If you want to skip my rambling and just check out my new blog, here it is: http://www.refocuser.com.  Refocuser is a blog about focus; specifically the ability to apply your focus at will to whatever requires your attention.

Hi folks!  Since December of 2004 I’ve been blogging here on Torres Talking – sometimes regularly and sometimes irregularly :)  Topics on this blog have ranged quite a bit from “what I’ve been up to” type posts to detailed descriptions of the ways I’ve applied various technologies in my life.  Torres Talking was a real passion of mine for a number of years and has been very instrumental in crystallizing my thoughts and helping prove to myself that I actually have something to contribute to the overall “conversation”.  It’s also how I became a published author, has served as motivation for my part in revamping Microsoft’s social networking strategy… and most importantly is how I’ve come to connect with hundreds of new and interesting people (both virtually and in the real world).  For all these things, I’ll always be grateful.

But all good things come to an end.  As you probably already know, since the birth of my daughter and a shift in job responsibilities, I’ve had a hard time dedicating the kind of time and effort to this blog as I once did.  I feel like most of my posts recently have been apologetic and not at all informational, and every time I feel the urge to post something interesting about something on Techmeme, I tweet it instead.  The urge disappears and I move on.

Also, as a Microsoft employee and someone who loves his job, there’s inherent conflict in evaluating and talking about technology from a personal standpoint.  You run the risk of insulting internal Microsoft teams inadvertently and can be accused of being both a self-promoter (through genuine praise of our tools and products) or a liability (through equally genuine promotion of other tools and products).  It’s a bit of a no-win situation.  Either way you always strive to be honest, but all the while you’re doubting whether or not you should hit publish.  The cost/benefit ratio shifted at some point for me, so I’m going to focus most of my “tech writing” energy on Microsoft-run blogs like Windows Live Wire (I have a post coming soon there).

But I’ve also decided to start another blog.  Something I’ve been “threatening” to do for years (like… 10!) and finally decided to just go for it.

This time it’s a more structured blog to focus (no pun intended) on another lifelong passion of mine; personal growth and self-directed focus.  At times I dabbled in this area on Torres Talking, but this blog will go into much more depth on this broad topic.  The full title of the blog is Refocuser: Find flow, fight fear, and create focus!

You can learn more about Refocuser here: http://www.refocuser.com/about.  And if you’re interested in how I’ve found time to keep this blog up with everything else going on, I’ve already blogged about it!

Refocuser covers:

• Goal setting
• Flow
• Fear management
• Work/life balance
• Conflict management
• Productivity and yes, some ‘lifehacks’ occasionally
• Nutrition and supplementation (fuel for focus!)
• Exercise and activity
• Philosophy
• Positivity
• Purpose
• Sleep (it matters more than you think!)
• Simplicity
• Creativity

Browse through the site and start filling your own toolbox.  Email me with questions if you have any.  Or just sit-back, relax, and subscribe to updates via email, Twitter, or RSS.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy it!

Note: Torres Talking will stick around for some time, but I’ve turned off comments.  I may not post here again for a while (or ever!) but if you’re interested in focus, you can always find me at www.refocuser.com.  And for Microsoft-specific questions, comments, or concerns, just hit me up on Twitter.  We have some great stuff on the way – I’ve definitely never been prouder to be a Microsoft employee!

A couple years ago (7/07) I wrote:

I think the digital book will be dramatically different from the 1999 eBook.  The hardware will be much more appealing to book worms - possibly with digital pages that actually flip - and the fonts and rendering technology will be wondrous.  The dedicated device will be connected to the net for instant download (via an iTunes-like store, probably provided by Amazon.com and B&N) of new books, magazines, newspapers, and other types of content.

Digital Books and the Trade-in Model

In other words, I had a vision of the Amazon Kindle – and as I typed this up, they were working on it (pretty cool).  I also wrote that I wanted to replace all existing paper books with digital books in the year 2012.  But I’m thinking of moving that up by a few years now that I have about 40 new books on shelves that I didn’t have back in 2007.  Books are starting to overwhelm our living space (just like CDs did for years) and it’s time for me to do something about it short of adding more square footage.  So here’s my plan:

1. Remove all books from my public Amazon wishlist and move them to a private “Want to read” list.  Having received close to 20 books for Christmas this year, I think I need to get serious about this.  I’m walking distance to the Microsoft Library and can get books delivered to my office whenever I want them, so owning books is starting to feel a little silly.  Where it makes sense, I will replace the physical book with the Kindle version once that’s possible.
2. As I read books I already own, I will take searchable notes (in OneNote) where applicable.  Not going to do that for Twilight or Tom Clancy of course, but I’ll definitely be doing it for psychology/business motivation/productivity books where things I want to remember are covered in detail.
3. Once finished, I’ll add those books to another list, “Books I’ve read” just in case I want to refer back to them at some point (or just remind myself that I actually read them).  This will address the packrat need in me.
4. Then, I’ll sell the book.  De-clutter.

