The new Xbox 360 Wireless Controller is sexy

Posted on November 13th, 2010

I don’t know what it is. The colors (shades of silver, grey) or that it’s matte instead of shiny or something else but I find the new Xbox 360 Wireless Controller with the new transforming D-Pad incredible looking.

New Xbox 360 Wireless Controller

Microsoft: #notdeadyet

Posted on October 30th, 2010

CNN ran a story last week calling Microsoft a “dying consumer brand”. No way. With products like Windows 7 that have been on the market for the last year and Windows Phone 7 and Kinect hitting the market soon – I of course have to disagree. But my opinion is pretty biased. Frank Shaw, however, has started up a new hashtag on Twitter called #notdeadyet with a series of tweets highlighting some pretty eye-opening numbers regarding Microsoft. Here are some of what’s been highlighted:

And of course in September we also released the new version of Windows Live Essentials which includes new versions of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mesh (previously Sync), and Family Safety. Download Windows Live Essentials 2011 here. Here are some interesting data tidbits about Windows Live my pal Dharmesh published in a blog post last week:

  • 300 million active Messenger users.
  • Mesh is syncing over 500 terabytes of data between PCs (wow!).
  • 360 million active Hotmail users.
  • Hotmail delivers 8 billion email messages daily.

Over the summer, we also released Office Web Apps where you can edit and create Microsoft Office documents, PowerPoint presentations, and spreadsheets online through Windows Live!

And in September we also launched the beta of Internet Explorer 9. As of this week, the IE9 Beta has been downloaded 10 million times making it the fastest adopted browser beta. If you haven’t already, you can download the IE9 Beta here.

I also highly recommend reading Frank Shaw’s blog post on the official Microsoft Blog from June called Microsoft by the numbers for further perspective.

Microsoft is not dead yet.

Am I a geek or a nerd?

Posted on October 30th, 2010

UPDATED 7/13/11: Some of the below has changed so I thought I’d update it and then pass the question along to folks again and see what kind of responses I get!

Perhaps you can help me out and determining something: am I a geek or am I a nerd (or both). Quite often, I have people call me a geek. Equally as often, I have people calling me a nerd too. And it seems that both hold slightly different meanings in society today – although I’ve yet to really figure out exactly how.

Here are a few characteristics of mine to help answer this question:

