I'm quickly learning the pain of running a 64-bit OS on my new laptop. Of course, that's the version of Windows Vista Ultimate it came with, what with all the processors being sold these days are 64-bit and all.

I went to install iTunes (which installed with a message explaining it would not be able to copy CDs) and activate the new iPhone, and what do you think I see?

Crap. You have got to be kidding me.

Apparently this is a well-known issue. Except that I didn't know and on the box it says, "Windows Vista" is supported, without any mention of version or 32-bit vs 64-bit. reading the fine print details of the release notes one finds a buried mention of no support for 64-bit Windows. Hmph.

Now I have to decide what to do - return the phone out of pure spite, or sync it to a different computer... Sorry, but "lame" is the only word that comes to mind here. Fanboys will undoubtedly spew vitriol at that statement, but it's still lame.

Ideas anyone? Will a 32-bit OS running in a virtual machine work for me maybe?

I guess $200 off was enough incentive for me. Plus the way cool interface and the fact that month to month it costs slightly less than the Blackberry plan I've been looking at. Now that I am buying my own service, it's time to make the change.

So, I'm officially an iPhone guy. That was quick.

Heh. I think pigs just flew. :)

Change happens, and I'm living that fact right now. The company I work for was recently acquired and after a long stretch of doing my part to make sure everything went well with the integration process, I spent my last day on the job Friday of last week. I worked at Corillian for the past eight years, to the month. It was a great experience and I am grateful to all the good people I had the opportunity to work with and learn from. I truly appreciate the people I have worked with as well as the ones I have met over the past year during the transition process. Thanks for everything you've taught me and for some great times.

So the short version of this story is that I chose to move on find the next thing, and that by my own choice I'm on sort of an extended vacation from work right now. To be honest, a break will be good for me. Some amazing work opportunities have been presented to me recently and there are a number of people who are probably surprised I am not starting a new job immediately, but overall fit is important to me in a job and as such I will be carefully pursuing options in the near future. At this point I have to think about a variety of aspects of my life as well as work.

I plan to take a few weeks to relax and do some non-work things, followed by getting back on the work track. That means taking some time to get things done around the house, visit with some people I care about in person, do some writing and generally decompress from a year or two of extra-hard work. I'm looking forward to it.

And then, I'll be back on the trail.

I saw the announcement that the Windows Live team has released Beta 2 of the Windows Live Suite of apps, and went to download and install the package on my new laptop that I bought yesterday, but found out (unfortunately) that I can't install it.

Ugh. So much for checking out the latest versions of the Live apps that I have come to know and love (well, at least like a lot). I also tried installing a couple of the individual apps, and got the same error message. I'm glad I got the previous beta version of Live Writer downloaded last night, since it works on x64 just fine...

Apparently, according to the release notes, 64-bit Vista is not supported at all for installation in this beta release:

64-bit is not supported for Beta 2
Beta 2 does not support a 64-bit installation; however the final version of Windows Live will support 64-bit (with the exception of Family Safety). You have the choice of either continuing to run the Beta 1 versions of Windows Live or you can uninstall all Windows Live applications and reinstall the released versions. For more information see KB Article 938275.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find the referenced KB938275 anywhere on microsoft.com yet.The final version will support 64-bit, though. Is it just me, or does that sound backwards? I understand the need to make things work in a limited beta environment, but almost every new machine out there is 64-bit. Just doesn't make sense to me. Looks like Robert McLaws agrees.

Oh well. I'll wait. I really wanted that Live Writer update. <sigh>

Glad I didn't buy one yesterday. I thought about it. Considered it. Decided it was too much money at $600. Now it's $399. It can't feel good to me the proud owner of an 8GB iPhone that was purchased before today though. Ouch.

UPDATE: Om Malik points out that if you bought one in the past 14 days at the old price, you should be eligible for a refund of the difference. He quotes the Apple return policy:

Should Apple reduce its price on any Apple-branded product within fourteen (14) calendar days of the date of purchase, you may request a refund of the difference between the price paid and the current selling price. An original purchase receipt is required, and you must request your refund within fourteen (14) calendar days of the price reduction.

Now that it's in my range I can reconsider, but then again there probably won't be any in stock to grab. Heh.

Read about it pretty much everywhere, including here.

Decisions, decisions...

