John Lamansky

If you’ve been planning to download the Office 2007 beta, better do it now! According to a PCWorld article:

Microsoft says that it will begin charging $1.50 for users to download a copy of the Office 2007 beta 2.

“In just the past two months since its launch, more than 3 million people have downloaded the 2007 Microsoft Office system beta 2,” the company said in a statement sent via e-mail.

“Given how dramatically the beta 2 downloads have exceeded our goals, we have made the business decision to implement a cost-recovery measure for downloading the beta.”

Microsoft will begin charging users starting Wednesday, it said. The company released beta 2 of Office 2007 in May.

As those familiar with WordPress probably know, WordPress’s “slogan” is “Code is Poetry.”

Personally, I think it’s a great slogan. And I agree: well-written computer code is like a work of art. Good code creates something that runs beautifully and can even look beautiful too.

So yes, code is poetry; however, I find it kind of annoying to discover poetry in code, or more specifically, I find it kind of annoying when I find Daisy Bell lycrics hiding in my WordPress CSS:

.navigation {
	display: block;
	text-align: center;
	margin-top: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 60px;
	}
/* End Various Tags & Classes*/

/* "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you.
	It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage.
	But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two." */

I do feel kind of annoyed, but the lightheartedness of it also almost makes me want to laugh. And that’s probably why it’s there.

If there is one place in our house that has the largest civilization of dust bunnies, it would have to be the insides of our computers.

So in anticipation of the “computer spring cleaning that’s not during spring” that my dad and I were going to do this week, my mom had purchased some “compressed air.” However, after finding that it wasn’t “compressed air” but rather a “compressed chemical concoction,” we returned it to Wal-Mart and decided that we would use my dad’s air compressor.

I got everything unplugged from the backs of the computers; my dad got the air compressor ready. I cleaned the dust caked on the back ports and opened the computers. My dad turned on the air compressor and blasted the air in there.

I wasn’t too sure… that air looked powerful enough to really damage something. This wasn’t air coming from a little can of compressed air; this was air coming from the big thing that you use to blow up tires.

The air compressor cleaned it out really good though. As I look out our porch window I still see the exiled dust bunnies on our porch, looking dejected and fluffless.

Anyway, I repluggified the computers, turned them on, and made sure that they booted up okay. Everything looked okey-dokey-dandy, so I went on to do some other non-computer things.

I came back to my computer after some time and noticed the HDD Health alerts on my desktop: hard drive over critical temperature. Uh-oh.

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I’ve been thinking about AMD’s purchase of ATI and what it might mean for us computer users.

The big thing that comes to mind limited buying options: I can easily forsee having to choose between AMD/ATI and Intel/nVidia when buying a new computer, instead of being able to mix-and-match your processor and graphics card vendors. If someone was buying a computer a year from now and wanted an AMD processor and an nVidia graphics card, they might be out of luck.

And I have no evidence to prove that this is a possibility; it’s just something that came to mind: wouldn’t it be so weird slash funny slash cool if Intel bought nVidia? I mean, really … that would make things very interesting indeed.

Sure, I had set up basic feed redirection. I had set it so that the feed/ and feed/atom/ WordPress feed URLs would redirect to my FeedBurner feed.

But when I saw that the Best of the Web blog directory had listed my RSS feed as being http://www.johnlamansky.com/?feed=rss2, I knew I had to implement more extensive redirection.

I had heard of this “WordPress Feedburner Plugin” before, and decided to give it a try. After a little bit of trouble at first, I got it to work and - lo and behold! - the next day my Feedburner subscriber count had almost - not quite, but almost - doubled.

It just goes to show how important it is to make sure all of your feed traffic is directed to the right place.

I would highly recommend the aforementioned plugin to WordPress bloggers who are using Feedburner; and if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Feedburner’s feed redirection tips.

I’ve noticed something very interesting on this blog, and on others; it’s something I’m calling “customer service blog comments.”

It seems that it’s becoming more and more common for company representatives to post comments on blog posts related to that company or its products. For example, so far on this blog I’ve had comments from FeedBurner, Dell, and Microsoft employees, plus a comment from the CEO of FeedBlitz; the comments were in reply to various blog posts I wrote that were related to those companies.

What I find interesting is that even big companies like Dell are getting on the bandwagon. I think it’s a great idea: don’t make the customers come to you, making them wait on hold or for an email response; instead, go directly to the customers and help them solve their problems with friendly, personalized service. That’s the way to do it.

One thing I don’t really like about blogs is that the old content gets shoved out of view. This is okay if the old content is time-sensitive, but otherwise, that isn’t always desirable.

Because quite a few (but not all) of my posts are NOT time-sensitive, I’ve decided to start posting some lists of past posts.

So, as a little something for this blog’s “first birthday,” here is the list of the Top 5 most popular posts (based on how many visits the posts have received) in this blog’s first year of existence. Enjoy!

1. Lifecycle of Innovation
   (posted July 25th, 2005)
2. Visual Studio 2005 Express: Free Forever
   (posted May 13th, 2006)
3. The Mystery of the Orange Light, Part 1
   (posted October 26th, 2005)
4. The Mystery of the Orange Light, Part 2
   (posted November 11th, 2005)
5. Vista Beta 2 Access Not Shut Off After All?
   (posted July 8th, 2006)

What I find amazing is that despite the fact that the “Vista Beta 2 Access Not Shut Off After All?” post is only about 10 days old, it has still managed to skyrocket into the top 5 posts, on par with the popular Mystery of the Orange Light posts. (Though note that because this list is list three days late, due to the fact that I was out of town recently, and therefore because this list takes into account visits from those three days, it’s possible that three days ago the post wouldn’t have made the top 5.)

I was also puzzled as to why the “Lifecycle of Innovation” post was getting so many visits. I finally figured out that apparantly the post ranks high in image search results for “innovation.” When I posted that post, I had no idea how popular it would turn out to be.

Well, with blogging, you never know…

This blog turned one-year-old four days ago!

According to numerous sources, Windows Vista Beta 2 downloads were to be cut off on June 30. If hadn’t finished your download by then, you could continue downloading it until July 14th.

However, I was able to start a download just fine. I’m still chugging away at 44 percent.

Take a look at my partial download file’s property dialog. The “date created” field reads July 6, 2006.

So… wuzzup with that? Is the Vista Beta still downloadable after all?

Microsoft has a webpage titled “Deploying Microsoft .NET Framework Version 3.0″ that has oodles of info about the new product that was previously known as WinFX.

Here’s what I found really exciting:

Because .NET Framework 3.0 is an additive release and uses the core run-time components from .NET Framework 2.0, it is completely backward compatible with the earlier version. Your existing .NET Framework 2.0 based-applications will continue to run without any modifications and you can safely continue your investments using the technologies that shipped with .NET Framework 2.0.

In addition:

The .NET Framework 3.0 is installed by default on Microsoft Windows Vista.

I’m assuming this means that .NET Framework 2.0 applications will be Vista-compatible. Cool!