Year: 2007

Now in London!

After a very, very long trip my coworkers and I finally arrived in London today around 1 PM local time (so 6 AM back in Edmonton). It was an uneventful trip, which is good, but there was a lot of time wasting going on. It would have been so much better to have been on the direct flight!

It was my first time flying British Airways, and my first time in a Boeing 777. We got bumped up to the middle class section of the plane, so that was good. The flight attendants were really efficient and friendly. And the movie selection rocked! There was Harry Potter (not sure which one, didn’t watch it), Ratatouille, and Transformers. I thought the food packaging was much more intelligent than other flights I’ve been on too, but I could have just been tired/hungry.

We landed about 45 minutes later than planned, after some circling due to the weather conditions and air traffic. Customs was a breeze, and once through we took the tube to the hotel. It was easy enough, but it took quite a long time. We’re in an area of London known as Camden Town. It’s kind of like Whyte Ave on steroids! There are so many people milling about. The first thing I noticed once we got outside was the smell of the air – it reminds me vaguely of Seattle. Our hotel (Holiday Inn) is really nice, so that’s one less thing to worry about.

It was above zero here today, but it was actually quite chilly with the wind (and it rained earlier). We wandered around the markets and stuff for a bit, and went to a little restaurant called Solo for dinner. And then followed that up with a coffee at Caffe Nero. Now I’m back at the hotel, obviously, and feeling very sleepy. It’s amazing how draining a flight can be.

I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting in the evening, as Internet access is actually quite pricey! I’m too cheap to pay $8 CDN for an hour every night, so I’ll probably write offline and post at work 🙂

I’m looking forward to getting to work tomorrow…after I get some sleep tonight, that is.

Photos are here, and I’ll add all new ones to that set too.

Off to London

I’m leaving here in a few minutes for London. Well, eventually. I go to Calgary first, where I have a huge seven hour layover, then it’s on to London! Clearly I will be booking my own flight next time!

I’ll update again when I have arrived, if not sooner.

So long 712!

Brand New BroomAs you may know, for the last few weeks Dickson and I have been moving out of the office. It was early 2005 that we decided we needed a central place to setup shop and started looking around for one. We ended up at the Empire Building on 101st Street and Jasper Avenue, a building I had been in before. We moved into Suite 712 in late April. There were lots of reasons we chose this particular building – among other things, it is secure, renovated, and well-connected (can get any kind of Internet connection in there).

The biggest positive about the location is also the biggest negative – you can’t get more central than the Empire Building.

I loved being right smack dab in the middle of downtown Edmonton. The Jasper Avenue address looks good on marketing materials, for one thing. It feels like the place a business should be. More importantly, it is easy to get to from pretty much anywhere in the city. The office was more than a place for Dickson and I to code…it became a meeting place for us and our friends. Going to the hockey game? Let’s meet at the office and take the train. Out for dinner? Meet at the office and then we’ll go. It was quite handy!

But being so central has it’s drawbacks too. Parking is pretty much nonexistent…I don’t want to think about how much gas I wasted driving around looking for a meter. There’s also the issue of Edmonton’s street people – not a major problem, but sometimes an annoyance. And the biggest drawback of all – cost.

That’s the main reason we decided to bid farewell to the office. We’ve changed quite a bit in the last two and a half years, and we just couldn’t justify the cost any longer. Our servers are in a data center now, and we’ve been working remotely more and more frequently. As an Internet+software company, we don’t really have visitors in meatspace.

That said, I still think there is value in having an office, and we may find a new one before long. Being in the same room usually can’t be beat when you’re working to solve a problem. We certainly accomplished a lot in 712 over the years. A new office will certainly be somewhere else though, with a smaller monthly bill and lots of free parking 🙂

Moving is hard work. It feels like we have been moving out of the office for months! Tonight I finally handed over the keys and access cards, making it official. The broom in the picture above was one of the last things we moved out. It’s kind of funny, because neither of us remembers buying it, and it clearly hasn’t been used (the building had a cleaning staff). Moving is definitely a good opportunity to clean house.