If I ever need to refer back to the book for some reason, I’ll either get it delivered from the library, listen to the Audible version, or buy the cheaper Kindle copy.  This assumes two things:

• I get a Kindle.  In order to go digital, I need a great reader.  I’m assuming that the new Kindle on February 9th will be one.  The DRM still bugs me but if over time enough people complain, they’ll have to do what Apple just did with iTunes and let people strip the DRM.
• I can sell books without dealing with selling the books. I have a used book store around the corner from me, but the best value I’ll get from selling books will come from Amazon or another online retailer.  Except I really don’t want to deal with shipping books every day (or posting them to begin with).  So I need to find a cost-effective and efficient way to do this, possibly by hiring a virtual assistant.  Ideas are welcome.

And just for fun, I’m going to learn how to speed read finally so I can get through all of this a little quicker.  Most of the books I read are perfectly “speed readable”.  I’ve found some resources on this but I’ll spend some time over the next couple of days digging up some more.

So just like CDs and paper in our home, in a few years most books (with a few exceptions) will be replaced with digital versions or gone completely once I get the value extracted from them.

[Omar and I are giving a talk on Getting Things Done at Microsoft at TechReady next week.  The funny thing is that one of the benefits we tout of applying a system to your inbox and task list is that you start to systematize everything around you.  This is one odd example of me doing that!]

Russell Beattie sums something up that I’ve been thinking for a while about personal blogging punditry in 2009:

Man, I wish I could just sit down and write like I used to on a daily basis.

It feels *different* though... Keeping a weblog seems to have become a sort of a mid 2000's fad that has passed its peak and starting to fade into obscurity, and maybe even soon ridicule along with bell-bottom jeans and mullets. Even though I love putting my thoughts out there, in the back of my mind it's almost embarrassing to add to the cacophony of opinions that now flow daily from every orifice of the Internet from people who just haven't gotten the message that it's just not cool any more. I mean, hey, let's face it - Social Networking elected the current US president, not blogging.

I can't seem to get into the habit... - RussellBeattie.com

I started blogging back in 2001/2002 on my own domain (with about 5 readers as I didn’t have “Microsoft” attached to my name) and continued to blog (this time as a fitness blogger) once I joined Microsoft.  In December 2004 I “reopened” my personal blog here on Spaces – Torres Talking – and for a few years I was rockin’ it, posting at least 5-8 times monthly with posts that took me time to research, think about, write, and comment on.  For a while I was in the Technorati 100 back when it mattered but given my lack of attention to this site since my daughter was born on Oct 07, I don’t even show up in a Live Search for “Mike Torres” anymore!

Oh well.

I’ve talked about this before, but there are lots of reasons for slowing down in addition to the embarrassment factor Russell calls out above.  For one, I spend 8-12 hours each day writing between email, product specifications, and vision memos… so the last thing I want to do in downtime is write more.  Secondly, time spent training (martial arts/strength training) cuts into already valuable time with my family and it’s frankly just more important to me than blogging.  And of course, downtime during early mornings, nights, and weekends are best spent with my wife and daughter.  The little one changes every single week and if I don’t spend enough time with her during any given week, I can feel her changing without me, and it’s one of the worst feelings in the world.

I think another real factor is that I contribute thoughts in other ways.  Twitter updates, SmugMug photos, Facebook comments, Google Reader shared items, and Windows Live to pull it all together for people… they all give me an outlet that takes seconds instead of hours, and anyone following that stream will immediately know where my head is without reading a bunch of prose.  Some examples of items from my Twitter feed which I would have blogged about back in 2006:

• Omar & I are giving a talk at TechReady next week, "Getting Things Done like a Ninja at Microsoft" - 350+ people projected, yikes!
• Offline Gmail is so NOT interesting, but the Labs concept continues to provide small reasons not to switch away
• Amazon Kindle 2 coming February 9th? Maybe I'll finally ditch books.
• IE should stop *clicking* every time it loads a page; first thing I turn off (but I'm sure most people just deal with it)

Each one could have been a long-winded post like this one, but instead I got the thoughts off my chest and got feedback on them almost immediately.

Now having said all of that, I do still love blogging (and Windows Live Writer) and want to keep this site alive for the foreseeable future – just without the “web 2.0 remorse” of letting it sit here.  So I’ll continue to post long-form posts every month (or three or four) and I’d really like to start talking more about the new Windows Live Movie Maker once we’re ready to talk about it.  I’m thrilled to be working on a project so many people care so much about and is so well timed with market needs.  So I’d like to make sure I can have an ongoing dialogue with folks about it on this blog, on Twitter, and anywhere else I can.  Again, once we’re ready to talk more about it.  But that will hopefully be nice and focused, not the inane ramblings of some random dude.

If you still want the inane ramblings of some random dude, just catch me on Twitter ;)

After some great years working on our web experiences, I realized over my parental leave that it was time for me to try something completely new; to stretch my brain in ways I haven’t before and be intimidated again by just how little I knew about something.  I’ve been around these parts since the first beta version of MSN Spaces in mid-2004 – and for a year and a half before that I was working on the underlying platform still in use – and have now seen many our efforts “grow up” into amazing Windows Live functionality like the What’s New feed, our new Profile, and our new People experience (one contact list!) 

I can actually remember when I was one of just a few people blogging regularly about our online services.  While that has taken a backseat recently (we have great marketing and a team blog) the passion to continually improve our online story is stronger than ever.  This past year was fantastic.  The team is functioning on such a high level and everyone is really, really proud of the work we did.  Yet as one wave comes to a close and another begins, it’s a natural time to make a move.

