I used to be a Netflix user. In fact I was subscribed for well over a year, but after the first few months I never built the queue back up and I just didn't care to use the service. I found myself constantly forgetting about it. Movies sat around the house after being watched. My monthly fees were going nowhere. Then an opportunity came along to sign up for Blockbuster's online service, and I took it - and promptly canceled my Netflix account. As it turned out, Blockbuster not only offered three movies at a time for a competitive price, but I would also be able to get free rentals in the local store by using monthly online coupons that I'd just load in my browser from the web site and print out at home. That sounded pretty cool to me.

Fast forward about a year, and Blockbuster enhanced their online rental service to allow you to return movies to the local store - they call it Total Access. On top of that, when you return your movie in its mailer to the store instead of dropping it in a mailbox, you get to exchange it for a free store rental of your choice. Now that's a great deal. In the end, it means I can sit at home and set up my rental queue, and rent online, and when I drop them at the store I can get three more movies to watch while I wait for the next set of movies to ship in the mail from my queue. And I still get the two free rental coupons (which can be used for movies or video games) each month. It's pretty awesome. We are watching a lot more movies as a result, and we're also watching more movies that fall into the "interesting" category, too.

I have only one wish-list item for Blockbuster to improve its service, and this is a big one in my book: Right now, if I put movies in my online queue to have mailed to me, there is no intelligent connection between what I rent in the store and what sits in the queue. So, if I put Children of Men in the online queue and I also rent it in the store because I find it on the shelf while I am in there, currently there is no way for the online service to "know" I have already rented it. What Blockbuster needs to do (in my humble opinion) is to compare what I rent in the store to the list of movies in my online queue. If I pick up a movie in person, they should prompt me to remove it from my queue, or allow me in my account settings to have that film automatically removed. More than once I have picked up a movie at the store only to have it shipped the next day or so from the mailing service. In those cases I have just taken the duplicate mail copy and exchanged it for an in-store rental, so no real harm or anything, but I would sure like to have some inventory and queue connection happening with my account.

I highly recommend Blockbuster Total Access. They ship fast, the selection is good, and I am really enjoying the in-store integration.

One of my favorite people in the whole world, Scott Hanselman, has launched a campaign to raise donation funds for Team Hanselman's goal of $50,000 in this year's Step Out to Fight Diabetes fund raising walk.

Last year, Scott's team raised around $12,000 on a goal of $10,000. This year Scott's pushed way ahead and has more than quadrupled that amount for the team's current goal. You can help! Go to:

    http://www.hanselman.com/fightdiabetes/donate 

... and provide your assistance there. Here is what Scott has to say on his blog about the walk and the goal:

This year Team Hanselman, led by myself and my wife, Mo, who had this whole idea, will be walking to fight diabetes on Oct 20h, 2007. We have set a goal of raising US$50,000. Crazy, huh?

If only 2500 of you, dear readers, gave US$20 to this cause, we've met our Team Goal. If only 1000 give US$50, well, you get the idea. If you can't donate, that's OK. Post about this on your blog, spread the URL http://www.hanselman.com/fightdiabetes or put some of our Diabetes "Flair" on your site!

Last year this time, there were over 5000 people subscribing to this blog (for the technical content, I assume) - this year there are over 14,000.

Let's see what we can do to add to the pot. There are more than 14,000 daily viewers of this web site, as well - so if there is anything you can do to help, even just a couple bucks, please consider making a donation!

Read more about the walk, Scott's own motivation and battle with diabetes, and get all the details at Scott's site.

A few weeks ago I had to fly with a coworker down to Santa Barbara. It was a last-minute trip. Of course, if you absolutely have to fly somewhere for work at the drop of a hat in March, Santa Barbara's a pretty darn nice destination. Good weather, good food, interesting people. We spent almost all of our time there indoors, but we did get an evening outside to enjoy the nice weather and check out the town.

Anyhow, this particular story actually starts right about the time we arrived at the airport for our return flight back to Portland. My co-worker Matt and I finished up our work and dropped off our rental car. We headed for the terminal at the last minute. In the process, Matt found out first-hand why one shouldn't pack liquids in carry-on bags (heh).

