shahine.com/omar/

She is very cute. Since this was a gift for my wife, unboxing will have to wait for tonight.

Went to Amazon today and was puzzled for a second. Then I realized, they changed the whole thing. Looks like it's still undergoing some A/B testing.

I like the new look. I love that the search results now indicate what is eligible for Amazon Prime.

Like Dare, I didn't really see the value in this thing when I first heard about it.... not even later when I first tried it, but I have to admit, it's a nice installer.

I was curious how the installer talks to the web page about what to install and Long Zheng documents the magic. Pretty clever.

I'm loving the new Windows Live Photo Gallery (that my fam can now run on XP and Vista) allowing me to put Digital Image Suite out to pasture... since it never did anything correct with meta data and Gallery supports XMP and the like. It also means my Mom can finally ditch the MSN Client in favor of Windows Live Mail with PhotoMail (the killer feature IMHO).

Simplification of my life is a good thing, even if it's mainly simplification of my family IT support workload.

Wow, and what a long way to travel. I'm glad I paid for the free shipping since it appears Apple if footing the FedEx bill from China.

BTW, Mike Torres has some thoughts on the iPod vs the Zune.

Here is the thing... folks like me, who might have purchased a Zune this year (v2) won't... why? Cause I just spent $650 bucks to refresh my iPod(s). That covers me for a year. I'm not sure there is any feature that would encourage me to spend money on a Zune v2 (assuming it's something I want).

To bad, missed opportunity. Chris Lanier even thinks that the Zune is dead:

"Sorry for anyone looking for a pro-Microsoft post today, but Apple just announced those new iPods I was talking about last night when criticizing the Zune and I’m personally declaring that the Zune is dead."

It's ironic, but Google Reader just got search.... that's kind of like... well I can't think of anything clever right now. I did expect Search to be part of any Google application, but nevertheless, it's a welcome addition.

Consumerist has a good post on ways smart people waste money.

Lets see how I stack up. Currently offending numbers:

1) Forgetting To Pay Bills

As hard as I try at least once or twice a year I make some kind of a goof up and smack my head against the wall when I find out.

2) Bank Fees

I've gotten screwed by the $5 ATM surcharge fee for withdrawing money in China, Europe etc. I've also paid the credit card bill with the wrong checking account causing a cascading series of fees that made my lose close to $100 bucks when all was said and done.

5) Subscriptions

Recently gotten rid of a few

6) Letting food spoil in the fridge

I will admit to that nice cheese I purchased at Whole Foods to serve when guests that were never invited didn't come over and I had forgotten about the cheese.

7) Wasting Energy

We are actually pretty good about this, but could be better.

9) Buying DVDs you will never, ever watch, or books you'll never read, or clothes you will never wear...

Guilty

10) Paying too much for cable

Semi guilty. Lora and I have been on basic cable for a year now and haven't looked back. We get all the HBO shows on DVD from Netflix whenever they get released.

There should be something here about getting a new iPod and digital camera on average every year (and phone for that matter).

This morning Money greeted me with a message saying there was a new update available (Money Plus RC3). However, every attempt to update resulted in a CRASH. Sound familiar?

Turns out the fix was to launch Money Plus as an Administrator (right click on the Money Plus and select Run as Administrator).

You know, I've been wondering. With the change of Money Plus naming from the Money YYYY format I wonder if we are witnessing the end of development for this software. No more yearly updates.... I mean what will they call the next version? Money Plus 2009? I don't think so.

I've been using Wesabe side by side with Money now for a few weeks. It's not much more effort. Wesabe is a fun product to use, but it needs a lot more features before I can switch to it, but I think I've decided that this is going to be the plan moving forward. The Wesabe folks are all over the blogesphere commenting on any post about Wesabe which indicates to me that they care a lot about the success of their product. Money team? No blog, only the usenet group and some MVPs answering posts. Right now I use the Wesabe Uploader to download all my bank transactions into Wesabe via their OFX interfaces. It's a bit of a hassle since I do this on 2 computers and each one has to be configured separately. There are also some bugs with the uploader on Vista (it won't quit, and there are some redraw issues).

Anyway, back to updating Money.

