A question for Microsoft

I’ve experimented with Microsoft’s "Live" search (remind me to go on a rant some other time about the stupidity of naming everything "Live" – shades of ".NET" eh?) and I keep going back to Google.
 
One thing on Live Search that I’ve found that I really don’t like is the use of a redirection page.  If you run a search on Google for, say, "Cars", the first non sponsored entry is Cars.com.  If you look at the URL that you would be going to when you click on the Cars.com entry, you’ll see that it points you to "http://www.cars.com".  If you run the same search on Live Search (or whatever it’s called, there’s actually no branding on the page except for Live Beta), you’ll find that a subsite of Cars.com (for Central Arizona) is the first link.  If you look at the URL that you would be going to if you clicked the link, you’ll see that it starts with "http://g.msn.com"  and after that follows a lot of other stuff, including somewhere nested in there, a redirect to the actual site.
 
What does this mean in the real world? 
Two things:
1) Apparently Microsoft is tracking which items you visit from the searches.  I doubt this is being done for "evil" purposes, probably just to improve their search results. 
2) Clicking on a link from the Live site is slower than clicking on one from Google.  When you click on one from Google, you go straight to the site.  When you click on it from MSN, er, Live it is much slower as the request first goes to an MSN server and then you are redirected to the target site, resulting in several unnecessary round trips.
 
Item #2 (along with the worse results, an Arizona subsite of Cars.com is the first link?) is enough to keep me on Google.  Keep trying Microsoft!
 
– Eric.
 
PS: While scrolling through the Live result set in order to see if a bug with going "back" in the browser when using their site had been fixed, it crashed IE.
 
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Arrived in Tampa, beginning to lose weight through evaporation

The trip to the Tampa area was pretty uneventful.  Except for being tailgated once by a crazy woman in the mountains and Deb nearly getting sideswiped, the trip went smoothly and exactly as planned.
 
The weather down here is quite nice, but it is going to take some time getting used to the humidity.  While I used to live down in Florida, it was a long time ago and I’m pretty sure that they have found a way to cram more humidity into the air than the last time I was here.
 
We’re still waiting for a our stuff to show up.  It was supposed to be here on Thursday, but we got a call Wednesday from the driver that it would be Saturday now before he could deliver.  Hopefully that is the last delay.  It will be nice to sleep on our own bed rather than an air mattress! 
 
 
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How Verizon forced my business to Cingular and lost thousands

As part of moving down to the Tampa area and setting up a new business, we wanted some new phones.  We wanted a phone that was also a PDA, ran Windows Mobile 5 (as I’m a developer on Windows and I want to play in that new environment using .net) and most importantly, we could be used as a network access tool for our notebooks. 
 
The reason that is important is that a large part of what we’re doing down in Tampa is on site and remote support for IT users and if one of the problems we’re fixing (or creating!) is preventing access to the Internet, we need to be able to get there from our notebooks.
 
We really liked the idea of the EVDO (no link as they don’t have a simple explanatory page on their website, only links to bundles of services) network that Verizon has for their phones.  It’s very fast, which is obviously very good.  So we went to a local Verizon store to purchase a couple XV6700 phones, and sign up with the EVDO unlimited data access plan. 
 
Things started to go from good to bad pretty quickly.  We were greeted at the door by a person who’s job was apparently to use the kiosk to queue us for access to a salesrep.  We’ll call the greeter Mr. Stoner. Mr. Stoner asked us how he could help us.  We thought he was a sales rep, so we told him we were Sprint customers and wanted to know if they had a plan similar to what we had with Sprint.  He promptly turned to the kiosk, and started punching buttons.  He punched in that we were existing Verizon customers, got to the phone number field, realized that he didn’t have it, punched the cancel button, repeated hitting the Verizon customer button, skipped the phone number field, and told us to just wait and someone would be with us shortly.  However, Mr. Stoner signed us up for the customer service section of the store, not the sales section!  After we were called by customer service and told them that we didn’t know why we were there as we were not customers, they queued us up for the sales department.
 
We finally got called by a salesrep.  We carefully explained what we wanted (the specific phones, plans and services) and he began waiving a brochure in our face.  As we began discussing the plans, he pointed out that with each plan, we got two free phones.  Twice we had to explain to him that we didn’t want the free phones, we wanted the XV6700 phone.  Later on he told us that with the plans we were getting, we would get $100 off each phone, and then even later again mentioned the free phones again.  Apparently this rep was sharing with Mr. Stoner.
 
Finally, while questining the salesrep, we discovered that Verizon disables their phones ability to be used as a "modem" through Bluetooth or even a USB cable.  However, they’d be more than happy to sell us a separate PC Card and data plan in addition to the ones with our phones.
 
This was the last straw.  We left, went to a Cingular booth, and purchased their 8125 phone, which while it doesn’t have access to a super fast data network, it can be used as a "modem" by a notebook or PC using Bluetooth. 
 
