Portland's Shizzow, a thankfully-simple service that you can use to "shout" to your people and let them know where you are, has announced they're expanding into the California market. The service got its start here in Portland, Oregon and the team has methodically built it out and run it in the home market up until now.

The basic idea of Shizzow is this: A quick and easy social networking service that lets you quickly and easily communicate to your friends about where you are so you can spend more time face-to-face. It's really as simple as that. You don't need to know addresses, you can just provide a name. Shizzow figures out the rest. You can also add custom locations (like Greg's place, for example). There's a simple interfaces for web, mobile and SMS.

Now Shizzow has sprouted wings and is offering the service to people in California, with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area - That's quite an expansion! The service is available for people living in either area via an invitation, which you can request here. I also have ten invitations available for anyone who asks, until they're gone. Just email me or leave a comment (be sure to provide your email address in the comment form so I can send it to you).

Great job by the Shizzow crew, which (it should be noted) is a small group of people that have built and run this operation outside of the their day jobs. That's how they plan to expand - Bootstrap it along and continue along the lines of their current success. I hope we'll see an API sometime soon, since that would provide the ability to deliver mobile apps and what have you, and could open up the use (and in the end enhance usability) of the system substantially. Cool stuff!

I wrote all about it on my flying blog, but Sunday was an exciting and cool day, because I flew an airplane solo, all by myself with no one else in the plane, for the first time. This whole flying thing might work out, after all!

The full story is documented on my "Coordinated Flight" blog, should you care to read all about it.

While at the TechEd EMEA conference is Spain this week, I had the opportunity to visit with Thomas Dawkins from Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. He's the guy responsible for the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool (or MSAT for short). The MSAT is a tool that's been around for a couple of years, but it was recently updated by Thomas with some great new enhancements, including a new user interface and a stronger, more complete set of back end information.

MSAT is a free tool that you can download from Microsoft. It's targeted to companies of 1,500 employees or smaller (as a general rule) and follows a questionnaire format to assess weaknesses in the IT security environment. Bt it's not a parching tool or a scanning tool. Instead, it leverages standards like ISO 27001 and NIST-800.x to baseline the security readiness of your organization.

It enables people to do what we security professionals hope for: analysis across each of the people, process and technology elements of a business' computing environment in order to ascertain how and where we need to spend our time and energy. The tool not only describes the state of readiness of the assessed environment, it also provides best-practice recommendations rooted in industry-accepted standards that can be used to improve the organization's security stance.

One of the most likely users of a tool like this is the IT manager, but one can also picture security consultants, business managers, and anyone else with responsibility for an organization's security operations leveraging the tool and the reports it generates.

You'll also likely be interested to know that Microsoft has released the fifth version of its Security Intelligence Report, which looks at the state of computer and information security over the past six months. You can find links to the full report and the key findings summary documents on Microsoft's web site.

Well, we're getting going full swing for a week of TechEd conference in Barcelona, Spain. video, audio and stage presentations will be keeping us busy all week. If you're here, please let me know, or drop by and say hi at the "fishbowl" or TechEd stage.

The weather when I flew in yesterday was bumpy and wet, but today it's beautiful and sunny outside - more like the Barcelona I remember. Not that well be out in the air much, this week - but it's nice to look outside and see sun. The hotel and conference center are right on the sea, and as long as I can stay heathy this week, it will be great.

I had the opportunity today to spend some time chatting with Ben Jackson, who's the owner and technical director of Brainjuice, LLC. His company created Blogo, the app I use on my Mac to write posts like this one.

But today we weren't talking about Blogo, we were discussing a new iPhone game Brainjuice is in the final phases of completing called Arcade Hockey. It's just about done and will appear in the iTunes App Store in early to mid November. It's a table hockey game and it's a lot of fun, well-executed and designed.

Here are a few screenshots of the game screens, so you can see what's coming. You can click on each image to see the full-sized version.