PS - the whole notion of "updating software" is a PITA. I mean, why are we forced to manually install updates? Why can't our client applications act like web services. I want the latest bits 100% of the time and I don't want to apply patches and updates to 3 different computers. What a headache. It's ever worse for programs like Messenger that have hooks into Outlook and Internet Explorer and require that I quit everything I am doing just to updated... and usually reboot. Sheesh.

It feels like Christmas.... in a few hours I will replace a few of my iPods and I can't wait. The only question is, will I be able to purchase them today or will I have to wait.

Right now I have a Shuffle (2nd gen), a nano (1st gen) and a missing 30GB iPod (latest model).

All the rumors are fun to read, now I can't wait to hear the actual story...

Purchased Microsoft Money Plus today from the company store.

Installed and launched it. CRASH.

Um, ok, that sucks....

Next logical thing to do... search the Internet.... and I found this.

Money Plus does not work when Data Execute Prevention is enabled, which it is by default on Vista.

Ugh... I can't believe it shipped like this. Hopefully it will be worth the upgrade.

Now, off to reboot my PC with DEP off so I can Activate it.

My laptop is blue screening a few times a week now, and I have no idea why. I have been installing driver updates as they come to me from Lenovo and Microsoft, but this is just getting horrible.

Most recent issues are:

1. Laptop takes 5 minutes to go to standby
2. Laptop screen never turns on after standby
3. Laptop blue screens when waking from standby and docked
4. Laptop won't undock
5. Explorer is crashing left and right (due to Search Protocol Host crashing)

Problem caused by Windows Search Protocol Host

This problem was caused by Windows Search Protocol Host. Windows Search Protocol Host was created by Microsoft Corporation.

We are aware of this problem and working as quickly as possible to make a solution available to our customers. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Recommendation

---

This problem might recur until the solution is released. Please continue to send error reports so Microsoft can study and try to correct the problem as quickly as possible. If you report the problem again and a solution is available, you will see an updated message and information about the solution to help you fix the problem.

Not sure what to do except reinstall Vista, which I don't really have time for.

First there was Napster, MSN Music, now Urge.

The digital music selling business is a disaster. I wonder how one "authenticates" these songs in like 10 years... will those DRM servers be around to give you the right to listen to your music?

At this rate... Rhapsody might be next.

I suspect Apple will be around a very long time and will be able to answer the phone when iTunes comes a calling... ditto for Zune, but really, who needs this.

update: forgot MSN Music.

It's pretty darned clear to me that every time Apple fixes a bug with the iPhone that the intertubes and facebook will be clogged with posts about this... most wondering what the heck is updated.

This is mildly annoying since none of these updates contain better Exchange functionality, which prevents me from going to the Apple store and forking over $600 for an iPhone and god knows how much for accessories and stuff.

At the very least they could be more descriptive than "Bug fixes".

Last week I upgraded to Apple Bootcamp 1.4 for our Kitchen iMac. I think Apple has already become the best PC OEM. Why?

Well take a look at the new volume graphic that appears when you use the Volume Up and Down keys:

And Eject

Just like the Mac OS. It's beautiful. Contrast to the junky garbage you see when doing this on a regular PC.

Also new is the Bootcamp control panel for Windows.

Which gives you a lot of new functionality.

Also new in this version is that the Apple Remote works with iTunes and Windows Media Player and Apple Software Update which checks for updated Bootcamp drivers.

Also, Apple somehow manages to place all the required drivers on a single CD you can burn yourself with a single installer. Why can't anyone else do this is beyond me.

I think all my future PCees will be Macs.

For fun I ran YSlow to find out how it rated Windows Live Hotmail's Performance according to Yahoo's rules.

The reason Hotmail got a 98 and not a higher score? We use ETags... correctly. Yahoo should update that rule since we use IIS and you can in fact sync your ETags across your servers.

Update: turns out that YSlow doesn't work well with Frames, hence the numbers above are actually not accurate (at least not for The Full version of Hotmail). Not sure if this is something that will be fixed in YSlow.

Here are the numbers using the "classic versions" of each site. By classic I mean traditional Web 1.0 HTML.

If we didn't get an F on the ETags I wonder what our real score would be.

The Outlook Connector (the piece of software that lets you access your Hotmail account in Outlook) is finished out of beta.

You can download it here.