When doing the slides for my optional parameter video, it never even occurred to me that PowerPoint may be able to accommodate aspect ratios other than 4:3.  While watching my video after it posted to YouTube, I started wondering if PowerPoint would support 16:9.  Sure enough, from the Design tab, click “Page Setup,” and the first configurable property, “Slides sized for,” lets you pick from several aspect ratios, including 16:9.

Wish I’d thought to look for that sooner.

I've got a grab-bag of information to talk about, but none of the topics is enough to justify a full post.  So I'll just rapid-fire these tidbits of news in a single post...

• I've had my mid-year review at Corillian.  It was a positive experience, and I'm feeling much more comfortable in my role with the company.  Between this review and a fruitful meeting with a client, I'm really excited about the opportunities I have to accomplish some really cool things.  And telecommuting is getting easier, too.  I daresay I'm more productive than I've ever been.
  
  
• I picked up a Garmin nüvi 200 GPS.  For an entry-level GPS geared toward car navigation, I couldn't be happier with it.  My only complaint is it seems to make some weird route suggestions occasionally.  For example, I'll be driving to San Antonio later this spring.  Google Maps says the quickest route is I-35 all the way from KC to San Antonio, which seems pretty reasonable to me.  The nüvi disagrees, and has me taking a route that, while technically shorter in distance, is also an hour longer in terms of time according to Google Maps.  Meh, it'd still get me there eventually.  That's the most important part, I think.  I drove to Omaha, NE for business last week, and it performed beautifully in getting me to the hotel, around town, and then back home.
  
  
• I'm an ergonomics nut.  I love ergonomic keyboards and mice.  My current keyboard is the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000, which I think is the best MS Natural Keyboard since the original (which I still have in my closet).  I was using a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000, which was mostly comfortable but was causing some  minor discomfort in my first and middle knuckles and my wrist.  When I was in Omaha last week, a colleague introduced me to the Microsoft Wireless Laser Natural Mouse 6000.  I ordered one for myself immediately.  While not as alien as a vertical mouse, your hand is elevated and rotated in a position that, while extremely natural and comfortable, is a little weird at first.  Give it a day and you'll never turn back.  I cannot recommend this mouse enough.
  
  
• If you have multiple IM clients running, you owe it to yourself to try a unified client.  I use Pidgin (nee Gaim) to log onto my Windows Live and Google Talk accounts, as well as CheckFree's internal Sametime server.  Very handy.
  
  
• My brother-in-law (and close friend), Bruce (aka Unknown Echo), started Basic Military Training for the US Air Force a couple weeks ago.  He's a remarkable young man, and we're all very proud of him.
  
  
• I wish my old friends at Commerce would quit blowing off my lunch invitations.  I'm looking at you, Joel.

I don't have a traditional landline.  I have Vonage.  Originally, switching to Vonage was something I did to save a few bucks, as the monthly cost of Vonage, which includes unlimited calling anywhere in the US, was still less than just local service from the phone company.  Over the past year, they've added services that make them even more of a value.  Most of these are "beta" features, ala Google, but they're still cool as hell.

Vonage Contacts:  More than a simple online phonebook, this is a full fledged six-way conference call system with a slick AJAX interface.  Very useful for the telecommuter.

Vonage Me:  A "click to call" feature that allows your contacts to initiate a toll-free call with you without dialing direct.  I've added the URL to my email signature.

Vonage Fax:  An outgoing fax service.  I've really, really needed this service for a long time.  I've tried a few pay services on the web, but this one is included with the cost of my Vonage subscription.

Vonage Talk:  A softphone interface for your primary Vonage line, combined with an IM client.  For some reason, I couldn't get this one to work.  It kept erroneously telling me my password was wrong.

I've loved Vonage for as long as I've been with them, and their willingness to explore new features like this makes me love them even more.  It's too bad they've been having financial problems.  They deserve a far better fate than to be sued into oblivion by the traditional telecom industry.

With the most recent system update for the Xbox 360, Microsoft added support for my favorite video codec, DivX, and its open-source equivalent, XviD.  I decided that, with modern inexpensive storage, the time was right to build an online video library, as I already had for music several years ago.