  • I love to build my own PCs (desktop PCs not laptops of course!).
  • I love to blog (duh?).
  • I hate math.
  • I used to draw and paint a lot as a kid. As I grew older, I did less drawing and painting and got into writing stories and eventually movie screenplays/scripts that my friend and I were shoot (high school).
  • I am reverse engineering the theme on my blog from scratch – barrowing code from the default WordPress theme to make things work. As you can tell – it’s a work-in-progress.
  • I love doing things to make people laugh. Ask my co-workers. Sometimes I do so at inconvenient times.
  • I do have a blunt sense of humor.
  • I am a huge Star Trek fan – mostly Star Trek: The Next Generation and on (and 2009 Star Trek movie).
  • I own many Star Trek “technical manuals” and can tell you where Captain Picard’s quarters are on the Enterprise-D.
  • I randomly quote movie lines from such classics as the Back to the Future Trilogy, Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and *many* others.
  • I like listening to music soundtracks – e.g. The Dark Knight soundtrack is one of my favorites, so is Tron: Legacy.
  • I recently pulled up to a stop light next to a car with 2 nice looking women blasting the E.T. theme. Yes – I smiled and waved.
  • I recently discovered I could almost sing the entire song “Can you feel the love tonight” from The Lion King from memory. Why am I admitting this?
  • I dislike most Disney movies except for The Lion King and the Toy Story Trilogy. They better make a 4th Toy Story.
  • My music tastes are very eccentric – my favorite band is The Beatles, but have a huge 80’s music collection (remember the song “The Flame” by Cheap Trick?) and like a lot of the modern rock of today (Weezer, Foo Fighters, Jimmy Ear World, Linkin Park are some of my favorites to name a few.). Check out my Zune profile to see what I’ve listened to recently.
  • I enjoy going on long walks while listening to my music or long drives.
  • I love photography and taking photos. I like taking photos of landscapes and scenery. While I like taking photos I hate being in them and finding a good photo of me in it is, well, pretty rare.
  • I collect these “mini-figures” called Minimates from Diamond Select Toys. No they aren’t “LEGO people”. They are better!
  • Over the last 2 years, I’ve really gotten into Batman comics (Bruce Wayne returns!). Dick Grayson has grown on me as Batman and I’m disappointed he won’t remain as Batman when DC Comics re-launches all their comic titles this fall.
  • New software releases excite me.
  • My favorite animal is the Velociraptor. Oh sure, they are extinct now. But they were a real animal at one point!
  • Cats despise me.
  • I try to be a gamer. My Gamerscore on Xbox LIVE is 1020 1470 and it has taken me a while to get there. I tend to lean toward playing classic games like Sonic The Hedgehog 3, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, etc. available as an Arcade game title on the Xbox LIVE Game Marketplace. Yet I spent $149.99 on the Halo Reach Legendary Edition. UPDATE – Improvement in my Gamerscore is due to Kinect Sports and bowling. I rock at that.
  • I like reading “Making of…” books on movies that show production art and talk about the making of the movie. In a different life I would have loved to have been a director/producer/production designer for movies. I just love this stuff.
  • I love sushi. I eat too much of it.
  • I did not like Avatar. Effects were good but the storyline was boring and felt ripped off from Fern Gully: The Last Rain Forrest.
  • While I did not like Avatar, I HATED Transformers 3. Worst. Movie. Ever.
  • I’m not a fan of 3D. Love HD though!
  • I love Family Guy. I equally love American Dad.
  • I really enjoy Top Gear. Jeremy Clarkson is a hoot. Those guys get themselves into crazy situations doing messed up things with cars and its hilarious. They’ve had me laughing so hard I was crying (such as when Jeremy capsized his Toyboata).
  • Getting into I love Fringe. I jumped in at end of Season 2. Enjoying the “over there” storyline. UPDATE: I loved everything about Season 3 and can’t wait for Season 4 this fall.
  • I heavily support manned spaceflight and believe we should return to the moon and look at going to Mars (I hope to see us reach Mars in my lifetime however recent events have casted doubt this will be achievable).
  • I like to bowl. I am quite good at bowling on Kinect Sports and like to of course bowl outside my living room in a real bowling alley too.
  • I love movies about history or historical events or people (e.g. The Aviator, Tombstone, etc.).
  • I also find myself “socially backward” in that I’m not very good at “socializing”. I tend to be shy.
  • I don’t like large groups/crowds.

So am I a geek or a nerd? Would love to hear what people think! No – dork is not one of the options.

Forgive the downtime

Posted on September 4th, 2010

Forgive the downtime recently… if you tried to read my RSS posts from last week you may have hit a error. I neglected to pay my hosting bill (credit card needed to be updated and I forgot) so my hosting provider took down the site and locked my account. I’m very embarrassed. Of all the time I’ve done my own blogging this has never happened. I mean, my site’s been down plenty of times. But that’s usually because of me fiddling with something and breaking it. Anyways, everything should be back to normal. Another blogging best practice: stay on top of your hosting bills!

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Best practices for bloggers regarding their RSS feeds

Posted on August 29th, 2010

I seem to be on a roll today regarding RSS. I was going through Google Reader today clearing out a bunch of inactive RSS feeds or RSS feeds I no longer am interested in reading content from. I was absolutely shocked at how many RSS feeds from websites I discovered that were actually “broken”. Broken meant a variety of things ranging from the feed completely not working and the site gone, to feed just broken, to blogs or websites that have changed their RSS feed for whatever reason and I never knew it.

The majority of broken feeds I discovered were the result of blogs or websites that have changed their RSS feed or did something to their RSS feed that resulted in me not seeing any of their content for the last few months or even over a year.

