Google has finally heard my prayers and responded with a calendar app in the same style as Gmail.  It's still pretty early in its maturity, but it's got all the basics covered, including Gmail integration and a nice web invitation feature.  Between this and Gmail, it's safe to say that my home/personal PIM environment (as opposed to work) is no longer hindered by a lack of Outlook .  Besides, for personal data, I prefer the web-based stuff anyway, since it's way more portable.  Leave the work stuff at work, but I want to be able to get to my personal stuff anywhere.

Some things I'd like to see:

1. A to-do list with reminder capability.
2. A desktop reminder agent (integration with Gmail Notifier, perhaps?)
3. Configurable notification addresses, so I could use email addresses outside of my Gmail account (although they DO provide SMS capability - that's a plus!)
   

Having gotten sick of the obnoxious Flash-based ads in MSN Messenger, as well as the unweildy tabs mechanism, I made an effort several months ago to deprecate Messenger in favor of the Windows port of Gaim. Unfortunately, I found myself turned off by Gaim's incompatibility with MSN's video conferencing (how I see my kid when I'm on the road) and the general "industrial" feel of the GTK+ library Gaim is built on.  On my last trip out of town, I found myself going back to MSN Messenger.

The thing is, the interface still bothers me.  The ads are annoying, as is the clutter from the tabs.  Here's my tips on creating a nice, minimalist MSN Messenger environment.

1. The built-in configuration options are your friend.  At a minimum, turn off the "Show MSN Today on Login" option.  If you're getting sick of your contacts' display pictures, by all means, disable those too.  You'll note the default soccer ball associated with my wife's entry in the screenshot.  I hate that.  Default images annoy me.
   
2. Kill the tabs.  There's an option to do it in the Security section of the options (on Messenger 7.5).  Find the checkbox that says "This is a shared computer so don't display my tabs" and check it.  If you don't have that option, there are alternatives.
   
3. The ads are a piece of cake to kill.  Using ZoneAlarm to block and log all outgoing connections from Messenger, I quickly deduced that the ads were being served from a web service on http://config.messenger.msn.com.  If you're using ZoneAlarm or another software-based program-oriented firewall, just block outbound HTTP from MSN Messenger to that address.  Alternatively, add an entry to your HOSTS file (C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts on Windows XP) that points config.messenger.msn.com back to 127.0.0.1.  That works just as well.
   

Holy cow, it's been a month since my last post.  Funny how time flies when you're boning up for MCP exams, huh?  On that note, I've completed two MCPs, I'm almost ready for a third (making me an MCAD) and then I'll be two tests from MCSD.  I'm hoping to have my MCSD by the end of April, at which time I'll start working on my upgrade exams to become an MCPD in Enterprise Applications.  Good times!

So Scott Hanselman posted again on something near and dear to my heart, Outlook Inbox organization.  He's apparently a big advocate of the Getting Things Done method, making use of a concept called Zero Email Bounce.  I freely admit, I don't know much about Getting Things Done, never having read it, but it sounds too focused to be something I'd make work.  I revel in a certain degree of chaos.  As I commented on Scott's blog, I actually drew some inspriration from Gmail in my Outlook Inbox handling routine.

As each message comes in, I make a decision: Action item or not an action item. If it's an action item, it (and its ensuing conversation thread, since I sort my Inbox by conversation rather than date) stays in the Inbox until complete.

If it is not an action item, then I have another decision to make: Is the message signal or noise? If it's noise, and of no possible future value, it gets deleted. If it's signal, then it gets moved into an "Archive" folder in my Exchange message store. I wrote an Outlook macro and assigned it to a toolbar button so I can archive the message with one click (again, ala Gmail). As action items are completed, they are assumed to be non-action signal items, and are archived.

Our organization has a ridiculously tight 85 MB mailbox limit, so I've got my auto-archive settings for the "Archive" folder set at a relatively short two weeks. If there is a "signal" item that I need to stay in my Exchange message store (so it's easily available on both my laptop in offline mode as well as my desktop), I drag it to a "Do Not Archive" folder until it can be moved to "Archive." An example of this is travel itineraries.

To keep my auto-archive file from consuming too much space on my tiny 40 GB workstation hard drive, I have it set to auto-delete after a year. I figure that's enough time for most items to lose relevance, and a year's worth of messages only consumes about 1.5 GB.

To find items, I use Windows Desktop Search (MSN Toolbar and Desktop Search without the toolbar). I really prefer Google Desktop, but it had trouble with my short auto-archive window, often expecting an item to be in my inbox when it was, in fact, in the auto-archive PST. Windows Desktop seems to handle that better.

For Christmas, my wife had me buy myself an MP3 player.  I ended up picking up the Sandisk Sansa m140.  Rather than go into the long, boring story of it all, let's just say I'm less than thrilled about its playlist limitation of 270 items and the totally clueless outsourced tech support who couldn't tell me why the playlists were limited to 270 items.  In fact, they didn't even know you could put playlists on the device via Windows Media Player.  I love it when I know more than the tech support drones.