I've divided my media folder into two sections:  Home Movies, where I keep captured camcorder tapes, and Entertainment, where I keep my DVD movie collection.  I use different processes for each.

For the camcorder tapes, I capture the digital video over Firewire using WinDV or the video import tool built into Vista.  I take the raw DV AVI (about 13 GB per hour) and run it through MediaCoder.  I encode using 2-pass XviD at 1500 kbps, using VBR MP3 for the audio.  I set the output to resize to 720x400 (my camcorder shoots 16x9 video) and pass it through the yadif 0 de-interlace filter.  The final result is about 700 Mb per hour, and looks reasonably good on both the PC and the Xbox 360.  MediaCoder is a little tricky to learn, so I recommend reading the forums and FAQs on the website.

For the DVD movies, I rip the DVDs to my hard drive using well-known tools.  (Disclaimer:  It is my belief that this legally falls under the doctrine of fair use, as I only rip movies that I own.  I do not advocate pirating movies in any way.)  I then use the Auto Gordian Knot to encode the movie to XviD, specifying a custom file size that I calculate using the rate of 700 Mb/hour.  This process is well-explained in the AutoGK tutorial.

So far, I've got about 40 movies, the entire run of Firefly, the Band of Brothers mini-series, and 30 hours of home video stored on my server and instantly available on my Xbox 360.  This is definitely a convenience that I find worth the time investment if you're so inclined.

I couldn't resist sharing this, even if it does make me a bigger nerd at work than I already am...

Star Trek vs. Star Wars

I found an issue with the DVR that I find pretty irritating.  I STILL prefer Dish over Time Warner, contrary to the implications at the end of this letter.  Maybe 6.8/10 now...

The following is an email I sent Dish Network tonight:

I've been a Dish customer for a couple of weeks now, and while I'm very pleased with your signal and programming choices, I've got to express my dissatisfaction with your HD DVR, the ViP622.

I previously emailed Dish Tech Support regarding a scenario in which I would want to be able to record new episodes of a show with a high priority, and reruns of the same show with a lower priority. They replied that this was not possible with the current software. I decided that I liked the ViP 622 enough that I could live with this.

I've now discovered a larger, much more serious issue that really vexes me. Apparently, the DVR has a maximum number of 288 scheduled events. Between 20 event timers (most of which are set for "new episode") and 5 dish passes, I've currently got 80 events scheduled that result in a recording and 208 skipped events. This puts me at 288 events and I can add no more timers.

I've used a good DVR (DirecTV's old TiVo line), and I've used a downright awful DVR (Time Warner's SA 8300HD). Neither DVR imposed this kind of arbitrary limitation. How on earth have you guys been distributing this thing for over a year without having fixed this issue?

I'm very, very torn. On the one hand, I love your channel lineup, your customer service, your signal quality, and, for the most part, your DVR. On the other hand, these two issues with your DVR are such fundamental flaws, totally counterintuitive to the core benefits of even USING a DVR, that I am seriously wishing I had done more research before becoming a Dish subscriber. Had I known about these limitations, I would have preferred to stay with Time Warner's otherwise inferior product.

Please, please, PLEASE tell me you have plans to update the DVR software to address these limitations. I want to love Dish Network, but right now, I'm just frustrated and wishing I'd stayed with cable.

UPDATE - 3/3/2007

It looks like relief is on the way!  Here's Dish's response...

Thank you for your e-mail. We are aware of the issue with this receiver. Our engineers are working on the problem. It will be corrected in a software update which should increase the amount of events available. Unfortunately, there is not a way for us to know the status of their work. Please remember to turn off your receiver when you are not watching TV, so that it can receive the update when it becomes available.

So they promise that it will be corrected.  Better yet, the people in the know have confirmed that it's going to happen sooner rather than later!  This rocks!!!

My wife and I lost yet more shows when our Time Warner DVR (SA 8300HD) suddenly decided to stop recording without warning.  And considering that popular opinion is that Time Warner's new Navigator software sucks even more than the software we've got, it became clear to us that it was time to jump ship.

