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April 2005 - Posts

Friday, April 29, 2005 7:48 PM

Vacation in progress

If you are trying to reach me over the next week, I will be unavailable. Many have asked me why I'm on vacation so much these past few weeks. Well, my wife has been in Oahu for the past 9 weeks doing a rotation at Kaiser Permanente. One of the things
Posted by omars | 3 Comments
Tuesday, April 26, 2005 11:21 PM

I'm not alone with my Comcast DVR woes

I'm not the only one who thinks the Comcast DVR with TV Guide software is buggy . I should call Comcast and ask for a refund. That will surely get them to notice the issues. Money talks...
Posted by omars | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, April 26, 2005 1:43 AM

Fixing Outlook Red "X" Problem

Every few months, Outlook 2003 will get into a situation where it will no longer render images in the preview pane or the message window. If you reply to the message, then you will see the image. Perplexed by the problem, I would take the brute force
Posted by omars | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, April 26, 2005 6:08 AM

Interesting things Jimmy did see

My good buddy, Jimmy (a.k.a. JimmyG) who no longer works for MS, spends all day taking spy photos of interesting things in Dubai, U.A.E. He happend to grab a pic of a very rare Mercedes G Class, and Microsoft's CEO walking with the Crown Prince of Dubai
Posted by omars | 2 Comments
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Monday, April 25, 2005 11:45 PM

New VP of HR for Microsoft

Lisa Brummel was just named Vice President of Human Resources at Microsoft. Previous to this role Lisa was Corporate Vice President of the Home and Retail division, which is where the Mac Business Unit has been located for the past few years (before that,
Posted by omars | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, April 26, 2005 2:10 AM

Photoshop CS2

First of all, a big shout out to Adobe for creating an awesome upgrade for Digital Camera owners. I still don't understand why you insist on installing Adobe ImageReady when I never use it and curse it when I accidentally double click a PNG and watch
Posted by omars | 3 Comments
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Saturday, April 23, 2005 3:30 AM

Office 2003 Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies

I can't even begin to explain how happy I am that we recently released the Office 2003 PIA download . Why am I excited? Just read this and you will understand. I've known about this for a while but I had to keep my mouth shut :-). Not being able to install
Posted by omars | 1 Comments
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Friday, April 22, 2005 10:22 PM

Media Center TV on PSP

I just found this app called Image Converter 2 made by Sony, that will convert a wide variety of video and photos to playback on the PSP. It supports DVR-MS, the file format that Windows Media Center records TV. It costs $19. Now all I need is a 1GB Memory
Posted by omars | 1 Comments
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Friday, April 22, 2005 5:35 PM

Adobe Photoshop CS2 in the mail!

Just got this email from Adobe. Wohooo! Your Adobe Store order has shipped! Product: Adobe Photoshop CS2 Upgrade for Windows Ship Date: April 21, 2005 Quantity: 1 Price: Price:$149.00 Item Subtotal: US$149.00
Posted by omars | 0 Comments
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Friday, April 22, 2005 12:19 AM

So long MPx

Motorola finally cancelled the MPx [via Steve Makofsky ]. I just pulled up this post I wrote last year on the subject: I remember when I used to see announcements or rumors of Pocket PC and Smartphone devices and I would get so excited. I'm at the point
Posted by omars | 0 Comments
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Saturday, April 16, 2005 8:41 PM

Greg on PDA/Phone devices

Greg Hughes has a great write up on a bunch of "smartphone" PDA type devices. I have never used a Blackberry, and probably never will because it requires that middleware be installed, and Microsoft just isn't going to do that. So I am stuck to chose between
Posted by omars | 5 Comments
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Saturday, April 16, 2005 8:29 PM

Zinio 3.0

Zinio released an updated version of their Magazine Reader. It's much improved over 2.0. One of the things I actually do religiously with my Tablet PC is read PC Magazine in Tablet mode. I can't tell you how cool it is to sit there and read the magazine,
Posted by omars | 1 Comments
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Friday, April 15, 2005 8:37 PM

PSP

Nooooo!!! I could not resist (sorry Steve ). I had to have one. Must purchase. Well, I was walking back from a Dr. Appt near Union Square 1 hour ago, and I figured I would stop by the Sony Store at the Metreon. If you are in need of a PSP and you live
Posted by omars | 2 Comments
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Friday, April 15, 2005 4:25 PM