Now of course, there really isn’t a better group in the company to work in than Windows Live.  So while my #1 priority was to do something different, inspiring, and challenging, a close #1.1 was to make sure that whatever I did was within Windows Live.  So effective this week I’ve moved over to lead the Windows Live Movie Maker PM team – now a part of Windows Live as of the latest release.

There are so many reasons why I’m excited about this: it’s a v1 product that already has a big following...  there are big hard technical, UI, and set of project management challenges…  no one has really gotten this stuff “right” yet… the team is rock solid, experienced, and driven… and it’s an opportunity to really play a part in the new excitement around Windows PCs and show how good ol’ software can make a difference.

Curious about the new Windows Live Movie Maker?  You can learn about it here.  In the meantime, please send me your thoughts on Movie Maker – you know how to reach me (email is best).  Although if your feedback is about needing to see “time” in the product somehow, we’ve definitely heard this feedback loud and clear :)  (Remember, what’s currently out there is a very early beta!  There’s a lot of work happening in Redmond)

As you may have heard, the new and improved Windows Live is coming your way very, very soon.  We announced it last night at 9pm and so far, the feedback has been great.  This is certainly the most satisfying part of this job: shipping!  Shipping something you’re proud of that is.  Particularly with a release like this one that was very much a “redefinition” in a lot of ways. 

Long gone are the days when I was the only one blogging about our release though ;)  Check out our Windows Live Wire blog for more information on Windows Live.  And check out the video below for more depth:

Also – read the quotes below.  FUN.  Emphasis below is mine.

Hall underscored that Microsoft is trying to simplify the Web experience by bringing together people and content scattered all over the Web and across personal computers, phones and other devices. Having one central place to organize and manage information relieves some of the social networking fatigue people are experiencing, he said. To that end, Microsoft formed partnerships with a number of  companies including LinkedIn, Photobucket and Twitter. – LA Times blog

It could be pretty exciting for Live.com users before the year ends, especially for U.S. users. And this could make or break, Live.com’s relevance to Microsoft’s suite of web products. – Search Engine Journal

This is Big: Overall, these new services represent a major upgrade to the online part of the Windows Live suite. Microsoft is clearly trying to challenge both Yahoo and Google with its new photo application, while the new profiles and groups tie all the Live services together into a very sophisticated social network. – Read/Write Web

Microsoft announced Windows Live Profiles today, which takes some lessons from social networking sites and FriendFeed. The new profile page provides a central hub for all your online activities on Windows Live. More interestingly, your profile can also aggregate updates from other services, such as your Twitter account, your blog feed, reviews from Yelp, or photos you have posted on Flickr. You can also feed any standard RSS stream into your profile…You can choose the amount of personal information you want to display in your profile and Microsoft gives you very granular control over what parts of your profile you want to share with others. You can, for example, choose to share your last name and location only with friends, but make information about your relationship status and hometown public. You can also choose to make some items only available to a small sub-set of your friends. – Read/Write Web 

In addition to rolling out new services, Microsoft has given Windows Live a facelift. The overall interface is now less crowded with blocks of personalized content.  Another nice customization feature is the ability to add a personalized slideshow in the upper right-hand corner of your Windows Live Home page. The slideshow images are pulled from your Windows Live Photo collection.  Microsoft makes some serious strides into the future of cloud computing with this update to Windows Live. I like what I see, but if Microsoft is serious about aggregating online services, it should bring in more of the giant services that already have millions of members. Noticeably missing from Microsoft's long list of partners are AOL, Facebook, Google, and MySpace. – PC World

In many respects, Live Photos clearly competes directly with Yahoo's Flickr, though while it has a lot of Flickr's features, its focus is more on sharing pictures with a small group of friends or family than with the whole Internet. We have been using Live Photos for about two months now, and our overall impression is extremely positive. – Read/Write Web 

On the whole, the overhaul's quite impressive.  The layout encourages people to create (and/or flesh out) user profiles, and then offers the sort of Friend Feed-style updates to which we've become accustomed.  Profiles will also be useful when it comes to tagging and sorting photos, or creating groups… What's more: it's done all this in a timely manner.  The new Windows Live will be available to everyone by early 2009, with U.S. customers seeing it rather sooner.  This should put Microsoft ahead of Yahoo, which is bucket testing a similar sort of upgraded homepage…  Chris Jones, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Live Experience Program Management, tried to sum up the accomplishment in a statement.  He explained, "Our customers have friends across the Web.  They communicate through many unconnected Web services and want access to it all from a single location - without worrying about how it's done.  Now Windows Live takes care of that, with an integrated personal communication service that works across the Web with optimized experiences on the PC and mobile phone." -- WebProNews

If you’ve been following the news about Windows 7 and Office 14 coming from PDC, one thing should be immediately apparent: experience matters these days at Microsoft.  Ever since the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007, I’ve seen a real shift for the better in the way people are approaching UI design within the company.  No longer is it an afterthought – it’s baked into the product development cycle at almost every level, and people are paying particular attention to the way our software makes people feel.  It’s fun to watch (and certainly has something to do with ramped up competition with Apple).

