shahine.com/omar/

I was excited to read about all the fixes in the upcoming Vista Performance and Reliability Pack and the Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack. However, part way into reading the list of fixes I started to get worried:

• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

WTF? You mean the software I'm running can corrupt various files that I actively use via features in the OS?

Man, maybe next time I will wait for SP1. I'm especially concerned about the "synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted." since I use offline files to cache my Pictures on 2 different computers.

I'm also delighted for these specific items:

• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.

These issues above cause me daily pain.

Like Ed Bott, my nVidia card is disconnected and lying on a shelf. I got fed up with it, and the driver mess. Not to mention that the process of upgrading their drivers is PITA.

I'm now using the onboard Intel Graphics with my Media Center and things are much more stable.

I subscribe to a handful of tech news feeds. A few years ago you'd find a few posts a day max on these feeds. While I found some of the news wasn't interesting to me, that was not a big deal since there weren't many posts to wade through.

Now many of these sites have full time staff. It's not like there is more interesting news out there, but they are generating more posts than ever. Why? Advertising. Blogging is big business now, just look at Federated Media Publishing. Most of the blogs they manage advertising for are pumping out hundreds of posts a week. Many of these sites are probably bring in tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in ad revenue.

The problem here is that no one is helping me find stuff I want to read. I have to manually do this myself. Even with old school newspapers and magazines, thought was given to what was important and what was not. This determined placement.

With RSS it's all just reverse chronological. Like time is the only attribute that matters.

No thanks. I don't have time to give any more. I unsubscribed from every blog that has "staff". This includes longtime favorites like LifeHacker. Seriously, most of the stuff there has nothing to do with Life Hacking any more. It's just tech news. Long ago I unsubscribed from Engadget. Don't miss it one bit.

Bottom line is this. If I don't ready my RSS feeds for a week, and there are > 100 posts from you to sift through then you've just lost a reader. The signal to noise ratio these days is terrible. I'm getting off the Web 2.0 Hype Treadmill at the same time and like Jeremy Zawodny says:

"Sooner or later the treadmill is going to tire you out..."

I'm tired of feeling like I have to read all this stuff.

As time in my life becomes a more constrained and valuable resource, I've started to re-evaluate a number of things. This includes TV (I watch less than an hour a day), RSS reading, E-mail, etc. Life is short and I'm not getting any younger. Efficiency and Productivity become even more important to free me from time sucking activities.

Once upon a time I subscribed to a new feed every couple of days. I'm on a path to do the opposite now. There is plenty of good content out there, and most of it isn't overwhelming to peruse every couple of days. Perhaps this will allow me to focus on blogging at least once every few days (which I used to do).

My best friend from high school has been working on a new venture focused on Hotels and Reviews called VibeAgent. I've been looking for a site like this for a while since I like to travel and like to find out places that my friends have stayed that they recommend. Sites like Expedia and TripAdvisor do a pretty bad job at capturing or bubbling any kind of review information for Hotels, let alone finding stuff your friends and friends of friends have reviewed.

Anyway, VibeAgent is in private beta right now, but if you want to play with it send me an email at shahineo at hotmail.com and I'll send you an invite. I only have a few, so first come first serve.

I've already reviewed a number of hotels and it's pretty fun. It's a nice reminder of the fun places I've been in the past. It's even more fun to read the reviews folks have written about the places I've stayed...

Well, it's done. The one remaining feature that I used offline mapping software to do now exists in Google Maps. They have the ability to change the suggested route using drag and drop. I've been awaiting this feature for a long time because often the suggested route by online mappings problems falls short for one reason or another.

Jeff Atwood explains why offline mapping software can't compete with the web.

There's no reason Streets and Trips couldn't adopt the same conventions as Google Maps. But Streets and Trips seems to be completely stuck in the old world mentality of toolbars, menus, and right-clicking. All the innovation in user interface seems to be taking place on the web, and desktop applications just aren't keeping up. Web applications are evolving online at a frenetic pace, while most desktop applications are mired in circa-1999 desktop user interface conventions, plopping out yearly releases with barely noticeable new features.

This should be an unfair comparison. Streets and Trips is free to harness the complete power of the desktop PC, whereas Google Maps is limited to web browser scripting and HTTP calls to the server. Google Maps turns all those browser-based application weaknesses into strengths, by offering a bunch of online-enabled features that Streets and Trips doesn't: satellite view, real-time traffic data, and the new street view. Plus it's always up to date; we're guaranteed to be using the latest version with the newest features. And unlike Streets and Trips, it's free-- or at least ad-subsidized.

The web has won for mapping.

For my offline mapping needs I now use my Samsung Blackjack with Live Maps and my light, small, and sweet Bluetooth GlobalSat BT-359 GPS receiver.

I was going to try and say something original, but Adam Barr said it best.

Today is July 7, 2007, which of course abbreviates nicely as shown in the title. For some reason I like to post blog entries on days like today as proof that I did actually take note of their awesomeness, as I was experiencing it.

I can still remember the time, gosh it must have been about thirty years ago, when my father pointed out to me that it was 7-7-77.

In other news related to this date, it would have been Robert Heinlein's 100th birthday (nice how the slashdot URLs happen to have the date in them in 2-digit format, so they encode "07/07/07" for all stories posted today), which means he was also born on 07-07-07.

And Boeing is planning to introduce their new airplane, the 787, tomorrow, on 07/08/07.

In other news, it looks like I've been blogging for 6 or so years. In that time I used Radio Userland, Blogger, now DasBlog. Does anyone use Radio Userland any more?

Oh, and I'm looking forward to flying the 787 someday. It may displace my favorite aircraft the Airbus A330-200.

I waited a few days so it wouldn't be crazy when I went to the Apple store, but yesterday I placed my grubby fingers on the iPhone and played with it for 10 or so minutes.

Scott Hanselman has a great write up of the experience.

The iPhone reminds me of what it's like to play and experience something I hadn't experienced before. Microsoft Surface gave me the same goose bumps. It reminded me why I am such a gadget freak. Every couple of years something like this comes along that puts a big huge smile on your face every time you use it.

It's the perfect blend of technology and art. It's a completely emotional experience. It's fun.

I did not buy one. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future, but if it did in fact support Exchange ActiveSync I would instead be writing a review rather than a "Wow" post. It's not the e-mail I care so much about, but the calendar, contacts, and tasks sync that is the killer app for me. Knowing that when I update some one's phone number on my phone that all my devices on all my computers get that update is the holy grail.

BTW, other gadgets which made me feel this way:

• TiVo
• Apple AirPort
• Newton MessagePad 100
• Newton MessagePad 130
• Newton MessagePad 2000
• original iPod
• iPod nano
• ipod Shuffle v2
• HiDef
• original Canon PowerShot Digital Elph