well, as soon as I can get some free time I would like to go through my music collection and get it in better shape. Plus, I am considering going to paying for music online. Media Player works with Urge. How well will it compare to iTunes? Also, I like the new iPods, but I will wait for Microsoft’s upcoming Zune player before thinking of replacing my aging e.Digital MXP 100.

BTW… the e.Digital MXP 100 was smaller than an iPod (5GB original) when I bought it and it came with 1GB of memory (in a CompactFlash card). It was way ahead of its time… leading into the wide variety of small multi-GB players we have now.

nVidia Drivers for Windows Vista – Oops!

I went to nVidia’s web site to download their Vista drivers. Unfortunately, my experience sucked. I ran through the installation just fine. Everything was perfect. When it asked me to reboot I did and left the room. I had some other things to do and returned to my study about 20-30 minutes later. When I returned Windows was in the middle of a reboot.

Yikes! Was my computer stuck in an endless cycle of reboots.

Nope. I watched my desktop finish this boot to make sure there wasn’t some message I needed to acknowledge. It booted fine but told me that the drivers did not work and that my system had been restored to its previous condition.

I didn’t have time to try again, but so far it looks like nVidia has some work to do.

Another Free Lunch – This Time HP Buys

Our HP representative came to town to talk about a few items. This is our support person that is permanently assigned to us. So when he visits it doesn’t cost anything extra from the level of support we get from HP.

He took the new DBA (I was “acting” DBA for 5 years), our operation manager, the network administrator and myself out to Johnny Carino’s for lunch. My director never let’s vendors buy him lunch. He doesn’t want any chances that it might seem like a conflict of interests, or a bribe. Since I don’t make any purchasing decisions I don’t have that problem. From a personal standpoint you can’t buy my opinion, however, you certainly can buy my attention with a free lunch.

That makes three free lunched this week.

Cool!

Firefox 2.0 – Is it out or not?

I was able to download the final release of Firefox 2.0 here. However, if you go to the official Firefox site it still shows 1.5.0.7 as the current release and version 2 is still at Release Candidate 3.

The Ten Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online

Now here’s an article everyone should read. I came across this on Byte. Read the article yourself. Though if you are reading this blog I suspect you know most of these things already.

Firefox 2.0 Release Candidate 3

I finally starting giving Firefox another chance. I have not had time to test it fully, but it does not give me any of the errors I get with Internet Explorer 7. Because of this I have switch to updating this Blog exclusively from Firefox.

I did notice one great feature while updating this Blog. Firefox as in-line spell checking like Word. Yep, the red underline for misspelled words. I was never too thrilled with WordPress’ implementation of spell checking, though it was far better than Blogger. Now that Firefox does my spell checking it is a lot easier to post information.

Firefox is very close to becoming my default browser. I’ll keep you posted on this one.

Training… with Free Lunch

I am taking a class called Developing Software Testing and Quality Assurance Techniques. It is being held on-site at our facilities… and… lunch is provided. I am enjoying the content of the class a lot. I just hope the business side lets us implement many of the ideas in this class.

I was really impressed by the idea that even the requirements should go through testing and a walk-thru. Wow, that’s a concept that will be hard to get buy off on, but it would save a ton of time programming to bad specs early in the life of a project.

Nvidia Releases Windows Vista Drivers

I just read on PCMag.com that nVidia has Vista Drivers out. I need to get busy testing Vista RC2. Maybe this will give me an incentive.

Dog Eats $62 Cord

Our dog ate the power cord to my son’s laptop. This is the part of the power cord that is permanently attached to the AC adapter. So, we have to buy a new $62 AC adapter just to replace a $3 cord.

Why is this? The part of the power brick that plugs into the wall comes apart from the AC adapter, why can’t the other cord be a detachable item as well?

TransMac for reading Macintosh Discs

I needed to access some clip art for a project at work. The graphics department lent me their Art Explosion Clip Art Collection with 750,00 items in it. I say items because it has clip art, photos, backgrounds & textures, fonts, etc.

Anyway, the discs were all Macintosh discs. So I downloaded TransMac and copied what I needed off the discs onto my Windows computer.

I’ll let you know how it works out after I build the slide show I need to create in PowerPoint.

Script Errors in Internet Explorer 7

Well, it didn’t take long. I got the following script error when visiting Tom’s Networking site:

But it doesn’t stop there. When I uploaded the error message above I received this error:

Then I received this error when I I tried to run the spell checking on this site:

Finally, when I went to Publish this post I was presented with this error:

So much for Internet Explorer saving me from having to answer a bunch of questions about debugging other people’s code. I get enough of that at work, I don’t want it when reading on the web.

