MyVerbalOutlet

This is where I spout off about stuff

A Zune in the Wild

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. 

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  • Filed under: Tech
  • Firefox 3 RC 2

    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.

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  • Little Videos

    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.

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  • Filed under: Personal, Tech
  • 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.

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  • OpenID Enabled

    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.

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  • Evaluating the IE 7 UI

    I am a web developer I spend a lot of time using web browsers. I primarily use Firefox 2.0.x as my main browser but I spend time in IE 7 and to a lesser degree Safari. Lately I have come to realize that the UI for IE 7 is not the monstrosity I initially took it to be when it first came out. Here is shot of IE 7.

    I have found that the user experience of IE 7 is pretty nice. I really like having the reload and stop buttons to the right of the address bar. It makes me wish I could reorder the toolbar in Firefox. I like the compact toolbar in IE 7 and the way it compacts the menus into a button.

    What I don’t like about the IE 7 UI is are the tabs.  They take up to much space they are big and ugly.  The current tab doesn’t stand out enough from the other tabs.

    I wish that Firefox 3 would have learned something from IE 7 rather than just changing the toolbar graphics and layout slightly.

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  • Official Dilbert RSS Feed

    Until today I was using an unofficial Dilbert comic RSS feed to read Dilbert.  My unofficial feed shutdown with the notice that there is now an official feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip.  I am loving the official feed so far because the daily strips are in color.

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