While we're on the subject of less-than-stellar Media Player/Sandisk Sansa experiences, let's talk about syncing the device with Media Player.  Media Player actually copies new content to the device before it deletes old content.  That's right, it can't finish syncing up-to-date podcasts and random auto playlists because it runs out of space. Is this a Media Player thing? Can I expect the same thing to happen with any MTP (Plays for Sure) device?

I'm beginning to think I should have followed the crowd on this one - It looks like the iPod people have got it figured out.

Oh, and Scott Hanselman's podcast rocks.

Say I've got a base class Foo.

public class Foo
{
    public Foo()
    {
       Console.WriteLine("Foo Constructor");
    }
}

Now say I've got a derived class Bar.

public class Bar : Foo
{
    public Bar()
    {
       Console.WriteLine("Bar Constructor");
    }
}

When you instantiate Bar, you'll get the following in your console output:

Foo Constructor
Bar Constructor

That's fine.  That's the expected behavior.  But what if I want to completely override or ignore the constructor for Foo?  The compiler doesn't like it when you declare a constructor virtual, and even if I could, I don't think there's a syntax for overriding it.  It seems that I have to take the base class constructor method whether I want it or not.

Am I missing something here?

I saw this on Slashdot today, and I have to say, I'm intrigued.  The article, as expected, spawned lots and lots of the usual Slashdot speculation, with plenty of Microsoft bashing just for good measure.

Having run a few Linux distros, I have to say, I really do like Ubuntu, and if Google can make a consumer release version, I think it'll be a lot of fun for us geeky types who like to run Linux.  I don't see this taking off on the home or corporate fronts, though.  People want their favorite app of choice, and they want it to work in a supported environment (not Wine).

Don't get me wrong;  I'm a big Google fan.  I think they've got a corner on "getting it."  But whatever this Ubuntu-based project they're working on is, I seriously doubt it's going to be anything that can compete with Windows.  An internet appliance, I might believe.  A PC operating system?  I'll believe it when I see it.

I don't get to play my Xbox or my Xbox 360 nearly enough.  These past two weeks have been a prime example.  We deployed our new Online Banking system on the 23rd, so the week leading up to that and the week after have been rather hectic, especially considering the minor issues we had in production.  So the games on my playlist are a bit old-news-ish, but at least I've been able to put some thought into them.  Take that, IGN!

First up, I finished Call of Duty 2 on Xbox 360 last night.  Having given up on Dead or Alive 4, I decided it was time to play through the rest of this one, and I'm really glad I did.  This is easily among the most intense experiences I've ever had with a video game, at least from the single player aspect of it.  I haven't bothered with the online side of it, since it's apparently been mired with issues.  Playing the game on a 91" screen with 5.1 channel sound probably contributes to my love of this game.  Not since sitting in the front row at a Saving Private Ryan screening have I felt anything close to the level of anxiety (pseudo-shellshock?) as I felt playing this game.

I've been playing my way through Gun on Xbox 360.  I have a real love/hate relationship with that game.  On the one hand, you've got respectable graphics, an awesome storyline, and an interesting old-west setting.  And voicework by Kris Kristofferson!  That dude should be a prerequisite for anything even thinking of resembling the old west (Deadwood, I'm looking at you). On the other hand, you've got a sandbox game world that is just too small (I can cross the whole thing on horseback in just a couple of minutes), and really shallow gameplay.  The storyline missions as well as the side missions are spoonfed to you, made entirely too methodical thanks to the radar on your screen that plainly marks the objectives.  Being raised by a father whose favorite shows were Bonanza and Gunsmoke, and being a Deadwood addict myself, it's still a lot of fun.  Just not the perfect 4 out of 4 Playboy gave it this month.

On the legacy Xbox, I haven't got to play much of anything.  Michelle commandeered it for the living room, and she's been playing through SW:KOTOR, SW:KOTOR II, and she's just starting on Fable: The Lost Chapters.  I'm considering putting some time into Morrowind again (when I can pry Michelle away from the Xbox), since I'm looking forward to Oblivion in March.  Nah.  Between work, reading, preparing for my MCSD (hopefully to be followed with an MCSE), my kid, my wife, and my other games, I don't think I'll be hurting for things to do waiting for Oblivion.

Dear EA:

I'm writing to give you a clue.  I don't know why I'm being so generous, as I generally hate your company.  In my mind, it is everything evil about Wal-Mart and Hollywood wrapped up into a single package.  On the one hand, you work your developers like slave labor while swooping in to buy up every licensed content and/or independent developer that you can milk, and then on the other hand, you churn out schlock on a weekly basis because you know the lowest common denominator will buy it.  To put it succinctly, you suck.