So I logged onto Amazon and ordered the TiVo Series3.  Then I did some browsing around the TiVo community to congratulate myself.  I'm glad I did...  It turns out that there is a pretty serious issue with the TiVo Series3 boxes on certain cable providers.  You see, the TiVo Series3 uses the CableCARD 1.0 spec.  A lot of big cable providers are moving parts of their channel lineup to a new technology called Switched Digital Video (SDV).  SDV is not compatible with CableCARD 1.0.  So as a given cable provider moves channels to SDV, a CableCARD customer would lose those channels.  There's no way of knowing when or what channels would be affected - It all hinges on how Time Warner decides to maintain their network.

Today, I doubt it would impact us.  In all fairness, I would probably be very happy with the Series3 at first.  But what about in a few months?  Years?  How long would it be before my $660 TiVo (Amazon's price) became a boat anchor?  I'm a geek, and I enjoy being an early adopter, but not in this case.  The technology is already partially obsolete with a good potential of becoming further obsolete in the very near future.  I love you TiVo, and you're doing some cool things, but I can't accept that.  Give me a call when you roll out the Series4.

So we started thinking outside the box, and we decided to drop our terrestrial cable (except for RoadRunner)  in favor of Dish Network and their very well received HD DVR.  The installer comes Thursday.

I've been running Vista on my home desktop and my wife's Dell XPS m140 laptop since it went RTM, and I've got nothing but nice things to say about it.  However, I can't run Aero on my wife's laptop.  Turns out that Intel has elected not to make the prerequisite WDDM video drivers for the 915GM chipset in the XPS m140 and half of all the other laptops manufactured in 2006.  They blame Microsoft, but honestly, I just don't care.  I bought a "Vista Ready" PC in 2006, and the damn thing isn't completely Vista ready.  Jerks.

One of the first things I noticed about Vista was that they'd included thumbnails on the alt-tab dialog and on the taskbar buttons.  Thumbnails in alt-tab is nothing new.  I've been using TaskSwitchXP for a while now.  What is new is the thumbnails on the taskbar buttons. When you point at a program's button in your taskbar, you get a tooltip with an embedded thumnail.

As if that weren't cool enough, the thumbnail is actually updated in real time.  Observe here, I'm viewing Weird Al's White and Nerdy* and the thumbnail is updating at the same 30 fps as the actual video player (I added the red box for emphasis)!  Well, maybe not the same framerate, but it has to be pretty close.  How cool is that???

* Yes, I'm an unabashed fan of Weird Al.  He's like the patron saint of geeks.  If you don't like it, suck it.

While importing a Virtual PC image into our enterprise VMWare server, the process kept bombing out with sysimage.fault.ReconfigFault.  I Googled high and low, and didn't get any hits on sysimage.fault.ReconfigFault (or anything that appeared to be related).  I decided to try to convert the VPC to a VMWare Workstation image so I could try playing it in VMWare Player, and I got the same results.  I was resigned to giving up.

Then I noticed that VMWare Player included Microsoft VPC in its list of compatible images.  On a lark, I loaded my VPC image in VMWare Player, and it started a short conversion process.   Sure enough, it bombed out with "A required archive (driver.cab) could not be found in the source OS."  Hmmm.  Something else to Google.  Thankfully, this new Google search was a bit more fruitful in its results.  This guy's solution fixed the problem in VMWare Importer as well as VMWare Player.

I'm totally surprised nobody else has run into this.

Update 3/18/2007:

So it looks like this is the #1 hit on Google for resolving this issue.  That's pretty cool.  So I decided that, just in case the above link breaks, I'd grab the pertinent part out of the above link (in case that site ever disappears).

1. Find another computer running the same operating system and service packs.
2. Copy the "%windir%\Driver Cache" directory into the same location on the VPC image.
3. Shut down the VPC.

That's it!

Hey, if this helps anyone, please take a second to drop me an email or leave a comment here.  I'd love to hear from you.

