I got a certificate this morning celebrating my 10 years as a member of Mensa.  I took the test as a lark on day (a former employer of mine had been bugging me to do it long before I actually did it) and a few weeks later found out that I qualified.

The sad thing (maybe) is that in all that time I’ve only gone to two Mensa meetings.  A few weeks ago I was telling Deb that I need to go more often, but I don’t want to nerd out too much, you know?

Oh yeah, if I had invested my IQ in an investment that returned 5% over the past 10 years, it would today be at about 237.  Instead I’ve decided to bathe my brain in beer, wine and margarita’s, so I’m lucky if it’s not down to 90 by now…

Yup, definitely don’t want to nerd out too much…

Just before the holidays I decided to try out a Zune 80.  The new Zunes are getting pretty good reviews, and I decided that I would try one out so I could get all my .wma music onto the system from my media center PC that died on me.  Yes, I know I can convert it to mp3, no I haven’t done it yet.

Besides getting my music onto this thing, I wanted to see how podcasts work on it.  The original Zune didn’t have the ability to handle podcasts, which was enough to keep me away from it.  Probably 75% of the time that I’m in the car alone, I’m listening to a Dot Net Rocks, TWiT, RunAs Radio, or some other podcast.  If I’m going to be driving, I might as well be learning, right?

Before I got the Zune 80, I downloaded the software for it from MS and got it up and running on my Vista system.  No problems there.  The software installed easily, and after some adjustments to the options, it got busy indexing my music.  So far so good.  With that done, I ran over (well, drove really – I do live in the USA after all) to Target and picked up the Zune 80.  I got it home, plugged it into the PC and all was good and simple in the world.

Overall, I find the user interface on the Zune 80 to be quite nice.  The screen is big and bright, and you can put a picture of your choosing on as the background.  The Zunepad (aka Squircle?) is kind of neat, and not hard to get used to coming from an iPod.  The original Zune’s attempt to use a circular directional pad was a huge mistake, and MS fixed that problem.

So overall, it’s a fine device.  The music playing works well.

Subscription Music

Subscription music is something that I love.  I pay my $12 or $14 a month and can listen to anything I want.  Previously I was using Rhapsody, but I switched the Zune store and started loading up with everything from Saliva to Linkin Park to Dane Cook.  I’ve enjoyed having all this music / stuff with me, along with the 300 albums that I already owned.  The Zune store seems to work pretty well.  I do wish they offered the equivalent of radio stations like Rhapsody does though.

Podcasts

Well, here we run into the first misfire of the experience.  On the iPod with iTunes, you subscribe to a podcast and it immediately downloads the three most recent shows.  Then as new shows are made available they are downloaded and sync’d with your device.  With the Zune software, it works a bit differently.  When you subscribe to a podcast, it downloads the first three episodes and puts them on your device; however, when the next episode is downloaded, the oldest of the three gets booted from the device!  So even if you haven’t listened to it, it gets removed from the device.  This is a changeable setting, so you can set it to keep a certain number of episodes; However, if you do this, you cannot delete an episode that you’ve already listened to if it is in that range of episode.  For example, if you tell the system to keep all episodes, then you listen to 10 of them and try to delete them, the software will just re-download them!

On the device side, there is no obvious way of knowing if you’ve started listening to an episode.  On the iPod there is a dot next to new episodes, but nothing of the sort that I could see on the Zune.  So, if you are on a roadtrip and you are listening to a variety of podcasts, you will have a lot of trial and error trying to keep things straight.

There is the ability to have only unlistened episodes loaded on the Zune, which is a nice touch.

Finally, if you listen to a podcast and then sync the Zune, the PC software doesn’t know where you last stopped listening.  If you’ve listened to 37 minutes of a Dot Net Rocks episode and you want to continue it through your PC, you get to start at the beginning and try to find the location.  ITunes doesn’t force this on you.

Xbox 360 Playback

You can feed your media from the Zune software to your Xbox 360 over the network.  The 360 easily discovers the media on the PC, and lists it in the standard 360 interface (workable, but not great – playlists are your friend!).  However, when you try to play the music, currently most of it comes up as not playable.  This is not due to the music format, but rather apparently the last update to the 360 broke this feature.  I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a fix yet.  Plugging the Zune into the 360 worked perfectly, and there’s nothing like blasting fast and loud music while getting your ass kicked in Halo 3 by a bunch of 12 year olds.

The Windows client software

Well, overall, it looks pretty nice.  However, as is to be expected with media software, there are UI problems.  Why everyone that creates media player software feels the need to make it not conform to the platform standards, I’ll never know.  Why Microsoft insists on doing this is well beyond me.  Let’s take a look at a few examples, shall we?

First of all, take a look at this screenshot (taken with the software in Now Playing mode) and tell me where the close button is on the Zune player window:

It looks easy to find, right?  Top right corner…. Nope.  Look just below the X that you think is the close button, and you’ll find a very faint set of minimize, maximize and close buttons.  Those are the Zune players buttons, not the ones you can actually see.  This is a real screenshot, not doctored in any way.  This is why several times when I’ve gone to close the program, I’ve closed the one behind it instead.

