shahine.com/omar/

Uh, oh. If this is the experience I can look forward to from the music labels I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Shame on you Sony.

“In this era of 3ghz processors, 1gb memory, and 500gb hard drives, why is the Windows clipboard only capable of holding a single item?”

[via Jeff Atwood]

Good question. clcl is a sweet little app. Added to my arsenal of cool little utilities. Throw it in your startup items folder, or anywhere else (it’s portable).

I love apps like this.

So, with Visual Studio 2005 now RTM’ed it was time to get my hands dirty. I haven’t written any code in a few months, and that’s sad. I’ve also never played with Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 which now contains a wonderful new Outlook Add-in model. At long last, much of the heavy lifting of creating an Outlook Add-in is nicely abstracted away (as it should be).

Anyhow, this was a great excuse to finally build something I’ve wanted Outlook to do forever. A lot of the time I will get added to a e-mail thread by some one else. I have no desire to be on this thread, nor do I have any intention of continuing to delete e-mails as they trickle in for hours, or days! So, I built Thread Killer. It’s a very simple addin consisting of a button in Outlook called Kill Thread and a subfolder of the inbox. When you select an email and press Kill Thread I add the conversation index of the email to a blacklist (managed using the new ApplicationSettings feature). Then I process all the message in the current folder and move any instance of that conversation to the same folder.

Thread Killer also listens for all new mail that you receive and checks to see if we have blacklisted that ConversationIndex and if we have, then we move it to the Thread Killer folder.

Future versions may allow you to move items to the deleted items folder (I feel safer quarantining them for now). I’ll also think of adding some heuristics so that if some one mentions your name in a reply (indicating that you may need to actually see the email) that email isn’t filed away.

I’ll be placing this on toolbox soon for MS folks, and eventually I’ll release it.

BTW, Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 ROCKS! So does Edit and Continue! Unbelievable.

update: I finally posted ThreadKiller. Howevever, the version in ClearContext v3 is a bit more reliable IMHO .

I recently discovered a problem with Windows Mobile 5 and the Pocket MSN Messenger that comes with it. If your device is a Pocket PC Formfactor (not Smartphone) and you sign into MSN Messenger, every time a contact signs into the service your device will do the following:

• Play a sound
• Place an alert on the screen with [Chat] [Ignore] buttons. The notification will remain on screen for a few seconds and interrupt whatever you are doing (like writing an email).

If you have over 200 contacts in your buddy list, chances are some one is signing into the network at least once a minute during peak hours. You can imagine the shock I had when I discovered there was no UI to turn this off. I recall from Windows Mobile 2003 that you could go into Sounds & Notifications and select the “contact online” action and disable alerts and sound. However, this does not exists on my device.

I fired off a mail to some friendly folks in the Pocket MSN team. After a few exchanges they let me know that I could manually add the registry keys for the events and that this might resolve the issue (and that this was unsupported etc etc). So I fired up PHM Regedit (freeware) and added the keys. Lo and behold, I could now mess with the notification options in Sounds and Notifications.

Here are the registry keys you’ll need to add to your device:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D65E-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}]
"Options"=dword:00000008
@="Messenger: Contact Online"
"Wave"="notify"
"Duration"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D65F-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}]
"Options"=dword:00000008
@="Messenger: New Message"
"Wave"="notify"
"Duration"=dword:00000000

 After adding these you can go to the Sound and Notifications control panel and customize the notification behavior.

Today was a hard day at work. I was my usual grumpy self. But watching this video put a big smile on my face. Thanks to my little sister for forwarding (she is engaged btw for you folks that know her).

Whenever you switch from one platform to another, or one program to another, all you are doing is trading one set of problems for another. If you think otherwise, you are kidding yourself.

You are trading the problems you know about, for the problems you don’t know about. You don’t find out they are problems till you switch and live and breath that product for a few days.

I happily used my Treo 650 for 7 months. That is a pretty good run for a phone of mine. The shortest phone tenure was the piece of crap Audiovox 4100 at about 2 months.

Well, the thing that drove me to get rid of my Treo 650 (well give it to my wife who was using a Treo 600) was that I grew VERY tired of the exchange synchronization. It was buggy as all heck. Also, only Mail and Calendar Sync’ed. No Contacts, or Tasks. Lastly, you could not do things like move message on the server, and you were limited by the OS limitations of the Palm (15 categories, 5 phone numbers). Silly stuff that should have been fixed in the last century.

When I received my k-jam I was overjoyed. There are so many wonders of this device, and the software I now have running on it that it will take me days and many words to explain. The sheer bliss of having all my exchange PIM data on my phone, robust synchronization, wifi, and loads of other stuff are awesome… except.

