Overheard on United Airlines flight 955 to San Diego (insert Will Farrell comment here) yesterday:

"For those of you on the left side of the aircraft, you have an unusually clear and spectacular view of the city of Los Angeles, Dodgers stadium, and the downtown LA area. For those of you on the right side of the plane, you have a great view of the backs of the heads of the people who are looking at Los Angeles out the left side of the aircraft..."

Heh...

Scoble posted something that's had my attention all evening (well, off and on anyhow - I'm easily distracted). Have you seen the Slingbox from Sling Media? It's may just be the perfect gadget for me. Think something along the lines of a Media Center extender (note: it's not one of those, just try to think along those lines), only instead it extends any TV image to pretty much any computer anywhere you have a fast connection to the Internet.

"The Slingbox is a compact and elegantly designed, state-of-the-art electronic device that connects to the back of your TV. It redirects, or “placeshifts,” the TV signal from your cable box, satellite receiver, or digital video recorder (DVR) to your computer or laptop of choice, no matter your location — so long as you have a high-speed Internet connection."

It's something close to pure simplicity, too: Plug it in, hook it up, install the SlingPlayer software on your PC, and BAM! You're controlling and watching your TV, DVR, set top box or whatever you use from your computer, wherever you may be.

It's for PCs now, but more is coming very soon:

"In the coming months, SlingPlayer software will be available for select PDAs, smart phones, and Macintosh computers and will be fully compatible with the Slingbox."

You can check it out at:

http://www.slingmedia.com

And then, of course, there's Orb, for some of the same people who are interested in Slingbox (the geeky ones who are not looking for a plug-and-go solution since Orb uses your home PC and a tuner card), and it's especially nice for those who have Windows MediaCenter Edition):

http://www.orb.com

Nope, we're not in the air. That would be nice, but no such luck. Instead we're stuck on the ground in San Francisco with the typical SFO airport weather delays. They loaded the aircraft and then all the ground crews were ordered off the ramps due to tons of lightning, so we're just hangin' out.

Luckilly, I can stay productive anyhow thanks to the TMobile hot spot that must be right inside the terminal.

Ive been traveling a bit lately, and have been to 11 states in the past few weeks. This time I'm to San Diego for a few days, for conferences and all that sort of stuff. If anyone's in the area, let me know and maybe we can meet up if schedules allow. My cell phone number and email are over in the right menu bar.

Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry devices and servers, are getting ready to kick another new model out the door - the BlackBerry Electron. It looks a lot like the 7290 in size and basic shape, but also appears to have features you typically see on the 7100 series.

The higher-resolution screen will be a welcome addition, and the idea of programmable keys is also something I'd definitely take advantage of.

And perhaps the best part: EDGE network capability. About time! Plus a speakerphone.

Only one thing more to hope for: Will it play MP3s and have a SD card slot? Well, we can always hope.

(via BlackberryCool)

NASA's latest plans to return to the moon, and from there to go on to Mars, are now out, with more detail available. The spacecraft look a bit like the old Apollo ships, but looks can be deceiving:

"Coupled with the new lunar lander, the system sends twice as many astronauts to the surface as Apollo, and they can stay longer, with the initial missions lasting four to seven days. And while Apollo was limited to landings along the moon's equator, the new ship carries enough propellant to land anywhere on the moon's surface.

"Once a lunar outpost is established, crews could remain on the lunar surface for up to six months. The spacecraft can also operate without a crew in lunar orbit, eliminating the need for one astronaut to stay behind while others explore the surface."

• Lots of information on the NASA Web site
• QuickTime video of the proposed new spacecraft and system here

Fly softly, and carry a big stick...

I just found a great story linked from a new b5media blog (oops ) called Flightnest.com, where a student pilot was out with his instructor in a Cessna 172 and the landing gear would not lock down. Talk about baptism by fire!

Anyhow, even better is the way they solved the problem. While the student ad his instructor flew around the airport for about an hour and fire crews stood by, a couple guys in a jeep raced down the runway with the aircraft flying a few feet away. they eyeballed the gear, grabbed a big stick, and - well - go watch the video. Nice.

Scoble's posted an interview with Rob Leferts, a program manager at Microsoft, who talks about the new workflow services that will be built into SharePoint in the next version, which is tentatively set to release in the last half of 2006.

There's all sorts of new features that take advantage of the two-way connection between SharePoint 12 and other Office tools, including the Office suite of applications like Word, Excel, Outlook and others.