Intrigued by Scott Hanselman's blog post and podcast on Office 2007, I finally managed to carve out some time to give the Beta a try.  I'm totally stoked about the overall usability improvements, particularly in Word, but, as with all Office releases, Outlook is the application by which I live and die.  Outlook 2007 doesn't disappoint, although most of its improvements are really subtle in nature.

I installed Office 2007 Beta on a VM, as I wasn't going to install it on my office workstation or laptop (I've been busted for that sort of thing before) and I don't really have time to play with it at home (since I'm usually spending time with my wife and kid).  But once I got it installed and running in my VM, I figured there wouldn't really be any harm in having Outlook connect to my Exchange message store on the corporate network from my VM.  It was in that way that I was able to try out some of the cooler functionality, like calendar overlays using my coworkers' shared calendars.

That said, I discovered a couple rather interesting features.  The first problem was that I couldn't get my Outlook profile to operate in cached mode.  It kept throwing an error that the offline cache file wasn't a valid PST file.  Then it would present me with a dialog box to select an OST file.  The only OST file in the dialog, Outlook.OST, threw the same error, so I assumed it was the file that caused the problem in the first place.  I tried giving the dialog a PST file, but it then told me that the file I had given it wasn't a valid offline cache file.  Well, no kidding!  But an OST file isn't a PST file, and it complained about that, too.  Sheesh.  So I gave up on cached mode and just ran in online mode.

The other problem, which caused a fair amount of anxiety for me, was when I started Outlook and it complained about my rules being bad and having to convert them all to client-only.  This wasn't what bothered me.  What bothered me was when I went back to Outlook 2003 on my laptop and none of the rules actually worked, I couldn't delete them, and I couldn't add any new server rules via the "Create Rule" context menu in the inbox (only client-only rules, although the Rules dialog seemed to work to create new server rules).

True, I could workaround the rules issues, but I don't like workarounds.  I like things to work the way they're supposed to work.  That was problematic for me, though, because I don't know thing one about Exchange Server, and I could just imagine the trouble I was going to be in if I had to go to the Exchange Server admin and ask him to fix it.

Luckily, as it often does, Google saved my butt.  Turns out I'm not the only one who had the problem.  I didn't have access to Web Outlook as one of those posts mentions, but a little more Googling turned up the /cleanrules switch.  I ran Outlook 2003 with /cleanrules, re-built my rules (luckily I only have 5 or 6 of them), and all was right in the world.

I got a chance to sit down and chat with Scott Hanselman for 20 minutes or so while I was in Portland.  Scott was a totally gracious host, and took an opportunity to introduce me to another tool that he raves about (and I never tried), PowerShell.  For the uninitiated, PowerShell is a command line and scripting environment.  Think cmd.exe, but with first-class support for the .NET framework class library, XML, WMI, and much, much more.  After Scott demoed it for me, I went back to my hotel and played with the shell for a few hours.  Although my need for it has been limited, I'm madly in love with PowerShell.  This is powerful stuff.

I can't say anything about PowerShell that hasn't been said already, so do yourself a favor and check it out.  While you're at it, check out some of the info on Scott's blog, his podcast on the subject, and his recent post about the PowerShell IDE.

Slashdot ran this story about a couple whose hard drive, which had been supposedly destroyed by Best Buy, turned up at a flea market.  The implications are, of course, a little scary.

It amazes me how blazé people are with their data.  It's just not a lot of effort to keep your data secure.  Here are the measures that I take: 

1. Password-protect your user account.  My wife an I run as local admin, which is a bad idea, and I strongly recommend that you do NOT do that unless you are very confident in your ability to protect your system from malware.  That said, it is ALWAYS a good idea to password-protect your user account.  My wife and I have separate logons on all of our systems, and we use Fast User Switching to log on/off.  Password protecting your accounts ensures that anyone in your house using your system is going to be logged on as the guest account, and will only have the rights you grant them.
   
   
2. The directory tree on our network that we store all of our stuff in is set up with proper ACLs to deny access to anyone that isn't me or my wife.  This is lets us comfortably allow a guest to login to our desktop system without worrying that they'll get into our files.
   