In your latest example of suckage, your downloadable demo of Fight Night Round 3 for Xbox 360 on the Xbox Live Marketplace is so frustrating to play, I don't see how you can even dream you'll garner any sales from the demo.  First, let's talk about the music.  Not every video gamer likes rap, but I can tolerate certain varieties of it in small dosages.  That said, I have no idea what that garbage is you're playing on the title screen, but in terms of enjoyable music, I rank it somewhere between Yoko Ono and fingernails on a chalkboard.  Not necessarily the first impression you want to make on prospective buyers of your product.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let's talk about controls.  Why do you offer 6 different control schemes without a way for the user to differentiate between them?  "Config 3" and "Config 6" without a controller map to look at makes it hard to make an educated choice in controller configurations.  So I have to play "guess that control scheme" without knowing what the controls are until you show me the loading screen.  I'll give you points for having the controller map on the loading screen.  Now if you'd just give me the option of starting the fight when I'm ready, instead of starting the fight as soon as it's done loading (which takes about 3 seconds).  Once the fight starts, I have no way of looking at my controller scheme again.  Thanks.

Finally, rather than just throw me into a fight, how about a brief tutorial so I understand what I'm doing?  It took me 4 bouts to realize that I even could block, much less how.

Overall, your demo seems pretty typical for EA:  Lots of pretty graphics, frustrating gameplay, and least-common-denominator styling.  I think I'll take a pass on buying this one.

I don't consider myself a hardcore gamer, as much as I would like to.  I love gaming, but I don't get to devote enough time to it to get really good (although devoting money to it never seems to be an issue).  Even then, I was able to beat Dead or Alive 3 with just about every character on the normal difficulty.

So what in the heck is up with Dead or Alive 4?  Is it me, or is that game just stupid hard?  I have fun with it until the 5th fight with any given character, then it gets ridiculously hard.  It's a beautiful game (hehe...  She kicks high...  Also gotta love the "jiggle" factor!), but dang it, I want to beat it with all 16 default characters and Helena so I can unlock Spartan 458!!!  So far, I've only managed beating it with Ryu, Kasumi, Jann Lee, and Ayane.  I got owned when I tried with Kokoro, Brad Wong, and Zack.

Knowing that unlocking Spartan 458 ain't gonna happen, maybe I'll try some sour grapes rationalization.  Let's see...  Oh, how's this:  "It'd be stupid to play a Spartan in a fighting game set in the 21st century, because the Spartan program didn't exist until the 26th century."  What?  You say they explained that?  Oh.  Drat.

Scott Hanselman has a funny way of blogging about things right after I start using them.  In this case, he's talking about RSS auto discovery.  I had just been digging around in my dasBlog theme to ensure that I had the right tag for RSS auto discovery earlier in the day.  Auto discovery is a great little mechanism for, if nothing else, alerting the user that you have a feed available (in case they didn't notice your feed icon).

As I embark on this blog project in the hopes of being interesting enough to garner a regular readership, I've done a lot of thinking lately regarding the nature of content syndication and its ultimate place in our society.  I'm a religious user of a RSS.  I monitor about 25 different feeds on various topics using an online aggregator (up until a few days ago I'd been using Bloglines, but now I'm giving NewsGator a try).  I'm an advocate for RSS.  I wrote a whitepaper for Commerce's online banking product management suggesting how we could implement private account information feeds in our online banking site.  Unfortunately, though, the response was lukewarm.  It seems I failed to take into account that only 4% of Internet users knowingly use RSS.

So what's the deal?  Why hasn't RSS caught on?  I've read some ramblings lately of "information overload", and that the feeds are providing data faster than people can keep up with them.  I suppose that may be the case if you have 50 or 60 feeds, but for my purposes, 25 seems to be a good number.  I set my aggregator to only show new items, I skim the headlines, and if the article doesn't seem appealing to me, I let the reader mark it as read automatically.  I don't ever browse the web anymore.  I just check my aggregator to see if there's any new content, rather like e-mail.

So, what's the difference?  Why does everyone use e-mail, yet nobody uses RSS?  Surely, subscribing to a site's feed isn't such a complex notion.  It isn't any more complicated than e-mail.  I think the issue is one primarily of awareness.  When I presented my whitepaper regarding RSS in online banking, the most common response I got was, "What's RSS?"  Obviously, these people are part of the other 96%.  After I explained what it was and what I wanted to do with it, everyone thought it was a really groovy idea, but doubted if anyone would use it.  I bet if it had a sexier name (rather than an acronym), everyone would be using it.

So, as an advocate of RSS, what do I suggest we do?  Spread the gospel.  Show people how your aggregator works and how convenient it makes retrieving your Internet content.  Firefox users may not realize that it uses RSS automatically (via auto discovery) in a feature called Live Bookmarks.  IE users will have a similar feature in version 7.0 (currently in beta).