Before Windows Media Center Edition was released, I purchased two TiVo DVRs.  My family has really enjoyed these units - In fact my 3 year old daughter has become so used to being able to watch a favorite episode of Rugrats on demand that when we explained...

Jeff Swift was asking me about royalty-free music earlier today and the first thing that popped to mind was Richard Stallman's magnificent " Free Software Song " - Jeff thanked me for my suggestion, but pointed out that it wasn't very appropriate fare...

This last weekend a couple of guys from the EEC and the Windows Server TAP team went down to a place called Hole-in-the-wall Paintball to shoot each other with small projectiles from pneumatic weapons :-) Before From left to right, we have Matt...

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? - Having been born and raised here in the Redmond area with a couple of years spent in rural parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland and elsewhere, here's how I tested out on the latest " timewaster of the week ...

Last week the Terminal Services Team squared off against the EEC crew in a very one-sided dodgeball game at the ProClub in Redmond... I wasn't able to make it, but as I hear things, the score was something like EEC=3, TS=0! Stanley Jones took some video...

The EEC has recently been evaluating iSCSI technology options from some of our vendor partners - Really interesting stuff. We haven't had any requests from customers for this technology yet, but we want to get up to speed on it and gain some operational...

Well, it's official: Richard Gregg has been sentenced to 2 years in one of Washington State's fine correctional facilities for the crime of tragic stupidity. This is really a shame - Richard is a very likable fellow who had run the software library for...

I had a surprise the other day - I run MSN Messenger 6.2 on my laptop here at work for occasional IM sessions with friends and family, and after I signed in yesterday morning with my user@microsoft.com Passport, it prompted me to change my Passport email...

Wow! If a Microsoftie has a few complimentary words to say about Sun's latest Windows-compatible hardware, should he be fired for revealing his latent "hardware fetishist" tendencies? According to TheRegister , the answer is a logic-defying "yes". Fortunately...

I never saw this one coming: After playing with the new WindowsXP x64 Opteron-based Sun workstations at tonight's Sun mixer held in honor of the deployment of two racks worth of new SunFire Windows Server 2003 gear, my boss cleaned off his old HP desktop...

Well, after reading Aaron Margosis' blog , I decided to give running as a limited user at home another try... I'm used to running *Nixoid workstations in this manner of course and I've tried running this way on my Windows boxes on a couple of occasions...

There's been talk around the halls of building 25 of exploring an IBuySpy/CommunityServer/CommunityStarter type web site to host community-generated ITPro content, provide community resources pertaining to Windows Server System products, and perhaps add...

It's a widely acknowledged fact in the software industry that we've got a pretty hot marketing machine here at Microsoft that is fueled by an endless stream of excellent products and creativity, but I've been thinking a lot recently about the " Windows...

On the topic of Kindomality, for those that have a copy of the book , they may have noticed there's a different version of the personality test in the appendices than the better known online version . Here's a companion worksheet I put together that let...

I know the www.kingdomality.com quiz has made the internet rounds a few times, but I was recently handed a copy of the book by my boss and I really did find "Kingdomality: An Ingenious New Way to Triumph in Management" to be quite an engaging read that...

A friend put me on to this the other day: Microsoft has released a free beta download of our new Windows AntiSpyware application . I ran it on a couple of machines at work and at home and it detected nothing, but on my daughter's PC, it found several...

Well, I'm pleased to report that after sinking an excessive amount of time into this project and stumbling through all of the gotchas detailed in the previous two installments, I finally hit upon a set of products and a work flow that resulted in really...

While I am pleased to report that Movie Maker and Windows XP Media Center 2005 have been responding within specified parameters, I am displeased to find that the most of host of 3rd party media capture products I've tried since have not lived up to expectations...

While catching up on some time off this month, I decided to sit down the other day and digitize several hours of old and recent home video, but despite having what I thought were likely to be all the right tools for the job, this turned out to be much...

After executing on grueling schedule this Summer, the EEC crew decided top blow off some steam by tearing up my boss's cabin a few hours north of here one weekend... Lots of sun, fun, and hurricanes :-) I decided to try out the new PhotoStory package...

The Enterprise Engineering Center has two really cool positions available to the right candidates... We're looking for some rare and talented professionals, and I'd be extremely grateful for any truly outstanding referrals you'd care to send our way!...