Immediately we were faced with a departure delay. Now, I'm not sure what the rest of the world's experience is with SkyWest Airlines (a regional commuter airline that operates and flies the smaller aircraft fleet for the "bigs," in this case United Express), but my consistent experience over the past year is that they do a pretty poor job of being on time and they generally come across as semi-pro. They're just a bit too casual. By contrast, other regional carriers for United Express have always been quite professional and timely. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

Anyhow, eventually the aircraft showed up from it's previous leg. When it came time to board the airplane, an E120 turboprop, we waited in line as instructed, like impatient school kids waiting with eager anticipation five minutes into a fifteen-minute recess to be told they can run onto the play field, staring out at our aircraft. Our anticipation was interrupted a few minutes later as we were ushered back indoors and directed to take a seat again. "They have to reboot or reset something or another with the airplane, but they didn't tell me what it was," the gate agent informed us. "We'll let you know when it's time to go." Breeds confidence. Nice.

No less than two minutes later they got us back up, hurried us back into line (by now it really did feel like first grade), rushed us to the airplane like a herd of cattle. I looked at my watch. We were nearly an hour behind schedule by now, and it was very unlikely we'd make our connecting flight in San Jose.

Fast forward about 45 minutes to our landing in San Jose and sure enough, we hit the ground five minutes after our connection had already left for Portland. Nice. We headed over to Alaska Airline's service desk (because that's who had the ticket for the flight we'd just missed) and the agent there quickly told us that she would not be able to help us find a flight, that we had to go down to United. There's probably some rule or something that says who has to deal with the ticketing that I am not aware of, but I can tell you that it seemed as if she really just didn't want to be bothered (although the lady standing next to her was quite nice) and was brushing us off without any real concern to the next counter, but what the heck. I'm a frequent flyer with United and have what they call "elite status" with them (I easily broke the 100,000 mile mark last year), so we marched with our bags in tow down to the United ticket desk.

That's where things changed. As it turned out, there were no more flights that night from San Jose to Portland (save an Alaska flight later that night, and I was not about to go back there). But the United desk agents jumped right in and saved the day. They hired a town car (on their dime) to drive Matt and me to the San Francisco International airport (a 40-minute drive) and got us on a flight to Portland that evening. Even better, we ended up in first class and got home the same day (it was late, but at least is was not a day later).

The fact is that traveling for work is not the super-fun thing that people who don't travel sometimes assume it is. More often than not I get to see airports, the insides of office buildings, hotel rooms and lobbies, and the scenic drives through often industrial areas from the airport to the hotel and back. Several months back I started to make a point of scheduling some extra time at my own expense in places where I know I would regret not seeing the sights and taking some time for myself (and Lord knows if I didn't take vacation time that way I would pretty much never get any).

But it's nice that all that flying means I can count on United to be there when things get tough. They may not have the most comfortable seats on their aircraft (Alaska's got them on that one for sure), but the people are consistently great and believe it or not they almost always get me there and back on time, even with all my flights that go through Chicago, which is pretty good in this day and age. So -- Thanks, United.

Do you have a favorite airline? If so, why?

Exactly forty years ago my mom and dad brought me into this world. As I recall (from their stories, not from personal memory), my dad went to park the car and by the time he got to the delivery room I was already in preschool (not really, but it was a very fast delivery and dad actually got there real quick). I'm told that when they handed me to my mom, I peed in her face, and the rest is history. What a great way to kick things off, eh?

It's been quite an interesting journey so far, with lots of life lessons, trials, tribulations, successes, fun and great experiences. I am blessed by the many terrific people, friends and family members who are and have been a part of my life - and for that I am truly grateful. Thanks everyone. I only hope I can give as much back.

I suppose it's just about time for a mid-life crisis, so... I think I will sell my motorcycle. How's that for backwards? And the spur of the moment trip I made this past weekend to Las Vegas with my good friend (and with less than an hour's notice)... Well, lets just try for a bit more of that kind of fun.

Mostly it's just another day, and it's always nice to keep adding those on - one at a time. I don't plan to do anything particularly special, other than to maybe getting outside and enjoying the day for a while and hanging around people I work with and a couple friends.

Maybe I should shave my head or get (another) tattoo or something?

Or maybe not. Heh.

Here's to another forty, if I'm lucky enough.

What better way to spend your "I am officially old" day than doing something completely new? As of today, a new podcast called RunAs Radio, hosted by Richard Campbell and co-hosted by Yours Truly, is being launched. Richard writes in a bit more detail about it on his weblog.

