Kavanagh, John J.

As I have blogged, I upgraded my 1stGen Zune 30 to a 3rdGen (at least from what I read the 120 is a gen newer) 120GB Zune.  Admittedly I still fire up my Zune 30 and despite my torture on it, the device still wants to work.  The 120GB is definitely an upgrade, not just in terms of capacity.  The display, which yes it is important on an music player since I watch several regular video podcasts, is sharper.  The start up and synch times are impressive.  Now I will say that I am still getting used to the new navigation mechanism.  I wouldn’t consider this a Zune thing since I really hate that laptops are all using these glide pads, I really miss the pencil eraser.  I turn off the touch sensitivity on the new navigation pad because much like the gas pedal in my vehicle I do not have the finesse touch.  Even with that turned off, navigating through the User Interface is great.  The new Zune120 despite the capacity increase is much more comfortable. 

I upgraded to the premium headphones.  Much like my Zune30 but in much shorter period of time I have already rendered them useless.  The headphones that come with the Zune aren’t bad but I like to play the music very loud and isolating or in-ear are just more polite to those around me.

So, I have been really enjoying my Zune120 and even though my “Plays” (the software keeps track of how many songs you have played) have gone down, that is not because I am using the device but rather I am addicted to Podcasts.  I was already using the Zune 3.0 software and compared to iTunes I love it.

So where is the “More” you ask?  I bought a new Zune8.  Working out with the Zune120 just made me nervous.  I ordered one of the Zune originals with a cool tattoo-like skull etched on the back.  I also ordered the iHome ZN9 alarm clock (which I haven’t really used but already have some reservations about it).  The Zune8 is smaller and lighter but there is no loss in terms of functionality.

I like that all I had to do was connect it, let the Zune software recognize it and away we went.  First thing was to install the firmware upgrade.  Then name it, link it to my gamertag and then pick what I wanted to synch to it.  Obviously I can’t synch everything to it since my collection is well over 40GB, but I was able to get my workout playlist and told it to sync it to LittleZune and as expected it synched the playlist and only the songs that are part of the playlist.  After two workouts this was a good additional to the arsenal.  The only downside is that its so light you almost forget about it.

I do have to point out a bad part of my customer experience.  The ZuneStore’s order tracking is weak, and that’s disturbing since its not like your standard internet purchase with the customization so it would be nice to see where your order is at in the fulfillment process.

With all of the rumors about the Zune failing and maybe being discontinued.  I sure hope that is just people over-reacting.  I love my Zune players and think they are as good as the competition if not better in many respects.  If anything does happen, I sure hope the Zune software does not experience a demise.  The software is clean and the marketplace is well done. 

http://social.zune.net/member/jkavanagh58

Well if nothing they are consistent.  There have been two NHL oriented video games on the market (unlike the NFL that EA owns all rights to).  I have stuck with the 2K line because the EA products are just not realistic or playable.  I have been enjoying NHL 2K9 and had a pretty good first year going in franchise mode.  Three weeks from the playoffs and now I can’t play or even simulate the next game.  I have tried several times, then popped the power, re-seated the hard drive, cleaned up several gigabytes of disk space.  Since Fallout 3 crapped out on me today I started thinking about upgrading to the Elite console.  Then I did some research and it would appear this is common with the game and not the console type.  2K Sports has stated that they will not release a patch.  I had this problem with the 2K7 version.  Shame.

A sucker for beta stuff, I have been using IE8 for some time.  It was definitely beta, crashing with some regularity (although it was pretty good at recovering).  I of course jumped on the IE8 RC 1 when it became available.  Interesting note on that, I follow technology specific RSS feeds constantly but the first whiff if IE 8 RC1 being available was via Twitter.  The RC 1 is very solid, to date it has only crashed with poor websites, not something I would blame a browser on.  Working on a little project I have been experimenting with CSS and I was able to crash IE8 beta 2 consistently with my lousy CSS but now RC1 seems to ignore my malformed CSS.  All in all I am liking the Release Candidate version.

One thing that I have not tried with IE8 is the “Accelerators”.  Doing some research on a topic I tried the map accelerator.  Definitely well done.  On the page I highlighted the City and State (the breeder did not post the full postal address), used right-click and then let the cursor hover over “Map with Live Search” and wala…. a map shows up in a new window as shown below:

If you click on the option, as you would expect, it takes the selected text and opens maps.live.com to the location.  I prefer Live Maps (not to mention the whole Windows Live Platform) but if you check www.ieaddons.com and check out mapping there is an accelerator for some other mapping services (Google, Yahoo, multimap, etc…).