Installing Internet Explorer 7

You have to love Microsoft sometimes. Notice that the install dialog box has the green indicator constantly running from left to right… over and over again. So how long is this install going to take? How many steps are you going to do? What a waist of time. Well, at least it is installed.

I got a quick error when I tried to create this post. It was a typical error asking if I wanted to debug a script that had errored. This is the first thing I was hoping IE7 would fix… not get errors running scripts. I get prompted with the question of whether I want to debug the script or not all the time. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) I did not screen capture the error and I can’t seem to get it to repeat. Maybe IE7 remembers that I don’t want to debug scripts. That would at least be an improvement. Better would that the script errors weren’t errors in IE7. I’ll have to restart IE7 and find out. I’ll report back later.

Internet Explorer 7 Finally Available

From what I can tell Internet Explorer 7 was released yesterday. Be sure to download it yourself. Now that it is out of Beta I will have to try it out. I’ll let you know how it goes later.

Max Payne & Need For Speed Most Wanted

I have been playing a lot of Need For Speed Most Wanted. But now that I have a new mouse I have been also getting back into Max Payne. I just finished Part 1, Chapter 8. Part 2 started in a funky dream like state with a maze of really long corridors that lead to a room with a blood trail that seems suspended over a very long drop. I have not made it all the way, but I am thinking this might actually be the end of the game as I have no weapons and this is out of character for this game. One of the reasons I liked it was the lack of weird mutants to kill.

Has anyone played Max Payne to the end?

By the way… I just made it to #2 on the Blacklist of NFSMW. A few races and I can race the guy that stole my car at the beginning of the career mode.

Another Free Lunch

We had a workshop at work today and we were supplied with another free lunch. I hope I won’t get paid back by having my lunch stolen again.

I did get stuck in a tiny bit of rain on my way home with the top down. Hopefully that’s the extent of my payback for eating for free.

Click! – Sucks

I was really expecting to like this movie, but I found it incredibly predictable and mostly boring. I usually like Adam Sandler, but this time he blew it. As far as predictability, I knew exactly how it was going to end before he got the remote. There were a few moments as he figured out what the remote would do that were mildly funny, but overall it was no where near Adam’s usual work.

Ultimately the characters were unrealistic, and it just wasn’t fun to watch them either. Don’t buy or rent this movie.

PocketMouse Wireless Mini & Knight of the Old Republic

I picked up a new mouse today. I was looking around at CompUSA for a new game and looked at the “mini” mice. I did not want to spend a lot of money, but wanted something of decent quality. They had three wireless mini mice priced at $24.99. One was a CompUSA branded mouse. Another was a generic Targus mouse. I settled on a name brand mouse. I bought a Kensington Pocketmouse Optical Wireless Mini. It seems to be just the right size. I was sharing a wired mini mouse I got from a HP consultant. I shared it with my son. However, it was so narrow that my hand would cramp up after about 30 minutes of use. The Kensington seems to be just wide enough to prevent that. I’ll have to save that opinion for some long hours using it.

BTW… I headed over to Best Buy to continue looking for a new game and bought Knights of the Old Republic. It is a little old, but it was priced at my sweet spot of $20. My sons started playing it on my desktop. I will have to see if it is possible to play it without the CD so I can play it when I want on my laptop. If you know how to get this game to play without the CD let me know. I already tried to get it working using Virtual CD 7 without any luck.

Electric Mini Cooper Goes 0-60 in 4.5 Seconds

I came across this a couple of weeks ago, but forgot to post it. They put electric motors in the wheels. Kind of cool. You can see the car here.

Microsoft takes on Dreamweaver in video series

Well, Microsoft is trying to take on Dreamweaver in a toe-to-toe battl… uh, I mean comparison. The have developed a series of videos that show Visual Studio 2005 against Dreamweaver 8. We all know Microsoft doesn’t know how to be impartial, but I think they are really missing the point. Visual Studio is a developer’s environment. Dreamweaver is a designer’s environment.

I wish they would make a similar video series comparing their Expression Web Designer tool against Dreamweaver. As a programmer I know I won’t switch to Dreamweaver, but as a FrontPage user I am going to have to make the switch from FrontPage to something. Comparing a design tool to a robust programming tool is a waste. Do the right comparison and show us what really can be down with Expression Web Designer.