Microsoft Tag

This looks pretty cool!

http://www.microsoft.com/tag/

 

Here’s the tag I created, which would bring you back to my blog if you scanned it with a tag reader app on your phone…

Gigabit cross-over cable

Was talking with Dean this evening, and we wanted to swap a bunch of files around.  “Bunch” being multiple GB.  Started off all well and good over the wireless network, but we were still lacking something…ahh..that’s what it was:  “Throughput”

Since both his laptop and mine have gigabit ports, we decided to cable them together to get a little more “transfer” into the “file transfer” process. 

Fortunately I decided to think out loud when I said, “Sure, I think I have a cross-over cable”…because that gave him the opportunity to say, “Gigabit is smarter than that, you don’t need a cross-over cable anymore, it will automagically figure it out” – to which I appropriately responded: “Huh? What?”

So yeah – turns out that you don’t need cross-over cables anymore, gigabit network ports will automagically figure it out, and (according to Dean) they will even figure it out when you have gigabit on one side and 10/100 on the other side.  This obviously explains the long line of cross-over cables outside the unemployment office.

(for all of you who are thinking to yourselves, “yeah, duh! You mean you didn’t know that already?” – No, I didn’t)

I’m starting to enjoy this 21st century thing though

On death and De-Perimeterization

Two co-workers just published an excellent article in Network World describing how we “really feel” about network based access control’s.

Price is a security architect in MS IT, and Dan is an Identity Architect on the same team that I am.  Both are ridiculously smart guys, who (obviously) wax poetic.

http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2008/050208-jericho-forum.html

The Great Pacific WHAT?

Ok, so those that know me well, would never remotely accuse of “being green”.  Ah heck, ok, I’ll admit it – I drive a Chevy Suburban that reliably gets 10 mpg.

But I don’t think you have to be green to find this really disturbing:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch.htm [1]

 

…The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas . The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii…

Maybe you’ve heard about this, apparently it isn’t new.  I never had though, until it was used as a passing reference the other morning on KROQ, and I was certain that they were (as usual) full of crap – nope, apparently the ocean is what’s full of crap, all of our crap.

So welcome to the 21st century, would you like paper or plastic?

[1] Yeah, so “how stuff works” may not be the greatest reference on the web, but it’s what google gave me when I “felt lucky” so it’s good enough for a blog post (more reputable data sources with a better search)

More Stupid Clock Tricks

After my first “21st Century” post, Nick walked down to show me some more neat things which Windows Vista has done to improve our temporal awareness.

Turns out that if you click on the “January, 2008″ above the calendar, you can zoom out to months.

Of course, if you can click it once, then why not click it again!

And if you go yet again, you find this little gem:

 

It’s powerful feature sets like this, which allow me to find out that I was born on a Monday – in only 8 clicks.  Welcome to the 21st century.

Yes, it’s my meeting…no, I don’t really care if you accept

Have you ever scheduled a meeting with a large group of people, and then get flooded with all of the accepts, tentatives, and declines?

It was recently pointed out to me, that in Office 2007, when you schedule a meeting, you can opt out of these responses – BRILLIANT!

Just uncheck the box.

Welcome to the 21st century. 

Welcome to the 21st Century

There are a ton of new features in every piece of software, most of which go unused.  So “Welcome to the 21st Century”, Brian’s stories about how he’s discovered things that everybody else probably already knew. 

The bar for a 21st century post, is when I go “well, duh” when I discover some infinitely easier way to do something that i’ve been doing the hard way for a while.

For today, I would like to show you my latest discovery which is used to manage “time”.  Sure, we all know about the little clock down in the system tray, but I’ve been travelling a lot this year and so having multiple clocks for different time zones has been key.  In fact, until recently, I sacrificed a large chunk of my Vista sidebar to tracking “time”

The other night, I “discovered” that there is an “Additional Clocks” tab when you go into the date/time settings page – BRILLIANT!  (yeah, that was my “duh” moment).

After reclaiming my sidebar space, I can now mouse-over and to get a quick peek

or click and get