The splash screen, which you see when the game first starts:

You have the option of playing a one- or two-plater game. In the one-player version you play against the computer's artificial intelligence opponent. More on that later in the article.

You can choose a few options, like the size of the paddles and pucks, as well as the version of the game (standard arcade deck, or "boomerang" style.

Game play consists of a classic table hockey game, and you use the tip of your finger on the touch screen to move the paddle and hit the puck. The physics of the game are pretty good, and the puck reacts pretty how you'd expect and want it to.

The classic and boomerang tables:

When you've played your "best-of" set, the game makes sure each player knows who won and who lost.

I ordered some new business contact cards since I ran out of the old ones some time ago. They arrived today. Rather than going the standard route or reordering the ones with my mug on the front, I decided to shop over in the UK via the Internet.

I ordered one of Hugh MacLeod's designs from over at gapingvoid. He's made a bunch of his designs available for online ordering at Street Cards. The quality of the cards is great (I ordered the coated cards), and I received them just in time for my trip next week to TechEd EMEA in Barcelona and the Dev Connections conference the following week in Las Vegas.

If there's one thing I've learned working in IT and security management over the past several years, it's what these cards convey. It's been a bot of a motto of mine over the years, so it's appropriate for my business cards, I think (click the link to see the full-sized image).

Thanks to Hugh for making it possible to use his artwork. He makes them available for download and use from his site, and they're great stuff.

It's been an interesting and exciting few days in iPhone land.

In the just past couple days, Google Earth and a voice recording application from Griffin have both been released for the iPhone. Add to that the news that iPhone owners now have access to AT&T WiFi hotspots for free - nice! Google Earth is - of course - free, and Griffin iTalk is free for a limited time, along with it's Mac client (for syncing).

Google earth on the iPhone (iTunes app store link) is pretty cool. It takes advantage of the GPS and accelerometer, and other than that it's, well... Google Earth, just on a smaller screen. You can use touch/twist to rotate gestures on the screen, as you'd expect. I should mention that it's crashed a lot on me, and that when I first installed it I had to hard-reset my phone to get anything to work. But for the most part its been as stable as any other complex app on the device (meaning mediocre to so-so). It's worth the install for sure, if for no other reason then just because of most of the cool things you can do with Google Earth on your Mac or PC.

The other great app that everyone with an iPhone or second-gen iPod Touch should run and get right now (while it's free) is Griffin's iTalk and the complementary iTalk Sync client, which allows you to sync your audio recordings made with the iPhone app to your Mac (PC version coming soon) over the air via WiFi. It works like a charm, is well-documented, looks great and the audio quality is user configurable. The best quality setting sounds pretty great. It could realistically be used for man-on-the-street style interviews.

Provide a file name, select the recording quality, and start recording by clicking the Big Red Button:

The green button means you're actively recording. The VU meter shows your audio levels live. Click the green button to stop recording.

You'll end up with a file (or more than one if you record multiple times) showing in the recording list.

When you load up the Mac sync client app (a small and quick install) and start the iPhone app on the same wireless network, you'll be prompted to allows the sync client to access your iPhone's recordings.

While copying the file via the sync program, the iPhone shows you the status and progress:

And finally you have the files on your Mac (or soon on a PC), in .AIFF format, ready to use. Nice and easy!

I plan to play with the app in Barcelona next week and test the audio quality to see if it's really good enough for on-the-spot interviews for the podcast. It's worth a shot, although it won't touch the quality of my Zoom H4 recorder, of course.

I got a call this morning, a variation of the same call I get around two or three times a month. Someone saw my phone number over in the sidebar and called me to find out about posting items for sale or rent on "Greg's List."

Each time the call comes in, I explain that the site they're looking for is actually Craig's List, which is on the web at http://www.craigslist.org. So, if you happen to be looking for Greg's List, it's actually called Craig's List, and there's the web address for ya. And don't worry, you're not the only one.

