shahine.com/omar/

I hate newspapers. I hate the way they feel, I hate reading 2 paragraphs and then hunting around for the rest of the article. I hate folding those huge pages. I just never ever liked reading the paper. But I do like the cover page. I look at the paper when I see it.

Online never really did it for me either. I disliked the way that most newspaper websites layout their pages. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal online does the best job.

But, I love the New York Times iPhone app. It’s easily skimmable and glanceable. Of course it’s slow and buggy and crashes pretty much all the time. In fact I launched it over an hour ago on my iPhone and it’s still Updating… but when it works it’s great.

The other day I saw a link to a new New York Times Prototype called the Article Skimmer. It’s simply fantastic. It’s entirely designed for some one like me. I just want to glance at the news every day, and drill into the articles I might find interesting. You can read about it here.

They have done a really good job at actually bringing the best aspects of the analog paper including sections and a new “most emailed” feature, and they have awesome keyboard shortcuts. They also seem to be using the little square photo that the iPhone also uses to make the articles pop.

This is my new Homepage, the Article Skimmer

Compare this to the current New York Times web page.

The Skimmer is just better in every way.

I refresh a bunch of my gadgets almost yearly. This includes things like iPods, Cameras, Phones etc. Selling these items through eBay can be tedious. Selling them through Craigslist usually has some one on my doorstep negotiating a different price with me. Both are annoying.

In fact, I just just sold something on eBay yesterday and eBay decided to “hold” my money for 21 days. That is just lame. Actually this is PayPal, but whatever, same company.

So for the past few months I’ve used a service called Gazelle. I love this service because they tell you up front how much they will pay you for something. They will also ship you a postage paid box to send the item to them. When they receive the item, they inspect it and then pay you via PayPal, Amazon Gift Card, check, or you can donate to charity.

Gazelle is super easy to use… and you get money without any hassles.

My only complaint is that they don’t buy all forms of Gadgets, but if you have a camera, digital music player, mobile phone or anything listed below, it’s a bit easier than eBay or Craigslist IMHO.

• Cell Phones
• Digital Cameras
• MP3 Players
• PDAs
• Laptops
• GPS Devices
• Gaming Consoles
• Camcorders
• Satellite Radios
• External Hard Drives
• Video Games
• Movies
• LCD Monitors

Another great thing is that they will recycle anything of no value for you.

Give them a try next time you need to sell a gadget.

Get Cash For Your Gadgets at gazelle.com!

There is one thing in life that is certain. Hard drivers get cheaper and bigger.

For the past year I’ve been using a Windows Home Server to backup 6 computers in my life. If there is one piece of technology you should down it’s a Home Server. It has literally probably saved my wife from devastation at least once (she completely horked some work critical data that would have cost her months of time) and it’s saved me countless hours when upgrading hard drives and such in my Media Center. Best of all, it’s piece of mind and I value that a lot.

BTW, they key about Windows Home Server is that you don’t have to think about what to backup and what not to backup. Traditional backup solutions have you deciding what to save and what not to save. Windows Home Server just backs every dammed file up (minus temp files and such). You don’t bother to think about it, the entire computer is backed up such that if you rip the hard drive out and place a new one in, you can restore your computer to any machine state over the past 3 months). Is that cool or what? Not to mention it uses Single Instance store meaning that if a file exists on two machines it only stores one copy of it. That means that when you backup 6 machines running the same operating system, the os is only stored once on the server, not 6 times.

However, Home Server not a panacea. If your house burns down, or some one steals your Home Server, all your stuff goes with it. As such you need some kind of a backup for your backup strategy.

Well there are two ways to do this:

1. Remote backup to the cloud
2. Offsite backup

Remote backup to the cloud

Remote backup to the cloud is possible via KeepVault and Jungle Disk, both of which have Home Server add-ins that will copy your stuff to the cloud. The problem with both these services is that they are pretty inefficient. They don’t support block level backups (well Jungle Disk does via a $1 monthly addon). They also don’t support file renames or moves (if you move or rename a file it’s copied back to the server, and in the case of KeepVault they don’t even delete the old copy).