Another group of accelerators that I came across and has proven quite handy is the Sharing or Social Networking, as there are accelerators for Sharing links or data found on a website using your Facebook, Twitter or other social network.

Check out the video for more information than I can give.

Off to do more testing.

Okay, so all of this blogging, micro-blogging, social networking it is all just a blur.  I have pretty much stuck with the Windows Live platform but working in Information Technology you always hear the chatter.  Interesting twist to that is IT is normally the group that prevents you from accessing these types of services.  That in reality is a shame but a necessary evil I suppose.  So, Twitter is a “micro-blogging” platform.  I looked into it and at first I just didn’t get to it.  I did like the fact that I could post with a simple SMS text message.  The key is you have to start following people.

Twitter alone is just a plain (although you can use Twitbacks to customize it) web page listing all of the threads.  Installing an app like thwirl makes it easier to use.  There are plenty of apps for your iPhone and Blackberry as well.

Linking it all together, my home.live.com gets updated with my Twitter activity and I have Facebook setup so when I post a twitter entry it updates my Facebook status as well.

Determined to figure out why tweeting is all the rage… I looked further and trust me this is in now way an authoritative document but I found a way to make it really work for me.  I explored http://search.twitter.com ; again a very generic looking web page but enter a topic.  In this case I will use Twitter to monitor chatter about my favorite hockey team. 

Okay so now with these results you can:

• Find twitter accounts you want to follow.  Sure there will be lots of yapping but then you start to see a twitter account that you want to “follow”
• See the RSS icon… and I do love RSS; subscribe to the feed and use your RSS Read (Windows Live Mail for me) or use the URL and plug it into my.live.com

I am using Twitter to follow topics of Powershell and Zune right now and I have to admit it has been informative and when I posted that I was struggling with Powershell and SQL, I receive some very informative responses.  That is one of the reasons I hate that we can’t access it from work because it does have some benefits, but I am sure it would be abused more than correctly leveraged.

The highly anticipated beta was in so much of demand getting it was not easy.  I still laugh at those complaining, I remember when a Beta was only released to circles such as Technet and MSDN, which come at a cost.  Okay, enough about that.

I used an old laptop for this testing.  Irony is this is the same laptop I did Vista beta testing for.  For Vista it was a dog but functional.  The machine is starting to show its age with the hard drive and optical drive having issues from time to time.  In the last two years I have been using this for all of my Linux testing and at the time I did a restart to install Windows 7 the machine was running Ubuntu.

Install:  One word; WOW.  The install process was so much quicker, quicker than Windows as well as Linux (GUI assisted install).  This was a complete new install, to include wiping out the drive contents, so with a bare drive and no OEM drivers Windows 7 installed and came up with no issues.  No special hardware on this laptop but it is not necessarily current.  I have not found any hardware that did not work.

I love that Powershell is installed and now I will have to start learning Powershell V2 since in a professional capacity I have been pushing hard to learn Powershell V1 to deploy in a production environment.

First task was to install Windows Live Essentials.  This made the process of setting up the machine so much faster.  For starters getting the primary tools I use installed, then the content.  Just consider the Favorites Synch… it prompted me if I wanted to enable this function, turned it on, and I now have all of the favorites I use on a daily basis… no export/import just sit back and watch the folder content populate.

A few updates came up during my first login session, before the haters start making an issue of that… I have spent several weeks installing OSX and various Linux distros… they all do the same thing (Fedora consistently would blow up after the third bath of updates scrambling the display making it unusable).

Used the Homegroup function to share files… not bad for a free P2P function but with Mesh and Skydrive I will probably not use it.

Several articles have been written about the Taskbar.  I don’t like the spacing of the icons but the interaction is great. One of the interactions I liked was with IE running and several sites in tabs, when I move the mouse over the IE icon each tab is shown.  Annoyance for Windows Live Messenger it shows two items .

Like most of the complaints I hear about Vista, I was at first not happy with it but after using it I found it was just different and once I used it in normal activities I can see its benefits.

Bouncing around from one application to another, the OS is extremely quick and very stable.  I will not be replacing my large screen laptop with this unit but this might be my road warrior.  I admit, Vista on my main laptop has been great, IE8 was frustrating at first but it seems to be more stable.  Admitting I like Vista I have to say that once available and based on current testing, I will be upgrading to Windows 7.  Next to test, Zune; Importing Media (camera); scripting (Powershell… and hey vbscript shows version 5.8 very interesting); Media Center; an office application (probably OpenOffice since I can’t afford another Microsoft Office license) and more Windows Live Essential testing.