In 1988 I met my future wife, Eva.  That summer I left for DeKalb and made her a mix tape (that apparently was really meaningful beyond the hours I put into hand writing the track lists and getting the right tracks to fill up a 90 minute cassette.  One of the bands I picked was a little known...

no list of applications would be complete without microsoft office.  i have always used this on windows and had a chance to check out office 2004, 2008 and 2011 on the mac.  the latest versions of office (2010 for the pc and windows phone, 2011 for the mac and the web versions of office from...

remember real player ?  winamp ?  codec’s like xvid and divx ?  there are addins like adobe flash and quicktime to work with certain video formats on webpages.  occasionally i’ve had to go find a video codec or install one of these programs based upon content that i’ve got, but the...

imagine you are in your car, at a restaurant or a store and a song comes on that you really like but you don’t know the artist or song title (you make an educated guess with what sounds like the chorus, but certain songs/artists might use this as the title/might be hard to understand what they are saying...

before joining microsoft i was a technical trainer and part of that job was dealing with the constant "what if" questions that would come up in a microsoft course ("what if you created or deleted an object from two windows 2000 active directory domain controllers at exactly the same time?" - a personal...

for the last 30 years i have been using a computer and the one common thread among all those computers?  applications that made it useful.  many of these applications were “off the shelf” meaning i or someone i lived with paid for the application.  but an important part – especially of...

it’s december 1st and having recently gotten a windows phone 7 and starting to play around with applications, i’ve decided blog posts of my 25 favorite apps would be a good series for my blog. i’ve been using microsoft applications since ms dos 2.0 and microsoft flight simulator 2.0...

wow – how cool is this?  obviously anyone with a portable music player or using sync with the jukebox feature (why not for ipod or zune?) is familiar with album art, but what about online search? bing’s billboard’s past albums – recognize any of ‘em?

it’s been an entire year, but later this month tekken 6 comes out for the xbox 360.  since then i’ve added a second xbox to our home, begun watching netflix movies instantly on them, created my own custom avatar and gone back to mainly wireless game play even in titles like rock band and guitar...

today we conducted a windows 7 install fest at work.  i ran through some tips and tricks and learned a couple myself.  this evening i’m installing the zune 4.0 software on my last system running windows vista and then going to my windows 7 system.

so i’m headed to seattle for microsoft’s internal version of teched called techready and i’ve got high speed wi-fi access on the flight.  it’s usual for me to use the 4 hour flight to catch up on cached email or listen to the music and movies i’ve already downloaded, but to be able to send and receive...

when you are logged into windows live (home.live.com), you can go into your profile – permissions and on the bottom right is web activities to start, i’ve added 5 web activities in alphabetical order:  digg, facebook, pandora, twitter and zune social

today i discovered another useful facebook app – windows live messenger within facebook – click here to install it.  we’ve also announced that windows web messenger is now part of hotmail and people.live.com.  hopefully you’ve received the message that cwug (the chicago windows user group)...

almost a year ago we had a portable media session at cwug (chicago windows user group) which was a lot of fun.  we had people bring their archos media players, ipods, psps and zunes.  when we talked about the zune, one of the questions was do you need the hardware device to use the software...

so i’ve made the switch – yesterday i picked up a brand new 2010 ford fusion hybrid with sync (and navigation so i can pay attention to driving and not where i’m supposed to be on any particular day).  this marks my return to ford (the last one we owned was an escort in the 90s).  having a...

the next zune is going to have hd (hd radio and hd output) and an oled screen. check it out here .

so i've installed my first windows 7 home premium build 6801 and my first upgrade to an existing windows vista system (which just so happened to be running windows vista home premium). both of which emphasized the strong application compatibility we'll have between windows vista and windows 7. remember...

in case you didn't know - i'm a huge fan of rap music. old school, new and emerging artists, hardcore, i listen to a lot of different stuff. so besides finding ice cube on channel 9 (one of my first posts here), i am really excited that we'll be offering common's new album on dec 9th for 99 cents through...

wow - this just brought me back to a zune subscription. in the past when i went through periods of wishing i actually owned some of the songs i had synced to my zune i had to decide whether to pay an additional amount, but now included with the zune pass subscription, you get to keep 10 songs per month...