It's a weekly IT podcast with a Microsoft technologies focus. Richard and I will discuss all sorts of relevant topics with a variety of smart and interesting people. I am excited and looking forward to being a part of this project.

RunAs Radio was launched on April 11, 2007 with a nod from its sister show, .NET Rocks!, which started as a weekly downloadable mp3 in August, 2002! Coincidentally, the first RunAs Radio show features Patrick Hynds, who was also the first guest on .NET Rocks!

I have acquired a nice new mic and accessories to make some high quality recordings (but I will save the details for another post).

We hope you enjoy the show, and of course you should let us know what you think. The show is professionally produced by the great people at Pwop Productions.

Show #1 | 4/11/2007 (46 minutes)
Pat Hynds on Storage Technology

Patrick Hynds from Critical Sites kicks off this all-new Microsoft-centric IT podcast with a discussion about storage. This show is atypically long. We're trying for 30 minutes per show.

Links: RunAs Radio web site and RSS feed

My friend Chris forwarded me recently. Apparently I need to get in touch with myself so I can figure out how to get some of what I already got. Also to find out why I am dead. Identities below changed to protect the "innocent" (and by that I don't mean "Harry." I mean people who read this and might for some reason email or call "Harry").

From: Harry Traore [mailto:haruna_traore309@yadayada.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2007 3:03 AM
To: htraoreabcs.com
Subject: From Harry

My name is Haruna Traore (27), I work as houseboy and steward to Mr. GREG HUGHES. He was come from America, and who use to be contractor at big oil servicing bureau here in Cote D’Ivoire. Last year {Jan. 2006 }, my master die of a terribly illness , but before him death, he tell me in confidence of money,  $8.5 Million dollars he deposit with a bank here.

He was very sick and afraid to die and lose all he has in foreign land. He make me to promise he that if him die, I go should try everything possibly to make the money at bank to gets to survivals 1. the earthquake of Pakistan (where he work for long before come here to Africa) and 2. hurrycane of America and he handed over bank document of this deposit to me with letter carry instruction.

I go bank before but they refuse to release money for me unles I appear one of Mr. GREG HUGHES relationes. This hard for me, because since I live with master he no mention any name of family. i try for one year now but no succeed so therefore I want to appear you to bank as my master relation because you are foreigner.So that my master wish before death will ok be done.

I am an ordinary houseboy and not fit reach the survivals in Pakistan and Amerika. If you able to do it for me thank you and respond back immediately so we talk on what will be give to you from the money.

Please telephone me for 225-04-123456

Thanking you for agreement.

Haruna Traore

Oh wait. I'm dead? Wow, I sure missed something here. Hmmm.

Call me, Harry. We should talk.

Um. Yeah, right.

For some reason the subject of "seats parts that may be used as flotation devices" has come up in conversation a number of times lately. Maybe it's because a number of the flights I've been on recently have been over-water, so the portion of the safety briefing that admonishes you to follow crewmember instructions and whatnot just stands out a bit more: "In the event of a water landing, your seat bottom cushion may be used as a flotation device."

Water landing?

Let's be honest. There's no such thing.

I mean, it's nice that this ultra-comfortable seat has a couple straps and that I can take it with me as I leave my carry-on luggage behind, and the emergency exit slides that convert to rafts are pretty cool as well. But if the airplane I'm on right now (as I type this) "lands" on the water, what's likely to happen, really?

Water weighs a little more than eight pounds per gallon. By the time you put an airliner into the water at somewhere around 200 miles an hour and displace thousands of gallons of water with just the engines, and when the wings make contact (assuming a flat, relatively gradual contact with the surface), the plane might as well have hit a mountainside covered in heavy, wet snow. Airplanes break when too much stress is applied, and if they happen to float, it's not likely to be for long.

But it sounds nice to remind us that in the event of a water landing (like it's a perfectly normal, happens-occasionally, hey-what-the-heck kind of thing) that the seat bottom is there for you. It will make exiting the gaping hole right behind you where the rest of the aircraft used to be that much more memorable and safe.

It's called a crash. Not a landing.

Kind of funny, the level of ridiculousness that gets injected into our little world nowadays. Avian flu pandemic contingency planning, seat bottom cushions... All for edge-case scenarios. Not that those are bad things to do, but when you can't get your freakin' luggage from one place to another reliably, it seem as if there are perhaps a few other things that could also use some attention.

