Every person participating in this debate needs to first evaluate the following two questions:

1. What are the services I expect from my government?
2. What am I willing to pay for those services?

Anyone who reflexively says that they don’t want the government to take any of their money should be called on to define what minimum services the government should provide and then their answer for question 2 should be reconciled with that level of service.  Anyone who comes up with a huge laundry list of services & social programs for question 1 should likewise be called to reconcile their answer to question 2 to a level reasonable to pay for those services.

Basically our entire complicated federal budget can be simplified to something like this:

(yes those bars are to scale, scary huh?)

Now there’s a large number of people who shout about the fact that the interest on our debt is going to bankrupt us.  Let’s split out interest spending on the above chart to see how big of a part of the problem that is:

(note for data nerds, the purple box gets smaller if you discount the portion of interest payments to the Federal Reserve that get kicked back to the Treasury)

I think it’s safe to say that no matter what your political slant that we’ve got a problem in that the spending column _way_ overshadows the income.

Now how we _fix_ the problem is the subject of many debates.  I think we collectively waste a lot of hot air shouting about how we’re going to fix things when we haven’t even come to a basic understanding about questions 1 & 2 above.  If you and I have a difference of opinion about whether the Federal Government should maintain the road outside my house, the interstate I drive on to get to work & the railways that bring coal to the power plant that provides power to my home, then we’re never going to agree on what marginal tax rate, and progressive tax structure would be appropriate to _fund_ those things.

Now in reality, question 1 _is_ the major divisive question in many political debates, but framing it as a question on tax policy first is dishonest.  Let’s discuss our differences on what we expect from the government and come to a legitimate compromise on what a reasonable level of government service is.  After we have agreed to a compromise on what the government should do, it should be possible, though not easy, to begin the debate on how we are going to pay for it.

From: [removed]
To: me
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 18:10:32 -0400
Subject: Contact Request: Link in Blog Post

You have contact request!

Link in Blog Post
From: [removed]

Hi Rick,

I hope this message finds you well. I’m currently working on cleaning up [company name].com’s online presence and noticed you have a link to our site in your blog post. First off, thank you for finding us valuable enough to link to – we appreciate it! Part our clean-up process includes adjusting links to match the current title we’re using on our site outside of the [company name] brand name.

Your Post with Link: [link removed]

If you could please change the current link text from saying “[company name]” to “[company name] [important industry keywords]” it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for taking the time. Let me know if you have any questions on this change seeing as I fully want to respect your blog post as is as well. I look forward to hearing back!

Sincerely,

[removed]

Hello [removed],

I am not a big fan of altering links just to serve Search Engine Optimization. If your request below is really about cleaning up branding, I would gladly change the link but if I do so I would also add a nofollow tag. If [company name] prefers not to be linked to in this manner, or the original form from the blog post I wrote over 4 years ago, I’d gladly change the post to remove the link.

Just as a side note if you don’t know already, many bloggers are going to be defensive about this sort of thing. I’m not trying to be difficult, but taking time to edit a post just to serve your employer’s search rankings isn’t on my list of priorities.

I am a bit curious what sort of success rate you have with this type of request.

Regards,

Rick Hallihan

I have heard several stories lately from folks who are finally taking the plunge into the world of SmartPhones on Verizon (with the AWESOME HTC Trophy).  Some Verizon reps simply state that you can’t move contacts from the old to the new phone, but they helpfully print out a hard copy of the contacts from the old phone.  Others point to the Microsoft Article on Syncing Outlook Contacts with Windows Phone which isn’t very helpful if you don’t have or use Outlook.  I figured it would be worth putting up a post on the process I used.

The first step is to make sure your contacts are backed up with Verizon’s Backup Assistant from your old phone.  The process is different for different phones, but should be similar to the following.

On this feature phone, you select MENU, then Contacts, then Backup Assistant, then OK, and finally Backup Now. If you have not used Backup Assistant previously there are a few extra steps to set up a password, but they are pretty self explanatory. Verizon also has a great deal of documentation on their website at http://verizonwireless.com/backupassistant

Once your phone shows “Pending: 0” that indicates that all of your contacts have successfully been updated to the web.  You then need to sign in at http://verizonwireless.com/backupassistant 

If you haven’t already signed up for Verizon’s online account access, there will be extra steps here.