Why should you care about block level backups? Well lets say you have a photo that’s 6 MB. Now lets rate it or add a keyword. Well, now the file has changed by a tiny amount, yet it takes smart backup software to know this. Most software will just see that the file has changed and copy 6 MB up to the cloud.

This isn’t a big deal if we are talking about a single file. But we are talking about gigabytes of data (which I have), then this can seriously mess things up. It means that your bandwidth is getting hogged up by these apps, and the amount of time it takes to copy the changes to the cloud means that your changes are unprotected during this process. No good.

There are two other backup programs I have used that support block level backups, Mozy and Carbonite.

Unfortunately, neither of these are supported on Windows Home Server.

I currently use Carbonite after having started with it and then switching to Mozy for about a year. However, Mozy royally screwed up my backup at one point and my attempts to get them to help went unanswered so I dropped them and went back to Carbonite. Since then I’ve not had a problem. It just works and I don’t think about it (like my Home Server).

As I mentioned though, they don’t support Home Server. For me this isn’t a big deal though. I have a Windows Media Center PC which acts as a “Media Hub” with all my photos and videos. It also has Windows Live Sync (aka FolderShare) installed and all the stuff I use to Sync between my PCs gets backed up to the Media Center.

This ensures that:

1. all my files are backed up to Home Server (because the Home Server backs up the Media Center nightly)
2. all my files are backed up to the Cloud.

However, is this really practical for all your files? Well keep reading.

Offsite backup

I have also employed an Offsite backup strategy to complement my Cloud backup strategy. An offsite backup is actually what it sounds like. You keep your stuff not at your house.

However, today I got a gizmo that literally makes this a turnkey solution for me.

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has a feature that lets you backup your Home Server shares using the built in software. All you do is plug in a USB drive and select which shares you want backed up.

Up until today I was using a desktop USB 500 GB drive to do this and I would take it to work. However, this proved to be a bit of a pain in the neck. It meant that I need to lug around cables and a dreaded power brick. I HATE power bricks.

Anyway, this weekend while at Fry’s I noticed that Seagate makes an awesome little portable drive called the FreeAgent Go. It comes with a super cool dock that you can just leave plugged into your Home Server. Then you can get a couple of 500 GB portable drives that plug into the dock. The drives were selling for $109 (limit one per household) so I got one and plan to get another from Amazon.

Now I can keep one drive at home, and one at work. Once a month I will just swap the drives and it will ensure that I at least have an offsite backup of things like my 100 GB of my music and 200 GB of Movies and such so that I don’t have to rely on Cloud Backup for moving around that much data. If I ever lose a drive it’s also much faster to drive to work, grab 500 GB and drive home than it is to download that much data from the cloud.

A few years ago I wrote about adding GPS coordinates to your photos. Much has changed since then, and I thought I’d write about how I Geotag photos these days without using a GPS receiver.

Of course you can always use a GPS receiver, but they are generally a pain to carry around for casual photos. Also I fully expect consumer cameras to have some form of A-GPS support very soon. Till then this solution is easy, we get to use all the location information associated with WiFi access points that are all over the world.

Requirements for Geotagging without GPS

1. An Eye-Fi card with a Geotagging subscription
2. Downloader Pro for downloading your photos

Eye-Fi

The Eye-Fi card is a neat little memory card for your camera. It has a built in WiFi chip so that you can have your photos automatically copied to your home computer or a photo sharing service. However, the coolest feature of all is that the Eye-Fi card is always looking for nearby WiFi access points and recording what access points the card “sees”.

note: there are numerous models of the Eye-Fi card. They all support Geotagging via an optional upgrade from their website. However, the Eye-Fi Explore comes with unlimited Geotagging as part of the purchase price.

Later on when the Eye-Fi software is copying the photos to your computer it looks up the GPS coordinates of the WiFi access point and then stamps the GPS coordinates like this:

+37° 26' 57.00", -122° 9' 50.00"

that’s cool and everything, but not really all that useful. Enter Downloader Pro

Downloader Pro

If you consider yourself an amateur or pro photographer you simply need this software.

