Too Early

John has posted some great pictures from our little adventure yesterday.

Office XP was interesting, it has a lot of the usual feature bloat, but Microsoft finally caught on to a few things about Office 2000 that annoyed people.  The paperclip guy isn't turned on by default now, you can use the group scheduling functions of Outlook, even if you don' t have an Exchange server, and it's much easier to format and perform a lot of the common tasks in Word.

In my opinion, UserLand should be scared of Microsoft's SharePoint server product.  It's everything Manila & My Userland On The Desktop could be, all ready for the masses.  Microsoft has something called "web parts" which allows you to create your own little applets for web pages, that retrieve news, stock quotes, etc. from other sites via JavaScript, VBScript, or even using XML.  They demoed it by retrieving headlines and stock quotes from other services, and said there will be several hundred pre-built web parts available at launch.

Sorry Dave, no RSS in there... 

The web integration looks pretty cool, but I'll have to use it in person before I can judge its true utility.

The "smart tags" in Office XP are a feature that I'll have to get used to.  The amateurish comedian demo guy showed us how you could start typing someone's first and last names in Word, at the beginning of a letter.  Word would scan your Contact List, and if it found the name, you could simply right click on it, and choose to insert the person's mailing address, saving you the hassle of typing it. It's a neat feature, but only for those who use Outlook.

If nothing else, I learned a lot more about transferring a NT domain into Windows 2000 ActiveDirectory, and had a good lunch at the Machine Shed...

Too Early

Ugh.  It's 5:30 a.m and my body wants to sleep another two hours.  Time to go get the University car, and drive to Story City to pick John up at the local McDonald's.  Zzzz...

Still Waiting...

I added MacOSRumors to the list over at www.weblogs.com tonight.  I get tired of checking the site daily to see if there is an update.  It's one of those sites that sits idle for two weeks, then updates daily for three days in a row, then sits idle for another week.  Add in the fact that they only keep the most recent day's post on the front page, and you get a weblog that's not so user friendly.  Hopefully, having it part of my weblogs.com list will keep me up to date.  For those of you looking to find the listing to add to your list, it's "MacOSRumors".

Excitement here at the apartment tonight, my girlfriend just dropped her watch in the toilet, as she was flushing it.  Yes, she is talented...

I recovered it, and it's still ticking away, it's a quality Armitron timepiece... It wasn't even affected by the blue stuff in the toilet.  I washed my hands thorougly afterwards...

My sister's MRI is today, the e-mail from my mom says they may be doing a biopsy also.  The waiting is the hardest part...

I just saw over on John's weblog that an old co-worker of ours has brain cancer and is now living on borrowed time.  Hopefully Jessi's tests will return better results...

John and I will be hitting the road tomorrow, to a Microsoft presentation in Des Moines.  He wants to learn about upgrading his NT domain to Windows 2000, I want to see the preview of Office XP. 

We decided to skip the free lunch that Microsoft provides, as it would require us to sit through a lecture about software licensing and the importance of complying.  I've already been enough of a pain to the people in my college here, I get the impression that they were used to just getting whatever software they wanted, and no one ever said "Who's going to pay for it?".  When someone calls me, and says they want the newest version of Office installed on their computer, I hit them up for $60.  It not only pays for the license, but it keeps my workload down, as they're only going to request the software upgrades they actually need.

 I'm not trying to be a Nazi about the licensing, but I just came from an IT shop that was in GROSS violation of the licensing on much of their software, despite my urging to comply.  I'm not going to let that happen to this place under my watch.

The Waiting Game

Bad news tonight in an e-mail from my mom.  The doctors have found a lump in my sister's neck, on the trachea, apparently... 

For those who don't know, my sister had cancer over  five years ago.  She had an extremely rare form of tumor that grew under her chin.  It was removed via surgery when she was 16, and followed up with radiation therapy.  Jessi's had clean checkups and MRIs for over five years now, and is finishing her last semester of classes at NAU before student teaching and graduating.  She'll be 22 in April.

Jessi's having an MRI done on Monday in Vegas, but it'll take several days before we get the results back.  Nothing we can do now but wait and hope and pray...

Flower Powered Dalmations

Apple introduced their new iMac models tonight.  I'm underwhelmed.  The new color choices are "interesting", but nothing that I'd want to buy.  They raised the speed of the chips, and added CD-RW to the to high-end models.

Here's what I like:  Faster CPU's, CD-RW drives are finally available, new color schemes are bold, if nothing else.  The addition of the CD-RW drives does make the machine a nice little digital music station for a teenager or a college student. It's probably a little more useful than watching a DVD on a 15 inch screen.

What I don't like:  (deep breath) 

There's no option for DVD-ROM, if the top model of iMac had one of the combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW drives that are available, that would have been very cool.  Watching DVD's on a 15 inch screen isn't great, but if you're a college student, it'd be nice to be able to do both in your cramped little dorm room on your fancy new iMac.

Still stuck at 15 inch displays.  Those CRT's need to be bigger, 15 inches simply isn't reasonable anymore.  iMacs make good "grandma" machines, but many grandmas don't have very good eyesight...

64MB of RAM standard on two of the three models.  That's not even enough RAM to run the new Apple operating system that ships in 30 days.  How many people are going to buy a new iMac and be peeved when it can't run the newest OS less than a month later?  128MB is the requirement for OS X. 

Apple charges an outrageous amount to upgrade the RAM when you order.  They want $283 to go from 64MB of RAM to 256MB.  It's always cheaper to buy RAM yourself and install it, but Dell only charges $184 for the same level of increases on their machines.  You could buy a 256MB chip yourself for $91.79 with free shipping...

Ugly cases.  They're bold, but I wouldn't want one on my desk.

The price of the low-end model has been raised $100.  It's 50mhz faster, and now sports firewire and Airport capabilities, but most of the budget PC crowd aren't interested in those technologies, they want a cheap machine to surf the web and write e-mail on, not edit their home movies or set up a wireless network.

I was hoping for the introduction of new iBooks, as that's the Apple product that most interests me right now.  But, I guess I'll have to wait on those.  Apple also changed some of the options with their Cubes, adding a 450mhz model with CD-RW, and dropping the price of the basic model.  I still don't want one of them, they're a product in search of a market.  Or, as Michael Dell says in his book that I just read, it's "technology for technology's sake" rather than technology driven by what the consumer asks for.