The experience at the booth could not have been different.  When we walked up the sales guy (we’ll call him Mr. Professional) was busy with another customer.  We walked around and when we saw the phone in the display case, we mentioned something about it to each other.  Mr. Professional overheard us, took a second away from his current customer (while they were playing with a phone) and took out a boxed phone and gave it to us to play with while he was finishing up with his other customer. 
 
When he was done with that customer, he was attentive, well informed, friendly and funny.  Within 10 minutes we had the whole transaction taken care of, and he suggested that we come back in an hour so he could finish setting up the phones properly.  We went to run a few errands, came back, got our phones as promised and left as happy customers.
 
So, Verizon, while you have a better data access network, your locking down of the phone’s abilities in order to try to drive additional revenue and hiring stoned employees, has backfired, costing you thousands in long term revenue and driving us into the arms of a competitor, proving that "you sir, are dumber than me!" (chorus: "Yes you are!").
 
PS: That dumber than me refernce is for those Dot Net Rocks listeners out there.
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Goodbye Chicago, Hello Tampa!

Tomorrow our cable modem is disconnected, so I’m posting this tonight.  On Friday we’re moving to the Tampa Bay area in Florida.  We have decided to hurry up and get down there so we don’t miss another hurricane season!
 
I’m excited about our new venture (HSI Technologies), and looking forward to getting down there and getting settled.  The only problem is that I will have to suffer without a high speed Internet connection for at least five whole days!  Oh the tragedy!
 
I remember many years ago when Bill Gates talked about the digital lifestyle.  People would be dependant on the Internet to do everything from getting the weather to planning their days.  I know that I definitely live that "lifestyle" and many of my friends do as well.  Not having Internet access for five days (three of which will be spent on the road anyway) may not sit high on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but in my case, the others are covered, so Internet access is the big crisis. That and trying to move a small reef tank aquarium across the country in the back of my Honda Element.
 
It reminds me of a time, about 7 years ago, when I was bitching to a friend that my private airplane wasn’t available to me because it was in the shop getting an annual inspection.  About mid-way through my rant I stopped msyelf and said something like "if the biggest problem in my life is that my personal airplane isn’t available on demand, I really need to just stop bitching…". 
 
Remains true to this day.  Now if only I still owned the airplane, then I’d have something to bitch about – it wouild probably still be in the shop.
 
See you in Brandon! – Eric.
 
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Beware cheap Xbox 360 faceplates

Some background: As we prepare to move to Florida, we are looking to simplify our home theater a bit.  Given how well the Xbox 360 works as a media center extender, we have decided to use it as our main media device in our living room. 
 
Just for fun, we bought some el-cheapo faceplates for the 360, two faceplates in one package for $19.  The faceplates went on just fine, and the tropical one looked nifty.
 
Now begins the interesting part. We also purchased a Harmony remote for the 360.  We use several Harmony remotes in our house, have recommended them to others, and installed them for clients.
 
When messing around with the remote, it worked quite well controlling our HP x5400 Media Center Extender in the home office.  However, when I brought it into the living room to see how well it worked on the 360, I found that it didn’t function well at all unless it was roughly 3 feet away from the 360 and directly in front of the infrared pickup window!  Not an ideal situation.
 
After much troubleshooting, I discovered that the cheap 360 faceplate was to blame for the problem.  I swapped it out and put the factory faceplate back on, and the remote began working appropriately. 
 
One thing that is quite interesting is the design of the infrared pickup in the 360.  Normally, you can see the IR pickup in the red window on a piece of home theater equipment by shining a flashlight on it.  With the 360, that won’t work.  The vast majority of the IR pickup window isn’t actually see through.  If you take the faceplate off of the 360 and look at the back of it, there is a plastic "stick" that projects from the IR window, which is what channels the IR beam down to the pickup about 1/4 an inch behind the faceplate.  I wonder why MS didn’t simply make the IR pickup window be just a 1/8" hole in the faceplate.  I’m sure it’s a global consipiracy to drive up the sales of red translucent plastic.
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What the hell is wrong with our (American) government?

 
You have got to be kidding me.  They are trying to collect records of every phone call made in the United States, just in the hope of maybe data mining it into finding a terrorist?
 
I’m not sure that innocent until proven guilty is applicable anymore.
 
This is almost as scary as the proposed legislation that would require ISP’s to track every email you send, and every web site you visit, except that it is apparently already happening.
 
A lot of these things are done in the guise of helping "the children".  Well what good will it be doing if "the children" end up growing up in a police state?
 
Perhaps we’re all terrorists now… Your papers please…
 
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VMWare 1, Virtual PC 0

I enjoy messing around with various versions of Linux. In order
to keep my desk from being completely overrun with computers, I’ve been
trying to use various distributions under Microsoft Virtual PC.
Unfortunately, what I’ve found is that if I attempt to run a copy of
Linux under Virtual PC at the full native resolution of the system that
I’m working on (1280×1024), it will not display properly. It ends
up looking like the alternating lines of the display have been shifted
over signifcantly. The best I’ve been able to do is set Linux to
use 1024×768 as the highest resolution, and then run Linux in a window,
rather than full screen, which deprives me of the "full" experience.