Now, let’s find the Now Playing playlist:

Feel free to zune, er, zoom in to find it.  Give up?  It’s the little bar graph to the right of the fast forward button in the bottom right corner of the window.  You know, the one that would mean "equalizer" in every other context.  Yeah, that’s intuitive.  I had to freakin’ Google for that one (yeah, that’s right Googlawyers, I verb’d your company, come and get me).  Oh yeah, don’t look for the equalizer, they removed it from this version – but I don’t miss it because I never use it anyway.

Third Party Support

When connecting our iPods to our cars, we use the Belkin adapter that includes an amp in it so that you don’t have to crank the volume of the iPod in order to have an easy to hear connection.  No such thing appears to exist for the Zune (yet), so you have to crank the volume of the Zune to 20 (10? 11?  For losers!  20 is the new 10!) and turn up the volume on your car stereo to hear it loudly enough to have the windows open while driving.  Also, without a device like this, I need to remember to pause the Zune when I turn the car off – with the Belkin adapter, the iPod pauses automatically.

Summary

Overall, the unit itself is very nice.  It feels good in the hand and the screen is wonderful.  The matt aluminum back on the device doesn’t scratch (easily) and attract fingerprints instantly like the iPod does.  My Zune is about 3 weeks old now and there are no scratches on the back.  Most iPods without cases pick up scratches in the first 30 nanoseconds outside of their packaging.  The Zune software is okay, but the UI misfires mentioned above are really baffling.  Finally, the podcast situation is still not ideal.  Sometimes less is more and in this case, MS could have done a lot less work and made the podcast subsystem work better.  If you are looking for a media player and aren’t married to an iPod yet, give the (new) Zune a try.

Over the past month I’ve had two client sites have problems with Verizon service.  The number of hoops they make you jump through in order to try to solve a problem are incredible.

In the most recent instance, the client called to say that no one there can get onto the Internet.  I walked them through the usual resetting of the DSL modem and router device (a Linksys in this case).  After that, they still were not working.

I attempted to use the Verizon web site to contact tech support.  First, I tried to find a phone number to call, but had no luck finding one.  Finally I had to resort to using the online chat function.  After I entered all of the relevant information (including problem, description, DSL phone number and my name), I was connected to a rep.  He then promptly asked me for the DSL phone number and name. <sigh>.  After that, he needed a description of the problem <sigh>^2.  Finally he asked me for the model of the DSL modem.  I informed him that I wasn’t in front of it.  Big mistake.  At that point, all he could say was that I had to be at the client site in order to help me.  Which is funny, because the client site doesn’t have Internet access!  No matter how many different ways I tried to get him to just check the darn line, he refused to help.  Apparently they are incapable of checking into anything without the DSL modem model.  Oh yeah, and it was very important to know what my operating system was, which of course has nothing to do with the problem as all computers were unable to connect, AND THE INTERNET LIGHT WAS OFF ON THE MODEM!!!

So, long story (1 hour 20 minutes) short, after going on site, I called the Verizon support number (which was the one good thing to come from the earlier chat) and when I tried to access tech support the system checked the line and claimed that nothing was wrong, and then proceeded to give me two options: 1) Go back to the main menu and 2) Hang up.

There was NO option to talk to, oh, I dunno, a human being!  After trying all forms of getting in touch with someone through the tech support line (screaming Agent and Operator and various profanities into the phone got me nowhere), I finally connected to billing, spoke to some poor guy there who finally transferred me to a support line where I could get in a queue to talk to someone.  Now here’s the best part, I’ve been working on this for over an hour and I finally get to talk to someone.  The first thing she checked (after getting the DSL number yet again) was whether there was an outage in the area.  Well guess what – there was.  Certain users in the Tampa area were having problems due to a piece of broken equipment in the central office.  It took all of 2 minutes for her to get this info.

Now, which part of that information required me to either be on site, or needed the DSL modem model number?  That’s right kids, none!

Anyway, if you ever need to get in touch with Verizon tech support, call (800) 569-6789.  If you want to find out if there are any outages in the Verizon DSL network, go to http://wapp.verizon.net/systemstatus/status.asp?status_type=DSL&template=eastern and there you will find out what’s going on.

Summary: Die, Verizon, Die!

Grrr, for about the 40th time today an application that was supposed to be doing something in the background stole focus.

In this latest instance, I was loading QuickBooks in the background while working with Outlook.  As soon as QuickBooks prompted for a password, the password window stole the focus from Outlook!

A while ago Microsoft added the feature to Windows that caused a background window to flash in the Taskbar when it needed attention, rather than stealing focus.  It’s been at least five years since that was first brought to market.  Why are there still applications out there that screw with the user experience, and why does Windows allow it?