There are a number of great examples of this over the last year or so at the company – and a LOT more to come over the next few months and years.  But I wanted to take a minute and highlight a few of my favorites just in case you haven’t been following all the recent news.  These are very specific examples, but I think the uber-message is that you should expect (and demand) great experiences from Microsoft now and in the future.  Never again should we release something as confusing as older versions of Office or Windows Media Player or as offensively colorful as Windows XP :)

Zune 3 Now Playing – Just a phenomenal visualization for your music.  It uses album art and stock photography of the artist, along with text to give you a real visceral reaction.  It’s one of the nicest looking things in the industry in my opinion, and part of the reason why I *love* the Zune client (the Zune Pass is another reason).  Pictures don’t do this justice, you should check out the video.

New Xbox Experience – I’ll admit that I have yet to play with this, but I’ve watched the demos a dozen times and have heard great things from friends here on the beta.  I think people are going to be wow-ed by this update later this month.  To be honest, I’m already wow-ed that a 3-year old system that should be obsolete by now is getting such a huge update.  It will feel brand-new again.

Office 2007 & Office 14 – I can’t talk about Office 14 in any detail yet (and don’t know much yet either) but Office 2007 has set the usability bar high.  If you haven’t used the new Fluent UI with live previews, the ribbon, SmartArt, and a dozen other improvements large and small, you’re missing out.  I think the Office 2007 user experience will go down in the books as an update just as impactful as toolbars and menus themselves.  You’ll start to see it in appear in Windows 7 and Windows Live (Movie Maker) over time as well.

Windows 7 Superbar – I’ve now been using Windows 7 for about a month and I dig the Superbar (that’s just a nickname, I think).  The functionality itself is great, combining the best elements of the old Windows model (Quickstart, taskbar, system tray) with new usability improvements like jump lists, progress indicators, Aero Peek (which lets you peek in at window contents) and more.  One subtle feature which shows the serious focus on detail is “color hot-track”. 

Long Zheng describes color hot-track here: “When hovering over the icons in the taskbar, the color highlight of the “glass” button is actually different from application to application. How it works is dynamically abstracting the color values of the application icon to find the most dominant RGB value. Besides the obvious eye-candy, this feature delivers some sentimental value by making it easy to identify applications by color.”  Examples:

Images from Long Zheng.

Windows Live Services, Wave 3 – Can’t talk about this one yet, but one of our tenets early on was “beautiful, fast, and polished” - which should tell you about how hot it’s going to be.  There have been previews posted in some places though where you can at least get an early feel for what we’re thinking.  Stay tuned on this one, it won’t be long.

In all, I’m pretty excited to see Microsoft really embracing experiences in such a deep way.

(Sorry, I accidentally posted an early draft of this earlier today)

One of the great benefits of working for Microsoft is our parental leave policy.  Even though we had our baby almost a year ago, you have up to 12 months to take your leave… which really helps work around project schedules, life events, vacations, and most importantly to me, making sure you’re home with your child at the “right” time. 

For me, spending time with my daughter as she approaches 1-year old was infinitely more satisfying than it would have been had I taken the time when she was born.  She’s barking at dogs, giggling all the time, playing hide & seek, and is saying “Dada” now.  We had a lot of fun.  She’s an amazing little girl.

But my time off wasn’t all play.  I had a bunch of little projects I wanted to finish around the house that I just haven’t had much dedicated time to do all year – so I used this work-less time to crank through them.  Here’s the list in all its glory:

• First of all, I was sick the entire time.  So I had a few doctor visits.  Turned out to be a series of colds thanks to my daughter’s daycare, but it threw a serious wrench in my gym time.
• Took a 5-day trip to the Washington coast to kick off my leave – lots of relaxation, reading, and walking on the beach with the fam.
• Cleaned out my closet & donated my old clothes.  I try and do this at least 1-2x/year, but for some reason this time it just felt more satisfying.
• Cleaned out bookshelves and recycled old books; sold old DVDs/CDs.
• Cleaned out bathroom drawers and realized it’s much easier to keep them organized than to organize them, so that’s the plan now.
• Stella and I took afternoon trips to the Seattle Aquarium (she loved it), the Woodland Park Zoo, the Children's Museum, and we even went to a parents & kids movie with some friends which was fun.
• Rented a wide angle lens to experiment.  Stella and I did a photo shoot with the lens and I got a few great shots.  In all, I probably took over 2,000 photos of the munchkin.
• Spent some quality park time at Myrtle Edwards Park, showing Stella the boats in the Sound (the photo above is from that visit).
• Filled up my gas tank just ONCE in 5-weeks!  WOW.
• BIG project: Scanned hundreds of old documents using a ScanSnap, and then proceeded to shred almost all of them.  Our home is now 99% paperless and it feels great.
• Downloaded Zune 3 and Windows Live beta – Love them both!
• Rebalanced all of our investments - not like it mattered once the crisis hit.  Would have been better off not having any!
• Applied for life insurance for my wife & me and started a 529 college fund for our daughter.
• Sold off almost all of my old Xbox games (sad – expected to get $5-10/ea but instead clocked in at $1-2/ea)
• BIG project: Digitally encoded 25+ VHS tapes and recycled them (this is worthy of another post as it took 4 trips to Best Buy to make this work – it was pretty horrible)
• Made a video with Windows Movie Maker for my Mom’s birthday from footage from 20 years ago.
• Bought a Polar heart rate monitor, learned how to use it, and started a more intense fitness program once back to normal.
• Ignored my blog completely thanks to Twitter which has become my outlet.
• Changed almost all of my online passwords after reading horror stories (see: Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account)
• Learned a lot more about politics and started following the campaign on an hourly basis (I’m hooked now!)
• Bought a new fireproof media safe for my backup hard drives & miniDV tapes, transferred everything to it.
• Renewed my driver’s license.
• Took a 5-day trip to Pasadena to visit family & friends and soak in the sun!