However, if my plane ever lands on water, I promise you I'll be glad for the floaties. And they have a heater built in, too - right? Oh.

I'm not a programmer (a fact that for some reason sometimes surprises people when I tell then), and I used to be a hands-on IT guy, configuring and setting up complex systems and troubleshooting. All that respectable, "real" work is - for the most part - in the past. Now I supervise teams that do all that legitimate work.

But now and then I have to do things myself. In setting up a dedicated server for this blog, I found I needed to run applications with multiple versions of the .NET framework - in my case v1.1 and v2 both. I know how to assign the versions of .NET to the applications, but what I did not realize (because I had never had to worry about it on a single server myself) was that there's a bit more to the game than just assigning a framework version to your app and web server instance.

Luckily for me, Scott Forsyth covers just this on his blog in a post entitled "Running Multiple Versions of the Framework in .NET," which I found most useful. Thanks to Scott for the easy to follow post. Apparently it's a IIS v6 thing. I don't remember this behavior in IIS v5.

We all have tell-tale signs that the level of difficulty, stress, work or just plain old "stuff" is too high. Maybe we spout off, maybe we forget things - It's different for all of us.

For me it happened on Sunday: I got in my truck, drove down the driveway, turned right and headed for town. A few minutes into the drive something just didn't seem right, and after trying for several seconds to put my brain on what was amiss, I realized I was still wearing my slippers. Luckily I had fresh socks on and shoes in the car. Heh.

Ever done funny or crazy things thanks to the amount of active clutter going on in your brain and life? Here's your chance to admit it. :)

A while back, I migrated this blog from a shared web host environment to a virtual dedicated server at GoDaddy. Now, before I gripe a bit about the performance, let me say one thing. What I bought from GoDaddy is exactly what I got. They guaranty something like 384MB of RAM for their Windows VDS's, and my blog plus mail server regularly exceeds that amount.

What that means is that when the host that houses my virtual server is under heavy load from the various virtual machines it's managing, the available RAM allocated to my virtual machine could drop as low as the guarantied 384MB level. Needless to say, if that happens and my apps need more, things might crash. Especially those apps that are already running in RAM at the time the allocation changes.

And that's what has been happening on my server. Plus, I have discovered it's getting quite expensive.

As I mentioned in my last entry, my blog typically pulls in around $80 a day or so from ad clicks. Well, this afternoon I had a few minutes to breathe at work and I discovered my server had been offline most of the day. My ad revenue for today is less than $30 as a result. Do that a few times a month and adds up pretty quickly.

So, I've decided that I will once again be moving, this time to a physical dedicated server on its own hardware - an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.13 GHz, with 2GB RAM, dual 120GB drive in a RAID array, a Cisco PIX 501 firewall and the works. The reliability and uptime of dedicated hardware is easily justified by saving all the lost revenue from the current system, so it just makes good sense to do this. It's true what they say: You get what you pay for.

At any rate, the downtime during the transition will probably be far less than the downtime each time the current server fails. Maybe I should install this copy of Exchange I have lying around here and really get things humming. Hmm....

Over at problogger, I recently (well, actually it was several weeks ago - I am just now using a long flight from Chicago to finish this post) ran across a post entitled "Does AdSense Suck for Bloggers?" where Darren Rowse points to Guy Kawasaki (who started a popular blog called "How to Change the World" in 2006) and the New Web Order blog, which editorializes a bit further on Guy's experiences.

A bit of a high-profile slam on AdSense was taking place in these venues, which is unfortunate because Guy's experiences are not the same as everyone's. I'd venture to say that his experience may in fact be similar to the majority of people who just "give AdSense a try" without putting any serious effort into it. But Guy's blog was never optimized in terms of layout for AdSense advertising and his page content is not exactly optimal for context-sensitive advertising either. Now, he writes about many things (and quite well, by the way) and I truly enjoy his blog, but the fact of the matter is that there are a few things he could have done to improve his click-through rate and revenue. Not to mention the fact that his blog is still relatively new - it's only a year old. These things take time, the creation of contextual content and careful design. And the kinds of changes I am referring to would not necessarily have required trashing the layout or skimping/compromising on the author's writing style.