After signing in you should see a screen listing your contacts.  Click on “Select All”

Now click the drop-down next to “Select All” and select “Export Contacts”

You will be prompted to select a file download type, select “Outlook (CSV)”.  We’re not actually going to use Outlook, but this is a file format that Hotmail can import.

Your browser may prompt you for permission to download the file, select “Save” and make a note of the file’s location.

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Once you have the MyContacts.csv file saved, go to http://hotmail.com and log in.  You will need to use the Primary Live Id that was first associated with your Windows Phone during setup.  From the main screen, select “Contacts”

On the contacts screen, select “Manage” then “Import” on the Menu. 

On the next screen select “Outlook”.  Again, we’re not actually using Outlook, that’s just the common language that both Backup Assistant and Hotmail know how to use.

Next click the “Browse” button and locate your MyContacts.csv file, then click the “Import contacts” button.

If everything has worked as expected your Hotmail Contacts should now include all the phone number from your previous phone.

A few points to note.  If you are using a Live Id that is not a Hotmail Address, you can still log in at Hotmail with that Live Id to access the contacts section.  Also, if you have been using Hotmail for a long time your Contacts folder might have a large number of entries that you no longer want.  The web interface has some good options for cleaning up and combining duplicate contacts, and is also a good place to sort through and clean out unwanted contacts.  Any changes you make on the web will be synced to your new Windows Phone.

Looking back, I almost wish I had stretched this over several days since the concepts take a bit of time to bake. Godin appropriately points out early in the book that the ideas will meet with resistance in your mind. In fact, one of the main premises in the book is this idea that we are all basically of two minds. Our creative social mind, and a nicknamed "lizard brain" that resists risk and sometimes sabotages our ability to put forth our best effort. My lizard brain was on full alert as I crammed through the book, but strangely that helped me to at least validate some of the theories in the book in real time.

This book is different from the other Godin books that I have read in that it wasn't prescriptive in how to accomplish a goal, reach an audience, or spread an idea. It was more of a manifesto, a plea for the reader as an individual to be different.  The different that Godin is pushing for requires breaking the rules of conformity and abandoning the repeatable cookie cutter factory-like methods that so many industries cling to in the name of quality.  He asks the reader instead to focus on human interaction and emotional nuance and makes a compelling argument that this will allow the reader to stand out, do more, and become indispensable to the organizations they serve.

Godin rounds out his argument with anecdotes of modern successful linchpins, historical perspectives about why the current career landscape encourages cookie cutter behavior but actually favors certain types of rule breaking, and even gives some basic evolutionary neurology backing for his theories.

This book is a great read if you are looking to stretch your mind a bit about what it takes to stand out, be successful and make a difference.

If you have heard of Outliers have most likely heard the correlation between professional sports “stars” and their birthdays.  Basically Gladwell highlights a correlation between those who are the oldest players  in a year-group, and those who grow up to be successful athletes.  This correlation is provable across many different sports, and Gladwell argues that the attention these players get from being just a bit better due to physical advantages means that they get more playing time, more praise and more practice, and that this cascades and accumulates, ensuring that they have more opportunity to excel and become experts.

The later part of the book brings in many other factors that drive “Outlier” like success.  There are a few other circumstance type drivers, such as the year when someone is born, or the historical experiences that a culture shares.  Gladwell also points out several Outliers that had happenstance advantages, such as being given a unique opportunity at a key point of personal development.

Gladwell revisits the idea of “time spent practicing” later in the book, but in more of a comparative way instead of the “10,000 hours to excellence” that was highlighted earlier in the book.  One such comparison was academic achievement in different countries, compared with the lengths of their school year.  This highlighting of marginal differences was much more compelling to me than the first part of the book.  I also appreciated that the end of the book discussed some ways we can eliminate the biases that our “normal” way of life imparts on us.

The last running theme that struck a chord with me was that success is not a matter of personal will, but rather a mixture of will, chance and opportunity.  I do paradoxically wonder what happens when more people are given the knowledge of what it takes to become an Outlier, and they set their will toward making it happen.

Sokol makes judicious use of personal and business anecdotes to highlight the points he’s making, but doesn’t belabor the reader with too much domain specific detail.