Recently I decided to download and install Ubuntu, and just for kicks, I decided I would try using VMWare Workstation
to host the OS. To make a long story short, it worked
perfectly. The OS runs at full resolution, which makes me very
happy.

Heck, even printing only took about 15 seconds to configure and send a print job.

So, if you’re planning on using a version of Linux in a virtual session
on your PC, give VMWare Workstation a shot. A free evaluation
version is available. I’m guessing I’ll be buying a license when
my eval time expires. At least the competition between VMWare and
Microsoft has resulted in a significant price reduction of their
respective products!

Posted from Firefox running on Ubuntu, running in VMWare Workstation, running under Windows XP SP 2.  Yeesh.

<span class="entry-utility-prep entry-utility-prep-cat-links">Posted in</span> Computers and Internet | Leave a comment

A fast win with eBay

A long time ago, shortly after they first came out, Deb and I purchased a 20" iMac.  We use it around the house, sometimes on my desk, sometimes on hers, and it’s always fun checking out how the other 3% lives.  However, we need to box up the machine for a little while in order to declutter our home.  Unfortunately, because we’re shy on space, we threw the original box out shortly after we brought it home.
 
eBay to the rescue!  It took about 10 seconds to find an empty box (with foam inserts) on eBay and use the Buy It Now button to buy it.
 
Net time invested – a couple of minutes (had to make sure that the local Apple store didn’t have a spare one laying around).
 
Wow, this whole Internet thing just might be worth something afterall…
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Interesting situation with an HP photosmart printer

I have an HP Photosmart 7760 printer on my desk for the occasional color printout, or the even more occasional photo printout.  Recently, it began printing very slowly.  It was taking 15 minutes or more just to print out a test page.  I spent quite a lot of time trying to troubleshoot this.  I uninstalled and reinstalled the print driver.  I disabled spooling.  I rebooted about 800 times, with various incantations between each reboot.
 
Eventually, I noticed that the Windows logo that prints on the test page was kind of washed out.  The printer was reporting that the color cartridge was half full, so I started to wonder if the nozzles on the cartridge were clogged or something.
 
I removed the color cartrige, and the test page printed very quickly, albeit in grey scale.  Aha!  We were getting close!  I put in the photo color cartrige, and the page printed quickly, thus proving that the problem was not in the printer itself, but rather something to do with the cartridge. 
 
Lacking better tools, I cleaned the head of the cartridge with a paper towel and some water (which is not the correct way to clean it I’m sure!), and while the printout got a bit better, it didn’t speed up to any significant amount.
 
Finally, I replaced the color cartridge (goodbye $30!), and that fixed the problem.
 
Total time to repair – 4 hours probably.  I was almost to the point where it would have been cheaper to simply buy a new printer!
 
Anyway, next time your printing gets wonky, remember that it could be the ink cartridge and not Windows!
 
Next up, a story on printing problems caused by Windows XP itself…
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Halo 2 on the PC to require Vista?!

Oh this is rich.  Bungie (aka Microsoft) has just announced that Halo 2 will require Windows Vista (aka Godot) to run.  While I can imagine that Microsoft wants to help drive sales of Vista, this isn’t going to be the way to do it.  I can just see the discussion at the sales counter when Joe Consumer goes to buy a copy of Halo 2 for the PC…
 
Clerk: Ah, I see you’ve chosen Halo 2!  Great choice.  Very nice for a three year old game.
Joe: Uhhh…
Clerk: Yeah, it was released on the original Xbox a long time ago, and Microsoft, er, Bungie, just got around to porting it to Windows.
Joe: Um, yeah, but it’s like $50, so it’s awesome, right?
Clerk: You bet!  So I’m guessing you bought a new PC in the last week?
Joe: Um, no, why?
Clerk: Oh, well, you see this requires Windows Vista.
Joe: What’s that?
Clerk: It’s the new version of Windows that just came out.  It requires a PC with 200 terrabytes of memory and 3 jigawatts of processor speed (editors note: this is what Joe Customer will think Clerk said).
Joe: Does that work on my XP machine I bought 3 years ago, and how much is it?
Clerk: It might, but only if you upgrade the video card, and add more memory.  The upgrade will cost either $100, $200 or $800 depending on which one of the seven versions of Vista you want…  Of course, the real thing to do is to buy a new game PC for $2000.
Joe: <putting Halo 2 back on the shelf>Yeah, okay, thanks.  I think I’ll just go buy a Sega Revolution for $200…
 
I guarantee you that if Bungie was still a standalone company, they wouldn’t be tying it to Vista.  It’s not a good business decision.  Three years after the release of Vista? Sure, when the vast majority of your user base has upgraded, but not in 2006 or 2007.  However if you’re Microsoft, you can try this, and maybe even get away with it. 
 
I for one won’t bother with Halo 2 for the PC.  Both because of this ludicrous Vista tying, and I don’t need another copy of a game that’s only 1/2 done.
<span class="entry-utility-prep entry-utility-prep-cat-links">Posted in</span> Games | Leave a comment