Go read Guy's post about his experience, and then take a look below at mine, to illustrate that it's not just about being famous or high up in technorati's listings when it comes to having a successful experience with AdSense. Being famous or well-known can help, of course, but it's really about how many web site visitors you get, whether the ads are contextually relevant, and how many of the people who visit your site actually click the ads to reach to the content they provide. I'm far from famous, and I am certainly not too well-known (thank goodness). But my revenues from AdSense on one single web site continues to amaze me.

Note: I am providing some information here that other people may not feel comfortable sharing about their own sites and experiences. That's fine, but I have no reason to hide any of this information. My point is to illustrate that AdSense can and does work, and to provide some evidence as well as a little balance to the "AdSense sucks" argument.

In mid-2006, my page views numbers were somewhere in the 8,000 per day range. Later in the year,  it's climbed to well over 10,000 a day, and is now well over 15,000 page views a day on most days - often in the 20-30,000 range.

So - for posterity's sake and for conversational comparison, here are some stats for the year 2006 on greghughes.net, per Google's system counters (which vary from and are slightly lower than my own internal stats counters, but I think being conservative is a good thing when looking at these values). Note that I cannot post publicly my account's actual click-though rate or other numbers due to Google's AdSense terms of service, which I respect. Also, I ran this article (pre-edits) by the AdSense support team before posting, just to make sure I am not crossing any lines. I have no desire to fall victim to the rather terse and stern terms of service that Google rightfully has on its program. They said I was good to go.

What I can tell you is that my click-though rate is relatively high compared to typical site averages, and that through testing I have proven to myself and others that the high rate is a direct result of effective placement and design of the ads themselves, in combination with site layout and design tweaks.

The 2006 stats for this site (greghughes.net):

• 2,355,059 page views for an average of approximately 6,450/day average (using some very conservative counters to be sure). Note that today I average more than 20,000 per day - a significant difference. As you'd expect, that difference is reflected in the total number of clicks per day and the daily revenue numbers.
• 264 posts for the year generated significantly less comments and trackbacks than Guy's blog did - and that's one difference in being famous and high-profile - people link and talk back to you more if you have some celebrity following like many of the A-listers do. Note that perhaps more important than how many posts and comments I had in 2006 are the other 1,107 posts that I made between this blog's inaugural post in 2003 and the end of 2005. Those posts still generate a significant amount of interest and traffic from search engines - many thousands of visits a day.
• Again speaking conservatively, several hundred people regularly grab the RSS feeds. Again, this is a huge difference from Guy's RSS subscription count (I'm on the low end of the spectrum). His subscriber count via RSS is in the thousands - and this is also an indicator of why his traffic may not be driving much revenue. It's been proven that RSS feeds are not the better advertising medium. People just don't click as much. However, I should say that my friend Scott has seen some good results in his RSS advertising.
• Total advertising revenue for 2006: approximately $8,700.00, which is significantly higher than Guy's revenue, and let's face, it - no one really knows me from a hole in the ground. It's also worth pointing out that the 2006 amount is for the full year, which includes a good six to seven months of significantly lower monthly revenue before I made some critical design changes to the page layout in about August. In fact, $1800.00 of the year's total came in December alone and my revenue values have been increasing consistently over time. Only time will tell, though. You never know what might drop or raise your numbers. Hopefully not this post, heh. For comparison purposes, my January 2007 revenue was over $2000.00 and it looks like February will close out at about $1700.00.
• Again, I have intentionally left out any mention of metrics other than how many page views occur and the total payment amounts, because Google is pretty strict about not sharing other metrics like click-though ratios, cpm, etc.
• As an aside, it's worth saying that for those who are not yet familiar with the process of IRS Form 1099 income, this is not all free money. You do have to pay taxes on it, and it's treated as income for an individual, so be prepared to set a large chunk aside for tax time each month. Keep that in mind and be sure to evaluate whether you should be running AdSense as an individual or as a business entity. Depending on your situation, there may be one option that's better than the other. you may want to consult a good CPA on an hourly basis to give you some advice. That tax hit, ouch!

There's a lot more that goes into making AdSense work than just dropping ads on the page and getting a few (or a lot of) people to look at your site. Sure, you have to drive traffic to your site content in order to get clicks. But ad positioning, relevance of the ads, the actual content of your site, and a number of other critical design and configuration elements play a major role in the failure or success of your advertising. The fact of the matter is, if you have a lot of distracting, flashy, graphical stuff on your pages, the ads will not get clicked nearly as much. Why? People just won't look at them nearly as much. It's that simple. 