If you are a blogger or website owner – the first best practice is you should be subscribed to your own RSS feed and checking it regularly. This is a good way to see what others are seeing when they subscribe to your RSS feed. If it breaks or is not updating correctly – you will likely see this behavior yourself and be able to respond and fix.

The next best practice is that if you absolutely have to change your RSS feed for whatever reason, you should look at putting in some sort of redirect that will redirect users automatically who are subscribed to your old RSS feed URL to the new RSS feed URL. This will result in no user action for folks subscribed to your RSS feed and they will continue to see updates as expected without knowing your feed even changed.

Of course there are also SEO (search engine optimization) issues if your RSS feed is busted too.

And just posted about how bloggers are (and should) be using RSS to push their content out to social networking services like Twitter and Facebook. If your RSS feed is busted, guess what? You’re content isn’t hitting these services and you’re likely losing exposure to the stuff you write.

Why RSS is still important (today)

Posted on August 29th, 2010

I hear a lot about how RSS is no longer important (e.g. subscribing to an RSS feed of a blog) now that everyone gets their information from Twitter or Facebook these days. While I agree that most people get their information from social networks like Twitter today than they do “subscribing” to an RSS feed – I do disagree that RSS isn’t important, at least today. It’s just less important for the average person visiting a blog (or website) but its still very important to the existence of a blog. Let me explain why.

The problem with RSS was that it never quite got to the point where it was something easily understood by the average person visiting a blog. My mom would never understand the concept of “subscribing” to an RSS feed of a blog or “subscribing to a blog”. It was easier for them to just add that blog to their Favorites (or Bookmarks) in their browser so they can revisit in the future. Along comes Twitter and Facebook which makes it extremely easy for people to consume information and easy for bloggers to push their blog posts out for people to read. The average person understands the concept of following someone on Twitter. Following someone could mean following a person or following a website. Most websites today automatically push their blog posts out to at least Twitter. And that’s where most people consume the content people blog.

But with bloggers pushing their content to Twitter – do you really think there is someone manually tweeting when a new post is published?

No.

At least not likely.

This is where RSS comes in.

Social networks today have become quite good at aggregating information from a variety of sources – including RSS. It’s almost a standard option. There are a bunch of services offered in Twitter’s extensive ecosystem that will take your blog’s RSS feed and automatically tweet it. My favorite is Twitterfeed. And both Facebook and Windows Live offer the ability for you to configure an RSS feed to bring in anything you publish to your blog and display it in your news feed. As a blogger and someone who runs a few blogs, I want to be able to push my content out to the major social networks for people to consume and as easily as possible. Today RSS allows me to do that.

RSS today is more important to content publishers like bloggers than it is to anyone else. It is very important for pushing blog content out to important services like Twitter, Facebook, or Windows Live for people to consume their content. It’s just no longer important for bloggers to recommend people “subscribe” to their blogs. Instead, the recommendation is to follow them (the blogger or blog) on Twitter.

Side note: The advantage to Twitter that is really exciting to me as a blogger is that its much more interactive. My Twitter feed is a place I can push my content to people that follow me but also interact with them and discuss my content beyond the comments section of my blog.

Now I say RSS is important today. It may not be very important in the future though. Actually, it probably won’t. If you look at Twitter, Facebook, Windows Live, and other social networks like Foursquare – they are all developing APIs that web developers can use to tap directly (and more integrate more deeply) into their services. Blog platforms are beginning to take advantage of this. Blogs and websites in general are looking at becoming more integrated into these services. In the future, it is likely a simple RSS feed won’t be enough. Actually – it won’t.

It will be interesting to watch this space in the next year or two.

Anybody know of a major website that is no longer publicly offering an RSS feed but instead asks their readers to follow them on Twitter or “like” their Facebook Page?

