CES: it’s the geek Mecca. This year, for me, it was a train-wrecka (har har!). Join me on my journey of unpacking the frustrations and tribulations of a CES I’d rather forget. I need some catharsis from the five days I spent in Vegas, so this is more for me than you, but perhaps you’ll find it entertaining in a “driving past a car wreck” sort of way.

When I went to CES 2009, I posted quite a few videos of what I saw there. Producing those videos in 1080p h.264 on my Dell XPS M1330 took a long time, so on December 9th I placed an order for a pimped-out Core i7-based Dell Studio 17. Plenty of time before CES, right? Wrong. Despite calling in a favour with a contact I have in Dell’s CTO office, as of December 30th I still didn’t have the laptop – the estimated ship date was January 8th, three days after I left for CES. Switching to plan “B”, I went out and purchased an HP dv7, a $2000 Core i7-based laptop with a 17.3″ screen and a weight of seven pounds. I was planning on bringing this beast of a laptop with me to CES to leave in my hotel room for video production, and I’d carry a netbook me me for day to day CES reporting. Then I started to hear about the security restrictions after the December 25th “underwear bomber” was foiled, and my already rocky start to CES prep got worse. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, I moved the remainder of my sites from 1&1 to Servage (that link will get you an extra 75 GB of storage) for my personal Web hosting, and among them was my wife’s domain. This domain is connected to a hosted Exchange account (4smartphone), and part of the move was setting up a the autodiscovery domain so Outlook can self-configure. After the DNS changes were made, something strange started happening with Outlook on both my wife’s desktop and netbook: it would repeatedly prompt for the password. No password changes were made, and strangely enough, she could send and receive email even though every few minutes it would prompt her for the password. 4smartphone tech support wasn’t very helpful; they claimed it was an Outlook problem. After some sleuthing around, convinced that it was related to the DNS changes I made, I realized my mistake: I had created the autodiscover CNAME entry pointing at the wrong server name (EXCH016 instead of EXCH015). After updating the DNS record, within a few hours the problem was fixed – no more repeated password prompts in Outlook. So if you happen to have the same sort of problem, double-check your DNS records…

I’ve talked about how awful some of the comments on YouTube can be, but sometimes the lack-of-brains can come from the content producers…check out the screenshot above, where someone named “FierceMightOMax” went berserk with the annotation tool. Yikes!

Wow..this is just so incredibly geeky and cool. As an old-time D&D player, this strikes a chord with me. If only we had technology like this back in the day…actually, it might not have been quite as much fun now that I think about it.

I was awarded the MVP recognition this year again for my work in the Windows Mobile world – 12th year running – and the award is really cool. It’s really cool not because it’s a shiny thing I can put on my shelf to make myself feel important (I buy big monitors for that ), but because they’ve implemented a “token” system whereby each year re-awarded MVPs will get a new year slice they can put on top of the previous one. This prevents the tremendous waste of sending out the same award year after year with a new date stamped on it. I think it’s great that the people working on the MVP program came up with such a smart way to reduce waste.

If you’ve never played an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), you won’t find this video as funny as I do, but if you have any background in online gaming, you’ll appreciate the clever lyrics. And if you’ve never checked out The Guild, you should – it’s absolutely hilarious!

This is just sheer brilliance. Check out the above image broken down into smaller pieces at Wired – every bit of text adds to the concept. So clever and well-executed!

Just a quick note for anyone that might run into the same problem as I did today: if you have an Asus P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard with the latest BIOS, and you’ve installed 6 GB (or more) of RAM in the system, and you’re only seeing 4 GB at the BIOS level, here’s what you need to do. First, take out half the sticks of RAM, leaving three sticks of RAM in, one in each of the orange RAM slots. Then power up the computer and go int the BIOS – it should see 3096 MB of RAM in the System Information section of the BIOS (it’s at the bottom of the first BIOS screen).

Now, power down the computer, unplug the power cable, and install the next three sticks of RAM, this time in the three black slots. Power up the computer, and go into the System Information section to verify that you have 6136 MB of RAM. That’s it, you’re done! I don’t know what idiot at Asus thought this was acceptable to ship a product where you can’t install all the RAM at once, but there you have it.

Remember too that you’ll see to be running 64-bit Vista or Windows 7 in order to access more than 3.5 GB of RAM.