If you can get your hands on a copy, it’s an excellent quick read.

Auletta seems to have enough proximity to some of the major players that he paints a vivid picture of the personalities and motivations of high-level Googlers, specifically highlighting why Google is different from most major corporations.  It would be interesting to hear an inside opinion of how accurate the portrayals were.

This book is a worthwhile read, whether you are involved in the tech industry, media, or even as a consumer who wants to understand more about why and how “free” really works on the Internet.

After reading this book, I settled on a new definition for Irrational Behavior: Acting in a way that is counter to or wasteful with regard to your true goals.

Just because someone doesn’t do what you want, doesn’t make them irrational, but when they start making choices that move them away from what they want, they have entered the realm of the irrational.

One morning when I opened the freezer there was a bit of a winter wonderland scene, with frost and icicles covering the upper-right corner of the freezer.  The in-door ice bucket was full of huge chunks of refrozen ice, and frozen up to the point where it couldn’t move the agitator to dispense ice.  Pretty much just an icy mess.

I originally thought that maybe someone had left the freezer a bit open, but there was still a bit of water dripping around and I know the door had been closed before I opened it.

Still not knowing what was wrong, I removed the ice bucket, emptied it out and melted all of the ice that was frozen around the agitator.  I put it back in the freezer and then went about my morning.  A bit later, I went to get some ice and remembered that I hadn’t turned the  ice maker back on, so I hit the switch.  I closed the door and waited for the ice to drop (It’s an in-door bucket so it doesn’t drop until the door closes).  Right when the ice dropped I opened the door and was then able to see first-hand the real problem with the dispenser.

Evidently in this model fridge, the water is dispensed into a small collector that then lets it flow into the ice tray.  The collector is circled in orange in the picture below.  Somehow this collector had filed with a solid chunk of ice, and was blocking the flow of water directly into the ice tray.  Since the float switch to stop the flow of water is in the tray, this means that the water stays on until enough water dribbles around the collector to fill up the ice tray (as well as coating a good portion of the freezer with water.

At first I thought I could attack this with a hair-dryer, but after removing all of the food from the top two shelves and then sitting with a hair dryer on the collector for about 5 minutes, I realized this was not getting me anywhere.  My next idea worked much better.  I used a turkey baster to squirt near-boiling water into the top of the collector (with towels positioned below to catch the overflow) and this unfroze the collector in about 2 minutes.

We haven’t had any further problems with the ice maker.  I’m not sure if this was just a fluke, or if there’s some sort of accumulation of ice in the collector that will come back again, but for now it’s working great and I know how to fix it quickly it it freezes up again.

The symptom is simple.  The power sliding door on one side or the other will stop working.  I’m guessing that this problem is shared between the Dodge Caravan and the Chrysler Town & Country since they share the same parts for this mechanism.  Some people on the Internet say that the problem went away after they had the dealer flash the BCM (Body Control Module).  Other people had to get an entirely new BCM before the problem disappeared. We never went down either of those paths since I had a simple quick, although temporary, fix.  If you open up the fuse panel under the hood next to the battery:

Then remove, count to 5 and then replace the following fuse:

The doors should work again for a while.

With the first van that had this problem, we went for many months just pulling and replacing the fuse whenever a problem occurred, and it would usually only stop working every few weeks.  A while later we ended up replacing the battery after the van wouldn’t start one morning.  Since the door issue was only an occasional problem, I never really realized that it never happened after we got the new battery.

Fast forward a few years, and we ended up having to replace the van, and we opted for the same exact model & year.  When we had the “new” used van for a couple of weeks, the left power sliding door stopped working one day.  We were on a trip so I did the quick-fix fuse pull & replace, and the door started working again.  Within a week, the van wouldn’t start one day.  A jump start got us working again, but I took the van to Auto Zone to have the battery checked, and it failed the load test.  I replaced the battery on this van, and we haven’t seen the doors stop working again!

My guess is that the Body Control Module (BCM) that gets so much attention has a failure mode that is supposed to disable the sliding door motor if it detects a short or a stuck electric motor, but that when the van’s battery starts getting marginal, it trips into this mode unnecessarily.

