I really hate to praise Microsoft but I have to say they have really made a few excellent products lately.  First, I really like Windows Live Writer its not perfect but its way more enjoyable to use than any web interface for posting to a blog.  I have investigated many weblog engines and played with the web forms they use for posting new content and I much prefer a desktop application for performing that task. I really wish there was a weblog editor for the Mac that was as good as Windows Live Writer.

Newsgator toolbar is finally working for me in Firefox 3.  I had some weird errors previously where the Newsgator toolbar wasn’t working for me in Firefox 3.  I am really glad to have my subscribe in Newsgator button working again.

I saw my first Zune in the wild today.  I have seen one other Zune before but I am not counting it because it was owned by a Microsoft employee. 

As I was on my way to work I saw a guy jogging through my neighborhood who had a Zune strapped to his arm.  This wasn’t a flash based Zune either it was the hard drive model.  I just felt sorry for the guy and I wondered if he had actually chosen to purchase a Zune or if it was a gift that he didn’t feel like he could exchange without hurting someone’s feelings. 

I have been running the Firefox 3 beta’s for a while now because Firefox 3 performance is so much better than Firefox 2.  The stability is better and the memory usage is a lot better. 

I overrode the compatibility checking of extensions in Firefox 3 in order to be able to run a few extensions that it was a real pain to live without.  As I have been running Firefox 3 I check each morning for updated extensions.  Yesterday one of the extensions I was waiting on NoSquint updated to support Firefox 3 RC 1.  Then I noticed that Firefox RC 2 was out and I updated to it.  Then NoSquint was listed as not compatible again which keeps me running with the compatibility check off.

The extension I am waiting to finally support Firefox 3 though is the Newsgator toolbar.  I really wish they would release an update so I can go back to subscribing to rss feeds with one button click instead of using the clunky method on the Newsgator web site.

I have had a Canon A510 digital camera for two or three years now.  I love this camera, its pretty fast and the pictures are pretty good.  I am pretty clueless when it comes to photography, my skill level amounts to selecting the preset mode for indoor, outdoor, and kids/pets. The camera has a feature that I had never actually used before the ability to capture small videos.  We were at my son’s baseball game last night and I decided to give it a try.  I got a couple of nice little video’s of him at bat.  I connected my camera to my Mac and imported the photos and videos.  iPhoto showed the videos just like it does the pictures.  It was so quick and easy this kind of thing is why I love my Mac.

Since I had to do this recently I thought I would document it here.  The reports in SQL Server reporting services are stored in the Catalog table of the ReportServer database.  The report name is stored in the Name field the Path field stores the URL path to the report.  So if you wanted to see a group of reports take the first part of the path value and plug it into this URL http://servername/Reports/Pages/Folder.aspx?ItemPath=/pathvalue.

I installed the WP-OpenID plugin for WordPress along with the OpenID selector. Now you can use an OpenID url as your identifier for commenting on posts. Now that I am more familiar with OpenID I will be looking for it on other blogs.