   
3. The really sensitive stuff (financial records, images of our birth certificates and SSN cards, medical records, certain pictures) is kept in a TrueCrypt drive.  This way, if the machine is stolen, and an adversary bypasses the ACLs (easy enough to do - reinstall the OS), the sensitive stuff is still safe.  The TrueCrypt drive also has ACLs to deny guests access if we leave the drive mounted while they log on via Fast User Switching.
   
   
4. Sensitive information is never sent to anyone via email.  I've got my mom and wife using PGP to encrypt plain-text messages and binary files for email transmission.  The basic functionality will always be free, thanks to the efforts of Phil Zimmerman (a true hero, in my mind).  My wife is a power user, but my mom is a more "typical" user, and she caught on very quickly.  If my mom can pick it up, how hard can it be?  (Sorry, Mom...)
   
   
5. Backup your stuff, but take the same measures to protect your data.  I use the cheap-o cheezy Backup app that's built into Windows to backup all my directories and TrueCrypt drives to an external drive, but I maintain the same ACLs on the backup media as I do on the "production" media.
   
   
6. If you're going to be selling/throwing away/giving away a drive, please, for the love of Pete, at least format the stupid thing first.  A better option would be Darik's Boot and Nuke, but a regular format will take care of most adversaries.
   
   
7. Whenever I connect to my network remotely, it's all done via SSH.  The only inbound port on my network is SSH, and I use PuTTY to set up a secure tunnel for any connectivity I need from work or on the road.
   

What fun I'm having up here at Corillian!  I love Portland anyway, but I'm really getting to give my brain cells a workout on this project.  That makes it oh so much better.

Since I'm up here over Memorial Day, my wife and I decided to make a family vacation out of it, and she and our 18-month-old son are flying up to join me.   We're looking to do lots of fun local stuff, like the beach and driving around Mt. Hood.

I blogged earlier in the week about playing with my GPS mid-flight.  It was a fun little diverision.  As I'm waiting for my wife's (two-hour-delayed) flight to come in, I thought it'd be fun to track her flight in real time online.  There are lots of sites around the web to do this, but FlightView seems to be a predominant one.  Very similar to the thing with my GPS, I don't see that the information is actually useful for anything, and it's ultimately about as exciting as watching paint dry.

It ultimately doesn't tell you anything the flight status page on the airline's website doesn't tell you, but it is kind of fun to look at that blip and say, "hey, my wife and kid are somewhere over Nebraska right now."

I'm in Portland, OR right now doing a residency with our friends at Corillian in an effort to collaborate on the next release for Commerce's Online Banking product.  It's a three hour flight from Kansas City, and I've made the flight several times before.  I often find myself wondering where I am geographically when I stare at the patchwork quilt thousands of feet below the plane.

I recently picked up Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 with GPS Locator, and it's a fun and useful little gizmo.  On a lark, I pulled out my laptop on the plane, stuck the GPS module's suction cup to the window, and waited.  It took a few minutes, but eventually my GPS got a lock and began reporting my position.  Not that you can do much with it at 33,000 ft going 460 MPH, but it's a fun little diversion when you don't have anything better to do mid-flight.

Scott Hanselman has blogged about it more than once, but I never listened.  Now I've been converted.  Go download Slickrun and quit leaning on the Start button.  That's so...  Windows 95.  Magic Words is where it's at, baby!

One thing:  Scott says he's got his Slickrun bound to Windows-R, so I followed his procedure to implement this.  For some reason, it flakes out on me sometimes and displays the Windows Run dialog anyway.  Since it's an inconsistent behavior, I figure it's probably just best to assign it to something else and get in the habit of invoking it from there (hopefully not the default  Windows-Q, since that's pretty awkward).

Update:  I figured out what was causing the flakiness.  It seems that the difference is whether you use the left or right Windows key when performing Windows-R.  At least, that's how it works on my Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite at work.  (Side note: The Elite model sucks, but it's the only one our desktop support team will purchase.)