In all – a very satisfying leave.

The new beta is here!  If you're wondering why I've been so quiet this year, this is a big part of the reason.  The other one is an 11-month old squirt who likes to open dresser drawers and pull everything out over and over.  This beta release is significant for a number of reasons, but I think the thing you'll really start to notice (especially as we rollout Wave 3 final with the "rest of it") is that Windows Live really stands for something now.  There's just so much cool stuff happening now.

Go to http://download.live.com/ and get the newest Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety.  Photo Gallery is probably the app I use the most outside of Messenger.  Just a couple weeks ago I created my first panoramic stitch out of photos of the Washington coast (yes, I know this feature has been around for a year - but I just started taking decent photos!)  This feature alone is worth the price of admission (well... it's free!)  But this was ONE click to create.

I'm using a new note-taking app for project notes, personal notes, goal tracking, checklists, and random brainstorms: Evernote.

Evernote is really the definition of software plus services working harmoniously together to get things done.  Similar to Remember The Milk, which is also available just about everywhere, it’s just a shining example of what can get done with a small, dedicated team of people.

I’m currently using Evernote on a couple Windows PCs, a Mac, and my new iPhone (and before this, on my Windows Mobile phone!) and changes made to notes on one device are almost immediately available on all the others.  The iPhone app is optimized for quick note-taking on the go (with video + audio, and even location tagging!) while the Mac and Windows apps are fully-featured note-takers.  Frankly, neither of them compare well with OneNote’s elegance and ease of use (I don't even really like the Windows app - and I love OneNote)... but the fact that my notes can be accessed and even edited from so many different places makes up for that.  I’ve always wanted OneNote for the Mac (and web) for the times that I’m not on a PC, but more importantly having my full notes available from my phone without ever having to connect to a PC is just a killer feature. (Anything that doesn’t sync wirelessly with an online service is dead to me these days)

The all-time coolest thing happens when you hook Jott up to Evernote though.  I called Jott and just started speaking to see how it would work, and about 5 minutes later the following note appeared directly in my Evernote notebook:

I'm just testing out the note taking feature from Jott to Ever note(?). I really would like this to work because if it does, it would be a fantastic way for me to be able to take note on the go, in the car, and so on. Thanks.

Perfect example of what technology can do for you.

For almost three years I've used my Xbox 360 just about every day - yet I haven't played a game for more than 10 minutes since 2006.  We use it in our house for renting movies (great quality, skimpy selection), watching DVD/"old" HD-DVD movies, streaming Zune Pass and WMA/MP3 music from the PC upstairs, and about once a month, streaming photos for a traditional slideshow for guests.  In our house, the 360 is our entertainment hub - we could almost care less that it plays games too.

Yet I have to admit, when I was in the Apple Store amidst all the chaos the other day, I yearned for an Apple TV.  The visuals are great, but the thing that almost had me is the selection of content (movies mostly, which is what we care about in our house).  Xbox Live Marketplace just doesn't have the same quantity/selection.  Yet did I really want yet another set-top box?  Remote?  Wi-Fi endpoint?  Not really.  I wanted my 360 to just *do* this.  Because no matter how great the Apple TV would end up being for us, we would still need to use the 360 for the Media Center capabilities + the WMA Lossless support, and adding yet another piece of hardware to the fold always complicates things for me.  With my luck, it would crash and destroy my router like the last time I tried connecting something.

Well... Wish granted two days later.  I love technology.

The 360 will have an all-new dashboard (check out the video) updating it's slightly dated look with snazzy new visuals, avatars, and an all-around more immersive experience.  But the kicker: Netflix queue integration.  Add a movie to your Netflix queue on the web and it appears in the queue on your Xbox with direct streams that start in 30 seconds.  It doesn't look like it's HD quality yet, but it's something - and I can't imagine HD is too far off.

This is cool stuff - I seriously thought my 360 would be obsolete by 2008 (I bought it in 2005) but it looks like it's getting another BIG upgrade.  It'll feel brand new again (although the fan is still too loud!)

Read more:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/e32008/articles/0714-nxe.htm

And a great write-up:
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/netflix-comes-to-the-xbox-360-did-microsoft-just-destroy-the-apple-tv/

I swore off the iPhone for at least a year when it was first announced.  I had good reasons (to me at least).  To recap:

1. I couldn’t synchronize with Exchange over the air (ADDRESSED)
2. Couldn’t swap the battery out for a better one
3. The EDGE network was/is so slow to be unusable (ADDRESSED)
4. It was a closed platform (ADDRESSED)
5. It was ridiculously, insanely expensive (ADDRESSED)
6. It was a v1 from a company that’s never built a phone before (ADDRESSED)
7. Typing on something without feedback won’t work
8. I didn’t want a phone that could get scratched easily
9. Functionally, it didn’t do more than my current phone (ADDRESSED)

I compromised on a few of these things – but Apple addressed the important ones.  So I ended up waiting in line for 2.5 hours (I think it was actually more like 3!) yesterday morning to get one.  I don’t even know where to start with this thing, I dig it so much; it’s easily the most excited I’ve been for a toy since I got my first PalmPilot in 1997 (the thing that started this addiction).

