On an unrelated note, Yahoo! just launched their hosting plan for $11.95 a month for unlimited storage.  I think there are upload limits of some sort to prevent people from totally abusing it, but for my purposes, it is unlimited.   I was on their legacy "standard web hosting" which was $19.95 for 10GB storage, but I switched over this weekend.  This new deal is screaming freakin' deal.  Aside from all theeislers.com subdomains having 403 errors for about 12-14 hours, it was smooth as a zipper, as my son would say.

Okay, back to email.  Still lovin' Live Writer!  Also lovin' the fact that Entourage supports accessing Exchange via https://blah.blah.com so no VPN required!  I have an Alienware gaming PC with a 30" monitor and one of the new 24" iMacs side by side in my home office, and so I spin 25 degrees in my chair to use one or the other - it is a pretty sweet setup.

I was pretty skeptical it would be useful for me - I assumed it would only target Live Spaces and Sharepoint.  I was wrong, wrong, wrong - I went down the "other weblog" path and after typing in my Movable Type info, not only did Live Writer do the right thing, it even went and detected my style so that my WYSIWYG editing is exactly in the style of my blog.  Very cool.

After passing the first test (configuring), next test was photos.  My pet peeve of all blogging software for Mac or Windows is the lack of good photo support (at least good photo support that also works with 3rd party blog solutions like Movable Type).  While seemingly easy, I have to date not found any software besides RocketPost that works well with photos and Movable Type.  My wish list is a simple one:

• Auto builds thumbnails and larger images (and remembers the sizes I want to use - I don't want to set them every time)
• Supports Drag and Drop  
• Supports effects for image presentation (like drop shadow) and for the image itself (sepia, black and white) (heck, this wasn't even ON my wish list before, but Live Writer put it there)

The only knock (and it is a small one) on Live Writer is that you can't change the default effect, so if you don't want drop shadow around your photo, you have to change it every time you publish a photo.   At first I thought you couldn't control the default sizes, and while you technically can't (the inline photo is always small and the larger photo is always medium), you can click on "advanced" when editing a photo, click on the triangle with a line under it, and then change the default maximum size of small, medium and large photos - which is the same thing, albeit a little hard to discover.

Other stuff I loved:

• As I edit this, I am marveling at how much I LOVE that I am editing in the style of my blog.  It is super, super cool. 
• Web Preview is also super cool - it shows you exactly how your post will look integrated into your full blog page.
• You can insert all the usual suspects (hyperlinks, pictures, maps, tags, video) but they also have plugins - I gave a Flickr plugin a quick spin, and it was pretty cool (albeit it wouldn't let me log onto my Flickr account and so I couldn't see any of my images as they are all private).  And the "Insert Current iTunes Song" plugin is nifty.  I click it, and out comes: While writing this, I was listening to "Lookin' Out My Backdoor" by Creedence Clearwater Revival

I've completely switched over - this ill-attended blog and my family blog are now being published via Live Writer on Windows.  While yes I work for Microsoft in MacBU, I use the best tool for the job I have at hand, regardless of who makes it - and Windows + Live Writer is a home run in my book.

I took the below photos Sunday afternoon before Macworld started. Our marketing team  did a fantastic job:

The best part of the entire experience, though, has to be the Pizza Tracker - a real time page that shows the by the minute status of my pizza. Matthew put it in the oven at 4:27pm, apparently. And wait! while I was typing, I Got It Heatwaved - "we packaged you order and placed in a warm HeatWave bag at 4:33pm". And wait there's more - I Got It On The Way - "our delivery expert, Octavio, left the store with your order at 4:35pm". I can't blog about it as fast as it is happening, it would seem.

Damn cool.

We’re confident there are NO more children inside Word or any other Office code, for that matter.

:-) TGIF!

If I had to pick a highlight for the week, though (and it's tough), it was Macworld Live! with David Pogue. It is a funny highlight for me to pick given how much I stress before public speaking events, but once the time was there and I was actually talking to David, it was great - I really enjoyed our conversation.

Lots of cool stuff at the keynote - I'm excited to check out the new AppleTV interface and I'm really jazzed about the new iPhone update that lets me clean up my home screen. The new MacBook Air is a way cool achievement and a thing of beauty, although to be honest, I'm likely to trade my MacBook in for tricked out MacBook Pro - my poor MacBook already screams in consternation every time I run Civ 4 on it, never mind more demanding games. Keeping score, I got 4 out of 10 things in my keynote wishlist, which ain't bad. Still holding out for a 3G iPhone!