Starting a few days ago, ActiveSync on the device would just get stuck trying to sync to Exchange (over the air, using Exchange ActiveSync). Pressing stop resulted in the stop button being dimmed and the app becoming useless. That required me to manually quit the process or reset the device. I NEVER had this problem on my Treo. If anything the Treo was rock solid when it came to GPRS and connecting to the internet when I wanted it to. The k-jam, while more reliable at making/receiving phone calls than any other Windows Mobile device I have used, seems to do so at the sacrifice of the functionality I really care about… getting my data when I want to.

What to do… not sure, it seems i’m on my own here, suffering the terrible repricutions of an early adopter using a v1 product. Maybe some Microsoft co-worker will have pitty on me and rescue me from this gadget hell.

Like I said, trading one set of problems for another… and such is life.

I was surprised to see this. I wondered when Sony would just acknowledge that Media Center is better than anything they could build (on the software side) and bring their incredible hardware design and enginnering to users.

Looks like a great system. I hope this space grows and improves even more in the next few years. Hopefully Sony won't act Schizophrenic and decide they hate Microsoft and ditch media center.

I find it interesting that Scoble is having a hard time sticking with GTD, but is finding that ClearContext is helping him manage his mail.

I think the fact that Scoble understands the value of a prioritization system based on something other than the intrinsic meta data of an email is a sign that the tools of today, are not suitable for the volumes of email that some of us receive. ClearContext just scratches the surface of what’s possible when your entire work life is driven via mail.

On “What’s the next action” I found this interesting post.

GTD is about habits, not software. Don’t worry about what software or outliner to use. Learn the habits first and keep it simple.

This is why I happen to love ClearContext and hate the NetCentrics GTD Add-in. The NetCentrics addin is waaay to prescriptive and not flexible enough. I find it too heavyweight, meanwhile ClearContext is just there to help me, not force me. This is the reason I wrote my own Getting Things Done Add-in that only does one main thing. It helps me to create tasks from email w/o mucking up Outlook so dammed bad with views and other nonsense.

To illustrate…

I recently took a two week vacation and didn’t take my laptop. I checked my hotmail account 3 times on vacation and my work account zero. Upon my return I checked my mail and found 800 unread items in my inbox (I left with zero). By Monday I was down do 90. Today I have 10, and will have zero by Monday morning. You know what helped me get there? ClearContext and David Allen’s book which I haven’t read in 18 months. I have a system now that’s far better than what I had 19 months ago, but I don’t follow GTD to the tee. That’s ok, cause I do what works for me. As I’ve said before. The book is not written for people who get > 100 message a day in their inbox. To deal with that you need to find your own way, ClearContext helps you get there but doesn’t solve the problem completely. Software never will; you need to find a system that works well given your work style, and work environment.

This is now the second vacation I’ve taken this year that was email and work free. Both times I got from hundreds of messages to under 20 in about a day using ClearContext and GTD. I’m getting closer and closer to Zen.

It wasn’t till this weekend that I could stick my head above water and process some pictures. I’ve posted a gallery of my Egypt pictures. I also geotagged them so that you can see an awesome sideshow using smugmug + google maps. This stuff is simply incredible.

This is like the 5th time in my life that I have trek’ed across Egypt. Once in your life you need to make it over there. Egypt has some of the greatest wealth of historical and ancient treasures. If you do want to go drop me a line and I’ll tell you what you should do and see. Expect to spend a min of 10 – 12 days sightseeing. Unfortunately, they no longer allow photos in the Cairo Museum. I guess to many people don’t know how to turn off their flash so they don’t allow any cameras. Oh, a lot of people post comments asking me where I'm from etc etc. Both my parents are Egyptian (d'uh). I was born and raised in New York City. I've been back to Egypt about 21 times in my life. I have a giant family there.

Here is a link to the gallery, and a link to the geotag’ed slide show (cool animation of where we went in Egypt and shows the power of geotagging).

My favorite pyramid, the step pyramid of Zoser

The ancient Sphynx. Quite a bit of restoration is done each year on him.

The Mosque of Mohammed Ali. An amazing building.

My camel for the afternoon in Sharm el-Sheik

It didn’t take long, just some encouragement from a comment left on my blog by Serge Baranovsky and I bought a K-JAM off ebay. Seems the only place to purchase these days is from David Weiniger (aka madmonkeyboy) or ebay.

Seems that the Motorola Q is turning into a fiasco, and since the Treo 700 for GSM is rumored to be far off (Q2 2006) I’ve taken matters into my own hands and purchased an i-mate K-Jam. I’m not going to buy one from Cingular even if they offer it cause I am still on my rockin AT&T GSM plan and Cingular simply doesn’t offer anything in the ballpark to the deal that I’m getting. I love unlimited incoming SMS and unlimited data for $20 a month. I’ll keep buying unlocked phones as long as I can avoid switching to Cingular.