I likely won’t be writing too much about my iPhone though, for a few reasons: 1) I don’t want to gush, and I will end up gushing 2) I’m not blogging that much anyway - even though the iPhone is inspiring me to, 3) It’s been covered to death, 4) Anything I write can’t do justice to this little marvel.

So, just in case anyone cares, I now have an iPhone (syncing it with Windows Vista and Exchange Server of course).  Using it is like having a magic wand ;)

I got tired of waiting for the great folks over at Remember The Milk to build a real Outlook add-in to sync tasks.  So I hacked something together myself now that I’m using RTM exclusively for tasks (the iPhone syncs with Exchange – but of course, not for tasks)  As I’ve written about before, I absolutely love RTM – I have Quicksilver and Dashboard widgets for my Mac, I have it working with Jott for “voice tasks” while I’m driving, and I now have it pseudo-integrated into Outlook 2007.

How to do it:

1. Click “Configure buttons” in the Navigation Pane and hide the standard Task list button
2. Open up the Folder List from the Navigation Pane
3. Create a new Folder in the tree and call it “To Do”
4. Right-click on “To Do” and click Properties –> Homepage
5. Enter www.rememberthemilk.com and click “Show homepage by default for this folder”
6. Click OK
7. Go back to your Inbox
8. Right-click on “To Do” again and click “Add to Favorite Folders” to get it to the top of the pane
9. Click To Do

This is what you end up with (upper left corner of Outlook)

It’s a total hack, but I’m going to give it a whirl for a while.  This doesn’t let me attach email threads to tasks which I will sorely miss, but it’s good enough given all the other benefits of RTM – most importantly, the ability to access it from anywhere (phone, web, Mac, PC!)

On my first father’s day (as a father) I felt it only appropriate to give a shout-out to the old man who got me interested in all this computer nonsense in the first place.  A truly inspirational individual – even if he doesn’t know it – my dad’s responsible for who I am as a father, a man, and… well… a technologist!

We ran our first bulletin board service (BBS) on the Commodore 64 twenty-some odd years ago on a 300 baud modem (then 1200, then 2400, then 9600!) using Ivory Joe’s 6485/Ivory BBS software.  Which we eventually got the BASIC source for and hacked up ;)  From that moment on (sometime around 1986) I knew what I wanted to do with my life.  Cool, eh?  At some point I’ll write something up that’s a more complete history… because a lot of what my dad taught me about over 20 years ago set the stage for what I’m working on right now.  We had IM, forums, email, page designers / homepages, and all that jazz back then!

Thanks Dad!  Happy Father’s Day!

Hello?  Anyone out there?  ;)  I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything of substance.  Certainly longer than I’ve gone with respect to blogging since late 2004.  Again, I expect I’ll be posting just as sporadically in the future as I am now given my “life priorities” and how they’ve expanded since welcoming a baby girl into the world back in October.

I did want to spend a minute or two giving folks an FYI post on the latest release of Windows Live Writer (Tech Preview).  If you’re a blogger and you’re NOT using Writer… well, you should be.  The new features include new formatting for photos, inline videos, word count, auto linking, and more.  It’s really a solid, solid product and one that makes the life of a blogger a lot easier.

Check out this pic of Stella using the new tilt + “reflection” features of Writer for photos:

Cool.  Interested in doing this yourself?  Get the Technical Preview of Windows Live Writer

Not too long ago (Jan 07) I blogged about wanting an Exchange Server for the rest of my life.  This week, something similar was announced called Live Mesh.  Yes, I know I'm days late to the party - but participating in blog chatter isn't top of mind for me anymore ;)

If you haven't been following the buzz around Live Mesh, here are some links to catch-up:

• TechCrunch
• Ray Ozzie's memo (linked from TechCrunch)
• On10 video
• Mesh.com
• Developer information

In short: this is one of the most ambitious platforms I've seen come from Microsoft since Silverlight or the original .NET Framework.  It has serious, serious potential to redefine computing.  The concepts resonate with me in a way few things do, particularly because they aren't an either-or approach (cloud vs. client).  Only time will tell.

As usual, Omar is a couple weeks ahead of me here.  But Mozy has been an absolute dog for me over the last few weeks, and it's time I move on.  Of course I'm going to wait until I'm completely backed up elsewhere before ditching Mozy - and I've "sold" Mozy to a number of people, all whom I now have to cross my fingers and hope they're not having the same problems.  To sum it up, look at this one screenshot:

There are like 4 “bugs” in that one screenshot.

1. Why 15 days?  That's like a lifetime when you take pictures of a 4 month old.
2. ConnectionError1 – that’s great.  Wha?  Sometimes it says this, sometimes it doesn't.  Nothing else on my machine has trouble connecting to the Internet.
3. Look at the bytes next to the # of files backed up (-86744233809... a negative number?)
4. 224GB remaining even though I’ve been running this thing every single day since last summer?  A couple weeks ago it said 0.  What happened?