Downloader Pro does one thing, and only one thing. It moves photos from one place (usually your camera) to another (usually your hard drive).

There are literally a million options in this program, but I only use a few. What I do is that I point Downloader Pro at the folder that Eye-Fi uses to store photos copied from my camera via WiFi.

important: your photos must be copied via WiFi to your computer or the GPS coordinates won’t be included.

Rename Photos

I rename all my photos from the default camera photos to a format like this:

20090123_G10_0011.jpg

This means:

{Year}{Month}{Day}_{Camera Model}{Camera counter #}

This essentially gives all my photos a unique and sequential file name

Up till today though I’ve been clueless about the GPS features in Downloader Pro, and there are many. However, the one I’m going to talk about assumes that the GPS coordinates are already in the photo.

Configure the Reverse GeoCode feature

Select GPS Settings from the Edit menu and enable the second checkbox:

Reverse Geocode is when you take GPS coordinates and turn them into a set of human readable words. Many iPhone applications do this already.

In my case I store these in the IPTC/XMP fields of the photo so that I don’t need to bother with tagging my photos with City, State or Country, although you could certainly also use the tokens below to create Keywords based on the Geocoded names.

Store Place Names in the IPTC fields

Select IPTC/XMP data from the Edit menu and select the Origin tab.

Now enter the following into the respective boxes:

If you did this right it should look like so:

Now when you download the photos from your Eye-Fi photos using Downloader Pro you should see something like this (see location info in the meta data area).

So in the end this:

+37° 26' 57.00", -122° 9' 50.00"

was translated to:

Palo Alto, California, United States

Pretty cool.

The thing that really drew me to Twitter was that it allowed me to use one service to both update my Twitter status and my Facebook status (via the Twitter Facebook applications).

However, what I’ve found is that I have a different audience on Twitter and Facebook. My Tweets tend to be more “geeky” than my Facebook friends probably understand. Also they are probably to “frequent”. Why are they too frequent? Well I post to twitter a few times a day and to Facebook once a day max.

Over time I’ve started to treat twitter more and more like a “Microblog”. That is I post small snippets of things that I consider more like a blog and less like a “Status Update”.

I view “Status Update” like

“Going to Seattle tomorrow”

and a Microblog post like

“11% of online adults use Twitter or update their status online. http://bit.ly/GFVqN”

So, a few weeks ago I decided to “break the link” between Twitter and Facebook. I was able to do this using a service called Ping.fm.

Ping.fm is a universal update status service. It allows you to add status update and microblog services and then chose where your updates go.

In my case I have defined the following:

if you look at the table above you can see how I’ve defined each service. Ping.fm has a notion of a Default trigger as well as a Status update and Micro blog post.

When I just post to Ping.fm without specifying a trigger, it will go to both Facebook and Twitter. When I post using a Micro-blog trigger it only goes to Twitter.

Here is a pretty picture.

So now I have one place to go where I can post to both services, or I can just post to Twitter separately and only have it go to twitter. In other words I use Ping.fm to replace the functionality I had where all services got updated at once without tying Twitter to Facebook.

When you use SMS to post to Ping.fm you can use triggers to route your posts. For example you would preface your post with “@s” to post a status update

• @s – status update
• @m – microblog
• @fb – just post to Facebook

The last thing I will note is that I aggregate my Twitter updates to FriendFeed but not my Facebook status.

Not every app supports Ping.fm yet but here are a few that do:

1. Nambu for the iPhone (Twitter, Ping.fm and FriendFeed app)
2. AlertThingy – Adobe Air multi headed client for Twitter, Facebook, etc
3. twitterfeed – will post your blog updates to Ping.fm
4. twhirl – another Adobe Air multi headed client
5. i.ping.fm – iPhone formatted page.

This system gives me a lot more control and lets me use Twitter to have geekier conversations and Facebook to have the kinds of conversations my friends and family would understand and want to participate in.

Big news day in my book, first Kindle2 and now this.

It’s interesting when you see a combination of technologies from so many fiercely competitive companies.

