Monthly Archives: October 2006

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Another EepyBird Diet Coke + Mentos Video (Experiment #214)

This one’s called “The Domino Effect“, because it uses inter-connected Coke bottles that start each other, in series:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-274981837129821058

And, for good measure, here’s their original video, which I’m sure you’ve already seen:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2755541280271963544

Their videos are by far the best Diet Coke + Mentos experiments. Not only are their videos coreographed and set to music, but the two dudes do a decent job acting in them as well. For more of their videos, visit their site, EepyBird.

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Update on Microsoft Expression Web Designer

It appears that Web Designer is part of a suite of apps that has yet to launch, called Microsoft Expression. It will contain three apps: Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer and Web Designer. Graphic Designer will be a marriage (in MS fashion) of Fireworks, Illustrator and Photoshop (we’ll see how well that comes out), Interactive Designer will be a UI design/destop app tool (it integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio), and Web Designer will of course go after Dreamwever, as detailed before, emphasizing the MS coding platforms (ASP, ASP.NET).

Microsoft Expression Graphic DesignerMicrosoft Expression Interactive DesignerMicrosoft Expression Web Designer
Graphic Designer and Interactive Designer are still in community edition (read flaky), and it looks like Interactive Designer will only work with .NET Framework 3.0 plus Visual Studio Express (at least). Web Designer is out in Beta and ready for download and use.

I have to ponder MS’ reach on this. They’re clearly building upon their strengths and going after their competitors, which is what they’ve always done, but to go after Photoshop and Dreamweaver is pretty lofty. Only time (and users) will tell whether they’ve managed to reach the target, or, in usual MS fashion, delivered something half-baked. Now we begin to see where all that R&D money went — it didn’t just go to Vista, it also went to stuff like this.

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Three interesting downloads from Microsoft

Microsoft’s out to kick butt lately, and with these three downloads, it’s taking on three companies at once: Apple, Adobe and Intuit. Try them out, and judge how well Microsoftie’s doing in the fights:

  1. Windows Media Player 11: organized pretty much like iTunes, but with a leaner installer — iTunes weighs in at over 35 MB for the installer, and WMP11 is a featherweight at 24.5 MB.
  2. Microsoft Expression Web Designer (Beta): Dreamweaver, you bloated piece of software, here comes MS to kick you into shape! If you’re sick of 100% CPU overhead when synchronizing your sites with Dreamweaver, like I am, then give the Web Designer a go. You might find it tastes a bit like Equal, not sugar, but hey, anything to whip Adobe into shape, right? Oh, and the kicker: it opens .dwt files. Yup, you heard me right…
  3. Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 (Beta): Quickbooks, shake in your boots! This piece of software will let 1-person or small businesses do most of the things they could do in Quickbooks, and, they’ll be able to do them knowing an enterprise-level database is storing their data, not some Quickbooks proprietary format db. Yes, Office Account 2007 installs SQL Server 2005 Express. A reboot is needed as well after the install (b/c of SQL Server). Yes, it imports data from Quickbooks, and from MS Money.
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Motorola's new, cheap cellphone

Motorola's new MotofoneMotorola’s just come up with a very nice and thin cellphone that’s just that: a cellphone. It’s called the Motofone, and has no other features — no music player, no digital camera, no fancy gadgets, games, etc. It’s just a cellphone, and it looks really cool!

It’s getting billed as the “dumb phone” by folks in the media, but I think it’s a really smart choice on the part of Motorola. I for one have been asking for just such a device for over a year. They’re targeting this phone for developing countries, but I say bring it to the States, too! I’ve been waiting for it for some time, get it over here! And make it even smaller and “dumber” if possible. I’m sick of bulky devices. I just want a phone, credit-card thin if possible. That would make me very happy!

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My favorite blogs and feeds

I’ve wanted to publish a list of my favorite blogs and feeds for some time, so here goes… These are blogs/feeds I read either daily, or at least once a week, and they’re listed in alphabetical order. Some of them are from established news sources, and some are personal blogs. They’re a snapshot of my current feed subscriptions in Google Reader. If you ask how I keep up with them, it’s pretty simple, and only requires about 30-45 minutes a day — pretty much the same amount of time it would take to read a newspaper. Thankfully, some of them aren’t high volume feeds, or I’d be in trouble…

You’re welcome to check them out, of course, and do subscribe to them yourselves if you like them.

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