Recently purchased a netbook with Windows 7 on it a few weeks ago. I didn’t realize until I started using it the massive limitations of Windows 7 Starter Edition. This article articulates it pretty well: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/Microsofts-Windows-7-Could-Disappoint-Netbook-Users-Says-Survey-368762/

Even worse, when the netbook was first loading, they misspelled initializing as “Initailizing…”. My blackberry doesn’t take very good shots of LCD netbook screens, but here is the picture:

Windows 7 misspells initializing as "Initailizing"

A coworker of mine is always talking about how great Ubutnu is: http://www.ubuntu.com/, and I do have an extra laptop to try it out on. So that seems like a nice weekend project.

Protect yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/mobile/publicpc.mspx

I found that link and the first thing I thought was: what is a .mspx file extension? A lot of googling revealed to me that the answer lie at http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_column_46.mspx. Unfortunately, that is a dead link. Fortunately for me, nothing on the web goes away once posted (more about that regarding social networking photos, but I digress).

From the web archives:
http://web.archive.org/web/2004080…

“The presentation framework includes a custom Web handler built in ASP.NET. Pages that use the presentation framework have the .mspx filename extension, which is registered in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) on the Web servers. When one of the Microsoft.com Web servers receives a request for an .mspx page, this custom Web handler intercepts that call and passes it to the framework for processing.

The framework first checks to see whether the result is cached. If it is, the page is rendered immediately. If the page is not cached, the handler looks up the URL for that page in the table of contents provided by the site owner (see below) to determine where the XML content for the page is stored. The framework then checks to see if the XML is cached, and either returns the cached content or retrieves the XML from the data store identified in the table of contents file.

Within the file that holds the content for the page, XML tags identify the content template to be used. The framework retrieves the appropriate template and uses a series of XSLTs to assemble the page, including the masthead, the footer, and the primary navigational column, finally rendering the content within the content pane.”

Now that is interesting. Oh, and so was this:
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/mobile/publicwireless.mspx

Still have a student email address and a craving for the latest and greatest Microsoft products? Well lucky for us Microsoft created Microsoft DreamSpark.

With DreamSpark students have access to full featured professional versions of the software (No 30-days trials, etc) for the purposes of furthering their education, knowledge, or skills. As far as my plans? I just downloaded Visual Studios 2008 and intend to install it tonight to try it out. When I have the time and server, Windows 2008 will definitely be next on the list.

This is such a great find!

I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 Calendar for all of my scheduling. I got in the habit ofusing Outlook Calendar at work for scheduling meetings, vacations, etc. So it is convenient to use at home for scheduling get-togethers with friends, administering dog medication, doctor appointments, etc!

For some reason it has taken me until today to realize – wouldn’t it be great if I had all of the United States Holiday’s in the calendar as a little reminder of when they were coming up?

So I googled around expecting to have to find some download someone made that would include a calendar import for Outlook. To my pleasant surprise, the functionality is built right into Outlook:

• Open Outlook and select ‘Tools | Options’
• On the ‘Preferences’ tab select ‘Calendar Options’
• Click the ‘Add Holidays’ button
• Select your country and then click ‘OK’
• After a quick import, all the holidays will show up on the Calendar

If you need to delete them:

• Go to the Calendar screen
• Select ‘Current View | Events’
• Delete all the ones you want from the list

Next step for me is going to be adding birthday’s to the calendar!