I felt a bit like the guy in this ad before Christmas. The SharePoint farm at work was down, and I stayed up for about 76 hours to bring it back up. Thankfully, I did my work remotely, so short of guided missiles, they couldn’t touch me… 🙂
Tag Archives: microsoft
A white MacBook unwrapping
My mother was fed up with multiple crashes on her Windows laptop, and wasn’t sure what to do. Should she get a new Windows laptop? Should she try to fix the existing laptop? It was all very traumatic for her, because she lost precious data with each crash.
When I first suggested she switch to Apple, she said no thanks, she wasn’t going to learn a new operating system. She had little spare time as it was. But with time, she relented. I convinced her to visit the Apple Store at her local mall and play around with the computers. I remember a few months ago, she called me from the store, excited. She was willing to give it a try and consider a purchase. She wanted a laptop, and didn’t want to spring for the expensive MacBook Pro, so I suggested the MacBook. She liked the white one. I advised her to wait till they came out with the Core 2 Duo and fixed the random shutdown and discoloration issues.
Fast forward a couple of months, and I placed the order for her. I expected to wait about a week till Apple shipped it out, like I did with my iMac G5. Was I ever surprised when I got a shipment notification the very next day! I thought boy, they really improved… but in typical Apple fashion, they managed to mess up the order somehow. When I ordered my iMac, they sent me a Spanish keyboard and instruction manual. This time, they didn’t ship the Apple Care plan for the MacBook. [sigh] Some things are just the way they are…
I had the laptop sent to me, since I promised I’d take her through the switch. Now I’ve got my work cut out for me. I’ve got to import all of my parents’ documents , photos, music and other things from the PC backup files to the MacBook. As if that’s not enough, I need to transfer her Outlook-based mail archive to Apple Mail, and that’s not a walk in the park. Fortunately, I’ve done it before. When everything’s set up, I’m going to fly it down to her and hand it over. There may be an official hand-off ceremony, I don’t know, we’ll have to see.
Anyway, the laptop arrived yesterday and I took it out of the box, duly documenting the process with photos. You’re welcome to have a look.
Microsoft Keynote Bloopers
It was only fair that I dig up some MS Bloopers after posting a reel of Apple bloopers yesterday. Unfortunately, there weren’t that many of them. Found the one below on YouTube, and another of Bill Gates banging his head on a camera, but that’s not really funny, it’s just an accident. You don’t laugh when someone hurts themselves, you laugh when the technology they tout as fantastic doesn’t deliver. So here’s a clip of an MS guy touting Vista’s speech recognition, only to have it fail miserably on the demo. It doesn’t help that he’s arrogant and hard to like, either. Schadenfreude, revisited:
Update on Microsoft Expression Web Designer
It appears that Web Designer is part of a suite of apps that has yet to launch, called Microsoft Expression. It will contain three apps: Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer and Web Designer. Graphic Designer will be a marriage (in MS fashion) of Fireworks, Illustrator and Photoshop (we’ll see how well that comes out), Interactive Designer will be a UI design/destop app tool (it integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio), and Web Designer will of course go after Dreamwever, as detailed before, emphasizing the MS coding platforms (ASP, ASP.NET).
Graphic Designer and Interactive Designer are still in community edition (read flaky), and it looks like Interactive Designer will only work with .NET Framework 3.0 plus Visual Studio Express (at least). Web Designer is out in Beta and ready for download and use.
I have to ponder MS’ reach on this. They’re clearly building upon their strengths and going after their competitors, which is what they’ve always done, but to go after Photoshop and Dreamweaver is pretty lofty. Only time (and users) will tell whether they’ve managed to reach the target, or, in usual MS fashion, delivered something half-baked. Now we begin to see where all that R&D money went — it didn’t just go to Vista, it also went to stuff like this.
Three interesting downloads from Microsoft
Microsoft’s out to kick butt lately, and with these three downloads, it’s taking on three companies at once: Apple, Adobe and Intuit. Try them out, and judge how well Microsoftie’s doing in the fights:
- Windows Media Player 11: organized pretty much like iTunes, but with a leaner installer — iTunes weighs in at over 35 MB for the installer, and WMP11 is a featherweight at 24.5 MB.
- Microsoft Expression Web Designer (Beta): Dreamweaver, you bloated piece of software, here comes MS to kick you into shape! If you’re sick of 100% CPU overhead when synchronizing your sites with Dreamweaver, like I am, then give the Web Designer a go. You might find it tastes a bit like Equal, not sugar, but hey, anything to whip Adobe into shape, right? Oh, and the kicker: it opens .dwt files. Yup, you heard me right…
- Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 (Beta): Quickbooks, shake in your boots! This piece of software will let 1-person or small businesses do most of the things they could do in Quickbooks, and, they’ll be able to do them knowing an enterprise-level database is storing their data, not some Quickbooks proprietary format db. Yes, Office Account 2007 installs SQL Server 2005 Express. A reboot is needed as well after the install (b/c of SQL Server). Yes, it imports data from Quickbooks, and from MS Money.
Raoul Pop 
