I was always at odds with myself when I was working in the Mac group at Microsoft.  The team is a great, smart bunch of people who really love the Mac platform and really want to do right by the Mac and turn out cool software.  I knew we were doing good work but there is so much zealotry in the Mac community that it took me a long time to refer to Microsoft as “we”.  If you check out comments on Omar’s blog you can see first-hand some of the quasi-religious fervor that can follow any post which is construed as anti-Apple.

Well, it’s taken me a long time but I can finally say I’m proud to be a Microsoft employee.  Having worked at Microsoft for almost nine years now I’ve come to realize the public’s view of Microsoft as a big, evil company who’s sole purpose is to crush all opposition is both not the view of the majority of the public and also just not true.  The people with whom I’ve worked are, with few exceptions, driven to excel and truly passionate about producing great software for their customers.  We are a competitive lot, but while having another company (e.g. Google or Yahoo!) producing cool e-mail software may drive me to want to out-do them I no more want to destroy Yahoo! than I would want to injure an opponent when playing soccer (besides, if Yahoo was destroyed, I’d feel really bad for Hans, Rob and Randy… they’re great people).

Seeing as it’s past 2AM and I’m on the road, having trouble sleeping without my lovely wife around... I was thinking... Being a white, American male growing up in the ‘burbs (raised Christian to boot), working on Macintosh software at MS provided me with what is probably the closest experience I’ll ever have to true racism.  And I’m know it’s nothing compared to what blacks, gays, Muslims, handicapped etc. people may face. 

So, I suppose it’s no great triumph of human will against insurmountable odds... baby steps.

Last night Kraft food announced they were raising prices on some of their products including Oreo cookies, Oscar Mayer lunch meats and even prices at California Pizza Kitchen.  They said the price hike is to help offset the rising cost of petroleum.

For Pete’s sake... just put less petroleum in Oreos, I’ve never been fond of the crude oil favor to begin with.

On a related note, Kraft continues to be tight-lipped about the color of Oreos:

Q: What color are Oreo's, black or brown?

A: We do not have a color assigned to the cookie portion of an OREO. Some people think the OREO is a shade of brown, while others view the color closer to black.

I have a work laptop, a work desktop and a personal computer at home.  Moving between each of these machines could be frustrating if it weren’t for a couple nifty tools.  The two big areas for me are my IE favorites and my OneNote folders.  While I have been happily using Favorites Sync for a while now I have only recently settled on a solution to keep my documents folders in sync. 

MS offers folder redirection to their employees that keeps your entire My Documents folder up on a server.  When you’re off the corporate network XP automatically makes the folder available in a cached mode.  It’s pretty slick.  But… the folder size is limited and, for employees in California, very slow.

Back in April Microsoft purchased Groove Networks.  The Groove product is very cool, creating what amounts to a peer to peer Share Point server.   Groove will sync folders and files across multiple computers and allows you to control access so you can easily work with multiple people on a projects covering a whole mess of files.  Groove is really cool, and since MS bought it, employees can use it for free.  But… it takes a while for a computer running Groove to boot up (not a ton of time, but I’m impatient).  Groove also has chat, project and people management functionality.  It’s a great product but overkill for simply sharing files.

That brings me to FolderShare.  FolderShare is much more light-weight than Groove, focusing only folder sharing.  Groove is great for a multi-person office environment and FolderShare is perfect for individuals.  FolderShare offers both free and for-pay versions of their service.  The free version of the service limits the number of files and sub-folders which can be shared as well as the speed of the file sync.  I’ve been able to stick to just using the free service by keeping a sub-folder in my documents folder where I put the items I want to share (typically my current work) and moving them out when I’m done.

This morning we announced that we purchased FolderShare...  I’m hoping I can get the upgraded service now for free.  Yep, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… I’m cheap.

Ah... it's the random stuff that's the best.

Here's a guy who dresses up like Elvis... dressed up like a storm trooper.

Yes, it's...

This made me happy:

Dad's home

Click then click "watch this movie!"

(don't tell me it's old... I'm just out of touch)

Success! 

I have finally reached the end of my CD collection... they are now all ripped.  870 (give or take) CDs are now stored on my PC.  17,501 files in 1,411 folders for a total of 270Gb.  There are 458 unique album artists covering just about every, imaginable genre.

Crap?  How do I find something now?

Windows Desktop Search to the rescue!  I use this free desktop search engine at work to quickly dig through megabytes of saved e-mails… and now I’ve also found a great use for it at home as well.

You can either type in your search (searching through e-mail, files and more) then narrow the results to just the music files by clicking the “Music” icon in the toolbar or you can use the keyword “music” when you perform the search (e.g. “Robert Plant Kind:music”).  You can even create some quick play lists by doing a search like “kind:music genre:classical”.  From the results you can select multiple files and either play them directly from search or create a play list.

Ripping all the music was done over the period of four months and took me hours to complete, I definitely don’t want to do it twice.  All the music is ripped to a RAID array, each hard disk has an exact duplicate.  For backup advice, see my earlier post: Are you crash-safe?

I find it strangely disturbing that Activision has people running around graveyards playing a somewhat morbid game of poker relying on info from tombstones.  Sure, marketing never really worries too much about who they offend... as long as they sell stuff.  I've always felt that "dead is dead" and the residents of the graveyard would be fine with this kind of stuff... I just worry about how the living feel.

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where they approached the graveyard operator.

"Hi, we want permission to let a crowd of nerds into your graveyard to run around playing poker.  It'll be okay, we promise... it's to sell a video game."

Visit C|Net for more info: 'Graveyard Games' makes lively debut in Bay Area

I’ve started noticing some interlopers into the carpool lane on the way to work… Toyota Priuses with only one passenger.  What the hell?

The rules for the carpool lane as I understood them used to be:
   - The specified number of passengers (2 or 3, depending on the segment of road)
Or
   - Fewer than four wheels (2 or 3-wheeled vehicles allowed)
Or
   - Zero emissions (electric, natural gas, hydrogen, etc.)

Now, with a new bill signed into law last year, ultra-low emissions vehicles (ULEVs) are allowed into the carpool lane.  To be an ULEV the cars need to meet emissions requirements and get more than 45 miles to the gallon.  The means that now, in addition to Electric and Clean fuel vehicles, some hybrid vehicles are now allowed to use the carpool lane if they display the correct stickers. 

If you want to be able to use your green vehicle in the carpool lane in California first check to see if your car is on the approved vehicle list then complete the REG 1000 form to apply for your clean air vehicle stickers.

I have just one request... drive faster or get out of my way, it is after all my lane.