I have a hosted Exchange account as my main Inbox in Outlook 2007, and I have five other IMAP accounts. If I open up a new email message, and it’s going to someone (say, my wife) and I always email that person from that email account, why can’t Outlook figure that out and automatically select the sending account? It would save me hundreds of clicks a day if I didn’t have to click the Account drop-down menu, select the account I want to send it from, then click send. This would have the side benefit of automatically changing the reply-to address on the email you’re sending, which I know people with multiple email accounts would like to have. Come on Outlook team, are you listening?
Category: Internet & Technology
Xbox Live Gamertags: Too Much Privacy
Something has always bugged me about the way Xbox Live deals with Gamertags: I think there’s too much privacy. I may be the first one in the history of the Internet to accuse Microsoft of protecting my privacy, but hear me out: on Xbox Live my original Gamertag, registered way back when I got my original Xbox, was Kensai. The original Xbox Live wasn’t good for anything other than head to head gaming, which I didn’t do much of, so I let it lapse. Along the way my credit card number and expiration date changed, so when I got my Xbox 360 and tried to activate my original Live account the system wouldn’t let me. I called in, and they informed me that due to privacy restrictions they were unable to let me have my old Gamertag, regardless of how I could prove that I was the same Jason Dunn that registered it. Gee-whiz, thanks for protecting me right out of my Gamertag, I really appreciate that.
Fast forward to today, and we have an over-done sense of privacy negatively impacting Xbox Live gameplay. How? By not allowing users to attach their real name to their Gamertags. Microsoft is so focused on the “cool” Gamertag experience where everyone uses a handle that they forget that Xbox Live is connecting real people, and sometimes real people like to use real names. On Xbox Live today my Gamertag is Tetsubo. What’s a Tetsubo (also known as a Kanabō) you might ask? It’s a big-ass iron-shod Japanese club meant for smacking people with, which is basically the way I play games (blunt force trauma). A quick look at my gamer score of 600 tells you that I don’t play game on the Xbox 360 that much, although I’ll point out that I think it’s lame that finishing a game like Gears of War on regular mode gets you a mere 110 points. That’s a rant for another day.
Back to the issue of privacy: because I’m unable to attach my real name to my Xbox Live profile, at least half the time when I add someone I know, I get a message back from them saying “Who’s this?”. My Tetsubo Gamertag doesn’t ring any bells with them, because it’s not attached to my real identity in any way. This was made especially evident when I installed the Xbox 360 update a couple of months ago and it integrated my Windows Messenger contact list, sending invites out to everyone on it that was also on Xbox Live. I received no less than six messages back from people asking who I was, and I had several people decline me outright – and these are people that I chat with online quite often, but they had no idea who this “Tetsubo” fellow was.
Why can’t Xbox Live allow people to attach their real names, making it optional of course, to allow people like myself who have no need to hide their identity behind a Gamertag? It’s great that the people behind Xbox Live want to protect my privacy by shielding my gaming identity from the world, but I should have the option of telling people who I am if I wish.
Guest Tech Internet Access: Surfing Like It’s 1989
[this is one of those posts I started writing months ago and never quite finished…whoops!]
See that upload speed? 14 kbps. That’s 14-friggin-kilobytes-per second. Let me put that into perspective for those that haven’t been on this earth long: people on dial-up modems generally connect at speeds around 50 kbps. The speed you’re seeing above, 14 kbps, is the kind of speed I saw with my 14,400 bps modem back in…well, it’s so far back I can’t recall. I’d have to guess and say around 1989 (give or take a year or two). And where did I discover such amazingly bad access speeds? Did I travel back in time to find a 14.4kbps modem? No, I stayed at a La Quinta hotel in Orlando, Florida. I was staying there on my own dime, and by myself, so I picked some place decent but cheap. They advertised free WiFi in all the rooms, and that combined with a clean bed is all I really need when I’m working (and I was down there for my CTIA 2007 gig).
The short version of this story is that the Internet access turned out to be a complete nightmare – when I could get connected it was at mostly pathetic speeds like you see above. I was on the phone with Guest Tech support at least once a day for each of the five days I was staying there for. Every time the technician would confirm my problem, try to fix it by remotely giving the hotel router a kick, and I’d usually get connected at a decent speed – at least for a while. You can imagine how frustrating it is to try and get work published online when you’re losing connectivity every few minutes. I don’t know whether it was the hotel not having a fast enough connection to support the number of hotel guests that were connected, or whether it was Guest Tech not providing a stable infrastructure, but whenever I see the name Guest Tech in my hotel room I shudder. The same thing happened when I was at the last MVP Summit – Guest Tech was providing Internet access at the hotel I was staying, and the Internet access was so slow it was useless…that’s if you were lucky enough to get an IP address. Guest Tech? You suck.
Live Action Iron Man Armour…Suuuweeeet!
This news got me smiling today! I was heavy into comic book collection from age 11 until I was around 18, but even when I stopped actively collecting I’ve remained a big fan of comics and still buy a few graphic novels or compilations every year. Comic book movies are more accessible to me than comic books are (it’s such a pain to track down every issue of a series unless you’re buying them from the start), and Iron Man is one movie I’ve been looking forward to seeing come to the screen for a long time. I’m hoping it will be the calibre of Spider-man and X-Men, and not the calibre of Electra or Ghost Rider (hey, I still own all of them). Of course, if I was really geeky, I’d buy one of these as well.
Blue Screen of Death Tattoo
I just had to post this because it’s so crazy…check this guy out!
Twenty years from now when we’re all using Macs (well, hopefully not) no one will know what this even means.