Now it’s finally finished. Nothing left to move, and we’re officially a virtual company again. So long 712!

Outlook 2007 on Vista with RDC is driving me crazy

I have written about Outlook 2007 here before, usually in relation to performance. The hotfix that was released back in April has mostly fixed that problem for me, but I have a new problem.

Outlook 2007 on Windows Vista is a piece of shit when it comes to accessing it through Remote Desktop.

I haven’t been able to take a screenshot of this yet, but essentially it renders the computer (or at least the remote desktop session) unusable. Outlook 2007 works fine for a while, but minimize it one too many times, and the next time you try to bring it up the screen is washed out with windows appearing all over the place and everything is just garbled. You can’t see the start bar either, so figuring out how to close it or get rid of it is problematic. I have to close the session and sometimes restart Outlook on the actual computer before it’ll work again.

I don’t understand what the problem is. I have tried messing with all of the RDC settings, and I am running the latest version. All the updates are installed, on both machines. The only application I have this issue with is Outlook 2007. A search on Google for ‘why does outlook 2007 on vista suck using remote desktop‘ didn’t return anything helpful either. Heh.

It’s driving me crazy. I love Outlook, but the latest version has been a real pain in the ass at times.

Any suggestions on this one? Any softies out there reading this? Help!

One Messenger Account, Multiple Computers

Post ImageMy favorite Skype feature appears to be coming to the next version of Windows Live Messenger! According to a cached LiveSide post, Windows Live Messenger 9 will get something called "Multiple Points of Presence Support". Essentially that means you can sign in using the same account from multiple places. Currently, if you sign in on your desktop and then try to sign in on your laptop, your desktop gets disconnected. Skype has had the ability to sign in from multiple computers for quite a while, and I absolutely love it!

I can’t believe it has taken Microsoft so long to add support for this feature. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has created multiple Live accounts just so that I can be signed in on multiple computers. That means you have multiple contact lists though, which kind of sucks. With this feature, and the ability to link Live accounts (released last month) I expect there will be a significant drop in the number of accounts in use.

Another obvious feature coming to WLM9 is support for hyperlinked status messages. Basically that means you’ll be able to click the Twitter link I always have in my status 🙂

Read: ZDNet

Notes for 11/25/2007

Here are my weekly notes:

  • Happy Birthday Andrew and Jane and Ana!
  • I really like the new Flickr Uploadr beta. Check it out here.
  • Interesting article on how Apple’s iPod commercials are making stars out of new bands and artists. Apple is the new MTV.
  • From the "copyright-laws-are-stupid" department: "We are living in the "infringement age," where it’s impossible not to infringe on copyrights every single day — yet many people still don’t understand why it makes sense to change copyright laws to make them more reasonable." Read about the research paper here.
  • Who would have thought that simple typos could be such big business?
  • Striking stagehands in NY resumed talks with producers today. I hope they come to an agreement soon – we have tickets for Wicked!
  • December is going to be a crazy month for me. I’ll be in Edmonton for just a single week! On the 1st I fly to London, on the 16th I head to New York, and on the 23rd I am going home for Christmas to Yellowknife.

Two Years of Xbox 360, Five Years of Xbox Live

Post Image It was two years ago today that I lined up at Best Buy very early in the morning to be among the first to snag the Xbox 360 gaming console. So, happy birthday Xbox 360! Kind of hard to believe it has been that long.

Last Thursday was another anniversary – the fifth for Xbox Live! It’s even harder to believe the service has been around that long – it launched exactly a year after the original Xbox console. My latest article at last100 examines Xbox Live:

Xbox Live started out as a multiplayer gaming network, but today the 8 million users with Live accounts do much more than just play games. Users can download movies and television shows, chat with friends, and more. Even Microsoft now describes the service as a “comprehensive unified online entertainment network”. Marketing-speak at its finest, but it’s true – Xbox Live is a key component of Microsoft’s connected entertainment vision. In this post we look at the state of Xbox Live today, and explore some of the ways Microsoft will likely enhance it in the future.