I recently upgraded my Windows Media Center PC

Posted on August 15th, 2010

I have a Windows Media Center PC (essentially, a PC running Windows 7 specifically for Windows Media Center) that controls my entire digital entertainment experience in my living room. I’ve had this PC since shortly after the launch of Windows Vista and it’s held up quite nicely over these past few years. I had upgraded it to Windows 7 a long time ago but I recently put in a new graphics card (for HDMI and improved performance) and Ceton’s new InfiniTV 4 digital cable quad-tuner card. This new TV tuner card essentially gives me the ability to watch 1 TV show in HD and record 3 others at the same time also in HD! Read my post over here on the Windows Experience Blog (part of The Windows Blog) for more on both my upgrade and Ceton’s TV tuner card.

Twitter’s Tweet Button

Posted on August 15th, 2010

I’ve added Twitter’s new Tweet Button (see details in their blog post here) to my blog. This button makes it easier to quickly share a post to all your friends on Twitter. For bloggers, Twitter is an excellent resource for getting exposure to blog content they write.

UPDATE: I tested the Tweet Button myself. Doesn’t seem to be showing the number of “tweets” that have been posted from the button although if I click on the number “O” it shows my test. Weird. Not sure what the deal is.

UPDATE 2: Now it seems to be working. It seems there is a slight delay? Are others experiencing a delay in tweet counts?

Considered Posterous, but sticking to WordPress

Posted on July 4th, 2010

I updated my blog to WordPress 3.0 RTM over the weekend. Time to give this place a little more attention. I debated moving away from WordPress all together and going to someplace like Posterous which is a little more automated. However everyone I know who considers themselves a serious blogger continues to use WordPress for their blogs. Many do, however, have Posterous accounts they treat as “secondary” to their blogs where they post images and other social updates to. I have done the same here – you can go to here to check out my Posterous account which I have configured on a subdomain. It is curious to me to see so many people using a service like Posterous as a secondary service to their main blogs. I’ve yet to see a good integration of both into a single site. If you’ve seen a site that integrates the two, let me know as I would like to see what that looks like.

When I was investigating using Posterous for my blog, Posterous’s CEO Sachin Agarwal had tweeted about taking in bug feedback. I jokingly replied to him that I thought not supporting Windows Live Writer was a bug (although I was being serious in that they should support Writer). His response to me on what I considered some valid and honest feedback was that he considers using Windows “a bug”. That kind of put me off a bit. Granted, I’m a bit biased. I know Sachin worked at Apple, supports their products 100% (just like I do with Microsoft), and is “inspired” by Apple and has never owned a PC according to his Twitter profile. But seriously… what kind of response was that? So Posterous is going to ignore the huge customer base that uses Windows today (it looks like Posterous doesn’t support IE8 either)? On Windows – Windows Live Writer is simply the best blogging tool available. It would be a huge benefit to Posterous to support it in my opinion and create additional value to people looking to move to Posterous. Perhaps he misunderstood my initial reply as being a bit snarky and if that’s the case – I do apologize. But if Sachin considers using Windows a bug – I take that as a heavy sign Posterous will likely not be doing anything special like supporting Windows Live Writer for Posterous – at least officially. Scott Lovegrove has made a plugin for Windows Live Writer that enables using Writer to post to Posterous blogs. Scott’s plugin works well. But I was looking for official support. It looks like Posterous is also focused on competing with the likes of Twitpic anyway. I wish them luck.

So in short – I’m sticking to WordPress as the blog platform of choice for my personal blog.

Twitter Acquires Tweetie Twitter Client for iPhone

Posted on April 10th, 2010

Twitter tonight announced they have come to a agreement to acquire Atebits and it’s iPhone Twitter app called Tweetie. In the next few weeks, Tweetie will be rebranded as Twitter for iPhone and be made as a free app in the App Store for iPhone users.

For me, I have a hard time not believing that this acquisition is only just the beginning for Twitter in terms of developing and or owning their own official Twitter clients on multiple platforms. I predict that in the coming months, we’ll hear more about Twitter doing official clients for the PC, Mac, Android, Windows Phone 7, etc. Twitter previously announced Twitter for Blackberry. Will Twitter look to acquire someone like TweetDeck next?

So what does this mean for third party developers and their apps?

Will Twitter use their official client apps to take advantage of exclusive features they develop that no third party app can utilize?

It will be interesting to see what happens in this space in the next few months.