What does baking workflow into SharePoint in the Office 12 release mean for business people? In a nutshell, it means a set workflow features that just shows up and notifies you that you've got something that needs to be checked on or completed. It also means users can create workflow and leverage it to suit their business needs.

Example: I open Outlook and I get a notification in Outlook that says I have a task pending to complete an employee's performance review, which points me to a SharePoint site where that document lives and is waiting for me to add my two cents. When I am done, I click a button in Word or whatever program I'm in that says I am done, and the workflow takes over and pushes the document on to the next step in the business process and notifies the next person. You can buy that kind of functionality and build it in to existing SharePoint sites if you really want to, but it's a lot of work and it takes lots of time (and therefore money). So, out of the box is a terrific thing. Some of us need that. Badly. 

Automating the processes that business follow in writing documents, managing tasks, and a variety of other things can be well-served by workflow automation, and the fact that they're building it into the entire Office system is not only nice to see happening, it's important to making SharePoint and the Office system in general better accepted and more usable - and therefore a more worthwhile investment.

• What you have today in SharePoint: Share and save documents, control security, publish and get notified of changes, etc.
• What you get tomorrow: Build workflow to share the document template, drive it through a process of step by step edits and reviews, get sign-off and then publish (or whatever). Note: Approvals are processed online, it's not an off-line process. You can take a doc off-line and work on it, then connect back to the server to sync it back up to its "home," then push the button to indicate you've completed your workflow task.

Expiration and document lifecycle policies can be created and automated, to ensure content is properly disposed of, flagged, reviewed or whatever. This is a pretty big deal in today's business world, where a document lifecycle process and program is - in some cases - legally mandated.

Lots of great stuff coming from these talented people, and lots of business uses and enhancements to look forward to for those of us that need to help workers better organize information and collaborate.

Again, it's going to be a very, very interesting year.

If you're like me and you disappeared for random business trips at the last minute this past week, and if your business trip didn't take to PDC in Los Angeles (neither did mine), you may have also missed out (like me) on the real-time updates related to the next version of the Office System products - currently known generically as Office 12 and the Office 12 servers.

Simply put, the Office user experience is changing significantly - and at first glance, the changes are pretty amazing and definitely fall on the "hey that's cool" side of the fence. Watch this Channel 9 video interview with Julie Larson-Green of Microsoft to get a sneak peek of what's coming.

Check Jensen Harris' blog here for Office 12 experience updates, too. Good stuff showing up there already.

Channel 9 tags for categorized videos and articles related to the topics:

• MS+Office
• SharePoint
• PDC05

Got SharePoint? Over at The Dean's Office, Dustin Miller lists a long - and exciting in a geeky way - list of what's coming up in the next version of SharePoint - which is due for release in late 2006 as part of the next version of the Office system.

HUGE improvements coming, and v2 to v3 will be an upgrade, not a migration. Phew! Check out the list.

A good Channel 9 video showing/discussing SharePoint v.next is here.

• RSS on all SharePoint lists - and access to the feeds respect the SharePoint security model
• RSS feeds are per-list and per-site (aggregated)
• Support is for RSS 2.0
• Out of the box blogs AND wikis! (and you get RSS feeds for those, too)
• Lots of search improvements and enhancements
• Outlook 12 will have an aggregator, IE7 also has one
• WSS v.next runs on ASP.NET 2.0, so ASP.NET v2 web parts are SharePoint web parts
• Version history in all SharePoint lists - with line-by-line diffs! Nice!
• Take documents off-line and bring them back
• Workflow built in - see a Channel 9 video about that here
• Document management significantly built out
• Email enabled discussion boards - send email to a SharePoint alias and it shows up in the discussion list! Nice - great internal option to things like Yahoo groups. You can also sync emails, tasks and other stuff to a SharePoint site from the Outlook UI.

It's going to be a big year for Microsoft's Office and Office Servers. Huge, really.

My employer, Corillian Corporation, announced the other day that it's achieved certification under the international security standard BS7799, which is also the basis for the about-to-be-released ISO17799 standard. Without disclosing anything confidential here, I wanted to write a few of my own personal thoughts about the process and my experience in it, and what I think it means in the real world.

Those of us that have been involved in making this happen - which in the end really means every single person employed by the company - are excited about the achievement. We didn't just work to certify a portion of the company's operations, we did the full-meal-deal. I know that those of us on the security team all feel a real sense of accomplishment and success, while cautiously recognizing that we now have that much more to continue to live up to, now that we've arrived. After all, resting on one's laurels in the security world is a dangerous place to be, and security is a process, not an event.