Give it a read, and let me know what you think!

Read: last100

Goodbye optical discs, hello write-once memory cards!

Post Image Engadget posted yesterday about 1GB write-once memory cards from SanDisk that would cost around $5.99 USD. My first thought was that it would never work. Why buy a memory card you can only use once for $6 when you can buy a rewritable one for as little as say $15? It wouldn’t make sense. But after reading the comments and thinking about it a bit more, it became clear that write-once and rewritable memory cards could serve very different markets, just as CD-R/CD-RW and DVD-R/DVD-RW do today.

For the digital camera user, a write-once memory card doesn’t make much sense, unless it comes as part of a "disposable" camera. Otherwise, you’re likely going to want to stick to a memory card that you can fill up, erase, and fill up again.

For digital media however, write-once memory cards do make sense. Think about albums, movies, and games – they all come on optical media. And as handy as they are, CDs and DVDs are still pretty big as far as technology goes. Each disc is 12 cm across, which means you need a pretty big device in order to read them. Imagine how big your digital camera would be if it saved data on a CD! And yes, I realize there are mini-CDs and DVDs, but they have drastically reduced capacities.

By comparison, an SD card is about 3cm x 2cm. Much, much smaller. They can fit inside all sorts of devices, including phones, cameras, and digital media players. I’d rather have digital media like music, movies, and games come to me via the cloud, but if I have to purchase it in physical form, I’d much rather have a smaller SD card than a relatively large DVD.

Write-once memory cards make the most sense for data archival, however. I’m sure I’m not the only one that burns write-once DVDs as part of my backup regimen. How cool would it be to use tiny little memory cards instead? Rewritable memory cards have already far surpassed the capacity of DVDs, so I imagine that write-once memory cards won’t be far behind. Plus, backing up data to a memory card is faster and less error-prone than burning a disc. And when you’re done? Memory cards take up a lot less room than discs do, so you can store many more of them.

The one advantage that DVDs have over write-once memory cards, of course, is cost. You can buy DVDs for around 35 cents per disc. I don’t expect that advantage will last long. When production of write-once memory cards ramps up and technology improves, the cost will come down dramatically. Okay maybe one more advantage of DVDs is that they are harder to lose, but that depends on how you look at it 🙂

My initial negative impression is long gone – I’m looking forward to write-once memory cards!

Read: Engadget

Facebook dropping "is" from status updates

Post ImageI knew something was up! For the last week or so, all text message updates I have received from Facebook say something like "Kimberly Male is is eating dinner" – note the double "is". Also, I got a strange message from Facebook saying that texts were being turned off because I hadn’t sent a text to Facebook in the last 30 days. I had to go into my account and turn it on again, twice, before it started working.

The point is, they’ve been tinkering.

And now it appears the grammatically inflexible status updates feature is finally going to be fixed. Ding dong, the "is" is dead!

My sister gave me the heads up tonight that she could backspace the "is" from the input box, and then type whatever she wanted. I just checked it out, and I can do the same! Looks like the mobile site still contains a hardcoded "is" however.

The removal is obviously not yet complete, but hopefully it will be soon. Keep an eye out here, here, and here for updates.

Read: Facebook

More on the Amazon Kindle

Post ImageNow that Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader has actually launched, there is a lot more information available out on the web. And after reading a bunch of it, I am less excited than I was yesterday. Here are a few links that may be of interest if you’re curious about the Kindle:

I dunno. Crippled wireless, lousy document support, DRM, a $400 price tag, and it’s still ugly. The Kindle sounds less and less impressive with each article I read.

Here’s to hoping that version 2 is better!