On an unrelated note, on Friday when I got back from Macworld I swung by the AT&T store and upgraded my Samsung Blackjack to a Blackjack II and it kicks some serious ass - but more on that for another post.

1. Less than 3 pound notebook. I love my Macbook but it is 5 pounds!
2. Hi-def video content on iTunes
3. NBC shows back on iTunes
4. Hi-def DVD drives in the whole Mac line
5. Apple TV hardware refresh: 1080p out and a hi-def DVD drive. Oh, and an option to get the 300gb 2.5" drive, too. I dislike manually upgrading
6. Ability to access the iTunes store from my Apple TVs
7. iPod Touch with a hard drive - I want to be able to carry all my movies again!
8. 3G iPhone - please, please, please have mercy and get me off edge!
9. iPhone with 16GB or even better 32GB
10. Quad SLI ATI Radeon HD 3800 or NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra gaming cards in the Mac Pro (heck, throw terabyte drives in as an option too)

Can't wait to hear what's new!

The reviews of Office: mac 2008 have started to appear the past couple of days, and I think it is fair to say that folks generally like what they see. The below isn't a complete list, but it is a decent sample. January 15th here we come!

January 3rd:

• Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal: New Office for Macs Speeds Up Programs, Integrates Formats
• Stephen H. Wildstrom, Business Week: Microsoft and Mac, Happy Together

January 2nd:

• Macworld.com has a very detailed overview:
  • Jim Dalrymple: With release looming, Microsoft previews Office 2008
  • Tom Negrino: First Look: Entourage 2008
  • Rob Griffiths: First Look: Excel 2008
  • Franklin N. Tessler: First Look: PowerPoint 2008
  • Jeffery Battersby: First Look: Word 2008
• Michael J. Miller, PCMag.com: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
• Wilson Rothman, Gizmodo.com: First Hands On: Microsoft Office for Mac 2008

I don’t have internet access at home right now (a rant too long to take time for here) and I don’t have a camera with me, so no pictures – sorry.

Blogging woes aside, the good news is that we released to manufacturing last Wednesday. Hoo-freakin'-ray! And even more good news is that as of Friday, a fair number of boxes were already assembled and we are ahead of where we need to be at to have boxes in the hands of our distributors. Boxes go off to our various distributors late December/early January and then bam! On the shelves in the U.S. & Canada on January 15th. U.K. English, Japanese and French (other than Canada, who get it on the 15th) will be available January 16th, with other languages following throughout the quarter. If going to your favorite store on the 15th/16th it isn't your style, you can preorder it from your favorite online retailer (avoid the lines AND simplify your work, baby! )

Here are some pictures from around our halls (the whole set is here). You'll see similar signage (we've tweaked the language a little on some of these) at Macworld in January, if you go. See ya later!

I have a 4 and a half year old boy named Duncan and an almost 7 year old boy named Angus and I love them both with all my heart. The demands of my job mean that I am only around them for about an hour and a half in the morning during the week – I typically don’t get home until long after they are asleep. And those 90 minutes are harried - we all tend to wake up around 7am, and then it is a mad dash of a blood test & insulin for Angus (he was diagnosed with type 1 (aka juvenile) diabetes last December), then KT & I have to create two breakfasts, two snacks, and two lunches and then I have to shower, shave, dress and roar out the door by 8:20 so they can be at school at 8:30. So on weekends the boys and I make up for lost time during the week by doing what I dubbed years ago "boys day out". We do things like go to parks & playgrounds, we ride the ferry, we explore the Seattle Center, we go to the zoo or the aquarium, we visit the Lego store (I should blog about my Lego habit some day. I have… um… lots), sometimes we go to my office so I can catch up, and oh yes… and sometimes we go to the Apple store.

This Sunday was one of those Apple store trips. Like anyone who paid $600 for an iPhone (for two iPhones in my case) and then saw the price drop to $400 a couple of months later, I was irritated. However, I realized that if I had it to do all over again, it was worth the extra money to experience the early adopter excitement - so I got over my irritation pretty quickly. And then I put two and two together and I realized that I had not one, but two iPhone rebates pending – so a brand spankin' new 8GB iPod nano was a now a freebie. As Mr. Burns from the Simpsons would say.... Exxxxxxcellent!

