shahine.com/omar/

Working at Microsoft, and not working in Redmond means a few things. 1) I spend a fair amount of time traveling back and forth, 2) I spend a lot of time calling in to meetings and usually can't hear what is going on and 3) I spent a lot of time trying to get our VTC system to work (50% of the time it doesn't).

Let me tell you... calling into a meeting is very unfulfilling when you are collaborating with folks.

Even though Microsoft is a technology company, when it comes to collaboration, 9 out of 10 times you need to get your butt in a plane and go if you care to participate in planning.

Well today I saw, and used something that changed all that. For the first time in 9 year I participated in a meeting that was held in Redmond while sitting in my Office.

Some of the new conference rooms in Redmond have a Microsoft RoundTable. RoundTable is a combination conference phone like a PolyComm but it also has a set of cameras arranged in a circle. A person in the room connects their laptop running Live Meeting 2007 and what I can see on my end is a panoramic view of the entire room AND a camera view of the person who is talking. You can see this below.

I can't tell you how natural this feels. I can literally feel like I am there. And the folks in the conf room can see me on the projector since I had a webcam. No phone was used at all.

This technology is simply amazing. It is going to have a huge impact on me and I hope a lot of folks in Redmond take advantage of this.

It's days like this where I come to work and just go Wow... I can't believe we made this. There is a pretty good review of it here.

PS - If you haven't tried Office Communicator 2007 you should. It's the best IM/Collaboration software I have ever used. It has killer features like delivering missed conversations to your inbox and letting you reply later. More on that in a future post.

I have fallen in love with Amazon.com's new MP3 download service. Here are the facts:

• DRM free music from EMI and Universal
• $.89 a track
• $8.99 for most albums
• 256 kbps Variable Bitrate MP3
• Application that downloads tracks and transfers to iTunes or Windows Media Player with Album Art

Before this service I was still firmly a "CD only" purchaser. DRM was too restrictive. For example, how would my wife and I share music on our iPods? Our current solution was to use my iTunes accounts on my machine, her machine etc. But this got to be a pain in the butt.

Another thing that rocks? Amazon customer service. I had a problem with a credit card on file due to some one-click thing. So I clicked on the help link, and then clicked "call me", entered my phone number and within 3 seconds I was talking to a live human being who already had all my account info. It was actually kinda funny because I was buying my wife the new Fergie Album she asked for and the customer service lady was like "So you're trying to get your fergie"?... awkward!

Anyway, lets see how this stacks up to iTunes:

1. Cheaper
2. More DRM free music selection
3. No DRM on all tracks sold
4. MP3 format, so it works on all music devices.

Sold!

Let's face it, the ATM is pretty dammed awesome. I remember when I was a kid and used to go to the bank with my mom and wait in line to withdraw money for the weekend. If you ran out of cash on a Sunday, or in a foreign country? Tough luck.

Over the years I assume most of us have just come to expect the ATM to be everywhere. We are used to the process of sticking card in, picking an amount, and watching as the $20 bills POP out.

Well, I was about to write about the new Wells Fargo technology marvel in the Microsoft SVC Cafeteria but Bubba beat me to it.

These new ATM machines are "envelope-less". What does that mean? Well when you make a deposit you just take your pile of cash or checks and stick them into a slot. A few seconds later they recognize all the stuff you inserted, show you the amount for confirmation, and print you a receipt with a digitized version of what you inserted.

Amazing.

Unlike Bubba I am not ditching Wells Fargo any time soon. Why? Well I have my mortgage with them and as such I qualify for the highest level of checking with them which translates into very few fees these days.

Anyway, it's great to see technology keep getting better.

If there was one thing I wished though was that you could pick denominations other than $20 bills. After all, $50 is the new $20.

Over the past 6 months I've just been amazed at overhearing people talk about directions... and MapQuest. It seems that people still use MapQuest.. I haven't touched that thing in years. Almost all the conversations I've heard regarding Mapping and Directions have referenced MapQuest.

I've never heard anyone reference Google, Yahoo or MSN/Windows Live/Microsoft/Virtual Earth Maps.

It seems like the old Web 1.0 companies still maintain a lot of mindshare. This includes Ofoto and Shutterfly as well.

It's official, flying sucks.

Flying with a Baby is pretty stressful. However, I have now flown on 3 different airlines with Sarah, and have learned a lot. The first thing I learned was to get Sarah her own seat, put the car seat in it and strap her in. She is a wiggler, and won't sleep or sit still on a plane without a car seat. Of course you should see what I look like coming down the aisle with a car seat, her two carry on bags (she has more carry on luggage than we do), and my teeny tiny bag with the absolute bare essentials in technology (iPod, book, headphones, camera). I learned quickly that taking a laptop with me anywhere with our baby is pointless... you see, 1) I never have time to use it, 2) it's big and heavy, 3) Security in this country is the biggest pain in the ass joke I have ever seen... Take off your shoes, take out your laptop, take out all the fluids and crap, take off baby shoes and on and on. It's hard enough by yourself, but with a family... I'm sure I'd forget my laptop lying there on the belt cause I'm so dammed overwhelmed with 800 things to do.

Anyway I digress....