Of course, you can still feel free to call me up and say hi anyhow, if you like. :)

Update: Microsoft's Mac business unit just set the land-speed record for turning around a fix. The story is available over at TUAW.

I've been wrestling with a problem for a few days after applying the latest Office 2008 for Mac update (v12.1.3). Everything works well except for sending and responding to meeting notices.

After the update, when Entourage tries to send a meeting notice or response, it throws the following: "[Error] Unexpected data was encountered. [Explanation] Mail could not be sent. Account name: 'Exchange - Greg' Error: -17997."

Needless to say, this is a frustrating problem. I managed to send some original meeting notices by opening them up after they failed to send (you can find them in the Outbox) and clicking the 'Send' button a second time. That worked for some reason. However, the same workaround doesn't seem to work for meeting responses, so I am having to send emails created by hand in order to confirm meeting requests with people who send them to me. Thankfully, when I accept a meeting request it does make it onto my calendar properly - it's just the outbound email that gets hung up.

I've had problems in the past with Entourage not parsing updates created by Outlook, but this is a much bigger and more painful problem. This is another case of "if it just worked the way it's supposed to, it would be the best option by far." A lot like my iPhone in that regard. Glitches kill the experience and create big frustration.

UPDATE: I just found a Microsoft newsgroup thread discussing the problem, and apparently it's a known issue bug in the latest release. Hopefully they'll be able to release a fix quickly. Workarounds include:

• Uninstall Office and reinstall, then update to the version prior to the latest release
  
• Move invitations you create from the Outbox to the Drafts folder and resend (won't work for acceptance notifications, though)
  
• Grin and bear it. :)

I may try removing my Entourage account profile from this computer completely and then setting it back up with the Exchange server fresh just to see what happens. I'd lose a few things that are store local-only in the process, but that won't really hurt me should I decide to go that route.

Anyone else having this issue? Any other great workaround ideas?

The fall conference season is upon us, and I'll be off to Barcelona on the first of November for a week at the Microsoft TechEd Europe/Middle East/Asia conference. I'll be joining my friend and colleague, Richard Campbell, there for the week. If by chance you'll also be there, be sure to let me know ahead of time!

Then, the following week Richard and I will both be traveling to Las Vegas for the Connections conference, where we'll be doing a live RunAs Radio recording session. Should be fun, and we have a great guest slated. More on that later.

If you'll be at either conference, please let me know via a comment or an email!

My friend Richard Campbell and I spent the morning recording a couple episodes of RunAs Radio for publication in the near future. One of our guests (whom we shall reveal when the show is published) provided some amazingly great information about using Performance Monitor, or "perfmon" for short. He's a perfmon Ninja, really. I'm excited about that show because I think when it comes up I think people will be able to learn something quite useful, as it includes some desktop video (perfmon is, after all, a very visual tool) and other resources. I think you'll like it.

Needless to say, both of us have been playing with perfmon for the past hour. Richard just IM'ed me with a funny situation, though:

Not really sure how that works. :)

So, be sure to check out RunAs Radio for the Performance Monitor show, which will be published sometime in the next couple weeks. We've also had a number of other great guests sit down with us over the past while, talking about some very useful topics suited for IT professionals. So check it out!

Want to watch tonight's final presidential debate live on the 'net? Everyone should watch, and please don't skip your opportunity to vote in the election. It's just too important.

Hulu.com is again streaming this debate, and you can watch it right here. Who needs a TV, anyhow?

Dumping the warm-fuzzy naming convention and avoiding the year-based names of the past, Microsoft announced today that the next version of Windows, which will replace Vista, will be called simply "Windows 7."

Good idea.

It's the seventh version of Windows. It makes sense. Returning to a solid, basic, fundamental naming convention helps, I think, in helping to focus purpose on ensuring the fundamental requirements are met, that a solid, simple (from a usability standpoint at least) product is released. Etherial names like "Vista" sound cool, but subconsciously they also evoke an image and set an expectation of something magical, something not quite real.