Google wants iPhone users to sync their calendar and contacts to the iPhone, so they go to Microsoft and license the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to do just that.

REDMOND – Feb. 9, 2009 – Earlier today Google announced Google Sync, which is made possible by a patent license they obtained from Microsoft covering Google’s implementation of the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol on Google servers.

Of note, Microsoft recently announced an expansion of its Exchange ActiveSync Licensing Program, and licensees currently include partners and competitors Apple, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, among others.

Each of the three companies competes on 1) phones, + 2) services but it turns out that the company with the right plumbing to make it all happen is Microsoft and the company with the phone driving all this seems to be Apple.

Exchange ActiveSync has won for the universal sync protocol of your Calendar and Contacts data. Congrats to the Exchange team for hitting a protocol home run .

“Google’s licensing of these Microsoft patents relating to the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol is a clear acknowledgment of the innovation taking place at Microsoft.  This agreement is also a great example of Microsoft’ s openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property. This open approach has been part of Microsoft’s IP licensing policy since 2003 and has resulted in over 500 licensing agreements of the last five years.” 

Now Apple if you are listening, please add multiple Exchange Account support to the iPhone.

... The Apple Store.

A few weeks ago my iPhone started to act up. Specifically my iPhone stopped reliably connecting to my Bluetooth headset. About 20% of the time it would fail and I would have to turn Bluetooth on and off a few times before it would start to work. Needless to say this got annoying. To make matters worse, when it did work 50% of the time the amount of time it took my headset to connect was longer than the ring time for the phone call.

I suspected that I was probably a victim of owning the first revision of the iPhone hardware. Probably my Bluetooth chip or antenna was acting up or something.

Anyway, last night I went to apple.com and made an appointment at the Genius Bar for 10am. This morning I drove to the Stanford Shopping Center and entered the Apple store. 10 minutes later a Genius asked me what was wrong, diagnosed the phone and then told me something that no other phone store will tell you… I’m going to replace your phone.

10 min later I walked out with a new phone, and even a little sticker to place on my iPhone box with the new serial number.

I went home, plugged my iPhone into iTunes and about an HOUR later, my phone was restored like nothing happened. It’s a bummer that it took so long but hey, it worked.

The best part? My Bluetooth headset connects in about 2 seconds when before it took 10 seconds. Something is definitely better!

All I can say is, this is an amazing benefit to owning an iPhone. When I had to get my Samsung Blackjack replaced in the past it meant waiting for AT&T to ship me a new one and then setting it all up from scratch again which is a huge PITA.

Anyway, I’m back in business and pretty happy about my experience. Living near an Apple Store is great.

I’ve been blogging for close to 7 years now. I think the amount of writing I did peaked around 2004 or 2005. When I had my daughter 2 years ago, I slowly started to crank down the blogging. This was really hard for me because I’ve always enjoyed writing on this blog (and I hope you enjoyed my random stuff!). At the same time I pretty significantly cut down the amount of time I spend on a lot of my side projects (like dasBlog) and even playing with every piece of productivity software I could get my hands on. Mostly I spend my time doing work, and when not doing that, hanging with the family.

In 2006 I started to play around with Twitter. In the past 2 years Twitter has really hit critical mass for me and I’ve found that my ability to get short little burst of stuff out there really alleviated much of the guilt I felt for not blogging. In fact, I first really used Twitter at ETech in 2006 but never really found much use for it after that till they added Facebook syndication.

Last year I also started to really spend more of my time using FriendFeed (although not that much because there are no good FriendFeed clients nor is there a decent iPhone experience) as a way to aggregate all the stuff that I do on the web (share items in Google Reader, upload photos to SmugMug, and comment on stuff). I kind of view FriendFeed as my “public” Facebook since my public internet activity is all visible there.

So where does this leave blogging? Twitter has sort of become the anti-blog in my mind. The more I use it the less urgency I feel to blog. Further my twitter updates are syndicated to Facebook meaning that people I am friends with in real life see my updates as well as the folks I don’t really know but I do enjoy interacting with, similar to my blog + comments.

