Streaming media and home entertainment…

History / Microsoft / Phones / Software / Technology / Video

I’ve recently helped a few friends get setup with "media centers" as their home entertainment systems. They’ve all been centered around using a small form-factor computer to ‘power’ things, and central to that is Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Windows Media Center. I was lucky enough to be a software tester at Microsoft around 2001 testing the first version of Window Media Center Edition (MCE) and it was exciting back then. It’s now been 10 years – and it still hasn’t caught on. But, I’m confident that’s about to …

Facebook privacy… IT’S THERE AND IT’S GOOD!

Databases / Law / Technology / Websites

I can’t take it anymore… I keep hearing people talking about how Facebook is "sharing all your information" or why they closed their account because it’s not private or how unsafe it is… Facebook’s privacy settings are GOOD! There’s LOTS of options that have been there for a LONG TIME. But, typical of a lot of web users, they don’t READ. Yes, READING is an important part of using the web. Especially if someone is going to complain or cry "foul!" My Facebook profile is pretty open. I …

Microsoft Live ID system fails again…

Customer Service / Microsoft / Technology / Websites

About a year and a half ago, I wanted to transfer my XBox achievements and credits to my primary Microsoft Live ID account. Sadly, I was told that it was impossible. About a year after my frustration with the XBox Live ID issue, I decided to spend more time using my Microsoft Zune player. When I first got it (about about two years earlier,) I was required to sign in with a Microsoft Live ID to track my music purchases and plays. But now, I wasn’t using that …

Zune on Facebook

Microsoft / Software / Technology / Websites

In January 2010, I spent far too much time trying to find the "Official" Zune Facebook fan page. There were three Fan pages, two of which had almost 30,000 fans. However, I wanted to be join the official Microsoft owned/run/sponsored Fan page. Sadly, there was no way to tell which of the three was created by Microsoft. I had been a fan of the two larger fan pages, but they had pretty much stagnated at 25-30k fans for many months. So, while I was working at Microsoft, I …

Google’s ‘Sidewiki’ feature…

Blogging / Customer Service / Microsoft / Software / Technology / Websites

Back in the mid-1990’s when I was working on the MSN Engineering team at Microsoft, one of the projects we started to work on was a tool that would allow people to post comments about web pages "on" the webpage. That is, it was a feature in Internet Explorer very similar to the "Comment" feature in Microsoft Word. As with far too many Microsoft products, they started it, then shelved it. I was really excited about it back then because of the great potential for true customer service …

Will Windows Vista be the next Windows Me?

Microsoft / Software / Technology

For those who even remember it, Windows Me (Millennium Edition) was a stinker. Even internally at Microsoft no one (at least the people I worked with on various engineering teams) liked it. There’s plenty of websites dedicated to why it was a stinker, so I don’t need to go into those details. But, with Windows Vista, there was a lot of the same vibes… which made me think, will Vista be the next ‘Me’? Like with ‘Win Me’, Vista was plagued with issues of all kinds, but the …

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