My friend Brad Pierce is in the middle of his trip around the world (literally), where he is doing the whole trip on the surface - no airplanes. He's crossed the United States, then the Atlantic, and is in Europe as I write this. Paris to be specific. It's a lifelong dream of his, and he left the familiar world behind to live that dream. I am a lot proud and a little envious. :)

You can keep tabs on Brad's travels at http://www.peopleinpassing.com/, where he is logging his experiences and posting some photos as he goes. Brad is also a talented photographer.

He says 5-6 months or more are still left to go, and the path is one that gets determined on the fly. It's a trip with it's bumps, which is really a critical part of the great experience in Brad's book. Great stuff, man.

It doesn't have to be mean or vandalism to be a good school prank.

Gotta give 'em credit. Well done.

Ummmm, wow. Just click it.

I just saw a post over at digitalmediathoughts.com that points out an unadvertised sale at Amazon.com on HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. So, I went to Amazon and got three movies for the price of two - I can confirm it's for real. no idea how long it will last, but if you're a HD disc person, it's a good deal on some flicks.

Not all titles are available. You have to put them in your basket (no one-click) and then "proceed to checkout," and then you will see the credit for the lowest priced disc under "Promotion Applied" (see my order below).

UPDATE: Here is a link to Amazon.com where they have a list of all the movies that are eligible for buy two get one free (for HD DVD):

Buy Two HD DVDs and Receive a Third Title for Free

Select any three titles from the list below and get one of them free. The promotional discount will be applied at checkout. You will see a credit in your shopping cart. Limit two of each title per customer. Quantities are limited; order now before we run out.

Cool.

Obviously, I could have been better off to choose three discs priced at $27.95, but you get the point.

Get it while it's still there. Enjoy.

I'm a little more behind the times these days than I tend to want to admit. Management work, flying all over the place, integrating two companies and the day job will do that to a technologist, let me tell ya. So, I was pretty amazed otday when I finally got to see some cool stuff I have been hearing about lately.

I have an older Mac Mini in the kitchen at home and that's the extent of my Mac world: Checking the day's weather, doing an occasional Google search, getting movie times - and applying seemingly weekly OSX and app updates.

Sidebar: I'm leaving my place of work after this week and moving on to new things, so I have been thinking about laptops (I have used a work laptop for pretty much everything up til now). I have been looking at Lenovo machines and some Dells as well, but someone mentioned running Windows apps on a Mac recently, and I started thinking about that this evening.

There's a cool app called Parallels that lets you run Windows apps on the Mac. People have told me it's really cool. But my friend of many years, Chris Pirillo, told me tonight to look hard at VMWare Fusion. Chris is a geek's geek and you might know him from his Lockergnome empire or from when he was on TechTV a while back (obligatory funny link here, heh). Anyhow - He cares desperately about usability and product quality. My area is more infrastructure, so we compliment each other. When he says look at Fusion, I listen. When I say look at RackSpace for hosted exchange, he listens.

Chris runs this great live video show online, and when I IMed him this evening to ask him what he thinks about running Windows apps on the Mac, he was pretty emphatic and told me to turn on the video feed:

Greg Hughes says: have you run windows on the macbookpro? with that program that lets you do that things where you can run windows apps in OSX and all that?
Greg Hughes says: i liked the idea of running a native windows app in OSX
Chris Pirillo says: Vmware.
Greg Hughes says: parallels?
Chris Pirillo says: Vmware fusion
Chris Pirillo says: Trust me, d00d.
Greg Hughes says: k
Chris Pirillo says: TRUST ME
Chris Pirillo says: Perf + seamless
Chris Pirillo says: Here.
Chris Pirillo says: watch
Greg Hughes says: k
Chris Pirillo says: No, i mean - watch the vid.
Greg Hughes says: one sec
Greg Hughes says: ok am watching...

Then he proceeded to show me via the live video feed (along with everyone else in his viewing and chatting audience) how incredibly slick VMWare Fusion is, and why I should look at it instead of Parallels. Both are cool apps, but the VMWare seems really cool for performance.

This stuff is really amazing, and this is a great example of something that's a lot easier to explain by showing it to you.

Chris has an archived video (see below) and a related blog post where he did a comparison of the two products (Parallels vs. VMWare Fusion). If you have not checked out Chris' video show, it's pretty slick, he does call-in's for tech support and all sorts of stuff -- and http://live.pirillo.com is the URL to watch.