That's not what's needed, especially this next time around. So keeping the name simple is the first sign of staying focused on the core product. I like that.

As Mike Nash explains, this is the first time a code name for an early product in development has been retained for the final product. Well, given the substantial departure from the conventional Microsoft code names, I'd say it's okay this time. :)

More information is available on the Windows Vista team blog, where the announcement was made.

Space Aliens for McCain or Obama? Could be... Someone's trying to get the vote word out, that's for sure.

Updates: The corn field in the video is at Baggenstos Farms, and you can go walk through it. Also, I'm geeking out a bit on the fact that I filed the video as a CNN iReport that was featured all day today on the homepage of CNN.com and was viewed by 220,000 people in one day (wow). A portion of it was also aired on TV tonight on Anderson Cooper 360. That was fun.

I had a flying lesson Monday morning and on the way back to our home airport, my instructor and I saw an unusual crop formation in a corn field from about 1000 feet above the ground. You'd never see it otherwise. You think someone out there is trying to send us a message? I captured it for you to see with my new Kodak Zi6 pocket HD video camera. You can get the higher-quality version of the video here.

Oh, and by the way: Don't forget to vote!

Analyst and research company Gartner revised its IT industry projection figures and - as reported this morning by ZDNet and released by Gartner themselves - presented them during a symposium keynote at the company's big annual IT conference, which opened this morning. In a nutshell, Gartner analyst Peter Sondergard says they still expect growth, and that even in the very worst case, IT spending next year will fall about 2.5 percent. From ZDNET:

• Gartner had expected budgets to grow 3.3 percent in 2009.
• Now the most likely case is IT budget growth of 2.3 percent to 0 percent.
• The worst case is that IT budgets will be down 2.5 percent.

Forrester Research also recently cut it's projections for 2009 IT spending, but still ended up with figures in positive growth territory. So, if the analysts are to be believed, the business sector feeding products and services to IT should still see some growth.

The question is, where will that growth happen? My guess would be that one good place to be doing business is anywhere products or services are commoditized and can be outsourced, as well as in key technology areas like security and high availability.

Having successfully managed an IT organization at a "dot-com" company through a few years of painful economic times early in this decade, I can say from experience that at the time we had to cut overall IT spending dramatically to allow the company to survive. We went quickly from buying lots of new computers and software and building out data centers to buying practically nothing new for two full years. We renegotiated stacks of contracts with vendors and major software suppliers, consolidated services, convinced vendors to charge us less, and in the end prioritized every single project and said "no" a lot.

As a result, we cut our multi-million dollar budget almost in half and - in combination with other business changes - put ourselves in a position where we were just able to weather the storm financially. It was painful and a bit scary at times, and we had to deal with the side effects of substantial change. We had to get very creative in leveraging what we already had and nothing more, but in the end we all learned a difficult yet necessary lesson: You don't have to spend, spend spend to survive, or even to thrive in some cases.

In fact, what we needed to do was just the opposite of the "spend" approach. We would still spend where it made the most sense - but our decision-making process changed dramatically. You have to shift where the money goes to maximize your dollar's impact in the specific environment, adapt to the rapid changes in the marketplace, and work with your business partners and vendors to make it through to the other side. Smart vendors and good partners know that doing whatever it takes to survive a storm together means a better relationship when we all come out of the clouds.

Gartner has a list of ten things they say IT organizations need to consider when faced with tough economic times. They are not easy or happy things. But I think they're spot-on. I've had to do all of these things when times were toughest.

• Reduce headcount or freeze hiring
• Renegotiate with technology and service providers
• Curtail data center expansion, virtualize assets and lease them back
• Consolidate systems
• Outsource commodity
• Offshore outsource
• Investment shutdown
• Prioritize projects
• Mothball businesses and projects
• Change leadership and restructure IT teams

What's your IT plan? Are your budgets shrinking, or staying about the same? How would you prepare for tight times ahead?