Jan ’08 22
K’s new iMac arrived today. We would have had it yesterday, but I had it delivered to the office and we were closed for the Martin Luther King holiday. Still pretty amazing that the system went from Shanghai to St. Louis in four days. We’re lucky if we can get first class mail from here to Moline in four days!
We’re in the middle of copying her settings and files from the old iMac to the new one. Impressive to compare the two iMacs. The new one is so much thinner, and the larger 24 inch display doesn’t hurt either. Have several days of getting things tweaked and moved around, but it will be well worth it. Here’s a photo of the new toy.
Of course, if we’re upgrading the Mac then I need to see about upgrading my system. I have a Dell XPS 400 I bought almost three years ago. This was the first name brand name PC I’d bought in years, going back to my Gateway 2000 486DX-33 I bought in the late 1980s (complete with VESA local bus graphics… remember those days?). It has been a great box, but I’m getting spoiled at work with Core 2 Duo systems, so it is time to break en the piggy bank and build a new system.
Tangent alert! Remember when Computer Shopper was a 600+ page tome, the definitive guide to anything and everything having to do with PCs? I miss those days. Sure we have all this info on the we, complete with scores of hands on reviews to help identify what works and what doesn’t. But with Computer Shopper, in an afternoon you could be completely cat up with what was out there. Now with the web, you start looking for a case, then for a video card, and then you’re watching a video, and before you know it, 8 hours have gone by and you’ve forgotten what it was you were looking for in the first place!
Anyway, here’s what I’m going with in my new box:
I’ll reuse my hard drives, TV card, DVD burner, and monitor. Christmas in January! Now if retailers would just start getting the E8400 in inventory….
Jan ’08 16
I bought the latest version of Microsoft Streets & Trips over the weekend, and after I installed it I kept getting error messages about the map data being the wrong version. I uninstalled, reinstalled, made sure the folder under Program Files was gone, all to no avail. Finally it occurred to me to check the AppData\Virtual Store folder in my user profile.
If you run a program under a standard user account and the program tries to write to a protected area, it redirects those writes to a per user space. Turns out that removing the old version of Streets & Trips left those per user files behind, so whenever the program ran, it looked at the old data files and not the new ones. Removing the Streets & Trips folder in VirtualStore cleared up the problem.
Microsoft has a Knowledge Base article (KB 927387) that talks about common issues related to file and registry virtualization. God reminder about Vista nuances.
Jan ’08 9
Over on Tech•Ed Rocks!, Brian Marble provided the locations for the next couple years. TechEd will be in Los Angeles in 2009 and New Orleans in 2010. Going to Orlando has been (and will be) great because it gives me a chance to visit Walt Disney World, and now we’re following up with Los Angeles which means a trip to Disneyland. Thanks Microsoft!
Jan ’08 7
Warner’s defection to the Blu-ray camp looks to push the stalemate with HD-DVD over the edge. The Financial Times is reporting that Paramount is ready to drop HD-DVD and switch to Blu-ray. Apparently they had a clause in their contract that gives them an out in the event that Warner went with Blu-ray. Amazing how quickly the competitive balance can change. I’ve been holding out like most consumers, but have been leaning towards Blu-ray because of Disney’s support for the format.
Dec ’07 13
I’ve been in Seattle since Sunday to attend the Windows HiEd Conference. Sponsored by Microsoft and the Windows in Higher Education community, the conference was at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond with ~100 attendees from various universities. There was a mix of presentations by both Microsoft people as well as higher education folks. Today was the final day and definitely the strongest. We’re heading back to St. Louis with some good contacts for some projects we have in progress.
I didn’t get to see much outside the conference, since they had us in sessions all day long, but did get to have some good meals as well as a great tour of the Microsoft campus and some opportunities to meet with some incredible Microsoft people courtesy of Xiotech, our SAN vendor.
Unfortunately I never found time to pop in to Trader Vic’s even though it was right next to our hotel in Bellevue. Oh well, something to save for next time. Even though the modern Trader Vic’s aren’t what they used to be, it still would have been a treat.
