Nathan's Occasional Blog

First off, it’s been a while since I’ve put a picture of the best thing to happen to me this year on my blog … so here you go!  This picture is from the end of September.  You can see more pics of us at our Smugmug picture site.

I’m sitting here in my office at work with tons of stuff to do, but being distracted by what’s going on here at the office today.  All I can really say is that THE MAN is here today for our annual review meeting, and needless to say that’s taking over as the most important thing to be here for.  I don’t have to go give a presentation; I don’t get to sit in on the meeting.  But I do get to meet him later on.  And I do need to hang around to make sure something doesn’t go wrong (projector bulb burns out, etc.).  Anyway, it’s quite a day and there isn’t much actually going on here productivity wise.  🙂

So it got me thinking … today is roughly the 1 year anniversary of me blogging as it was last year’s review meeting when I got started.  My blogging “life” has taken quite a leap forward since that day when I first saw MSN Spaces had gone live (beta).  A year ago I signed up for an MSN Spaces account and was super-pleased to get “Nathan” as my blog.  Spaces was a little rough around the edges back then, and I even found a security bug that I reported to the MS team.  The service has grown substantially since then and added lots of cool features (RSS, trackbacks, new themes, etc.).  In fact my wife Alicea is still using Spaces for her blog.  But I moved on from Spaces to Blogger back in April because I wanted a more customisable experience, and a service supported by blogging tools like w.bloggar and BlogJet.  The fact that I had to log in to Spaces with my Passport account just to post something was a pain in the arse for me.  I haven’t looked back since.  [Note: I saw yesterday that Spaces now supports blogging tools – good work guys!]

Now I’m sure you’ve noticed that while I’ve had a pretty good platform for getting my posts out to the world over the past year, I haven’t exactly been the best at keeping up with it.  Don’t get me wrong, I want to … blogging just gets shuffled down the priority list.  Most often by the time I get home after a 10 or 11 hour day at work I’m not real interested in hopping on a computer and spending more time at a keyboard.  And my darn job has this bad habit of keeping me so busy I can’t blog at work either.  The nerve!  😉  Seriously, though, I want to make a re-commitment here to doing a better job of posting daily.  And I want that daily post to be content that is from me – my thoughts and comments – rather than just linking to someone else’s work (though I’ll still continue to do that).  BlogJet 1.6 has some cool new features for pictures and pings, so hopefully that will cut down on barriers.

My year “in reality” has been a blur, and most of it dominated by my beautiful baby daughter Kaitlyn.  I can’t begin to express how wonderful her addition to our family has been, no matter how stressful her entrance was.  Thankfully Alicea has emerged from her ordeal with preeclampsia (aka toxemia or PIH) with no reprocussions.  She’s back to work at church too, serving as a full time assistant in our music ministries department.  Fun times all around.

At work I’ve spent what seems forever replacing our aging Nortel PBX (phone system) with a Cisco AVVID voice-over-IP phone system.  We were supposed to launch in late-May, right before Kaitlyn was slated to arrived.  Then it got rescheduled for mid-September … which got blown out of the water by horrible project management from our vendor.  We finally launched in late-November and the project was a rousing success!  Of course we’ve got a few loose ends to tie up, but what project doesn’t.

There’s lots of other stuff that went on this year; some good, some bad.  But that’s the high level view that I’m going into right now.  Thanks for reading this post … all three of you!  🙂

I just stumbled across this post – pretty sweet that the document imaging part of Office 2003 can do OCR “reads” as well as TIF “writes”. Who knew? But therein lies the problem … has Office grown so bloated that nobody knows what’s in the package anymore? How does Microsoft communicate all these new (and existing) features in a manner that is concise (you can stand to read through it) and yet thorough at the same time? I don’t envy the people trying to figure that out.

Microsoft Office 2003 includes an excellent, but little-known utility called Microsoft Document Imaging. This tool allows you to recognize text from TIF image files. Document Imaging actually does a much better job of recognizing text than some other OCR (optical character recognition) programs out there. I was pleasantly surprised with the results. Also included is Microsoft Document Scanning, which scans documents to TIF images. If you do a complete install of Office 2003, these tools are installed by default. If you didn’t install them along with Office, you can find these two utilities and plenty more on your installation CD. Just select a Custom Install and review your options.

