shahine.com/omar/

Scott blogged about a few cool shortuct launchers for Windows. Personally I’ve used SlickRun the longest, followed by AppRocket and recently tried Colibri. Colibri is very slick but could use some features like Directory Browsing. AppRocket hasn’t been really updated in a while and could also use a few new features (like showing folder pathnames when multiple folder matches exist).

update: looks like Launchy is a good mix of Colibri and AppRocket with a really slick UX.

Over the last few weeks my desire and energy level to blog was extremely limited. I basically pushed aside any and all TV, Blogging, RSS reading, and a whole lot of other stuff to focus all my available energies on work and moving.

Lets see what’s happened in this time frame.

• Dick (our dev manager and good buddy) and I gave a talk at Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence & Trustworthy Computing Form on Building Windows Live Mail with Scrum… we also participated in a panel on Agile Development at Microsoft.
• Looks like they posted the winners for the Microsoft Internal OneNote PowerToy Contest .
• A few weeks back Robert Scoble came down to film what would be his last video interview of the Windows Live Mail team :-(. I can’t believe that the first video we did has close to 200,000 views. Wow.
• Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft. That’s really too bad. Sean has one of the better posts about Robert, and I feel much the same way. Robert will be working down the street from my new house, so I look forward to hanging out with him more. I really wish him the best of luck.
• Lora and I are expecting our first baby in November!!! (thought I would drop that in there). I’m taking Lora to the Big Island in 2 weeks for our final vacation as DINKs (Dual Income No Kids).

Hope to return to my regularly scheduled programming now. Only 5000 RSS items to catch up on.

Today I got to have lunch at the Googleplex with Jon Perlow and some folks who work on GMail (which Jon works on). We’ve been trying to do this forever (I met Jon at ETech and he is a former Microsofty and friend of many of my co-workers) and we just got around to it.

The Googleplex is about a 3 minute drive from the Microsoft SVC Campus (where I work). The building I ate in was a former SGI building back in the day (before they went out of business). Anyway I had a good time and here are my impressions:

• Lots of young folks
• Felt like a College Campus
• Lots of positive energy. Reminds me of eating at the Apple Campus.
• The food reminds me a lot of the stuff they have at Whole Foods
• All the food is free. This was bizarre to me. I knew that before hand, but it was weird to go grab what I wanted and just start eating it.

I have to admit. I can understand the allure of working there now that I’ve visited. It felt a lot like visiting a college for the first time when you were a senior in high school on a bright sunny day… everyone seems happy and you could see yourself happy there too.

Anyway, it was a fun lunch, and now I need to do that again except this time with my former co-worker Scott Knaster who I promised to have lunch with a really long time ago!

This reminds me of when we used the QuickTime SDK in Mac IE 5 for our “media bar” feature and we had to remove it at the last minute because Apple got pissed off at us for playing video in IE and bypassing the QuickTime player. Sheesh.

If Adobe cared about PDF, Acrobat Reader wouldn’t be such a slow, uninteresting program.

I have to say, the AirPort Express is a versatile little guy. Today I was able to configure it to talk to my Samsung Laser Printer, and then I untethered it from my Ethernet connection, joined it to my wireless network, and then put it, along with the printer on the other side of my office. Works great.

Well tomorrow is moving day. I really hate moving. This time around I hired movers to pack everything up. Well not everything, but almost everything.

To make matters worse, Lora is doing her last rotation as a Resident Physician at UCSF and it’s Oncology, which is the worst rotation of all. She works 6-7 days a week from 6 am to 7pm and most of the patients are really very sick. So it’s just myself and the cat packing things up.

Anyway, I thought I would be in San Francisco for at least 7 years, but 4 will do. I’ve really enjoyed living in San Francisco, but I’m not going to miss the weather this summer. I will miss the amazing views we have from our apartment, the south beach neighborhood, and of course all our friends. But we are really looking forward to the burbs and I’m looking forward to a 15 minute commute to the office.

The last 4 weeks have quite possibly been the most stressful in my life. Buying a new home before you’ve sold your current home, and then dealing with open houses, and selling the new home don’t do wonders for your nerves. Especially as you watch your short term funds dry up as you try to manage all the temporary debt you take on . I’m looking forward to this summer when I can look back on all this as a piece of my history.

I've hopelessley wated forever for Motorola to release the Q, and now it appears Verizon will prevent the phone from going GSM for at least 6 months. Even more pathetic is the fact that the Q is not shipping with the MSFP. How lamo is that since MSFP was RTM'ed back in December and 5 months later, you get the older OS with the brand new much delayed phone. Ridiculous.

Anyow, the new hotness is the Fujitsu Q.

I've been really quite on this for some time. I've watched and read mini-msft since the first post. Last week Lisa Brummel announced some sweeping changes to the review model and compensation system for high performers. While many people have pointed to mini as possibly being a catalyst for this change, I know otherwise. There have been a lot of other people that have spent countless hours meeting, writing, and lobbying our execs to change the system. One of those folks is Bubba. I'd like to think that our many lunches, discussions etc have also helped a great deal, but Bubba deserves a lot of credit for really doing something about the situation and finding a bunch of like minded individuals within Microsoft to help him with the process.

I've never felt good about the fact that mini's blog results in a lot of our dirty laundry being aired in public. But I don't feel as bad knowing that there is a positive force within Microsoft that resulted in what I feel are fantastic changes for employees.

At the same time I am personally very disappointed at our leadership team for the lack of messaging, PR, marketing or whatever you want to call it that you do with the street that resulted in a 5 dollar slide in the stock price. I'm not impressed with our new CFO.

If you can read this post, then Word 2007 can successfully post to dasBlog. Why do I love this? Cause I hate the spell checker in every other applications (including BlogJet). Office has hands down the best proofing tools out there (and we use them in Windows Live Mail as well).

BTW – I’m currently on vacation. Right now I’m on Fripp Island in South Carolina attending a wedding. Earlier this week Lora and I spent time in Charleston, SC and Washington, DC.

update: looks like Word is passing in the dateTime in this format:

<member><name>dateCreated</name><value><dateTime.iso8601>2006-05-13T14:59:40Z</dateTime.iso8601></value></member>

Which dasBlog doesn't like. The format should be:

20060513T14:59:40

Stephen Colbert roasting Bush.

Bush roasting Bush.

All at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

Very very soon, our M6 release of Windows Live Mail will have support for Firefox 1.5 on par with our IE 6, and IE 7 support (minus a feature or two we haven’t gotten working yet).

We agree with Scoble here. Firefox support is important and we’re glad we finally have it.

What happens when you take two different brands, and combine them together? MSN Live. Nice I didn’t even see that one coming. Not even CNet gets our branding strategy.

I’m just going to start calling our service Windows Live Hotmail to clear things up.