What does it mean to be certified under the "7799" standard? Simply put, the certification says that the company has put in place a comprehensive security management system and program, and that it has shown evidence through a set of documentation and on-site examinations that it's meeting the complete set of standards without deficiencies. In other words, it means we've proven under close scrutiny that we have a solid security program that we take very seriously, and that it works.

I can't begin to explain the amount of learning I did in the process of doing my part in the effort to attain certification. I can tell you that I am convinced - well beyond the shadow of a doubt - that a strong security program and management system can and does contribute directly to the delivery of high quality of products and services. It's a lot of work to get to the point where certification is even possible, and many people dedicated incredible effort over the course of a couple of years to reach this point, but the value gained through the process is very high.

Every organization that deals with security issues and responsibilities should go through the process of certification under the standard. It would make for a much better operating environment, and would result in better-run companies. And in this day, age and operating environment, where trust and security are of paramount importance to business success, there's almost no excuse not to do so.

Google has launched their Google Blog Search -and its good stuff. One of the best things in my book is that you get a list of highly-relevant weblogs before you get the text search results.

Some searches:

• OneNote
• Security
• Exchange 2003
• Obligatory ego search

The XBox 360 console will be released in late November, and Microsoft has announced that several games will be backward-compatible and will run on the new machine.

Here's your chance (for the next few days, anyhow) to vote on which games will receive backward-compatibility support:

"... when it comes to determining backwards compatibility, the ball is entirely in Microsoft's court. As you'd expect, they've already baked-in all the no-brainer Xbox games that will work on 360 (e.g., Halo 1 and 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Fable, etc.), but with the Xbox 360 launch just around the corner this November, the boys from Redmond are unofficially reaching out to the gaming community to learn what remaining games Xbox fans would like to see backwards compatible on Xbox 360.

"We present below (split into two digestible lists) 80 worthy Xbox titles Microsoft isn't sure about. 80 games that will, over the course of the next 5 days, battle it out to the death. While there are no guarantees that the top 10 or 20 games will make it into the backwards compatibility list, or even what the cut-off number will be for the top titles, the stakes here are unquestionably high. To be sure, Microsoft will be checking out these results to gauge consumer interest in many of these excellent games. And they will act accordingly. So know that your vote will make a difference."

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3143553&did=1

News broke this morning: eBay to buy Skype for 2.6 billion in cash, stock. Crazy.

And for exactly twice that dollar amount, Oracle is working to buy Siebel.

So, in essence what they're telling us is that Skype is worth 50% of what Siebel is worth? Does this make any real sense?

Today I once again had the pleasure of working closely with Cops on Top, a non-profit organization that undertakes mountain climbing expeditions to the highest points in the world in order to remember and recognized the sacrifice of police officers killed in the line of duty.

Today expedition teams from across the United States and Canada took off for their respective state or territory high points to remember the first responders who were killed helping others on September 11th, 2001. We've enabled the teams to dial in via mobile or satellite phones, and their audio blogs are posted to the Cops on Top climber's weblog.

Congratulations and thanks to all the police officers and their team mates who undertook expeditions today. As a former cop and someone who's seen the positive impact the Cops on Top program has, I can tell you it means a lot to many people.

Hey, if all else fails, boot to a USB drive, right? Only problem is, who wants to haul around an external hard drive?

Actually, Tom's Hardware has an article on installing and running Windows XP on a USB flash drive. Windows in your pocket - it doesn't get much easier than that eh?

Boot up, access the Windows install and do whatever you need. Great idea.

Notes from the article:

• A USB flash drive with at least 256 MB of storage is enough for the uses described in this article. Additional system tools or applications require more space. The upper bound limits for storage in this case is 2 GB - a byproduct of the tool's use of FAT16 for the local file system.
• Most new motherboards recognize USB flash drives as valid boot media. But conventional motherboards that are more than two years old aren't likely to boot from a USB flash drive. But in many cases, this omission can be remedied through a BIOS update for that board.
• 1.5 GB of unused disk space is the maximum needed for the tool to do its job, particularly if you want to pre-install Service Pack 2 and RAM disk capabilities. 190 MB of unused space is all that's needed to use PE Builder and the applications described in this article, however. Additional plug-ins will increase storage requirements, as will additional tools or software.
• 512 MB of USB flash drive storage space is needed only if boot-up works from a RAM disk. Otherwise, 256 MB is big enough.
• Access to a USB 2.0 port is not mandatory, though booting with a USB 1.1 port takes about five times longer.
• A Windows XP Setup CD works fine as a foundation for PE Builder to generate the USB flash drive's contents.