Photshop Maximize Compatability

I just noticed this warning when I saved a file: So lets see. You are asking the user a question. Unchecking the checkbox above has no clear benefit to me. However, if I do uncheck it my file may not be compatible with future versions of Photoshop or
Posted by omars | 1 Comments
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Friday, April 15, 2005 4:05 AM

Uh oh

I just played with a friend's PSP . OMG it rocks. I have an Xbox and I play it like once a month. I have a feeling I would use a PSP a lot more. I could play in bed, on the plane or on the train. The last portable game device I used was an Atari Lynx
Posted by omars | 1 Comments
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Thursday, April 14, 2005 6:52 PM

Get Perpendicular

From a co-worker: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html A funny flash video of Hitachi's new Perpendicular drive technology. Very funny. I can't wait till I can purchase a 1 TB drive.
Posted by omars | 0 Comments
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Thursday, April 14, 2005 7:34 AM

Treo 650 Review Part 2

It's been a month now since I received my Treo 650, and I couldn't be more happy. There are some minor warts on this device, but I firmly believe this is the best and most usable PDA/Phone device I have used. It easily meets my needs better than any of
Posted by omars | 3 Comments
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Wednesday, April 13, 2005 6:01 AM

Dear Comcast

Dear Comcast, I have been using your new fangled High Definition PVR with two tunes for a few months now. Let me tell you, this is the buggiest piece of consumer electronics I have ever used (note: this is the version with the TV Guide Software, not the
Posted by omars | 7 Comments
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Monday, April 11, 2005 11:23 PM

Get to the root of an Explorer window

Found this great tip from Ed Bott . You can take advantage of the explorer.exe command line switches to scope a view to only contain the subfolders. For example: explorer.exe /e,/root,"C:\Windows" will open the Explorer Shell showing the Windows directory
Posted by omars | 0 Comments
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Monday, April 11, 2005 12:28 PM

Shutdown

Why doesn't Shutdown work? Shutting down Windows and Shutting down Outlook requires user intervention 80% of the time for me. Yes I run Add-ins in Outlook, so what? I also run software in Windows. I don't care that an Add-in might be holding an Outlook
Posted by omars | 9 Comments
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Sunday, April 10, 2005 1:23 PM

Wither the Audiovox 5600

Now I understand why Cingular hasn't launched the Audiovox 5600 Smartphone that AT&T was selling. Audiovox i s exiting the mobile phone business and selling to UTStarcom, Inc. Now I've never heard of UTStarcom, and I'm not sure this helps our effort
Posted by omars | 0 Comments
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Saturday, April 09, 2005 3:48 PM

Show/Hide Filenames in XP Thumbnails View

Did you know that if you hold down the SHIFT key when selecting Thumbnails View or opening a folder, the Filenames for the items will not be displayed? I didn't, but just found out because for some reason I had no filenames in any of my Thumbnails view
Posted by omars | 3 Comments
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Friday, April 08, 2005 10:35 PM

Microsoft Internal Recruiting

Is the tech job market heating up? Hell yes. In the last 4 months I've been cold called by 3 recruiters. Additionally, there is a lot of new headcount on the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus. However, since my time in Hotmail I've personally hired 2 folks
Posted by omars | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005 1:09 AM

Turbo Tax 2004

Well, this is the 6th year I've used TurboTax now. Each year I owe some federal tax, and each year TurboTax insists on printing out vouchers for estimated tax payments for the following year. They use the most conservative rule for determining if you
Posted by omars | 4 Comments
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005 1:05 PM

WikiSpam

I am getting a ton of LinkSpam on my dasBlog Wiki. It's driving me nuts. Like 3 times a day! In about a few days I'm going to hook up the same CAPTCHA that dasBlog has to FlexWiki and be done with them. The current antispam features of FlexWiki aren't
Posted by omars | 0 Comments
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Monday, April 04, 2005 12:53 AM

Think Outside Bluetooth Stowaway Travel Mouse

I picked up this little gem from amazon a few days ago and love it. Since my laptop has built in bluetooth, I was looking for a small travel mouse that also had a little switch so that I could turn it off when not in use (something that the Microsoft
Posted by omars | 4 Comments
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