Mike Torres recently wrote a similar post that got me thinking that I really need to put something up on my blog and let people know, if they didn’t already, that even though it’s been quiet here you can still see what I’m up to on Twitter and FriendFeed.

I do plan to continue writing here, especially on topics that will take longer than 140 characters, but the subjects and frequently I write about will differ from my posts in the past.

I had 5 min to kill yesterday and wanted to figure out how to enable Emoji on my iPhone.

What’s Emoji? Basically Japanese emoticons. They are simply gorgeous on the iPhone. However, Apple has only enabled the ability to author Emoji icons for Japanese users. Why you might ask? No idea, probably because here in the US the only phone that can render Emoji is the iPhone with 2.2 firmware. Practically everyone that I text has an iPhone already, so I wanted this feature.

Well, it’s pretty easy to enable Emoji authoring on your phone and it will only cost you $1. Here’s how.

1. Download this application. I have no idea what this program is for other than enabling Emoji.
2. Launch said application
3. Quit the application
4. Go to Settings –> General –> Keyboard –> International Keyboards –> Japanese
5. Turn Emoji on

Now, when you go and author something you can place pretty emoticons in your text.

I sent one of these messages to my Wife and she is already jealous.

I happen to love cooking and so does my wife. She loves it a bit more than I do.

I don’t know many people or couples that would say that they love to cook. But for me cooking is a great way to affordably eat great food. When you first start cooking, you suck at it (just like anything else). Over time though you get better, and start to experiment a lot more. You also develop a sense for what your favorite dishes are, and memorize how to shop, prepare and make them with very little fuss. For example, my favorite dishes are a pasta Bolognese sauce, chicken parmigiana, butternut squash soup and any kind of steak.

I’m also a Geek, and as such the kitchen provides for a lot of geeky outlets. I love Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table. I go almost as often as I drop into the Apple store. When my wife and I got married we pretty much built our dream kitchen arsenal (through the registry and post wedding purchases).

I read a blog post today by 37signals (How Cook's Illustrated thrives while others are dying) that reminded me why I got into cooking and how we’ve managed to learn to cook a lot of different dishes with ease: Cook’s Illustrated and The Best Recipe (this is the only cookbook you need). They provide simple and illustrative instructions on how to shop and prepare a meal, from Thanksgiving dinner to making pasta and rice.

I was first introduced to Cook’s Illustrated when I got my first All-Clad LTD pan (I now have a full collection). I immediately fell in love. This was a magazine that was published by Cooking Geeks. There is no advertising, and lots of product reviews, recipes and tips. The best part about their recipes is that they literally cook and try dozens of things to find out the best way to do anything.

• They will cook 20 turkey’s to figure out if you should brine, how much salt you should use, how long you should cook, at what temperature, if you need to rotate the bird and of course what kind of bird to buy.
• They will try 20 different kinds of Olive Oils to find the best and most reasonably priced olive oil
• They will try 20 different wood spoons to find the best one

They allow me to go to the supermarket, or the cooking store and literally buy the best product in the category. Which peppercorns should you buy? Cracked or whole? They tell you this. They are experts.

They also have syndicated in a bunch of ways:

• Cook’s Illustrated Magazine
• Online Website with a yearly subscription
• America’s Test Kitchen show on PBS
• A huge array of cook books.

My father who is as close to a gourmet chef as anyone I’ve met loves his Cook’s Illustrated magazine and also subscribes to the online site.

So, if you’re a Geek and you find yourself eating out most of the time, you should consider learning to Cook. It’s got tremendous benefits for your health and is a great way to unwind and get your brain to focus on other things.

Find a great grocery store (like Whole Foods) or a Farmer’s Market and enjoy buying great quality ingredients and making a fantastic meal for you or your family that will cost less than eating out. If you like doing this, then invest in some quality cooking gadgets (Pots & Pans, Knives, Utensils, Appliances). There is a whole world of geekiness outside of electronics .

Dare has a good post on how the notion of “Fan” or “Follower” is a key feature that every social network should have.