My spankin' new nano is cool – I love how surreally thin it is, I love the look of the anodized aluminum and polished stainless steel, and I love the bright screen. Oh, and I love that I can drop it in the parking lot and barely scratch it (a big oops! yesterday morning). But most surprising to me is how usable it is as a video device. I was skeptical – after using the iPhone for video, I swore I would never use my iPod again for video because I loved the screen size of the iPhone - and the nano’s screen is even smaller than my iPod. However, on my flight to San Jose yesterday morning, I decided to check it out and I watched an episode of CSI: Miami (gotta love David Caruso!) and it was great. The nano is so light that you can hold it forever, and the screen, as it turns out, is big enough. It's no iPhone or iPod Touch, but it is an OK size. I did get irritated by the fact that it was about a gazillion clicks to move between full screen and wide screen (and you have to stop watching the video to do it) when it is a double tap of my finger (without leaving the video) on my iPhone, but that was the only negative part of the experience.

I also have a new 24” iMac (I frickin' LOVE my job!), but more on that later.

nano-nano!

There were a couple of things that were not secret – like Microsoft Surface, which I have to say, is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. When I first came to Microsoft at the beginning of April, my temporary office happened to be right in the middle of the Surface team while they were assembling the hardware and getting ready for their launch event. I got a chance to play with it furtively late at night and I thought it was cool then even before they had it fully baked. It keeps getting cooler every time I see it – the interface is really a breakthrough idea.

The other not-secret thing was Microsoft Sync. Last time I had something in my car from Microsoft was the AutoPC back in the late 90s, which while a neat idea, was a little ahead of its time. Well it’s 2007 and Sync kicks ASS! I was blown away by how well everything just worked - I paired my iPhone in about 30 seconds, and suddenly my contact list was integrated into the car. The voice recognition is terrific - I didn't have to train it, it was a super noisy environment, and random names from the phone book worked great. If you plug in a Zune or an iPod/iPhone (or a 'Play From Device' player or even a portable USB harddrive), you get the same cool interface for music as for contacts – your whole catalog of music is available via voice control, including the ability to jump straight to an artist or song. I have a dealer installed iPod interface in my car and the interface is HORRIBLE. I really frickin' hate it, whereas the Sync interface rocks. All that, and the thing you plug your device into is USB and so your device charges while you drive. This is double-extra cool with an iPhone since you don’t have to worry about how long you talk and all your music is right there.

All that cool stuff, and I got a parking spot in the garage literally right under the science fair. It took me exactly 30 seconds to get from my car to the event. Sweeeeet!

When terabyte drives were announced, I figured that was the milestone to upgrade my storage world. But having had a double drive failure in my RAID 50 config (and as luck would have it, one drive failed in one RAID 5 stripe and one failed in the other) and having sat around biting my nails for a day and a half hoping the rebuild would finish before another drive failed, I was unwilling to move to terabyte drives (with 3+ day rebuilds once they were full) until RAID 6 was available. RAID 6 in hardware is the ultimate in coolness for large drives - 2 parity drives instead of 1, so you can sustain 2 drive failures and keep on ticking.

Tonight I did my monthly troll of Promise's web site to see if they had a 15+ drive RAID 6 appliance available, and sure enough, they did - the M610p is out, with 16 hot swap slots and support for RAID 6 and the Hitachi terabyte drive. And with the terabyte drives being only $329 from ZipZoomFly (a great price), the 17 drives I'd need (16 + a spare) would cost a mere $5,593. So with the M610p around $4000, all I need is $9,600 laying around to have 13TB of storage (2 drives for parity + a hot spare - never leave home without a hot spare in your storage array).

So it looks like I'm just gonna be almost out of storage for the forseeable future. Sigh. I hate waiting.

So I’m writing a mail to my team last night and I used the phrase “Ship it”. Well, all hell breaks loose with Skippy and he starts singing a variant of “Whip It” by Devo in my head NON STOP last night and through the day. So for your (quasi-)amusement, Skippy, the drunken SNL cast member living in my head, brings you “Ship It”, with apologies to Devo for my abuse of the lyrics. Oh, and for those of you young 'uns who don't remember Devo, you can hear the song and see their stylin' hats and outfits on this video.

I gotta stop staying up until 2am the nights before I fly to SVC.

=DATE(2007,3,30+(7*365.242199-(DATE(2000,2,1)-DATE(1993,6,28))))

It turns out I missed it: it was August 24th. (Technically, it was August 24.69539, but I'm going with the 24th)

Happy 7 years to me - it only took me 14 years, 1 month, 26 days and 4 hours (or so) to get there.