A combination of events recently lined up to get my laptop battery back in action.  Our original power adapter’s cord had broken through the insulation around the place where the DC cord enters the adapter brick, so we ordered an el-cheapo replacement from Ebay.  This new adapter had the same specs as the original, and we managed to continue along, still not able to hold a charge, but functional while plugged in.

This new adapter only lasted a couple of weeks before giving out entirely right before we were going on a trip.  We decided against getting another cheap adapter, and put in a order for the original OEM spec adapter, to be shipped to one of the destinations on our trip.  When it wasn’t there when we arrived I checked the order status to find that it was backordered for another 4 weeks.  Since we were suffering from laptop withdrawal, we ended up running out to Circuit City and picking up a Kensington Universal Notebook Power Adapter (K33404US).

Well, the new adapter is a 90 watt adapter, vs. the original 60 watt.  Low and behold, the battery will now hold a charge almost as good as when it was new!

Real Estate Agents:  Both buyers and sellers agents are paid a percentage commission on the sale price.  This means that the "knowledgeable representatives" on both sides have a financial incentive to get houses to sell at the highest price possible.

Mortgage Brokers:  Again, usually paid either a flat commission, or a percentage commission.  Either way, they earn exactly zero dollars for the mortgage they say shouldn’t happen.

Mortgage Lenders: This group was a major part of the real problem.  Mortgage lenders, through bundling and selling of mortgage backed securities, had no incentive to turn away bad loans.  The mortgage backed securities were selling at a value that didn’t account for the risk using standard economic formulas, so the lenders had an incentive to accept risky loans and sell them, passing the risk along to people who had no ability to understand the risk they were accepting. Basically the more they could get a potential homebuyer to promise to pay, the more money they made.  No incentives to push down the price of homes.

Appraisers: This is the group that should have been the safety net, but it seems that they’ve turned into yes-men (and women) for the Real Estate Agents and the Mortgage Lenders.  They are well insulated from liability by the formulas they use, and are dependent on Agents and Lenders for referrals so that they can make a living, so they have no incentive to challenge the value of an overpriced home.

Home Buyers: This group seemed, as a whole, to believe that as long as they planned to sell their house every few years, they should buy as much house as they could afford in order to maximize the future profit.  As a whole it looks like we bought into all of the advertising that claimed that houses were a great investment, touting huge yearly percentage gains in value, even though the fine print read "past returns are not a guarantee of future performance."  Greed, and the blind hope for turning a profit led this group to accept the inflated values as a reason to buy.

Home Sellers: Finally we get to the one group that should have been putting upward pressure on home values.

So, we now have a correction of sorts underway.  Home buyers are wary of getting into the market for fear that the values will continue to drop.  Mortgage brokers and lenders know they can’t bundle and sell risky mortgages since there will be too much scrutiny, but they do seem to be trying to lock in anyone that has a good to excellent credit rating.  I haven’t seen any real changes in the real estate market, but I’d be amazed if there isn’t at least some fear of liability if an agent helps someone buy an overvalued home.

The current climate of fear and risk aversion has slowed the bad behavior, but nobody seems to be talking about fixing the system.  If we come out of this and the incentives haven’t changed, then the bubble will just grow, and pop, again.

 Now I already was expecting a bit of a bump since Raymond had given me a heads-up about the link, but I’m always curious exactly what traffic a link will bring.  Between December 31st and New Year’s Day about 900 extra views compared with my normal baseline is a pretty good reach for a pile-of-links post referral.  The results say a great deal more about Raymond’s reputation for putting up interesting links than anything else!

I just finished up my first time attending Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference and wanted to capture a few random observations.

This conference is beyond huge!  I was trying to unit-ize my perception of the size, and all I could come up with is “several football fields” worth of people.

The conference was run very well.  The event staff did an amazing job.  I did notice that they held some pretty strict people-routing rules and some of the attendees would get upset when they were told to go to the center doors of the Big Room in order to get to a meal that was in hall G or K.  If you’ve ever been responsible for maintaining order with a large gaggle of people you would recognize that they were doing it right.  If you wait until the line becomes a problem, it’s too late to fix it.  You have to send people along the path that a long line would take in order to keep this from becoming a problem.