In general, I agree that being able to support the notion of super-popular users who have lots of fellow users who are their "fans" or "followers" is a key feature that every social software application should support natively. Applications that don't do this are artificially limiting their audience and penalizing their popular users.

Does that make it a core pattern for "Web 2.0"? I guess so.

However, when thinking about Twitter, there is really a couple of things going on.

1. I follow your or you follow me
2. I follow you and you follow me

Unlike most social networks which require 2-way reciprocal relationships, Twitter essentially has one way relationships and allows for a two way relationship if both parties follow each other.

But, they also allow users to have “protected updates” meaning I cannot subscribe to you unless you approve. This is a bit strange from the social networking model because it’s still a one way relationship with approval required. I do not have to reciprocate by following you in return.

Now, that’s all interesting, and fine but the real problem with Twitter is that I have no clue who is following me. I mean 10% of the people that follow me use their “Real Name”. Without real name I can’t make any determination if this is some one that I want to reciprocate. I think this is the #1 flaw with Twitter. Further if I browse my followers or some one else most people have fairly useless “handles” that don’t do a good job identifying who they are.

Contrast this to Facebook where everyone has a First and Last name and it’s clear to me who is who.

In closing, blogging has always had the notion of Fan or Follow. This happens when I subscribe to your RSS feed in an aggregator like Google Reader, Netvibes, RSS Bandit etc. However, it’s completely anonymous, so I never really have any visibility in my audience. Kind of like Television. Blogging would be interesting if there was a way for authors to discover who their readers are (assuming the reader allowed for that and there was corresponding technology).

1. I have many things to be thankful for. I get paid to do something I love. “How many people get to do what they love and get paid for it? 2%? 5%?” Microsoft has been very good to me, and what that really means is that the people I work with are good to me.
2. The connections you have, the friends you make... your internal network is your most valuable asset.
3. Travel as often as your manager allows. See #2.
4. Force yourself to meet new people, and reconnect with people you haven't spoken to in years.
5. Understand what the company is building. The only way you can do this is by: 1) participating in Distribution Lists that interest you (they act as disconnected coffee house conversations) 2) dogfood products 3) read vision docs and memos (and internal blogs).
6. You can complain all you want about Microsoft and its problems. Finding a way to fix problems is far more interesting.
7. Register for every in person appearance by a MS exec visiting your campus/team etc.
8. Attend all your all-hands meetings.
9. Try not to criticize the efforts of another group in Microsoft, unless you have spent time investigating and living with their technical, business and market challenges, and/or can come up with something better than a glib statement to help Microsoft beat the competition. [quote stolen and modified from Paul Elliott]
10. Your manager is the most important person at Microsoft as far as you are concerned. If your manager rocks, your career will benefit in ways you can't substitute.

Will I write a similar post in another 5 or 10 years? I really hope so.

Starting tomorrow I officially start my new job, I’ll be based out of Redmond working on the Windows Live Social Networking team (which for those of you that don’t know, my family is moving because my wife got a fantastic job in Seattle) but won’t be moving there till she finishes up her training at Stanford this summer.

I’ll miss Northern California, which has been equally good to me.

Since having a kid we have sort of fallen in love with the movie taking capabilities of our point and shoot digital cameras. We take a lot of 30 second – 1 minute videos. Probably over 1,000 in the past 2 years. We then rate and tag them like we do our photos.

I have owned a number of Panasonic and Canon cameras over the years. Recently I switched back to a Canon PowerShot SD880 for a few reasons:

• Wide Angle lens
• Less noise than Panasonic cameras
• H.264 Video Support.

The latter being the most important.  Previous video cameras all shoot their video using Motion JPEG. H.264 is the new hotness in video codecs. The only problem is that the Canon shoots the video in a QuickTime MOV container which is not readable by Windows 7 without the QuickTime codecs. Also the bitrate is around 10 MBps which is huge for the quality of video it shoots.

Well, I’ve been using Handbrake, which is a really awesome video encoder for Windows and Mac to encode some video files for our iPod Touch. It turns out Handbrake is a fantastic application for re-encoding these digigam video files. On average I am seeing at least 3x - 6x smaller encoded files with the same quality.

