Going to PDC 2009

Today i fly out to L.A., to attend Microsoft’s PDC 2009.  I am looking forward to the announcements and demos of the 2010 wave of releases coming up.  Stay tuned as I post pics and tidbits of content here on my blog, or on my twitter feed (Follow me on twitter).

See you in L.A!

Tech support cheat sheet

I felt this was an appropriate representation of my tech-related phone calls with my mom [or insert family member name here].

Windows 95 still kicking

 

Just yesterday, I was walking into my client’s office building when I passed one of the kiosk machines setup along the lobby of the building.  The machine is supposed to run a custom software in “kiosk mode” (full screen) that helps visitors with a directory of the building.

To my surprise, that little kiosk machine happened to be stuck in the middle of a shutdown/reboot cycle and here’s what I saw:

If you can’t see the details of the picture – it is running Windows 95!  That’s right, 14 years later, Win 95 is still kicking it.  Who would have thought???

Love-Hate Relationship With My Lenovo T61p

I have had my current laptop (company issued) for nearly 2 years now.  In technology years, that’s more like 8 years.  However, I still think my laptop’s hardware specs can kick butt.  So why is it that it takes me nearly 5 min to boot up to Vista?  Could Windows 7 solve my woes? Perhaps…

To be fair, since Vista SP1 was released most of my headaches with the hardware went away (in particular, the bug with the sleep/hibernate feature).  What is taking my laptop 5 minutes to boot up?  What is Vista doing that brings my machine to a halt when booting?  What apps are being loaded that suck the RAM out of my machine?

My laptop is a Lenovo T61p, souped up with 4 GB or RAM, which are fully utilizable by the 64-bit edition of Vista Enterprise.  On top of that it has a pretty decent video card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M with 256MB dedicated graphics RAM.  It also sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU.  Overall, I get a nice 4.8 on the Windows Experience Index).

This laptop has all the potentials to be a speedy work horse.  It includes 3 USB ports and 1 FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3-in-1 card reader, DVD-ROM, and a 7200RPM hard drive.  For a model that has been out on the market for the last 2 years, I would say that the only things that have seriously improved in laptops are the newer Quad-core CPUs, faster graphics, and bigger hard drives.

I have seriously considered re-paving the machine with Windows 7 for the next while, but the only thing keeping me from it is the downtime while I re-install all my required apps.  If/when I do that, I will definitely post my updates and opinions on the process right here.  I must say that Win 7 64bit, which is running on a secondary drive on my home desktop, has been a very stable and pleasant experience “out of the box”, much different than my first year on Vista.

I wonder what will be the replacement for the Lenovo T61p, under my employer’s equipment lease program – perhaps the W500?

Let The Morning Come - CD/DVD project RELEASED

This is a really exciting bit of news:  my church's 2nd CD recording project, and 1st DVD, is finally complete and available!!!

We have a rather large pool of musicians and creative artists at my church (www.121cc.com), so last Fall, we all got together for 3 days and wrote and collaborated on music.  Then we planned a 2-evening event, which we called "Let The Morning Come" where we recorded music and video of the performances.

I was able to participate in 7 songs on the CD, and after having listened to the final mastered versions, this week...THEY SOUND GREAT!  Hats off to all of the folks that were involved, especially David Parker and Chris Clayton (www.chrisclayton.com), who headed up this effort.

We have a MySpace page for the Worship and Creative Arts team, which has a few sample tracks from the album (www.myspace.com/121ccworship).

Also, you can view a trailer/preview of the DVD on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9O1FwpCGI)

Hope you and enjoy - and check out the iTunes Music Store soon if you would like to purchase a copy of your own

So long PPS Planning - Long Live SharePoint

 

This week, in the news, Microsoft made some pretty big announcements.  Besides all the planned layoffs (~5000 jobs will be cut from R&D, IT, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and more), the big one came in the BI arena with regards to PerformancePoint Server and their BI strategy for the future.

After nearly 2 very slow years of adoption, Microsoft has decided to stop development and discontinue the Planning package, originally a part of PerformancePoint Server.  Microsoft also plans on rolling the Monitoring and Analytics piece of PPS into SharePoint Server, their enterprise content management and portal software.  This move will also rebrand the PPS offering to PerformancePoint Services.  Previous ProClarity and Business Scorecard Manager products, which have been integrated into PPS, will no longer be available for purchase as Microsoft puts all of their eggs in the one Microsoft Office basket.

By mid 2009, we should see the final cumulative updates to the current PPS offering, and from then on we'll just need to re-shift our focus.  After April 2009, customers and partners will no longer be able to purchase PPS, and will need to get a ECAL of SharePoint Server with Software Assurance, in order to obtain any additional licenses for PPS (even for current deployments).

Part of this decision stems from the fact that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort and investments in the next version of SQL Server in 2010 (aka. "Gemini").

You can read more about this topic, including their press release at the following links:

Office MS BI Blog: Microsoft BI Strategy Update

Just Call Me Office 14 SharePoint PerformancePoint Services

Microsoft BI Announcement Q&A