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[Via The Office Weblog]

It seems that NTP’s lead attorney owns a BlackBerry…

Canada-based national business newspaper the National Post has the most complete profile of NTP co-founder and power behind the RIM patent dispute litigation Don Stout that I have read to date.

Some  factoids from the article, written by the National Post’s Kevin Restivo:

A patent lawyer, Tom Stout was introduced to eventual NTP founder Thomas Campana as a result of a conversation with a fellow basketball player at a Washington, D.C.-area gym.

After Campana passed away in June, 2004, Stout has been running NTP with former telecom consultant Bill White, who is based in London.

Stout, 59, and his wife Mary have a son and a daughter.

NTP’s chief attorney, Jim Wallace (at right) initially met Stout during a case in the 1970s, but re-upted their professonal relationship in 1993 during a satellite communications case.

Wallace owns a BlackBerry- and it must be presumed, ocasionally uses it.

 

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[Via BBHub]

You know it’s going to be a great day when the first thing you read on your computer is this…

[Via Dilbert]

Bwahahaha! More movies!

Really people, I do actually do more than catch the ocassional online video. I’ve just been too damn busy to talk about it.

Xeni Jardin:

Yet another Christmas Story parody, this one animated and re-enacted in less than 30 seconds by bunnies. Link
[Via Boing Boing]

Evidently today has been dubbed “funny video day” here at The Grind.  Thanks for this one Sean!

Last year, my neighbor had a massive christmas light setup on his house, something only him, Clark W. Griswold, and this guy knows how to do. Last year, my other neighbor and I installed remote control switches into his chains allowing us to turn portions of his lights off and on at whim. This one is even funnier.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5409947201428088801&q=harry+potter+dance

Alicea just sent that to me.  I don’t understand how the audience wasn’t laughing their asses off.  The music selections alone are enough to make me bust a gut.

From BoingBoing last night…

Amateur band performs Super Mario theme on marimba
Monterrey sez, “In what seems to be a college/high school show, three guys (Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach) play various famous Mario Bro’s tunes with a marimba. Geeky fun!” This is hilarious — the band really gets into it, horsing around, doing all kinds of great physical comedy to the obvious delight of the audience. Link

Hey Alicea, I know what I’m getting the family for Christmas next year … an HD CableCard tuner for our Media Center Edition computer in the living room!  Microsoft and CableLabs, the consortium run by the cable TV industry to approve new hardware, announced a couple days ago that they’ll have HDTV CableCard support for MCE computers by next holiday season.

This new hardware support means you’ll be able to plug your cable feed directly into your computer, and get access to all the HDTV programming (and everything else) that’s on the cable network (in our case Comcast).  With that you can ditch your cable box and use just one platform for regular and HD-DVR.  I’ve got a way bigger hard drive in our MCE computer than the cable box does (300GB vs 120GB) which means 3x the recording capacity.  Well, only 3x until I go out and get an external USB2 hard drive to store even more video on.

Because the CableCard format is currently just a one-way communication stream (down to your TV) you’d probably give up the ability to use Video on Demand and Pay Per View, but the increased quality (the cable box sucks for non-HD feeds), recording capacity, and “one-stop” for all your media wins in my mind.  Heck, we hardly use VoD (and NEVER use PPV) anyhow.  Besides, they’ve got a year to figure out how to sign up for that stuff via a web page … maybe even an MCE plugin!

I can’t wait!  Woohoo!

Yeah, Scott Adams is a must subscribe for those of you who haven’t yet.  His latest post deals with the murderer who escaped from a prison the other day.

I hate to take sides, but if I made a fake ID using nothing but a pack of Marlboros and a spoon, and made a set of civilian clothes out of pillowcases, then walked out of jail, I’d be feeling pretty good about myself too. I know for sure that I’d feel superior to the idiot who let me out. And that’s not even counting the part about getting away with murder.