shahine.com/omar/

My readership went from ~2,000 readers to ~3,000.

Here is what things looked like on Feb 15th.

And on Feb 16th.

Looks like FeedBurner is now reporting on Google Reader's subscribers. Cool.

Now that I am running Vista on all my machines I'm much more aware of all the hard drive clanking going on around me. On XP my machines would eventually get to a "resting point" where the machine would stop doing stuff.

On Vista it seems like "stuff" is always happening. I'm beginning to wonder just how much Mean Time To Failure is a number we might pay attention to for hard disks.

Anyway, my buddy Mike Fullerton posted a nice entry on how to find out just what the heck your hard drive is doing.

The big offenders on my computer?

1. FolderShare
2. Windows Live OneCare
3. SearchIndexer
4. Sidebar
5. Outlook

#3 and #5 seem to tag team together in a WWE Smackdown on the hard drive.

As much as I LOVE Slickrun, I have yet to install it on Vista. Why? Well because of the awesome start menu.

Now that Start++ is out, it brings some of the Slickrun functionality to Vista... must... try... it... out.

[via Tim Marman]

Well I've had my new ThinkPad for a few days now and have some thoughts on it.

Generally I like this laptop a lot. Installing Vista was a breeze. It looks very utilitarian and is a bit larger than I would have hoped (I've gotten really used to 3lb subnotebooks). But I don't want to compromise performance at this point so a fast Core 2 Duo and a 7200 RPM drive are in... I'll go back to subnotebook when Intel's new 45nm chips are out.

I wish the LCD was widescreen (like 13 inches) and that it was LED backlit and had a glossy finish. But that's about the only nit that I have. LED backlit screen would save some battery life.

The LED status icons are very functional. The BIOS is easy to use (I had to set that up to turn on the Trusted Platform Module and Hardware Vitalization) for BitLocker and Virtual PC 2007 respectively.

The keyboard is fantastic as is the tactile feel of all the buttons, trackpad and trackpoint device. Lenovo/IBM has always made the best trackpoint devices IMHO.

The laptop feels very solid. No flex anywhere. It's EXTREMLEY fast. I mean this think smokes my desktop machines.

Running Vista has been a breeze. Other than setting up BitLocker (more on that nightmare later) I basically did a clean install of Vista, then downloaded a single application called ThinkVantage System Update, and that program did all the work of downloading all the required, recommended and optional components and craplets . Big Kudos to Lenovo for creating a single unified application to update, download and install all the things required to utilize the enhancements on the laptop (like the volume buttons, trackpoint, fingerprint reader etc).

I would like to point out that the Lenovo craplets are pretty crap free. I mean these things take advantage of Vista. For example, look at this nifty Windows Mobility Center customization.

Nice integration! There are other nice touches like this.... but Lenovo gets big kudos for doing things properly. I'm also really impressed with their battery charging optimization that extends the life of your battery by not charging it if it's got more than 96% juice.

This is also the first laptop fingerprint reader I've used that doesn't suck and works reliably from the welcome screen before and after standby. I like using my finger to login to the computer.

Battery Life is decent but no where near the 5.5 hours I got with my Fujitsu P7120. So far I'm getting close to 4 hours with the 9 cell battery. This is with heavy usage of WiFi and Hard Disk.

OH, BTW, the Lenovo folks get mad props for blogging. It's no wonder they have the best PC Laptop Brand.

I think I might be stuck to this brand. It makes me feel happy and not pissed off. 

Today is my last day of Parental Leave. I go back to work on Monday (in a few hours). In many ways I'm really sad, but at the same time I'm glad to be headed back to work. I've been thinking about what I've learned in the past 8 weeks and how I think I will change things.

It turns out that 8 weeks is enough time that you can really pull back from work and not need to think or worry about it. When I go back I feel like I'll be starting with a clean slate. After 8 years at Microsoft it's a nice feeling.

Anyway here it is.

