shahine.com/omar/

Years and years of prior art, and the recent Ford rental that I was driving in Redmond had this for a heating/cooling nob.

Tell me what this means? Basically you have two modes for AC and the one “off” location (that circle at the top) and the rest of the controls are for heat or air w/o AC.

Huh? How does that make any sense?

So far this year has been going great. I’ve almost forgotten the horrid Alaska delays of last year. In approximately 20 segments this year, Alaska has managed to depart within 30 minutes of the scheduled departure time for most of my flights. In fact, I’ve been flying so much this year that I did a Tier Match to get MVP status (Alaska will do a one time match of your FF status on another airline to MVP or MVP Gold). Why did I do this?

• Flying them a lot (and not flying American all that much)
• Want free First Class Upgrades (when available)
• Want selection of seats close to the front of the plane so I don’t have to bite my lip as I watch the dozens of people unload in the most inefficient manner possible while smiling the whole time (Dammit!)

Anyway, I get to the airport on time, and lo and behold my flight is delayed 7 mins. What airline delays flights such a short amount of time? 30 min later they delayed it 1.5 hours!!! That’s longer then my flying time. To make matters worse, the inbound plane is scheduled to arrive late, and the original time was already past our departure time…. which only leads me to believe that our original plane broke down.

Now you understand all the blog posts today.

I almost cried with joy when I read this:

Security in Outlook 2007 takes advantage of the status of antivirus software installed on a computer. This change represents a major departure from the way the Object Model Guard worked in the past. If Outlook is able to detect that antivirus software is running with an acceptable status, Outlook disables security warnings for the user. This allows external applications that previously had to resort to Extended MAPI or third-party libraries to avoid security prompts under the appropriate conditions. This new behavior helps keep Outlook secure without overwhelming the user with excessive warning messages.

Wow, no need to use Extended MAPI, Redemption or a host of other hacks to make the annoying dialog go away . Sweet. Another kudo for Office 2007.

[via Ryann Gregg]

Office 2007 is getting a lot of kudos today thanks to a post by Anil. When I first saw the ribbon I was like, Barf… however that was a long time ago, and it has improved a hell of a lot. In fact I'm surprised at the number of improvements they've continued to make during the “beta” period.

Today I find that the Ribbon really unlocks much of the hidden power of Office. It helps you make your documents really look professional, which was almost impossible to do before (unless you used Mac Office for charting and such). Of of my favorite features is just the fact that the WordMail toolbars don’t get screwed up any longer.

Anyhoo, one of the best things the team has done is the Send a Smile Tool. Every product should have a Send a Smile tool. I’ve started to use it whenever I find something I like or something that frustrates me. It’s a really amazing way of capturing user feedback without requiring the user to go to a web site and get lost in user feedback hell.

Jensen Harris also gets my vote for best MSFT blog. Back in the day, Jensen was actually the Lead PM for the Mac version of Outlook (when it was developed by the Outlook Team, and before there was Entourage or Exchange support in Entourage). It’s great to see the kind of positive impact he’s having on both the product and the image of Office.

Scott blogged about a few cool shortuct launchers for Windows. Personally I’ve used SlickRun the longest, followed by AppRocket and recently tried Colibri. Colibri is very slick but could use some features like Directory Browsing. AppRocket hasn’t been really updated in a while and could also use a few new features (like showing folder pathnames when multiple folder matches exist).

update: looks like Launchy is a good mix of Colibri and AppRocket with a really slick UX.

Over the last few weeks my desire and energy level to blog was extremely limited. I basically pushed aside any and all TV, Blogging, RSS reading, and a whole lot of other stuff to focus all my available energies on work and moving.

Lets see what’s happened in this time frame.

• Dick (our dev manager and good buddy) and I gave a talk at Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence & Trustworthy Computing Form on Building Windows Live Mail with Scrum… we also participated in a panel on Agile Development at Microsoft.
• Looks like they posted the winners for the Microsoft Internal OneNote PowerToy Contest .
• A few weeks back Robert Scoble came down to film what would be his last video interview of the Windows Live Mail team :-(. I can’t believe that the first video we did has close to 200,000 views. Wow.
• Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft. That’s really too bad. Sean has one of the better posts about Robert, and I feel much the same way. Robert will be working down the street from my new house, so I look forward to hanging out with him more. I really wish him the best of luck.
• Lora and I are expecting our first baby in November!!! (thought I would drop that in there). I’m taking Lora to the Big Island in 2 weeks for our final vacation as DINKs (Dual Income No Kids).

Hope to return to my regularly scheduled programming now. Only 5000 RSS items to catch up on.

Today I got to have lunch at the Googleplex with Jon Perlow and some folks who work on GMail (which Jon works on). We’ve been trying to do this forever (I met Jon at ETech and he is a former Microsofty and friend of many of my co-workers) and we just got around to it.

The Googleplex is about a 3 minute drive from the Microsoft SVC Campus (where I work). The building I ate in was a former SGI building back in the day (before they went out of business). Anyway I had a good time and here are my impressions:

• Lots of young folks
• Felt like a College Campus
• Lots of positive energy. Reminds me of eating at the Apple Campus.
• The food reminds me a lot of the stuff they have at Whole Foods
• All the food is free. This was bizarre to me. I knew that before hand, but it was weird to go grab what I wanted and just start eating it.

I have to admit. I can understand the allure of working there now that I’ve visited. It felt a lot like visiting a college for the first time when you were a senior in high school on a bright sunny day… everyone seems happy and you could see yourself happy there too.

Anyway, it was a fun lunch, and now I need to do that again except this time with my former co-worker Scott Knaster who I promised to have lunch with a really long time ago!

This reminds me of when we used the QuickTime SDK in Mac IE 5 for our “media bar” feature and we had to remove it at the last minute because Apple got pissed off at us for playing video in IE and bypassing the QuickTime player. Sheesh.

If Adobe cared about PDF, Acrobat Reader wouldn’t be such a slow, uninteresting program.

I have to say, the AirPort Express is a versatile little guy. Today I was able to configure it to talk to my Samsung Laser Printer, and then I untethered it from my Ethernet connection, joined it to my wireless network, and then put it, along with the printer on the other side of my office. Works great.