The Cloud is coming.  Microsoft’s Azure has a ton of promise and it’ll be interesting to see how it rolls out over the next decade.  I’ve always been a big fan of Amazon’s S3 and EC2, and it’s awesome to see Microsoft hit this space with a coherent broad strategy that covers not just silo’d implementations of storage and computation, but an ecosystem that can field complex applications in the cloud, on-premises, or any combinations of the two.

When developers file into a room, they seem to default to a sort of “worst-fit” algorithm, filling up the rows of chairs in the least efficient manner possible, causing the presenters and coordinators to have to go through several rounds of defragmentation in order to get the room to capacity.

It was great to meet some of the other Microsoft bloggers that I’ve been following for years.  I went to Raymond Chen’s talk even though it’s been a long time since I wrote any code that even came close to a Win32 call, but it was an interesting talk just the same.  I also stopped by the Win7 table in the Microsoft Pavilion and shook his hand.  It was a bit of a geek fan-boy thing to do, but I’ve enjoyed reading his blog for a long time, and it was cool to meet the man behind the blog.  Raymond was very friendly and approachable, and it was interesting to see that his face-to-face personality matched up exactly with what I had come to expect from years of reading The Old New Thing.

Scott Hanselman’s talk was awesome, entertaining, and educational all at the same time.  He’s another of my favorite bloggers and I’ve been a subscriber since long before he joined Microsoft.  He was pretty busy after the session, so I didn’t make the time to do the fan-boy introduction, but it was cool to see Scott in person.

I also got to meet Charlie Kindel.  It was a bit awkward since the last time we spoke I was an outside blogger who was spending a ton of time on Windows Home Server.  Since joining Microsoft last December, I really haven’t made time to do much of anything related to Windows Home Server, so we didn’t have much to talk about.  Still, it was good to finally meet Charlie and the WHS sessions at PDC were very interesting. (Developing Connected Home Applications and Services for Windows Home Server, Exposing Connected Home Services to the Internet via Windows Home Server) CJ and crew did a great job with the presentations and demos.  I’m still a huge fan of WHS as a key part of any home network, and as a central nervous system for the smart home going forward, I just don’t have the time necessary to evangelize the platform like I did before.

The gender divide at the conference was very pronounced.  I’ve been in Microsoft’s Charlotte office for nearly a year now and even though it’s no where near 1:1 there, I’ve gotten acclimated to a less skewed environment enough that I really noticed the gap at PDC.  It’s a shame that the industry is so far behind on this.

The geeks as a whole seemed to be making healthier choices from the provided snacks. The fruit tables seemed to get a fair amount of action, and the Ho-Ho’s and Twinkies seemed to stay on the tables for quite a while longer.  I’m sure that plenty of extra calories were consumed this week, but it didn’t seem to be too far off the unhealthy end of the spectrum.

The folks from the Dev Teams were here to really connect with customers.  The “Ask the experts” were the formalized version of this, but extended post-session Q/A sessions and lots of business card swapping means that real connections were being built.  It seems that if you came to PDC, you could reach out and get some real people to talk to about almost anything that Microsoft does.

Lots of international participation.  Hearing people having side conversations in various languages and then instantly switch to perfect English for another conversation reminded me how much it seems like Americans are behind the curve with languages.

That’s it for my random observations. All in all it was a great conference!

In my mind, I have over-simplified the pricing of stocks to this:

[Stock Price] = α[intrinsic value] x ß[extrinsic value multiplier]

Every stock valuation equation that I’ve ever seen ends up being some derivative of the above, where the intrinsic value is pretty constant and is related to the company’s holdings and it’s ability to generate consistent profits. The extrinsic value is subjective and can vary widely and can be seen more as a measure of the confidence that the pubic has in a company.

Over the last few weeks, the real inherent value of the companies that make of the DJIA, the S&P, and the market as a whole has not really changed.  What has changed it the perception of the extrinsic value, i.e. the potential for continued growth in value and earnings, and the ability of the company to weather a slump in the economy.

Now the interesting dilemma facing those in power right now is that everyone is screaming that they need to fix ß when the only way to fix ß is to set up a system that protects α, and that gives confidence to the public that you will continue to support α in the future.