I'm looking forward to playing around with this stuff. My inner geek is waking up and getting a bit excited. I need to find a Mac notebook to see how this stuff works, then write some more I think. Should be fun.

Here's Chris' archived video where he discusses the VMWare Fusion and Parallels software products:

Well, I just discovered that I am missing at least one blog entry from the past. I know it's missing because I specifically went looking for it today. I also linked to it in the past from another entry that still exists on this blog. It's just gone. Weird. Also not good. Makes me wonder what else might be missing. I have an idea what might have caused this, but that doesn't help solve the issue. I may have to go back and find some old site content backups and figure out when it disappeared, and probably enumerate all of my posts from the old backups and compare them to what's online now. from there I can make repairs.

Ugh, that just sounds like so much fun... A use for my copious spare time, I guess. Not. Heh.

If you happen to find a link to something here that doesn't work (it will probably redirect you to the main home page), please let me know the original URL and the topic or place you found the link.

Thanks.

This one should be interesting to watch. There's a new blog at Microsoft's MSDN blogs system called hackers @ microsoft (http://blogs.msdn.com/hackers/), and the first (introductory) post is up. I hope to see some interesting security and general information here. Might be a good source of some useful insight. There are many things Microsoft is doing right these days, security-wise. More on that in another post some other time.

From the opening post on hackers @ microsoft:

"Welcome to a new blog from Microsoft.  The focus of this blog is likely to be a little different from most other blogs you'll see on blogs.msdn.com.  Microsoft employs some of the best hackers in the world and actively recruits them and develops them.  They work on all kinds of projects, whether it be in development, research, testing, management and of course security ... So yes, Microsoft does have hackers, and its time to introduce you to some of them and show you what it is, exactly that they do."

Cool. Subscribed.

(via betanews.com)

John Nack at Adobe links to a video that I saw up on YouTube as well the other day after a friend sent me link, where a couple of incredibly smart people have presented a new way to resize (and otherwise edit) images. And apparently, according to Nack, one of those smart people - Shai Avidan - is working at Adobe now. Here's the video:

Technically, it's very interesting, even amazing to watch. From a pure photojournalism ethics standpoint, it's certainly to be considered as yet another real concern to those who work in the field. As much of a technology geek as I am, I was a photojournalist long before I got heavy into computers. As soon as I started watching the video my thoughts were as a former news photographer: "Wow, that's a lie." Proof again why art and reporting are not even close to the same thing, and why so few people with a camera fit into both the artist and reporter skins. You don't need to anymore, you can just cheat. Or at least that's what some people would call it.

It's becoming easier and easier to take liberties with the truth when it comes to recording scenes. With the continued technological progress in digital imaging pretty much anyone with a few bucks for some software and a computer (or even without a few bucks if their ethics are truly in the toilet) can create some pretty compelling imagery. But the easy way out doesn't do it for me... I prefer the actual scene, and non-story-telling edits limited to things like cropping, minor exposure compensation, lint removal and color/white balance. At least that's the way I feel with regard to photos that need to carry the journalism label (and for the most part for my photos, as well).

Artists and anyone creating images for effect as opposed to telling a true story, you can go for it. I won't count it against you too much, heh. But I think I'll just try to stick to taking a good natural picture. 

The Satellite Alignment Calculator over at UKSatelliteHelp is a great resource that allows you to choose the satellite(s) you need to point your dish at, specify your address, drag a pointer to the spot on your home or building where the dish is, and from that determine the specific angle and elevation you need to use to get a signal.

It also provides a visual representation of the direction to the satellite by drawing a line on the map, so you can see what landmarks fall in the path of the line of sight.

It's a great tool and works great in the United States and elsewhere, not just in the UK. For example, all the Dish Network and DirecTV sats are listed and can be aimed with the information from this service, as well.

(via jkOnTheRun and Hacks)

My good friend Scott Hanselman just published the latest annual installment of his Ultimate Developer and Power User's Tool List, which you can always see the most recent version of over at http://www.hanselman.com/tools. As usual, it's a great list of the many, many, many, many pieces of software and sources of information - big and small - that Scott has found make his life as a developer and power user better. I love this list and it's fun when he updates it. Look for the new items this year (there's like 50 of them) in red.