My Insights

I have recently been noticing that whenever I try to install something from the Windows Live suite of software, I almost always end up spending more time with the installer than I should be. Let me explain…

Almost always, I get the following message when installing any Windows Live software- "Sorry, this is taking a little longer than expected. Please bear with us just a few more minutes."

The above message doesn’t sound bad but in a lot of cases it is a precursor to the following message- "To try to fix the problem, click ‘Try again later’ and we’ll add the installer to your desktop so you can easily restart it later."

Once you click "Try again later", the installer exits and I end up ‘trying again later’. Is it just me or has anybody else had a similar experience with installing windows live services?

There was an Anti-War protest on Wednesday (Mar 19 ‘07) in Washington DC. The protest coincided with the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq. Here are some pictures from outside our office.

Special Thanks to Eileen Tokunaga and Kevan Marvasti for being the field reporters out there!

UPDATE (From Eileen): "That building in the shots is where American Petroleum Institute is, that’s why it was such a hot spot for the protesters"

UPDATE 2: Here are some more pictures taken by Drew Patriss.

I use a personal laptop and a work computer on a regular basis and tend to browse the internet during down times. I also have a lot of bookmarks in Internet Explorer that I wish to access while I am browsing - regardless of which machine I am using. Therefore I looked into different products that could essentially synchronize my IE Favorites across different machines. Up until now, I’ve been using Zinkmo and that has worked flawlessly in the background for me.

However, I recently upgraded to the latest version of IE7 PRO and noticed that IE7Pro offers bookmarks syncing as an online service. I decided to try it out and it seems to work just as seamlessly as zinkmo and it doesn’t place an icon in the taskbar notification area like zinkmo does.

So for now, I’ll be uninstalling Zinkmo and trying out the IE7PRO bookmarks synchronization for a while.

BlueSoleil is a Bluetooth manager that I use for my computer. However, Blue Soleil adds a plug-in toolbar in Outlook that is really hard to get rid of.

Unchecking the toolbar in the view toolbar settings will only remove the toolbar for that particular session. The next time you start outlook, the add-in pops right back up

HOW TO REMOVE:
Outlook 2007
Tools > Trust Center > Add-ins > Manage COMM Add-ins > Go > Uncheck the BlueSoleil Add-in

Outlook 2000/2002/2003
Tools > Options > Other tab > Advanced Options button > Addin Manager COMM Addin

Who is Steven (Last Name Redacted)? Well see for yourself-

Why is he worth mentioning? Because he brought in the following delicacies to work one day … and I saw him eat them-

About a month ago, I downgraded to XP from Vista. This is after using Vista on a daily basis for close to a year.

WHY? Most avid windows users know that windows installations tend to get bloated. In my personal experience, I’ve had to redo my Windows installation every 1-2 years on a regular basis. So after about a year of Vista, things had gotten bloated - REALLY bloated. It got to the point where I couldn’t watch YouTube videos on my computer.

This is not something that I blame Microsoft for. I think Vista is definitely more advanced than XP and I even miss some features of Vista (such as integrated search in the start-menu) after I downgraded.

I DO however blame the lack of support from third-parties. Sony was slow to roll-out the HotKey utility software for my computer. This meant that I couldn’t turn down the volume on my laptop or change the screen brightness by pressing a button like I could on XP. The lack of Video driver support for my integrated ATI video card was also a big factor.

In part I also blame myself for being a little ambitious and installing Vista on a Pentium 4 machine with a little less than 1GB of RAM. I also had a hardware issue where my processor would downgrade from 3 GHz to 1.6 GHz when the computer got a little hot. This hardware issue was alleviated to some extent by cleaning the ventilation fans.

In any case, I am back on XP and loving the little utilities that I had lived without over the past year. I would love to go back to Vista once I have a strong enough machine. I recommend that if you are buying a laptop, buy one that is designed for Vista so as to minimize compatibility issues with respect to various utilities and drivers.

If you can see this post then the nameserver change has successfully propagated to your DNS.

The primary motivator for the move was storage space. I was paying 4.95/month with Ace-Host for 5GB of storage. I have now moved to Web Hosting Pad for 5.95/month and now have 1700GB (1.7TB) of storage!

 Since I was spending the day moving my site, I decided to upgrade my bloggin platform from MovableType 3 to MovableType 4. However, after a few internet searches in an effort to re-evaluate my faith in MovableType, I started to like Word Press much more. The major reason I decided to switch from Movable Type to Word Press was the sheer number of plugins and themes available for WordPress as opposed to MovableType.

 Anyways, I am confident that I made the right decisions regarding my web host and my blogging platform. Comments are welcome.