As much as I am instinctively against the idea of the current bailout bill, there are some facets of it that make sense, and I think we’ll start seeing some progress in the next few weeks.  The bailout bills’ main focus is to break-up the gridlock that we currently have in the short-term liquidity markets.  This protects α by helping companies that have real value to avoid folding simply because they can’t get the short-term loans they need in order to operate. This helps us avoid a real reduction in the intrinsic value of companies, and in the long run that should be the focus of every leader who is currently attempting to help solve this crisis.

Disclaimer:  This post is not financial advice, I may have a business degree but I don’t claim to have any special expertise in economics.  I just had a few ideas I wanted to spout off. 

My previous style was mostly commentary on the technology industry and transitional media (blogging, podcasts, online video), mobile technology, and pretty much anything else I read online and had an opinion on.  I never talked about work, steered clear of politics, and pretty much just stuck with technology. 

In the future, I might talk a bit about work (although anything related directly to the work I do will likely be over at my work blog). I might touch on social issues (not "political" social issues, but broader topics like productivity, communication, motivation, etc.), and I’ll probably still talk about technology, but just keep in mind that I work for a big company and that puts some practical limits on the types of speculation that I can do, and might bias my opinions a bit.

For those of you who follow this blog to actually keep up with me personally, the new job is going great.  I look forward to going to work everyday and am constantly being challenged and having to learn new things (that’s what makes a job fun right?).  The family has gotten pretty settled here in Matthews, NC.  My daughter is into her second year of the Horizon’s program, our middle son is getting started with preschool, and our youngest son is just over a year old, and learning to cause trouble by watching big brother and sister and trying to do whatever it is that they do.  Tammy does an amazing job of keeping our schedules all straight, and keeps our house and family running smoothly.

That’s all for now.  I’ve got a few posts rattling around in my head, so I hope to post more soon!

Matt and Patrick have both posted recently that our team is still looking for more full-time hires.  Patrick points out many of the perks, and Matt highlights how working for Microsoft in Charlotte can be a great opportunity.

I just wanted to add my thoughts into the mix.  I’ve only actually worked 2 weeks, and now I’m out on “ICL” which is how they refer to Infant Care Leave at Microsoft.  In addition to all the stuff Patrick highlights, this ICL thing is by far my favorite benefit so far.  Even though my youngest son was born before I joined Microsoft, they allowed me to take the same 4 weeks off that any new Microsoft dad gets.  (I’ll refer any questions about how this works to someone in HR, I believe you just have to take it within 6 months of the child’s birth.)

In the first two weeks, the team has been awesome, helping me get machines set up the right way, teaching me the tools that we use to manage workload, bringing me up to speed on the messaging technologies we support.  I’m very psyched to get back to work, but for now I’m making the best use of my ICL by getting the family moved down to Charlotte.  The truck left today with all of our stuff, and if all goes according to plan, we’ll be starting the new year in a new (to us) house down in Charlotte.

In summary, the benefits are awesome, lots of great perks, challenging and interesting work.  If you have ever thought about working for Microsoft but didn’t really want to consider moving to the west coast, seriously consider these openings, and feel free to contact me via the link on this blog if you have any questions for a “new-hire”.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how we use media.  A little over a year ago, we joined the DVR revolution with DirecTv’s DVR option, and this taste of flexibility has highlighted exactly how far behind technology we’re lagging in consumer experience.  The DVR is a nice little island utopia.  As long as we’re at the TV with the DVR, the kids have their pick of their favorite shows.  My wife and I can watch a show that we missed, or that we recorded because it was too late for us to stay up.  Unfortanely as soon as you sail away from the island, all is lost.  The DVD player in the car can only serve up movies that we have physical discs for (what an archaic concept!).  My Zune only holds music, videos and pictures that I explicitly put onto is (I don’t keep a lot of media on my computer, so I have to go out of my way to sync stuff.)  My family pictures, home movies, and other digital media mostly lives on our Windows Home Server, which makes it very accessible to our home computers, but not very useful on the road.

What would utopia look like?  Media shared everywhere. If my family owns it, I want it available wherever.

In practice, it’s not this simple.  How would data get from the DVR to the server?  How do you deal with devices with limited storage (come to think of it, every device has some sort of limit)?  How does data get onto the Zune, into the car, etc.