I'm not patient enough to deal with customer support - there are just too many problems here to deal.  So I'm going to give Carbonite a go.

PS. Yes, I know.  My blogging is slow.  But I warned you ahead of time a little while back!  Just subscribe to my RSS feed and don't bother checking back regularly; that way quantity or frequency of posts don't matter at all.

I've been playing with Remember The Milk quite a bit this week, all the while wondering how I could fit it into my task/to-do workflow without complicating my life more than I need to.  It's dangerous when you spend too much time in the "meta zone", thinking about how you're going to complete your tasks instead of actually completing them.  So I gave myself a deadline (today) to figure out if and how Remember The Milk was going to work for me... and this is what I came up with.

<If you don't know what Remember The Milk is, check it out at www.rememberthemilk.com.  It's an impressive service for task management/getting things done.  I'm going to refer to it as RTM from now on.>

Since I rely heavily on Outlook + Exchange for work, any solution that took my tasks out of Outlook would be a non-starter.  I need the ability to attach PDFs and (more importantly) emails to tasks for quick follow-up and I need them in my face all day long.  At the same time, there are aspects of RTM that would make me more productive on a day-to-day basis so I wanted to find something that would work across both systems.  So I started with this:

• I continue to use Outlook tasks & my toolbar macros (from 2004, wow) to create tasks while at work.  Obviously this syncs to Exchange and to all of my other Outlook installations; I think I'm up to 4.  Using my macros, I'm able to attach emails to tasks automatically so that when I'm sitting in front of Outlook on any of the machines I regularly use, I can pull up tasks and act on email immediately.
• I continue to sync my tasks with Exchange on my phone.  I use Oxios ToDo List on my smartphone; when I complete a task on my phone it synchronizes immediately to Exchange and to Outlook at home, work, on my laptops, etc.  It's a great system that I've been using for a long time.

And this is what I'm now doing a little differently:

• I also use MilkSync on my phone (which works well) to sync my tasks back to Remember The Milk.  I have it set to every 15 or 30 minutes (experimenting) which means RTM now has all my tasks, complete with notes and categories.  But since RTM doesn't support email attachments, it doesn't store any of the email I've attached.  Which is fine with me because a) it would violate corporate policy to store Microsoft email on another company's servers and b) I only need those attachments when I'm sitting in front of Outlook anyway. 
• I setup Jott to publish directly to my “Next Actions” category.  So now when I’m driving and I need to remember to do something, I just hold down the number 3 and say “Task” followed by what I need to do.  It then just flows into the system and shows up in Outlook, my phone task list, and on www.rememberthemilk.com.
• I added an RTM gadget to my new Netvibes homepage.  No escaping my tasks.
• I added an RTM bookmarklet in IE and Firefox so I can grab any date or text on a web page and make a task out of it.  That task then flows through the system.
• On my Mac, I'm using Quicksilver to add new tasks to RTM with just a couple keystrokes.  I don't have to actually open anything at all to create a new task.  And I have a Dashboard widget running that gives me a quick snapshot of my current tasks if I ever remember to hit F12.
• I can now interact with tasks on every platform via the browser if I have to (Mac, PC, etc.) including going offline.  Ditto on the flowing through the system bit :)
• I setup a special email address for my wife on RTM for "honey-dos".  When she sends an email to this address, it will be added to my "Next Actions" list and sync to all my endpoints.  So if she really wants me to remember something (like the milk!) this is a great way for her to get into my head without spamming me with SMS or email.  TBD if this is good enough - or if IWantSandy is a better solution for us.

As you can probably tell, the killer feature for me is the fact that all of this stuff is talking to each other.  Everywhere I am (web, PC, Mac, phone) I'm working against the same task list.  As I add a task in one place (even via voice using Jott), it's available everywhere.

So basically, I have RTM and Exchange in sync using my phone (running both ActiveSync and MilkSync) as the sync hub.  It isn't the perfect solution, but it's working well.  And yes, I realize I'm a little "over the top" when it comes to time management!  But maybe one person will get value out of this post ;)

Back in September 2006, I wrote about moving to an ala carte model for television instead of relying on the increasingly expensive and unreliable cable companies to provide content for us.  With each passing day, I get more anxious about the fact that we're not doing this in our household - because we watch even less TV now than we did before, and we're still paying Comcast monthly for the privilege.

I just looked at my Comcast cable bill.  We have HD support but none of the special channels like HBO or Showtime.

$68.23 + $6.80 taxes & surcharges (approximated since my Internet access is on this bill too).  Add $10.75/month for Tivo (annual prepay) and you have an astounding $85.78/month just to watch TV.  If I were to translate that into iTunes or Xbox LIVE purchases, you're talking an average of about 42 television shows/month for that price.

Yet I think we watch about 8-12 shows monthly depending on the month (Smallville, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Office, and maybe a few others).  Seriously, why in the world are we paying $85/month when we could just drop $2-3/each to watch the shows we want to watch when we want to watch them?  How could things NOT be moving in this direction over the next couple years?