Deborah   says:
– first we need to go to the beach 
Deborah   says:
– then we need a giant gingerbread man
Deborah   says:
– and a towel that looks like a baking pan
Eric G. Harrison says:
– In order to have a day at the beach, we must first invent the universe.
Deborah   says:
– "bang"

There are frequent times when I need to get a full path and file name from Windows Explorer into something else. Fortunately Vista has a "hidden" feature built in to make that easier.

For example, earlier today I had to point to a Virtual PC hard disk image that I had downloaded when setting up the VPC environment for it.  Since I was already looking at the file in Windows Explorer, I simply used Shift-Right Click and then chose Copy As Path to get the full path and file name onto the clipboard.  A quick paste and I was done.

I’ve lived through so many of these things. <sigh>

The 11th reason is that if you’re sitting at the front desk doing something to the computer, anyone who walks in the door assumes you are the receptionist.

It’s funny, when I was CIO at a 550 person company and then Director of Technology at a Fortune 500 company, these things were just as true as they are today, when I’m "President and Chief Bottle Washer" at our tiny consultancy.

Just this morning I got an email from a friend asking what kind of laptop they should buy.  I dunno, how about one that works?  Would you like to purchase a CRM system to go with that laptop?

Of course, this is the nature of technology.  I’m sure mechanics of the early 20th century got a lot of the same thing regarding cars, and before then, a stableman probably got asked a lot about the best type of horse the questioner should get, but instead of hoping to be paid, they probably just hoped that the asker wasn’t going to stick them with something pointy if they didn’t give them the "right" answer…

A few days ago, shortly after replacing the hard drive in my notebook (upgraded to 200gig at 7200 RPM, woohoo!) Word 2007 no longer worked well for me.  The first symptom I noticed was that when I clicked on the X in the upper right of the window to close the app, it would crash instead of closing.  Word would then restart, which was kind of not what I wanted.

The next symptom I noticed a few minutes later was that if Word was in the background, I couldn’t use the mouse to bring it to the foreground if I clicked in the body of Word.  Clicking on the window frame, the menu bar or the toolbars would bring Word to the foreground.  Weird.

The real kicker was that I could no longer select any text in the Word document.  Unfortunately this problem fully manifested itself when I was trying to put together a rush quote for a prospect (of course).

Since this all occurred shortly after replacing the hard drive I thought that perhaps that might have had something to do with it.  After all, troubleshooting 101 is "what did you change last?".  It’s when we say "nothing!", while ignoring the major replacement we just did that we run into major problems. 

So, step 1 was to do a repair on Office 2007.  After that was completed, the behavior was the same.

Step 2 was to uninstall and reinstall Office 2007.  After that was completed, the behavior was the same.

Step 3 was to go to the MS newsgroups for Word and start reading.  It turns out that a recent update was causing the problem!  Following the instructions to delete a couple of registry keys solved the problem right away.  Good to know.  <sigh>  I lost about 3 hours of time to this stupid problem.

Two features that I’d really like to see:

1) Notification email when someone posts a reply to a blog posting.  I’ve missed responding in a timely manner to the last two people to reply to my blog.  Sorry Joe and Jeff!

2) The feature in Live Spaces that adds grammatical and spelling errors to my posts really needs to go.  I mean, I would never type in stupid typo’s and bad grammer in a post, so it must be Live Spaces doing it, right?  Right?!  Yes Justin, I know I made a few of those in the last two posts as well!  I mean Live Spaces did it!!!!

Last night I had the pleasure of sitting in on Russ’ presentation called "It’s All About The Tools – Episode 1".  I’ve sat in on a couple of Russ’ presentations and always enjoyed them, and last night was no exception.

He opened the session saying that one of the reasons he does them is because it tends to get people excited about what they do and the tools they work with, and I have to agree that I feel the same way.  I will frequently go to presentations such as these, even when I believe I know the content (not true in this case!), just because it’s a nice kick start.

Last night Russ covered a lot of ground, including introducing us to a snippet tool that’s built into Windows Vista.  To find it, just click on the Start "Orb" in vista, and type "Snip".  Run the snippet tool and it will pretty much be obvious how to run it.  This is a great tool to use when you’re at a customer (or walking one through something) and you don’t want to have to explain how to do an "alt-printscreen, find and launch paint, paste to Paint, select an even smaller area, copy, new image with smaller dimensions, paste again and finally, save as jpeg" process.  In my day to day job, I’ll stick with using Snag-It from TechSmith.

A much more important tool is Fiddler.  This is an http proxy for debugging the http protocol. I’ve used similar products, but Fiddler looks like a very nice tool that’s priced right (free!), and one that I’m adding to my kit tonight.

The bad news is that this was the 42nd, and last, of Russ’ presentation on these tools.  The good news is that 1) The entire deck can be found on his site, and 2) He has begun the Episode 2 tour.

If Russ comes around to your area, make the time to sit in on his session.  I certainly learned several new things, and got my creative juices flowing in a mere 90 minutes.