I’m thinking that a simple provider-subscriber model could work.  Each device would advertise it’s content using a format that could describe the media in enough detail that subscribers could make sense of it, and then they could make decisions about retrieving the media (RSS with enclosures might work as-is or with minor extension).  Each device would also have a configurable subscriber profile that would define what it would actively retrieve, or what it would make available by reference.  So, for example:

• DVR Records a bunch of shows.
• DVR publishes listings with metadata via RSS.
• Windows Home Server retrieves RSS from DVR.  Based on its settings WHS will actively retrieve some shows that I’ve set to archive and save them on the server.
• These shows will be added to WHS’s published RSS, with some sort of UID included so that the DVR doesn’t think it needs to copy them back.

or:

• WHS stores some home movies.
• WHS publishes a listing of home movies via RSS.
• DVR subscribes to this listing, and makes them available via the DVR _by reference_, basically it doesn’t make a local copy, but you can view the movies on your TV by selecting them through the DVR interface after which they are streamed from the WHS.  (Wouldn’t want to waste the DVR’s limited drive space by making a local copy.)

The scenarios go from there.  You could set priorities for devices with smaller storage like my Zune30.  It could actively retrieve the most recent 2 episodes of each of my kid’s favorite shows, as well as the most recent episodes of Las Vegas (the one show I try to watch each week), and maybe also a few podcasts that WHS has downloaded for me. 

Ok, that last sentence made this a bit more interesting.  The subscriber/provider model extends. I can subscribe to internet feeds to acquire content.  If I want to, I can publish a feed of select home movies and my family members can subscribe to them.  The data flow might go:

• Digital Camcorder uploads to Client computer. 
• Client computer publishes via RSS. 
• WHS subscribes to RSS and retrieves and archives media (archive action might actually remove it from client depending on settings). 
• WHS adds home movies to its published feed.  
• After reviewing the movies on the server I tag a few as “Share_Family” and they become available on a feed that is accessible from the internet. 
• My extended family then can subscribe via their own WHS or a client application and the content will automatically be transferred to their local repository.

Feeds should be configurable, so that I can build custom feeds that filter by tag, time, format, media type, etc.  So basically each provider will have a single subscription endpoint, but the feed can be filtered, or alternately the client can retrieve the entire feed, and filter locally.  Also, authentication should be an option so that you can make a public/private distinction, or even control access in a more granular manner.

Ok, this has devolved into a bit of stream-of-consciousness rambling, but hopefully it conveys that the technology to do this is available today, but that the implementation is lagging.  DRM is a hurdle to open integration like this, but it’s not an insurmountable one.  Hopefully media companies will realize that if they make their content available and give consumers the freedom to use it in flexible ways, then the consumers will actually be more likely to consume the content.

(Disclaimer:  This post is pure speculation by me.  It does not convey any information from my current or future employers.  I do not know if anything like this is in development, I just wanted to throw out some ideas that might make the consumer experience better in the future.)

Overall, it’s a bit of a mixed review for me.

Things that are much better about the u740:

Unlimited Mobile Web w/ VCast – Instead of paying $40 a month for unlimited data, I get unlimited Mobile Web by paying $15 a month for VCast.  My phone data use centers mostly around checking email and reading RSS feeds.  The mobile clients for both Live Hotmail and Gmail are very usable.  I recently switched form Newsgator to Google Reader, and while I used to read feeds all the time with Newsgator’s mobile reader, the mobile version of Google Reader is painful enough to use that I hardly ever open it up.  Regardless, Mobile Web is more than capable of allowing me to consume information (aka waste time) when I have a spare minute, and offset some other time that I would’ve spent staring at a regular computer.

Fast Application Startup – When you hit the camera button, the time to ready is very speedy compared with Windows Mobile.

Things that I miss about the Motorola Q and WinMo in general:

Pocket IE – As much as I cursed the partial compatibility of Pocket IE, it was leaps and bounds above the browser in Mobile Web.

QVGA Screen – Simply put, more pixels means more data on the screen, period.

Open platform – I like to tinker, and being able to try different applications, or even write some code every once and a while is nice.  No such luck with the u740

Summary

If not for the difference in data costs between the two, I would probably be back on Windows Mobile already. I know Windows Mobile data users probably actually use considerably more data than Mobile Web users, so I get the reasoning behind the price differential, but it’s too big of a monthly hit for me to justify it right now.