• Not a lot of men get or take this much Parental Leave. When people asked me what I was doing most of them were surprised or amazed. I was pretty much the only "dad" with a infant when I was out and about.
• The first 3 months of caring for a child are simply the hardest thing I've ever done. Our life has changed in many ways, but none of the changes are things I regret in any way. Life is just "different".
• I've gotten closer to my family in ways that simply weren't possible before. Having a child has really brought together our two nuclear families and they have been amazing in supporting us, visiting, and helping in countless ways. I'm really thankful and happy about this part. We could not have gotten where we are without their involvement in our lives. At the same time I think our daughter has really had a profound impact on their lives as well.
• The last 3 weeks have been amazing as our daughter has started to really interact with us; smile, giggle, grab, play and eat/sleep well.
• Not working is more than a full time job. I woke up every morning at 7 am and had a completely full day every day. It was harder work than going to work. I have a new found respect for stay at home parents. I completed a number of significant projects that I'll blog about later and it was nice to have some whitespace to do so.
• I've decided that jewelry was invented as a way for men to compensate for the significant hardship that pregnancy and nursing is. Having your body change over 10 months and then try and get back to normal is simply not easy and men get off easy. I can't understand how my wife must have felt and feels, but let me tell you... giving birth and being a mom is hard work with a significant physical, mental and emotional cost.
• Being home all day makes it really easy to get stuff done at home. Scheduling service appointments and such is way easier since you don't have to stress about being home and missing work.
• The Email behavior that I experience at work is simply a tax that is unnecessarily high. I've realized that too many of my cycles are spent not being productive and simply falling into a trap of just passively working... basically not doing things I need to do because it's too easy to stare at my inbox and triage email most of the day. This is going to stop.
• High volume RSS feeds are out. Even when I didn't have a day job I was unable to keep up with my RSS subscriptions. Gizmodo/Engadget and any site that posts more than 40 things a day is simply not in my RSS reader any longer. The signal to noise ratio on these blogs has gone in the wrong direction over the past 2 years. Most of the good stuff is picked up by the blogs with fewer posts anyway.
• Limiting yourself to watching 1-2 hours of TV a day is a good thing (or eliminating it entirely).
• Podcasts are simply amazing. There is so much good stuff out there now, including all the NPR and KQED podcasts.
• NPR is the best. Each year I find that I value their programming more and more and as a result increase our yearly donation to them.
• Cooking your own food saves you a ton of dough and is a lot healthier than eating out all the time. My wife and I have gotten in the habit of going to Whole Foods every Sunday and buying ingredients for 1 - 2 dishes that we cook that night and eat during the week. It's a huge time saver and we eat well. After all, from 6pm to 8pm every night it's all about hanging out with Sarah and then bathing her and putting her to bed. Around 9pm we are both finished and can't think of anything but going to bed. Life does feel a little bit like ground hog day.
• Simplification and efficiency are necessary. My life was pretty simplified before but I'm on a rampage now to really make all my technology stuff work for me, rather than have me work for it. I've sold a lot of gear I no longer use on craigslist and ebay and am in the process of streamlining the computers I use, how they are backed up and the number of gizmos required to make it all happen. This will be a work in progress.

Well, I guess that's it for now...

One of the nice features in the Windows Photo Gallery in Vista is the ability to add hierarchical keywords. I have a few hundred keywords right now. A subset of these keywords are People, Events, Places etc. I would like to collapse the flat list of keywords so I can more easily browse.

Well in the Windows Photo Gallery you can create a keyword like Foo\Bar and it will nest Bar under Foo. Cool.

But....

Yep you guessed it. Adobe's newly launched Lightroom has it's own incompatible hierarchal keyword system. When you export a RAW photo the hierarchy is collapsed and the parent/child relationship is not included.

This whole metadata, xmp, exif stuff is still not interoperable.