For example, I used to have a picture of myself in the header of every page on my site, but one day I decided to remove it just to see what impact that would have on my ad clicks (specifically the click-through rate). I suspected that the picture was competing visually with the ads, resulting in less clicks. Sure enough, click-through nearly doubled as soon as I removed my mug-shot from the page template. Visual competition with your ads equates to distraction (you can think of it as visual aerobics - like watching a tennis game from side court), which means less clicks, which in turn means less revenue. Not a very complicated formula.

So, let me leave you with this - Despite the occasional popular, cliche rant in the blogosphere, AdSense most certainly and definitely does not suck for bloggers if you have patience, use it thoughtfully and apply it well. If you don't believe me, ask Joel Comm, the AdSense guru. If his AdSense Secrets is the bible of AdSense, then he is the prophet who can lead you to the promised land (forgive the analogy, sorry), but only if you actually follow his suggestions - all of them, even the ones you don't really want to. Remember - it's just a web site, so you can always put it back the way it was if you don't like the changes you make. You will have to experiment and try new things. Joel can tell you pretty much everything you need to know and a whole lot more. If I was to put some real and substantial time applying even more of his suggestions and those of others to this blog and maybe another one or two topical sites, I could quite possibly quit my day job.

But hey, I am certainly not planning to do that. I like my work and blogging is more of a passion for me than a vocation. I consider myself lucky: I'm certainly glad to have a revenue stream that makes it easy for me to justify using a dedicated host server and which pays for itself quite well (and then some). I'm also financially able to do more charitable giving in my community and in the world, which is important to me. It's a pretty darned good deal, no doubt about it. And I don't even have to do all that much to make it work - the content I've already written over the past few years seems to appeal to a wide audience, so they come here to find what they're looking for. Because the ads are relevant to what they're researching they sometimes click. All I really have to do is continue to write about the things that interest me and hope that others will remain interested, too.

By the way, I am certainly not the only beneficiary of my advertising success. It's a good deal for Google and it's advertisers, too: The better the ad performance on my site, the more effective their customer's ad campaigns. We all win.

Here are a few resources for learning about AdSense and making it work. These are the ones I used, in addition to a few acquaintances who made suggestions here and there:

• Joel Comm - who has his AdSense Secrets and other resources
• Google's AdSense program site - where you can get started
• The Google AdSense Terms of Service (TOS) - which you need to read and understand so you don't make any fatal mistakes

Okay, so I though I was crazy. Like as in "insane" or "defective."

I have been using ThinkPad computers for some time now, and pretty much every time I type my name the crazy things BEEP! back at me with a loud system beep sound. Now, if it did that every time I typed an obscenity, or maybe if I typed a weak password or something, I would accept and understand this amazing audible prompt that almost always snaps my head back and makes me flinch. But no... I happens every time I type my name.

Once again, a post on Omar Shahine's blog has improved my life.

Turns out it's not me, and that technology is to blame. Phew - I was starting to get worried after going through three ThinkPads, all with the same ritual behavior. The beep actually happens when any three keys are pressed all in the same row when at least two of the keys pressed are in this list of characters:

4567rtyufghjvbnm

Now, how's that for obscure? the best technical guess I had was that maybe I was brushing the little-red-eraser-like-mouse-nub-thing (which probably has a real name) and it was complaining at me for rubbing it the wrong way while typing.

But it was my name, after all. My name is Greg Hughes. As in 4567rtyufghjvbnm. Lots of keys all on two rows, and I type fast and probably overlap keystrokes. Yep, that explains it.

And best of all, the problem can be solved. This blog post tell you how. I have made the change and what do you know - no more screaming ThinkPad. Thank goodness!

I hope this helps someone else. It's restored a small but welcome slice of sanity to my life.

I'll write up a couple/few posts about this new mobile phone over the next few days I am sure, but suffice it to say I have swapped out once again and am now using the Blackberry 8800, which was just released to the market by Cingular. You might recall my recent forays into the world of Windows Mobile with the Blackjack and Palm Treo 750.

I just fired up a personal account for the built in GPS navigation system, which is a TeleNav product. It comes preinstalled and all I can say is wow! Very, very nice. I will be using it for spoken turn-by-turn directions this evening to a weekend cabin on Mt. Hood, where I am taking the church youth group for a weekend of pain skiing and snowboarding.