What I’d really like to see is a Windows Mobile 6 device in the same form-factor as the u740, and then if Verizon could cut their data plan back to $20 to $25 a month, I’d probably be sold.

As of December 3rd, 2007, I will be joining Microsoft as an Escalation Engineer working in the Charlotte, NC office.  An unintended consequence of this is that I’ll no longer be able to hold the Microsoft MVP title for Windows Home Server.  From what I understand, I can continue to “serve” as an MVP until I take my spot as a FTE, and then my MVP status gets retired. 

Various friends and readers who have communicated with me in the past may know that I’ve had ambitions about working at Microsoft for a long time, and this final “fit” came together over the last couple months.

It’s a busy time, so I’m not going to promise anything quickly, but I have some rough notes around which I’m formulating a few blog posts about the Microsoft recruiting process and my own “journey”.  I think my “To Blog” list is at about 6 posts deep, and I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it.

In the mean time, if anyone is looking for a great family home in the Lexington Park MD area, check out: http://45693Spruce.com

Also, we’ve confirmed that one of my older kids has a bad cat allergy, so we’re trying to find a home for the last of our three cats, details can be seen here: http://www.animalrelieffund.org/animals/detail?AnimalID=321793

At this time I’m seeing Grey Lancaster, who has been on the listing since the category was added to the MVP site.  I’m guessing he may have been an MVP that was previously assigned to a different competency, but who got moved over to the WHS group.

Other appearances include Ken Warren.  If you ever frequent Microsoft’s WHS Forums, it seems that Ken manages to answer 90% of all questions posted. (Totally made-up statistic, but that’s the way it seems).

Also included is Terry Walsh, who runs the We Got Served blog.  Terry manages to collect and generate a great deal of information and news about WHS. His site is often the first place I see new information on WHS.

I’m very honored to be included in the list of awardees as well!  I’m not sure yet what all this MVP status really means, but I’m looking forward to finding out over the next year!

Hopefully the listing will grow a little bit more as WHS MVP awardees fill out their profiles and mark them as visible.  There has been some very strong community involvement in WHS since the early Beta days, and it’s great to see that Microsoft recognizes the positive impact of folks that make time to be involved.

As has been pointed out, I am the author of a new book about Windows Home Server for Wiley Publishing.  The book is titled Windows Home Server: Protect and Simplify Your Digital Life, and it should be available in January ’08.  The book focuses on teaching computer users how to make the best use of Microsoft’s new Windows Home Server line of products to protect their data and simplify their computing experience.

The Amazon.com write-up covers things pretty well.

I’ve got a bunch of blog posts in my head covering what I’ve learned so far as I’m going through the authoring process for the first time.  The editors I’ve been working with at Wiley are great, and I’m really looking forward to completing the process and actually holding a real printed copy of the book in my hands.  I’ve found writing to be very enjoyable.  The technical research, and the setup for screenshots and such takes a lot of time, but it’s a geeky kind of fun.  It’s great to have an excuse to “play around” with my home server and computers each night.

Obviously, blogging is going to be pretty slow until I finish up the book, but as I’ve said before, that really shouldn’t matter.

From the outside looking in, this seems to have gone more smoothly than other Microsoft projects as of late.  Maybe Charlie Kindel can give us a post-mortem of how they managed to to keep things on track, or at least maintain the appearance of staying on track.

I’m looking forward to seeing the OEM machines actually hit the street, and see how they fare in the market. 

1. Memory Stick Backups – A service that will run on my desktop or laptop and automatically back up my USB memory stick whenever I plug it in.  Each memory stick should be backed up to the same location on the server no matter which computer I plug it in to.


2. Download Manager – Automatically hand off regular downloads from Internet Explorer to be downloaded and stored on my home server.


3. User Account Sync – Automatically create user accounts on client PCs for each Windows Home Server user account.  Automatically update passwords.


4. Favorites Sync – Sync my favorites to a folder on WHS. (I know I can do this with foldershare.  Add-in would be much better.)  Also include Desktop Sync, My Documents Sync, etc.