The Vacuum Tube : Office Productivity

5 Things About Me You All Probably Don't Know

Viral Tarpara — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:12:00 GMT

So apparently my best friend since joining Microsoft, Anand Iyer, feels the need to involve me in his childish online ice breakers. Apparently he is currently involved in an inescapable game of blog tag. To better understand this phenomenon to the masses, I decided to research this odd online social dynamic with the world's definitive source for accurate, updated, and editable information--Wikipedia.org. According to Wikipedia:

Blog Tag, or better known as memetag, and I quote, "is a blog tag that is included in all posts that reference a meme. When a meme is started on a blog — for example, 'your top five favourite movies' — the meme tag is included at the foot of the text of each post that responds to the meme invitation. By including a memetag, bloggers are recognising the initial creator of the meme and allowing them to track how their meme has spread across the blogosphere through the use of social media tools such as Technorati. While inclusion of a memetag is not mandatory, it is done in the spirit of information sharing across the web and is a system based on trust."

In all honesty, if there wasn't a wiki about it, I was going to create one and attribute it to Stephen Colbert ~~hey it's true he created it~~. But I suppose it would be interesting how far my online presence could propagate ~~you can't start a sentence with 'but'~~. So...

#5 - I wrote production design code in Intel's XScale Monahans chip. ~~Did you ever wonder why your battery meter didn't work?~~ I converted old VHDL legacy code into fresh Verilog code. It was pretty cool work and it taught me that I could never work in a cubicle again. After my experience at that company, I was ecstatic to come to Microsoft.

#4 - I use Gmail for my personal email and my personal computer is an iBook G4. I know what all of you are thinking. That being said, if I didn't have my work laptop with Outlook 2007 on it, my productivity would go down 80%. Please forgive me if I seem less than convinced when Eric Schmidt and Douglass Merrill say they completely "eat their dogfood" and use Google Apps within their company. It wouldn't surprise me that they actually have a super-duper version of it running internally, but lets be honest, Google Apps, in its present form, is a half baked attempt at an enterprise suite. Enterprises would be better off with deploying Office Live even if Microsoft is currently only targetting small and medium businesses with that offering. The funniest part of the Google Apps video is when Merrill makes the argument that Google Apps meets your compliance standards because it meets Google's compliance standards. WOW...I'm pissed, I should write an article about this.

#3 - My first computer was my Dad's AT&T 8088 machine with two double-density floppy drives and a green monochrome monitor. I was age 4. I learned how to turn on and load "Zaxxon" and "Wheel of Fortune" from disks. Oddly I got glasses by age 5. I wonder if it is a coincidence?

#2 - I've seen a lot of the world and done some amazing things in my life so far. I've gone skiing in the Himalayas, went white-water rafting in Nepal, seen half of Europe, seen some of Hinduism's and Jainism's most holiest shrines, and faced certain death in a Los Angeles drive-by but survived ~~don't ever flip the bird at LAX~~. If my life ended today, I would leave satisfied.

#1 - And finally the number one thing you probably don't know about me, when I was 3, I rode a red tricycle down the stairs in my uncle's house because I saw a guy do it on a motorcycle on TV. Let's just say to this day, every person in my family never fails to remind me of my...err..daring ~~retarded~~ nature.

*Tags TBA*

Thank you. That is all. Here it is! Your moment of zen! ~~milk does her body good~~ *cards flying* *laughing like Letterman*

Video: Milk does body good! It did for Carmen.

And There Was Much Rejoicing: Office Migration Planning Manager

Viral Tarpara — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:59:00 GMT

For people who wanted to convert all their MS Office documents to the ECMA OpenXML file format *soon to be ISO ratified* in a batch process, this download will speed up your organization's migration. IT'S FREE!! ~~like beer!~~

Don't worry, it wont modify your orginal binary files, it will just create new XML equivalents in a separate folder. There is no downside, unless you think files that take up half the size is bad. *yay*

Vista, Office 2007, BDD, Exchange, Infrastructure Protection Oh My!

Viral Tarpara — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:29:00 GMT

Test Windows Vista and 2007 Office system for your organization http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/default.mspx Download the free Business Desktop Deployment 2007 solution to get all the deployment tools http://microsoft.com/desktopdeployment...(read more)

OpenXML, ODF, and Drinking the Kool-Aid at Microsoft

Viral Tarpara — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:03:00 GMT

So I've finally embraced this blogging thing. I told myself that after Techready4, which is a MSFT conference for the field, I would blog about all the non-confidential stuff I learned about. So far the topics I've gone to have been nothing short of amazing! My favorites thus far have been about OpenXML, ODF, and the Office suite. It was a real eye opening set of presentations that really drove home the point that people in the online community have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to XML document standards. I'm sure I'll be getting alot of flames for that statement, but its true. As an avid reader of Slashdot for about 10 years, I've found the recent FUD about ODF and OpenXML particularly disappointing. ODF is not a mature standard, it doesn't even work right! The dumbest thing is that if government mandates the use of ODF, it'll pretty much force them to use Microsoft Office since most of the other suites can't even make ODF 100% compatible between suites. Rob Weir and company like to claim that ODF has been implemented in Abiword, Google Docs, KOffice and OpenOffice, but last time I checked, a document format is supposed to look the same regardless of the app it is opened in. ODF fails miserablely. This also defeats the point of adopting ODF legislation. Even before I joined Microsoft, I thought OpenOffice sucked, honestly buy a Mac and use Pages. OpenXML, on the contrary, is a fully specified format that will ensure compatibility between suites. Between Microsoft Office, Apple Pages, Corel, Novell OpenOffice, NeoOffice, you have 99.999% of the market. Let's be honest, who is IBM kidding? ~~apparently the world~~ I'll be following up this post with interviews on why ODF and OpenXML has become such a politically charged topic. Stay Tuned!

Other stuff I've expanded my knowledge about was Windows Longhorn server, Google, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Expression Suite. Many of my friends make fun of me because since joining the company, I've done a complete 180 in my view of Microsoft. My collegue Woody says you have to "drink the Kool-aid" when you come to Microsoft. His statement was profound. As an Apple employee for two years, I became a diehard. As a member of the Church of Jobs, I actually went into my final interview on Microsoft Campus carrying my iBook G4 to give a 10 minute presentation (I didn't even use Powerpoint hehe). Suffice it two say I owe a lot to Jobs and Apple Keynote. The interviewers didn't even see it coming. When I did finally get the offer (3 hours later), I took it while telling myself that I'll never use Windows for home use. (I even used Entourage for my corporate email...it's shit).

Three months later, I couldn't resist the Kool-Aid ~~mmm grape~~. I still whince sometimes going back to Windows ~~imagine mosquitos the size of your fist~~, it's painful when coming from OS X in all its glory. I still do all my photos and video editing on my Mac, and I still use iTunes. But stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, it excites me to know that Vista is significantly going to change the user experience for people not willing to jump to Apple. The out-of-box experience of Vista is well-rounded and complete unlike XP which required additional apps and downloads to be able to do all the things consumers want to do with their computer i.e. email, internet, pictures, videos, sharing. The digital-lifestyle Windows OS is here! The funny thing with all this is that I barely touch my iBook now, I'm so busy with work, and when I say work, I mean email, and when I say email, I mean Outlook. Outlook is evil.

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And now to finish, taking a play from Jon Stewart's playbook, "here's your moment of Zen" ~~Ellen Feiss~~