shahine.com/omar/

I have outsourced all my local backups to Windows Home Server and now am the proud owners of http://shahine.homeserver.com. What these guys have built is slick.

I've been using the product since it was in private beta and more than anything else love the fact that it's completely independent. It just does what it does best every night and I never have to even think about it doing its job. It's completely headless and configurationless.

My HomeServer is currently running on a PC with two 500GB hard drives (one internal and one external). It does the following for me:

• Backs up 3 Vista PCs each night (one Media Center, one ThinkPad, one iMac) and 1 Windows XP PC.
• Stores a copy of all my Photos, Music, Videos, and Software accessible via \\server on my LAN.
• Serves as a relay into my Home Network even with a DHCP address
• I can access http://shahine.homeserver.com from any computer and Remote Desktop to any PC on my Home Network. I can even wake up sleeping PCees.

In the last 2 months HomeServer has saved my tush two times.

Once when my wife managed to lose a file that she was working on and Restore Previous Versions in Vista didn't have a recent enough copy. I was able to grab it from the nightly backup from WHS.

Another time I wanted to replace a failed C drive in my Media Center. The drive though had two partitions, C and D. The C Partition was too small for Vista (15 GB) and when replacing the drive I wanted to double the size of the C Partition. The built-in Vista Complete PC Backup tool is unable to create and restore an image to the boot partition that is a different size. I was stuck.

Well lo and behold I burned a boot DVD for Windows HomeServer, popped the new drive into my Media Center and booted from CD. I was then able to restore both my C and D partition to my new primary drive from the backup on HomeServer over the network. The whole experience was amazing. The HomeServer automatically recognized my PC by MAC address and suggested exactly what I wanted to do. It even gave me the option of keeping the new partition size of 30GB for the C drive. Total down time... 30 min including opening the case and replacing the drive.

In short, Windows HomeServer is an essential computer for anyone with more than one PC and anyone that never wants to think about backups.

I love that I never have to configure anything. It backs up the entire computer quickly and efficiently without wasting any space.

The team hit a home run. I plan to have all my family members purchase a HomeServer so that I never have to worry about them losing data.

Run, don't walk to get your Vista Updates.

I wrote about them last week. Talk about fast delivery .

A while ago I started experimenting with the idea of using a Hipster PDA over a Moleskine for tracking tasks and notes. I was attracted to the fact that I could move the cards around, throw them away, and found the system very flexible with lots of templates.

However, I found that I simply used the todo template the most. The other day while browsing Staples I found the 3M Sortable Post-it. These products come in a variety of sizes and colors. They can be stuck like a post it but can be re-arranged in a stack.

I got the 3 x 4 cards. The are the perfect size, 1 inch shorter than an index card an perfect for jotting tasks and notes. With a little paper clip you can easily carrying around 10 - 20.

I love that I can just stick them anywhere. They are pretty cheap, and pretty darned neat. You can get them at Staples, Amazon etc.

I absolutely empathize with this post on Software + Services by Zoli. As a long time user of Microsoft Money, I am this close to outsourcing the software part to Wesabe... but like Zoli there are a few features that I use in Money that are critical to my life:

• Ability to itemize a paycheck
• Ability to see in real time what my Federal Tax Liability us (requires you to Itemize your paycheck).
• Ability to manage my loan accounts (including mortgage), as well as Brokerage Accounts (like my 401K).

This past weekend I got the most horrible and scary warning from Money. Just reading the instructions on how to keep using Money with Online Banking is enough to make this computer professional run screaming from my office. The instructions are 24 freaking pages!!! longer than the manual for the product. I seriously almost went to the "Add / Remove Programs" Control Panel to fix the problem. Luckily for me I was some how spared the misery of sinking 2 - 4 hours into Money. I did not have to update anything. Lucky me... for now.

Now, I don't agree that Microsoft lacks Customer Focus. That's saying that all 70,000 employees lack customer focus. I'm pretty sure the folks who work on Microsoft Money are crying about this update right now (at least the Tech Support folks are), but I suspect that since money was put out to pasture years ago, there is very little "big investment" in this product... and Customer Focus requires real investment.

It's so dammed easy to generalize when your personal experience is colored, especially in the wrong way. Zoli (and all the folks dealing with this nightmare) have a right to be pissed. So do the folks that went through the horrible horrible Money 2004 (or was it 2005) update where I lost a good day or so of my life. However, there is plenty of Customer Focus at Microsoft, at least that's my experience.

