plaxoed!

So check this: Entourage has been dogging on my machine the entire time I’ve been using it and it also eats up a ton of memory. So far, I have yet to experience something that makes me understand why Mac zealots are always saying that Macs are faster…

Anyways, I’ve been using Parallels for a while and a few weeks ago I installed Office 12 Beta 2 so I could check out the new Outlook 12. So I started using it and as far as I can tell, Outlook 12 running inside a virtual machine is faster than Entourage.

Now I know there’s a good reason for this (WinXP and Office 12 are x86 code which Parallels is probably piping straight through to the x86 Intel Core Duo processor while Entourage is being run in Rosetta mode in OS X), but I still find it rather comical.

To the Entourage team: please give me a universal binary version of Entourage ASAP (I’ll take Betas ). I’d much rather be running a native application!

I also like the new Outlook 12 user experience, especially the new search box inside the inbox

For native e-mail duties, I’m going to try Mail.app now. I’ve heard good things about it (mostly that it’s fast) and I can do all the heavy lifting (scheduling meetings and etc.) in Outlook 12.

So I come home tonight and my trusty new Vista computer was on the fritz. I have a Dell Dimension 8400 and for some reason it was powered down with the power light flashing orange. After trying unsuccessfully to start it up, I looked online and it seems that I’m suffering from the infamous “Flashing Amber Power Button Light” syndrome (people are posting about it here, here, and a ton of other places).

Reading through a bunch of posts it looks like there’s really no solution for this problem. People have tried replacing their power supplies, motherboards, CPUs, etc. only to have the problem come back time and time again. Judging by some of the posts on the forums, it looks like they are creating some serious detractors over this issue.

Personally, I’ve highly recommended buying Dell computers in the past due to the great deals you can get. I’d never really had computer systems fail on me like this, so I figured who cares if I don’t have much of a warranty? If anything usually the hard drive goes bad and that’s not too hard to replace. Now after reading the forums, I’m wearing of buying anything from Dell in the future. A bad hard drive I can handle. A mystery power supply/motherboard/cpu/case/random problem… it’s basically cheaper for me to buy a new computer than it is to try to troubleshoot this one.

Huh… maybe that’s their plan. Make disposable computers and then sell them with 1 year warranties, knowing that they’ll mostly likely break. If anything, that’ll make sure I upgrade I suppose… to a non-Dell machine

Looks like it’s time for me to join Jeff Jarvis’s club.

So I’ve run into a few issues since installing Vista and I was hoping to file a bug. There’s a huge “Feedback” icon on my desktop, but that just takes me to a place where I can put in a support request. In the papers that they sent me the media kit with, it says to go to http://connect.microsoft.com, except all I can find is a place where I can read about other bugs. I can’t seem to find the “Report a new issue” button. It must be there somewhere, I’m probably just missing it?

If anyone knows where it is, please let me know

I got the Vista Beta 2 installation kit in the mail today so I’m going to try running it on my media center PC. I’ve got Vista Beta 2 running on my secondary computer at work and it’s a little bit slow, but my home computer is a bit faster, has a better video card, and more RAM. Hopefully, things will be pretty snappy

After I use it a little bit more I’m sure I’ll be blogging my impressions, especially of the new media center. Let me know if there’s anything in Vista that you want to know about!

Will Vista convince me to switch back to PC? We’ll see…

The Creative Arts Ministry at church is doing a 40 day daily devotional series using the Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life. I’ve decided to try it out too and I started a blog to record my progress over the next month or so.

I tried going through this book a few years ago, but I didn’t keep it up. I remember I didn’t care much for the book itself, but maybe this time it’ll be more engaging since I’ll be going through it with other people…

Anyways, now back to other random musings!

A few weeks back I met Weiting at a Lunch 2.0 event. He told me about a little app he was working on that was something to do with social networks and stocks which sounded pretty interesting; a few days later I got an invite in my e-mail so I checked it out.

Enter socialPicks, a social network + finance site. Basically, they built what Google Finance and Y! Finance should’ve built (and may be building as I blog…). The idea is that there’s a lot of community right in our brokerage accounts - people who buy the same stocks as you, your friends, your co-workers, etc. And there’s no good way to commiserate with them when stocks go down or celebrate together when stocks go up.

They’ve got cool ideas, like the ability to leave comments on stocks with your predictions, which anyone else can read over and then comment on.

We’ll put this in the “tools I wish I had before I lost a bunch of money in the stock market” bucket

If you’re interested in an invite, let me know. As far as I can tell, I’ve got unlimited invites!

That was pretty easy (as usual) Let me know if you see anything broken though!

Just read that S. Somasegar announced that WinFX is now known as .Net Framework 3.0 and will be shipping in Vista. This is great news for my old team at Microsoft, Indigo, which is now known as Windows Communication Foundation (another great name by the Microsoft Branding team ).

This is great news for Indigo and will probably speed up adoption by at least 2-3 years vs. if Indigo wasn’t included in Vista.

On a side note, as soon as I read about the news on Dare’s blog, I ran to my Vista Beta 2 installation and checked for the existence of a “c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v3.0.xxxxx” directory. Alas it was not there, but I did see System.Transactions.dll in there, which brought a smile to my face

Just unloaded my camera too

This past Tuesday (the ominous 6/6/06 ), Bubba, Rikk, Joseph and I went to Xanh for dinner to catch up. On the way to the restaurant, Joseph and Rikk saw these toilets and we couldn’t resist heading back after dinner to take a few funny photos. Here they are:

Oh yeah, the food at Xanh was great too

Whew, I realized today that I haven’t blogged in almost a month. So much to say!

Don’t worry, I’m still alive and kickin’; I’ve just been suffering from Mena’s Syndrome, being too busy to blog. Here’s what’s been on my mind lately:

• Got a new pair of headphones - Shure E4cs. Awesome; I’ll post up a review sometime soon.
• MacBook Pro was getting so hot, it was slowing down (and I suspect heat was causing some of the crashes); so I got a LapCool and it’s been much cooler and faster.
• Hosted some guys from the Michigan Men’s Glee Club when they were here in San Francisco. It was great to catch up with some of the other clubbers in the area at the concert too
• Lots of stuff happening at church. I’ve been helping out with graphics, production team on Sundays, and various other things for a long time and now I’m helping lead a small group too.
• Had a good time at zvents when they hosted Lunch 2.0 a few weeks ago (I’ve got a flickr photo set up). Thanks for hosting us Ethan!

yum!

Ah there’s so much more that I’m probably forgetting; but hopefully I’ll be able to post a little more often over the next few weeks.