I read and re-read dozens of message board posts and reviews on the device. The best reviews were the ones that Serge forwarded me at geek.com and pocketnow. There is even a K-JAM blog which is great.

A lot of people wonder how the K-JAM compares to the size of a Treo 650. Here is the breakdown.

Treo 650 – 11.3 (L) x 5.9 (W) x 2.3 (T) cm

K-JAM – 10.5 (L) x 5.8 (W) x 2.37 (T) cm

As you can see, the K-JAM is a bit shorter (no nubby antenna either), tad narrower, and .7 mm thicker. Here are two images comparing a Treo 650 to the K-JAM (from geek.com).

You can expect an exhaustive review of the K-JAM when I receive it this week. Something like my 3 part series on the Treo 650 that I did. I’m looking forward to kicking the tires on Windows Mobile 5.

I wish Palm the best of luck shipping the Treo 700. I just wish it were happening sooner (and that the display res was 320x320 like the Palm OS version of the Treo.

A while ago I wondered if we’d ever see a receiver that was targeted to a media center. All my receiver does is amplify to my 5.1 surround and act as an audio switch for my xbox, media center and comcast DVR.

Long gone are the days of a receiver doing things like video switching (my TV does that), and switching for tapes, CD, MiniDisc etc. The reality is that receivers are the kitchen sink these days and they can’t even do such things as DVI/HDMI switching w/o also doing composite, s-video, and a million other things I don’t need. I also don’t want to be buying a new receiver every few years (my receiver doesn’t even do component video switching).

Well I just read about the simplifi amplifiers for Media Center. They basically allow you to plug in your home theater speakers and your media center and you’re done.

Man, if only you could also pair it with an xbox and I had CableCard support in MCE. Then I could get rid of my crapola comcast DVR and my receiver and make room for a bad ass 200 Disc DVD Changer that was also just announced.

The Media Center space is getting really exciting.

I just installed my Media Center Rollup #2. What a silly name, but anyway. There is one feature in MCE Rollup that I have waited 3 years for (I think I was the first person to make this feature request of the team).

What is this feature? They call it Intelligent Zoom. If you have a Widescreen display, like my Plasma, and you watch a lot of TV that is not wide screen, you have a few choices:

• Watch it with grey bars on the sides
• Watch it zoomed in (with the top and bottom cropped)
• Watch it stretched (with the people on TV looking wider)

A lot of TVs like my Plasma also have a mode that uses something called non-linear zoom (Panorama or TheaterMode). Basically it stretches the edges of the screen, and not the center so much, so that the 4:3 picture fills the screen to 16:9 but it looks a lot better than stretch. Since I drive my Plasma via DVI, the fancy Plasma non-linear stretch mode is not available. As such I've been watching 4:3 TV stretched and mostly gotten used to it, but anxiously awaited this feature.

For a good example of what this all looks like, I found a great CNet article on the topic (see Solution 3 for the non-linear zoom or stretch mode).

I'm getting the itch for a new phone? Why? Cause the Treo 650 Exchange Sync story is pissing me off. VersaMail is a big unstable application. It crashes all the time for me now. Not having Contacts and Tasks sync over the air is getting to be a PITA. And now that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and there is a future Treo 700 running Windows Mobile 5 with all its over the air on demand sync goodness I'm getting antsy.

The way I see it there are 3 likley possibilities to replace my 650.

1. Cingular launches the HTC Wizard
2. Cingular launches the Motorola Q [seems unlikley]
3. Cingular launches the Treo 700
4. ... or, either one of these can be purchasd unlocked for GSM with quad band support (850 is a must).

My thoughts are Cingular will never cary this many WM Devices, and that #1 and #2 are most likley to happen in the next 6 months and thatn #3 may not happen till late 2006.

Not mentioned anywhere, but there is great news for us Geotagging folks. Adobe Camera Raw 3.2 finally reads GPS coordinates info from RAW files such as NEF and sidecar XMP files. Now I can get my GPS coordinates into the NEF photos and have them get transfered to JPG for upload to smugmug.

Thanks Adobe!

I got beat up in my last post on Kahuna cause it was pointed out that you can’t actually sign up for the beta if you are not already in it. Yes, we have cleverly given out some invites in the past few months, but that didn’t stop a few dozen folks from emailing me .

You can now sign up for our beta here:

http://www1.imagine-msn.com/minisites/hotmail/Default.aspx

We are rolling out the beta conservatively in the coming months, so please be patient if you sign up. If you sent me mail in the past few weeks and you are not on the beta, please signup at the url above.

The Camel my sister was riding today decided that he (or she) was hungry and wanted a bite of my leg. That made the rest of the ride a bit uncomfortable.

But it was a fun ride anyway, and I got some great pics. Sharm-El-Sheik is just fantastic. 4 days of sitting on the beach, snorkeling, and reading. Paradise indeed.