But using Handbrake each time I download videos can be a bit cumbersome. I’ve been messing around with PowerShell lately now that it’s build into Windows 7 and am really loving what I can do with it. I’ve never been a batch scripter and like the more object oriented nature to C# applications to do these kinds of things. PowerShell does the job really well once you get over the small learning curve.

Below is a PowerShell script I wrote that will take all the videos in one folder and encode them into another folder skipping any already encoded files.

All you need to do is configure the first 3 variables:

$sourceFolder = "C:\Users\Public\Videos\_Ingest\"
$destinationFolder = "C:\Users\Public\Videos\Encoded\"
$handBrakeCli = "C:\Program Files\Handbrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe"

$files = dir $sourceFolder *.mov

foreach ($file in $files)
{
	$baseName = $file.Name.Trim('.mov')
	$source = $file.FullName
	$destination = $destinationFolder + $baseName + ".mp4"

	if (Test-Path $destination)
	{
		Write-Output "skipping $source"
	}
	else
	{
		$scriptString = "-i '$source' -t 1 -c 1 -o '$destination' -f mp4 -p  -e x264 -b 2000 -2  -T  -a 1 -E faac -B 160 -R 0 -6 mono -D 1 -x ref=2:bframes=2:me=umh -v"
		$sp = [diagnostics.process]::start("$handBrakeCli", "$scriptString")
		$sp.WaitForExit()
	}
}

I have to say, what an amazing world we live in. This post is the first time I’ve connected to the internet without my feet touching the earth.

It was less than 10 years ago that I surfed the web for the first time without a modem or Ethernet cable via Wifi.

It was less than 10 years ago that I surfed the web on my phone at broadband speeds.

Now I I am sitting on a plane with my laptop connected to the internet and powered via the supplied in-seat power.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself.

Thanks Virgin America.

Last night we announced the world what my organization has been working on for the past year. It’s really exciting to see all the press in the past 24 hours.

So now that we’ve announced to the world here is what I’ve been working on (with my team) over the past year:

• Windows Live People - A unified contact list to help manage all your contacts across all of Windows Live
• Web Messenger integrated into Hotmail + People
• What’s new integrated into Hotmail (when you send an email)
• Unified Contact Picker and Auto complete controls for Windows Live
• Friends List control that you see on the Profile page and the corresponding page when you click “View more” to browse your Friends’ Network
• A whole bunch of cross team backend stuff to make this all work

LiveSide, as usual, has a great overview of Windows Live People. Go read it so I don’t have to write about it .

“Overall we really like the changes that have been made with the contact management, with the execution of the improvements being good too. Its simple, but effective.”

The NYTimes also has a great write up with a title that caught my eye! Microsoft Beats Yahoo and Google to Social Inbox 2.0

“Exactly one year ago, I wrote about the race between Yahoo and Google to turn their e-mail and instant message systems into something closer to social networks. Both companies figured it was futile to take on Facebook and MySpace directly. So they rushed to develop new ways for their users to trade news, photos and so on with the people already in their address books and buddy lists.

The winner of that race is…Microsoft.”

And for those of you who pay attention to how Microsoft is organized and led, here is the money quote.

Microsoft takes a lot of heat, much of it deserved, for its plodding nature and overly complex software. Since the services haven’t been introduced yet, I can’t tell how well these new Windows Live features work. But the fact that the company is the first to actually introduce social networking features to its e-mail is a sign of Microsoft’s discipline, or maybe the lack of resolve at Google and Yahoo. Or both.

Two words. Steven Sinofsky. Windows 7 and Windows Live will be just a piece of his legacy.

And on a personal note, I have to say that this past year working on Windows Live has been the most rewarding and fulfilling experience in my almost 10 years at Microsoft. I worked with a world class team to stitch together disparate services and bring some real value to our customers. I view Wave 3 as the beginning and Wave 1 and 2 as foundational releases for Windows Live. What we plan to do has me even more excited.

I’ve also learned a tremendous amount from our leadership team and my peers. Special thanks goes to them for creating an amazing organization that I’m proud to work in.