Unusual and a nice gesture from Cingular, but if you got your BlackJack a while ago then it came with two standard batteries. In my experience the standard battery lasts less than a day if you are using 3G and have Push Email enabled all day.

The Extended Battery easily lasts more than a day. It does add some bulk to the device, but it's much better integrated then the extended battery on the Moto Q.

Anyway, the current BlackJack comes with the extended battery and Cingular has set up a rebate program for previous owners to get theirs.

You can find your IMEI number by entering *#06# on your phone.

It's funny how every laptop maker has strange quirks.

Playing with my new T60 I noticed that it randomly beeps when I am typing emails.

So of course I did a search for "thinkpad beeping" and found this post.

It seems if you press any 3 combinations of these letters:

4567rtyufghjvbnm

the Thinkpad will make that classic old heartless annoying PC BEEP.

Weird. Why on earth would it do this?

73 degrees on Feb 17th... the east coast is freezing right now. Why would you live anywhere else ?

Not sure about you, but I have a ost file much smaller than 2GB and I'm experiencing pretty bad perf.

When I launch Outlook on a variety of machines (Vista, Core 2 Duo etc) it can take over a minute before Outlook is usable. Most of the time it will also make my machine generally unusable. I suspect this is due to the fact that there has been a lot of churn in my mailbox and between cached mode and the indexer my hard disk is being pummeled making disk i/o the bottleneck.

My laptop has a 4200 rpm drive and Outlook 2007 really suffers there. Not sure what kind of hard drive this intel iMac has but if it's 5400 rpms that explains that.

If I am using any kind of add-in that is disk intensive on boot (like ClearContext and SpeedFiler) forget about it. Launch Outlook and go do something for like 5 min.

Is your Outlook boot time longer than Windows?

Read this. Not that the rest are any better, but my Fujitsu doesn't require any drivers to "work". My Dell (when I briefly had that) didn't either.

Last week I was expecting 2 packages. One was sent via 3 day ground saver and the other was sent overnight saver.

The first package made it to Sunnyvale, CA (minutes from my house) and was then routed to Oregon (on a truck). It wasn't until the next day that their stupid tracking system updated the status from "on time delivery" to rescheduled. When I called the guy on the phone was like, "at worst you'll get it to tomorrow". I was like "do you have a map, did you see where my package is heading to?"

The second package, the overnight one, arrived in Menlo Park (my home) and sat on a truck all day long till the driver came back to UPS with the package undelivered. When I would call to ask about status they said "drivers are expected to attempt to deliver all packages before returning" and that I could receive my package up to 8pm.

No such luck. I got the package the next day...

Moral of the story? UPS, who has never failed me in all my years has two strikes against them.... what the hell is going on over there?

Looks like I'm not the only one with UPS problems.

I love LifeHacker but IMHO they post to much stuff I'm not interested in... especially the self promoting crap.

Well the good news is that you can customize what you see in the LifeHacker feed.

Check out this post for details.

For example, to move the Retro self promotion junk you would subscribe to:

http://lifehacker.com/software/not:retro

to remove that and the mac os software as well you would use:

http://lifehacker.com/software/not:retro/not:mac-os-x/

From LifeHacker: Put IE7's file menu back where it belongs].

And the world rejoices.

WOW! This is awesome news. A few months ago (before I stopped working on the mail team) I jokingly suggested that we ditch "Windows Live Mail" and convince someone to let us call it Windows Live Hotmail. Why? Cause the entire world recognizes the Hotmail brand... for one reason or another.

Anyway, the someone was the key. Doing something like this could be impossible and engulf someone's life for a few months trying.

Anyway, Richard Sim just announced on the mail blog that the new name for the service will in fact be Windows Live Hotmail.

Congrats to the mail team! That's great news.

BTW, recently the mail team released the M9 release. It's great to see the app get faster and all the new features. I love the sorting stuff that Ellie added.

Boy it's weird watching that team from the sidelines . M9 is the 2nd milestone I haven't directly worked on :-(.