So yes, I have given up the Palm Treo 750 running Windows Mobile. In the end, it was the lesser of the available evils, but was not stable enough and much of the usability was still quite clunky. It's a good device, but for what I do, once again Windows Mobile just doesn't do it. I have spent four or five hours so far with the Blackberry 8800 and I am supremely impressed. Although the trackball is a little different I like it and am getting used to it quickly. The menus are a little different than they used to be on all previous BlackBerries, but I am adjusting and I can see why they made the changes.

I wish I could write more now, but seven kids are counting on me to be ready to go to the mountain on time. Hey, at least we'll find the cabin when we get there!

Dag-Øyvind Paulsen has created a useful service for people who receive Office 2007 Word documents (.docx) and PowerPoint files (.pptx). His service allows you to upload the docx/pptx file to his web server, where the system he has put together will convert the Office 2007 files to classic Office 2003/XP/2000/97/etc. style files (of the .doc and .ppt form).

The services are called, appropriately, DOCX2DOC and PPTX2PPT.

While I suppose one could argue that providing a service that enables you to go backward from a strict technology standpoint is Not A Good Thing^TM, there is a market out there for people who:

1. Don't have Office 2007.
2. Don't want to (or can't) install the respective Office viewers.
3. Don't want to (or can't) ask the original sender to convert the file and resend it.

So, for those people this is an interesting service.

The creator has automated the conversion process and made it possible to do the transformations online in much the same way Office 2007 allows you to do Save-As and then choose the legacy formats. The service is offered on the honor system: If you use it, you're asked to pay $2 on the page where you download your converted file. Running a system like this costs money, and while on the order of 600 people a day have converted files in the week or so the service has been online, only a very, very small handful (less than you can count on one hand) have paid. If you read this and use the service I certainly hope you'll add to the paid-user count.

The process is rather simple from the end-user standpoint. Browse to the service web page for .DOCX or . PPTX files, browse to find the file on your computer that you wish to convert, choose the output format you prefer (you can choose from the legacy office formats, as well as .RTF, .TXT and .HTM), and then click the resulting hyperlink to download your converted file. It's pretty slick.

Being the security wonk I am, my antennae immediately went up as I thought of business users uploading potentially sensitive documents to the system, where they have to be stored in both the original and converted form for at least some period of time in order for a system like this to work. Dag-Øyvind responded by saying that he agrees, and that he warns people on the web site not to upload private, confidential or sensitive files.

His system appears to be well-secured (I did some quick checking and there is no way to browse for files without knowing the actual filenames) and while the file-naming and identification convention is strong (it uses filenames built up with a date-time value plus a randomly generated GUID, so you have to know the unique and random name in order to access any given file), the ultimate risk on a system like this is the guy who runs it. The files are cleaned up (deleted) from the system automatically every day. But, he says one should realize that since he controls the system, he has the ability to view any and all files up until the time they are automatically deleted. In other words, he's the biggest risk. I like the honesty in that statement. I asked him if the original and converted files could be deleted more often than once a day, and he said they could be and that he would consider doing so.

If you have a need to convert and don't have Office 2007 handy, this might be the right service for you.

Some technical details about how it works are available at: http://www.docx2doc.com/Newbies-Guide-To-docx.aspx

Well, I have had the luxury over the past couple months of not having to travel too terribly much, but this week it's back-on-the-road for me. Time to start racking up those frequent flier miles again, heh.

This week I will be in New York City (arriving this evening - I am on a plane in Chicago on a ground hold, just waiting to take off for LaGuardia... Nice to sit on a plan on the ramp for an hour and a half eh?). I'll be back home for a weekend on Mt. Hood with the youth group from church, and then Monday morning it's right back on another plane to head for Atlanta for a few days.

My hope is that I won't have to live the same crazy travel schedule I did last year, but my job calls for it, so a certain amount of it is to be expected (and accepted). If we ever get off the ground in the plane, that is. Maybe I'll spend the rest of 2007 here eating peanuts and working via Verizon broadband and a Cingular wireless phone. I guess it could be worse. I mean, they do have three (bad) movies in the tape library.

If you're in New York or Atlanta, let me know. I won't have a lot of free time but its always fun to try to meet people on the road if I can.