The catch for me is that sports content isn't available through either iTunes or Xbox LIVE - which means I'm either relegated to watching baseball on my laptop through MLB.TV or not watching it at all.  Neither is acceptable - so until there's a solution to this problem (and I suspect it will be in the next 24 months somehow) I won't be able to switch completely.  And of course, neither iTunes nor Xbox have Smallville... and iTunes doesn't even have TV shows in HD yet :(

So the dream will probably be on hold for a short while.  But I'm really looking forward to the day when I'm not paying $85/month for less than 8 hours of television watching.  Ugh.

I've been giving Mint a try over the past few days.  It's not quite feature-rich enough for me to switch from MS Money Plus just yet, but I do see a day when 100% of my banking and financial management moves to the web.  I've been waiting for this day for about a decade, so it's a long time coming.

Mint is unbelievably friendly though and has a great UI for getting up and running in less than five minutes.

And it tells you things you sort of wish you didn't know.  Like this:

Great.

It's been a few months since I last posted about photo tagging and asked "how should I use metadata on photos?"  There were some great responses, both in person as well as in the comments, and I filed that task away for a future project.  Well, the future is now.  We took over 1700 photos in the last couple weeks alone (having an 11-week old will do that to you) and our "filing system" is starting to show its age.  Not having things like ratings, dates, or even the basics like "this is a picture of Stella and Mike" is starting to bug me since I'm spending a few hours each week just dealing with photos.

So this is what I'm going to do with our entire gallery, starting right now:

1. Keep the photos organized by event in folders.  So "Christmas 2007 in Seattle" remains - it turns out that's how my wife and I like to browse our photo collection, and since I'm not a hardcore photographer (yet) it's easiest for us to keep it like this.
2. Rename all the files to something like "Title (#) mm-dd-yyyy" where title is the name of the folder (i.e. Christmas 2007) and the # is the sequence number. 
3. Make sure all the photos have the capture date set.  Since some of them are scans or were taken with a 9-year old 1MP digital camera, there's a good chance dates aren't captured across the board.  So I'm going to correct this.
4. Make the title on the photo the same as the filename for now.  There are some instances where I'll type more than this like "Stella laughing at her zebra toy", but just to be consistent I'm going to keep it simple in the default case where there's nothing better to use as a caption.
5. Add creator and copyright metadata.  The creator will be something like "Torres Family" and the copyright is used just in case the photos find their way onto the web.  I know it doesn't actually protect anything, but since it takes 2 seconds to add it, why not?  I'm also going to use the creator tag to indicate who took the photo since I have rolls from just about every family member over the last few years.  So instead of using sub-folders for this, I'm going to use the creator tag and filter on that.
6. Add two basic ratings to photos - 5 star for amazing, 4 for great.  I may have a few that use 3 as well, but to me that's the equivalent of not having a rating at all.
7. Flat out delete all poorly shot or blurry photos while I'm doing this.
8. Convert BMPs to JPGs since I have a bunch of images from the mid-90s using the bitmap format.
9. Opt to write all the XMP data to the file of course!

And finally: 10.  Apply tags to all the photos!  Talk about tedious :)

I realize that a few months ago I said "I'm not going to go crazy with this and spend hundreds of hours applying tags to previous photos"... but I rethought that [I know Jay is laughing right now thinking "I knew you would"].  But the photos we had pre-baby are all actually pretty easy to apply metadata to, and being the neat freak that I am I knew I wouldn't want to have half of my photos cleaned up and the others just sitting around unusable.  So I came up with a very basic tagging scheme based on what I've seen others do online.  I'm going to use hierarchical tags (even though most apps including Windows Live Photo Gallery don't visualize them like this) and I'm going to use capitalization and spaces in the tags.  This is the basic format I'm going to use:

1. Places -> Seattle, La Grulla, Glen Ridge, etc.
2. People -> Full name
3. People -> Stella Torres -> Birth, 0-3 months, 3-6 months, Smiling, Yawning, Sleeping, etc.
4. Nature -> Flowers, Landscape, Ocean, etc.
5. Things -> Car, Plane, Bike, etc.
6. Portraits -> Pregnant, Fitness, Funny, etc.

To perform all of the steps above, I'm going to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom since bulk edits like these are cake in that tool... and any changes I make, including applying tags, will immediately appear in Windows Live Photo Gallery for basic viewing/editing.  As I get more serious about photography (and trust me, I'm really not that serious) Lightroom is becoming an essential part of my workflow.  I love how I can use Lightroom to do all of this and not only does my desktop software (WLPG) pick up the changes immediately, but Media Center does as well!

To illustrate how slick this is, soon I'll be able to pull up pictures of any family member sorted by date in 3 seconds on the HDTV in my living room thanks to Xbox 360 and Media Center.  Love it!  It's like magic.

Of course, this is going to take me quite a while.  But just like I did when I ripped 900+ CDs, I'm going to take it week-to-week ;)  I'll spend about 30 minutes each Sunday working through 5-10 folders until I'm finished with everything.  It should only take a few months provided I'm disciplined about it.  And then I'll never have to do it again; it just becomes about new photos at that point, which is much, much easier.  And if it's anything like my encoding all of my music, it'll be boring and tedious... but I'll be pretty thrilled when it's all done.  Just in time for CES 2009!

Speaking of CES, be sure to watch Bill's keynote at 630 Pacific at www.microsoft.com/ces!  This is my favorite time of the year - CES and MacWorld... geek heaven.