So far I have flown:

1. American Airlines
2. Continental
3. Jet Blue

And I have to say, Jet Blue is the absolute best experience when flying with a baby. Why? Oh, let me count the ways:

1. Take off from the SFO International Terminal, which is quite possibly the nicest airport terminal in the world.
2. Family Boards first (not many airlines still do this). Since it takes me like 10 minutes to collect myself, get on the plane, gate check the stroller, get to the seat, put the car seat in there etc I need every minute I can get and the last thing I want is a line of angry passengers looking at me like they want to kill me.
3. 34 inches of seat pitch in the back, and 36 inches of seat pitch in the front (all coach). In fact, the coach legroom is on par or better than first class on Alaska Airlines. When you have a kid in a car seat, and tons of crap (and you are 6 foot 3) then this matter a lot. You don't even realize how much it matters till you fly on Continental and your plane has an astonishing 30 inches of seat pitch (the average in the US is 31).
4. Direct TV with 36 channels. When you only have 30 minutes here and there it's great to pass time with some mind numbing television while baby is sleeping.
5. XM Radio, not necessary with an iPod but nice to have.
6. Good all you can eat FREE snacks and drinks.
7. No stupid carts going up and down the aisle blocking you from getting to the bathroom to change a diaper.
8. Changing tables in every bathroom
9. Nice new clean planes
10. Friendly staff

Seriously, about the only thing that sucks about Jet Blue is getting to the plane. That airline rocks.

I can't say this enough, Tripit is going to change my world. Tripit is basically a travel organizing/planning site that you forward all those pesky emails that you get when booking air, hotel or car rental. It parses them and extracts relevant meta data. This is a productivity site for managing travel, the least fun part of actually traveling.

I am the designated family travel planner and spend hours and hours a year doing this stuff online. I just took 12 emails for 4 different trips coming up in the next 6 months and Tripit parsed them all and created amazing web pages for each one. This includes, hotel, cars, flights for 3 people with multiple destinations and non round-trip flights.

These guys are geniuses.

Just when I think the net can't do anything substantially new for me, something like this comes a long and I just go WOW.

Prior to tripit I (mostly) manually copied and pasted this stuff into Outlook, and then sent my wife meeting requests so she would have the info on her calendar. What a giant waste of time. No more...

Not to mention they integrate with sites like SeatGuru.com so you can get a good seat on your flight.

If this is the future, I love it.

Here is a travel hack I learned long ago.

Say you are on the 6:37pm flight from SEA to SFO. You get to the gate at 6:20pm and they announce a 20 min delay. No big deal right? Well in my experience it means of one two things:

1. the the inbound aircraft was a bit late
2. the inbound aircraft was a bit late and there is a problem they don't understand that they aren't telling you about.

I was just informed that the air conditioning wasn't working, and that boarding was delayed another 10 min. Then I was informed that they could not pressurize the plane and that they would have an "update" for us at 7:35.

When you hear those words, RUN! Run from the gate and get yourself on the next flight. Those are words of doom. It means that they don't know how to fix the problem, don't know how long it will take to fix the problem, and that the next update they plan to give you is in an hour. It's a recipe for more delays.

In my experience there is a greater than 50% chance that the next update will be bad news.

So, what I do is immediately ask to be placed on standby on the next flight. I am hedging my bets. The next flight is at 8pm, so really, either way I'm in a better position then betting on my original flight (which all the other passengers are doing).

I have been a member of the Alaska Airlines Boardroom (their club) for the past two years. Today I was wondering if I should renew my membership since I fly far less than before. But the thing is, the Boardroom rocks for this kind of situation. Why? Cause I am paying for service. I walk in, ask them to be placed on standby, and never wait in line. They just take care of it. Contrast to all the poor folks who are scurrying around the gate waiting to see what their fate is. In fact a few years ago I was denied the option to get on the standby list (at the gate) for the next flight because so many passengers were trying the same thing.

Anyway, the next time you find yourself in a similar situation, you can do the same at the customer service desk which is usually less crowded than the gate with over 120 people trying to find out what's going on.

I think I am going to renew my boardroom membership for this very reason. I am currently typing this in their lounge, drinking an aslaka amber, using free wifi and I plan to catch up on work.

Update: my hedge worked, I won, Alaska lost. I took the 8pm flight, which left on time and lander early. My original flight, scheduled for 6:35pm departed at 8:53pm.

My biggest complaint with iTunes was always it's mediocre metadata support when compared to Windows Media Player. However, sometime in the past year Apple quietly updated iTunes to support the last remaining critical meta data field, Album Artist.

Why do I care about Album Artist? Well lets take a look at the latest George Michael Twenty Five CD (yes, I do in fact like George Michael, it reminds me of being a child of the 80s).

Anyway, take a look at the normal "Artist" Field".

The problem with this is now when I look at my music in Cover Flow modeI see separate entries for:

• George Michael
• Wham!
• George Michael & Paul McCartney
• George Michael & Elton John

However, this is not what I want. I purchased a CD, and I want to lookup and browse using the Album Artist: George Michael.

Well in prior versions of iTunes you were stuck with this lame behavior. However, in Windows Media Player, it does the right thing(tm).

Well the latest iTunes has an Album Artist field. Just go to View -> View Options and select Album Artist.

When you do that you can get this:

Now Cover Flow will work as expected and you won't see more entries than the number of CDs.

Unfortunately, the iPod does not support Album Artist yet, and as such iPod Cover Flow is broken in this respect. To bad. I hope that gets fixed.

When my dad bought me my first Mac, there was a picture inside of the whole Macintosh Team. I thought this was really cool (I was in 6th grade).

They have stopped doing that since the Mac II I believe, but they did replace the picture with stickers. Every new Mac came with stickers. I can't remember when Apple stopped doing this, but the new nano came with two little white Apple Stickers.

Yay.

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.