I happen to love Fidelity. They provide an awesome web site, great online tools, and lots of local branches to go to. I open almost all my new accounts with them since I already have my and my wife's retirement accounts there (401k, 529, Brokerage, etc).

Well I was pleased to find out that they just rolled out a new checking account called the mySmart Cash account. Perks include:

• No Minimum Fees
• Re-imbruement (same day) for all ATM fees.
• 3.5% APR (better than what Wells Fargo offers for Savings Accounts)
• Deposits via Mail or the Local Branch Offices
• All the other normal stuff

Now I need to find out if they support Microsoft Money or Wesabe.

Given that I love Fidelity and hate the "nickel and dime" Wells Fargo, I just might use this account.

It would be really nice to be liberated from the burdens of having to hunt for a Wells Fargo ATM. Granted we have one in our cafeteria.... however, once you leave your home state, making cash withdrawals can be expensive (like overseas).

Over the past 7 or so months, since getting the Samsung Blackjack, I have been using my phone for a lot more GTD task management. The keyboard on the device makes it practical for doing so.

I've evaluated a few applications to manage my tasks, and ultimately settled on using OneNote Mobile and SmarterTasks. For a long time I was using Oxios Todo, as it has an amazing amount of flexibility. However, what I found was I was tweaking it to get to a point where it was like SmarterTasks out of the box. I also have a few complaints about SmarterTasks, but they have all been rectified in the latest release, 1.1.

IMHO you won't find a better task application. It removes all the unnecessary clutter UX from a task, and just focuses on the core features. It lets you enter a subject, priority, category and project. New to 1.1 is the fact that Projects are persisted using the increasingly common format:

[Project Name]

Where the name of the project is surrounded by brackets. This method is employed by ClearContext and Jello.GTD.

A recent GTD hack I started when I was on parental leave and had errands to run every day was to create a task in the @Errands category with the name of the store I was going to. Then in the notes field I would list all the individual items I needed such as:

@Errands

    @Whole Foods

        - milk

        - new york strip

and so on. When I got something on the list I just changed the dash to a plus sign. When everything was purchased I just marked the errand task as complete.

Yahoo has an excellent and short primer on 13 performance tips for web developers.

The only bug is that for Tip #13 they recommend disabling ETags because if you use more than one box to serve graphics requests, the ETags won't match from machine to machine.

Well we use ETags just fine with Hotmail because IIS allows you to synchronize ETags across boxes.

Either way, this is good stuff.

Another Win32 application is set aside in favor of a web application. Yesterday I stopped using FeedDemon to consume my RSS feeds. Don't get me wrong, FeedDemon is a sweet application and I used it faithfully for a few years. However, Google Reader FREAKING ROCKS.

The Google Reader web application is simply the most efficient way to move through unread news items quickly. As you read items it scrolls them down one at a time and marks them unread (all using the space bar). It's a very well done AJAX application.

Google Reader also boots in under 5 seconds from any computer with a web browser. FeedDemon is only running on two of my PCees and with all my feeds and a big fat cache of posts it takes substantially longer to bet to be usable. On Vista I even have to endure the whole "Not Responding" nonsense for a few seconds... finally after Launching FeedDemon I must wait for it to talk to all the RSS feeds and download content... contrast to Google Reader where when I login I can immediately start reading feeds without waiting on second.

However, the clincher is this. Google Reader Mobile is AWESOME. I read a lot of RSS feeds on my Blackjack. It's the perfect way to kill time when I'm bored. NewsGator mobile has not been updated in years and lacks some critical functionality. Here is what Google Reader Mobile does better:

1. Shows you one post at a time
2. Allows you to mark a post as unread or flagged before moving on to the next post
3. Shows you a preview of what the next post you are about to read is
4. Shortcut keys for all actions (awesome when you have a keyboard)

A picture is worth a thousand words as illustrated below. There is just the right amount of contextual information about the next post, as well as shortcuts and actions I can take on the current post.

#2 is absolutely critical. I would often find myself reading a feed in NewsGator mobile and keeping every item unread because there was one item I wanted to review on my PC later on. There was simply no way to flag a post or to leave it unread. All it has is a "Mark all posts read" option.

Since I use a Blackjack I had tried the native version of the Windows Mobile reader of NewsGator and that was 100x more painful then the problems of using a Win32 RSS reader. It's much slower and inefficient and the sync of read/unread state simply doesn't work.

As I continue using Google Reader I'm looking forward to seeing my reading behaviors and stats and I'm looking forward to them adding features such as ratings and other social type features to improve my experience consuming feeds in the least amount of time possible.