Turning on BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) in Windows Mail
I’ve been using Vista’s Windows Mail (the re-born Outlook Express) on the computers where I don’t want to have Outlook 2007 installed, and in generally it’s a pretty decent mail solution. I’m using IMAP so my email is the same on all the computers. One important solution I had to configure was using FolderShare to synchronize the /contacts folder between all my PCs so each PC had the same contacts. I wish Microsoft acknowledged and provided solutions for multi-PC households – they seem to have their head stuck in the sand when it comes to that.
At any rate, I wanted to email a bunch of people today and like any good, rational person using email I wanted to use the Blind Caron Copy (BCC) field to protect the privacy of the people I was emailing, and to lessen the chance of it being blocked by spam filters. So I start clicking through the menus, and nowhere do I find a simple “View BCC”. What the hell? I looked through the options, and even tried the help file. There isn’t a single result for the terms “BCC” or “blind carbon copy” (in quotes). Who writes these help files?
I finally turned to an online search and discovered that in order to view the BCC field I had to click on “All Headers” under the View menu. That’s absolutely inane – why could you have a UI element that doesn’t include the keyword that the user is looking for? To quote Monty Python, someone should be sacked.
12 x 12″ Paper and FotoFusion: A Great Combination
Since installing and reviewing v4 of FotoFusion, I’ve been really enjoying using it to create photo layouts – it’s amazing how quickly I can whip one up, and it’s equally amazing how quickly I can remove frames, resize them, and keep them locked into the grid so everything is clean looking. I ordered some 12″ by 12″ matte paper from an eBay seller a few weeks ago, and I decided to combine the two: creating a photo layout with FotoFusion and printing it out on the 12″ x 12″ paper. Here was the result:
This is such a fantastic way to create a unique, great way of remembering an event: I’m hooked and I suspect I’ll be printing many more 12 x 12″ prints in the future. I printed up several of these and gave them to a few of the people involved, and they all loved them. Scenarios such as this are when I feel I’m most successful with technology: when I can take useful software, a bit of photographic skill, a nice printer, and create something that people can cherish for years to come. That’s when technology works as it should.
Dell Kicked Out a Cool Commercial
We’ve all seen a lot of Dell commercials over the years, and let’s face, they’ve been as exciting as watching paint dry. The “Dell Dude” commercials were funny in the short term, but irritating in the long term. Dell has never tried to be hip or cool, and that’s for good reason: their products haven’t ever really been hip or cool. People have tended to buy Dell products because they provide good value for the money, not for how they look. Over the past couple of years they’ve started to change that with their XPS line of gaming and performance machines, and recently they’ve really kicked it up a notch with their launch of new Inspiron laptops and desktops. The laptops in particular have a nice “wow” factor with a choice of eight different colours, three different screen sizes, and all of the customizations Dell offers (CPU, RAM, etc.). But here’s what really caught my attention: I was watching a show on the SPIKE TV network and check out the commercial I saw:
Dell Inspiron Commercial
Uploaded by jasondunn
That’s completely unlike anything Dell has ever done in terms of marketing, and I think it works really well. Finally, a Windows PC maker trying something different! Catchy song, memorable video, and it shows just enough about the product to entice you to visit the site and check it out. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the Intel blurb at the end – it takes some of the shine off the commercial with that old and tired four-tone Intel branding. Dell mentioned Intel in the commercial, I don’t see why Intel had to also have their lame plug in there. Still, I think it works – what do you think?
Vista Pain Point: Software Compatibility
As much as I like Vista, what I don’t like is waiting for developers to catch up and make their applications Vista-compatible. I still can’t get ACDSee 9.0 to work on Vista, and Adobe Lightroom is crashing regularly on me when I try to edit my RAW photos (which is bizarre because it worked fine for more than a month on the same hardware, minus a video card). I filled out an Adobe tech support request and Vista isn’t even an option on their list of operating systems. Vista came out at the end of January, making it six months now since release. I have all of my hardware working, but I’m still fighting with all sorts of software issues. There’s no solution other than to grit my teeth and bear it, but I’ve gotta’ say, my jaw is getting sore. When will the pain end? When will computing feel “normal” again like it did with XP? Come on software developers, catch up…
YouTube: You Officially Suck
I emailed YouTube last week asking them why my 13 minute HTC Touch unboxing video was rejected for being too long when my account was categorized as a director account. I also asked why one of my videos was processed and live in about 20 minutes while the other took over two hours. Here was their response:
“Thanks for your emails. We’re no longer offering the option to upload videos longer than 10 minutes, regardless of your account type. If you see a video on YouTube that’s longer than 10 minutes, it’s probably owned by one of our content partners. There are also some users who can upload longer videos because they were given this permission before the feature was removed. Also, occasionally, depending on site traffic, changes to video and account information on our site can take a few hours to update and synchronize. We’re constantly working to make that happen a lot faster and appreciate your patience.”
So basically, we have a site that was built completely on end-user content now turning away users that want to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. I’ve had a YouTube account for a couple of years, and I thought I had requested “Director” status, but it seems either I hadn’t or it was never granted – and now I can’t get it. It’s bad enough the the quality is complete crap on YouTube, but it has such a large user base posting videos there gives you good exposure. Ideally my videos will be under ten minutes, but if I get on a roll and a video happens to go over 10 minutes, it’s idiotic that I’ll then have to break it up into two pieces. I’ve been testing DailyMotion and the video quality looks quite good compared to YouTube – they encode at 640 x 480 I think. So do I go for quality or put up with the length limitations of YouTube and the lower quality? Decisions, decisions.