Bottom line, the web is faster than traditional client applications for consuming RSS feeds. Further I don't have to worry about downloading or launching anything other than a web browser.

How many client applications have you replaced with their respective web enabled versions? So far I've replaced:

1. Microsoft Streets & Trips with Windows Live Maps and Google Maps
2. FeedDemon with
Google Reader
3. IMAP email with Windows Live Hotmail
4. Crappy Family Tree program with Geni.

and I'm considering replacing Microsoft Money with Wesabe.

Once again, OMAR outperforms MSFT 2 years in a row.I may never get my birthday wish... is 1$ a year in growth too much to ask for? Apparently...

Anyway, I have a nice 1991 Silver Oak Cab and a 1997 Mondavi Reserve Cabernet to keep me distracted tonight.

At dinner tonight with the family I saw something I've only seen once, a family walking their cat on a leash. No ordinary cat, this was an Asian Leopard Cat. It was the most striking and well behaved cat I have ever seen. I want one. These cat are hybrid cats.

Here is what they look like:

[photo by Bill Dow]

In other news, it appears that OMAR will once again outperform MSFT 2 years in a row.

With the second big recall announced (1 million toys by Fisher-Price) I think it would be a foolish to trust any toy that carries a Made in China label (for now). Most of Sarah's toys are wood, with vegetable paint dye, but for those that aren't, I'll probably throw them out. I mean, Lead Paint!!!

"Sadly, this is the most recent in a series of disturbing recalls of children's toys. While the toys may be different, they have one thing in common -- they were manufactured in China," he said. "With the current tools and resources the Consumer Product Safety Commission has, it cannot adequately protect American consumers."

This is just crazy:

"A ConsumerAffairs.com investigation also revealed that 96 percent of the recalled toys in 2007 were imported from China."

We love Haba wood toys. Moolka is a great store to get them from.

Not sure if I should laugh or cry.

I was excited to read about all the fixes in the upcoming Vista Performance and Reliability Pack and the Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack. However, part way into reading the list of fixes I started to get worried:

• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

WTF? You mean the software I'm running can corrupt various files that I actively use via features in the OS?

Man, maybe next time I will wait for SP1. I'm especially concerned about the "synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted." since I use offline files to cache my Pictures on 2 different computers.

I'm also delighted for these specific items:

• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.

These issues above cause me daily pain.

Like Ed Bott, my nVidia card is disconnected and lying on a shelf. I got fed up with it, and the driver mess. Not to mention that the process of upgrading their drivers is PITA.

I'm now using the onboard Intel Graphics with my Media Center and things are much more stable.

I subscribe to a handful of tech news feeds. A few years ago you'd find a few posts a day max on these feeds. While I found some of the news wasn't interesting to me, that was not a big deal since there weren't many posts to wade through.

Now many of these sites have full time staff. It's not like there is more interesting news out there, but they are generating more posts than ever. Why? Advertising. Blogging is big business now, just look at Federated Media Publishing. Most of the blogs they manage advertising for are pumping out hundreds of posts a week. Many of these sites are probably bring in tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in ad revenue.

The problem here is that no one is helping me find stuff I want to read. I have to manually do this myself. Even with old school newspapers and magazines, thought was given to what was important and what was not. This determined placement.

With RSS it's all just reverse chronological. Like time is the only attribute that matters.

No thanks. I don't have time to give any more. I unsubscribed from every blog that has "staff". This includes longtime favorites like LifeHacker. Seriously, most of the stuff there has nothing to do with Life Hacking any more. It's just tech news. Long ago I unsubscribed from Engadget. Don't miss it one bit.

Bottom line is this. If I don't ready my RSS feeds for a week, and there are > 100 posts from you to sift through then you've just lost a reader. The signal to noise ratio these days is terrible. I'm getting off the Web 2.0 Hype Treadmill at the same time and like Jeremy Zawodny says:

"Sooner or later the treadmill is going to tire you out..."

I'm tired of feeling like I have to read all this stuff.

As time in my life becomes a more constrained and valuable resource, I've started to re-evaluate a number of things. This includes TV (I watch less than an hour a day), RSS reading, E-mail, etc. Life is short and I'm not getting any younger. Efficiency and Productivity become even more important to free me from time sucking activities.

Once upon a time I subscribed to a new feed every couple of days. I'm on a path to do the opposite now. There is plenty of good content out there, and most of it isn't overwhelming to peruse every couple of days. Perhaps this will allow me to focus on blogging at least once every few days (which I used to do).