Great news, google buying one of my favorite social services.  I hope this means great things in the future for vark.com!

If you’re interested, or know someone who is, just email me or have them contact me directly, or leave a comment here.  We haven’t set a date, yet, but it will probably be next weekend.

I was really, REALLY wrong.

I spent about 10 seconds on hold, got a friendly rep that apologized and told me how it must be frustrating to not have my Kindle working.  They cross shipped me a brand new unit, no questions asked, and asked me politely to send the old one back.  I had my Kindle at 10am the next day.

That kind of customer service is amazing, and Amazon is a model for all other companies to follow.

Anyone else have any awesome Amazon customer service stories?

 http://mccain.senate.gov/public/home/contact/webformActionIAV2.cfm

Dear Senator McCain,

In my opinion, your net neutrality bill is very, very harmful to US citizens, and very very beneficial to the rich, and corporations.

My name is William Harris, and I am a United States citizen from Nevada. I’m contacting you about your recently proposed bill that would block the FCC from enforcing “net neutrality.” I want you to know that I disagree with your bill, because the concept of net neutrality will actually help to defend my 1st amendment rights as an American.

What net neutrality does is guarantee to me that I will never be silenced or slowed down by people or companies who have more money than me.  I am tired of people with more money than me claiming that because they have more money than I do, they are more worthy.  They are not more worthy.

Bandwidth costs consistently go down year after year, and ISPs do not need to charge more from the site owners, if they want more money they can raise their monthly fees.  This is a burden that we will all share as a people should they decide it is necessary in order to protect the Internet and content delivery in general.  Thus far, it has not been necessary, because bandwidth prices are not increasing!

I was puzzled by your opposition to something as American as free speech as you have always been someone who seems to support such things, but I was not at all surprised by a report I read on America Online’s service “Daily Finance,” which states:

“McCain, who introduced the bill to undermine the new rules, has received some $894,379 in contributions from AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other broadband interests over his career, many of those dollars directed to his 2008 presidential campaign, according to the Sunlight Foundation.”

I hope you will rescind your bill and put American citizens before your own private interests. It is far past the time that politicians accept campaign contributions and later proceed to do terrible things as a means to repay favors to those donors.  This is one of those terrible things, and because of a neutral Internet I am able to know what you’re doing.  Given your bill, ISPs could easily “manage” this dissenting opinion and we as a people would have no recourse.  This is UNACCEPTABLE for them to hold this power.

Sincerely,

William Harris

See this lifehacker article for more information.

Dear Digsby,

I have always been OK with companies installing profitable software on the side as long as I can turn it off.  Digsby has always been cool about being up front with what would be installed, and giving me an option to go without it.

The latest “research” feature installed without an option was a bit of a break of trust, but I’m glad that you’re “fixing” the issue for future installs.

Digsby is a good client, but make sure that when you’re installing things on our PCs that we are aware of the nature of the install, and give us an easy way to disable the feature. If you can consistently conform to this, we will always be happy.  Power users will rarely get trapped by the software, and normal people probably don’t care…but you have to make sure to appease the power users because we’re vocal and tireless, and we are the influential group that will dictate what the ‘normals’ are using by our recommendations.  I have probably introduced 50-100 people to digsby in the past, but would not hesitate to call or email each one and tell them to drop it if I felt digsby weren’t being honest about their revenue generating programs.

I hope digsby can learn from this to know that as long as everything is up front and in the open, people will be happy.  Digsby has been installing “crapware” since forever, but notice no one complained until it came in stealthily and under a slightly misleading and hard to find menu item!

Good luck in the future, you’ve got a great client, I hope that you continue on the path you’ve forged so far, and I look forward to using digsby and recommending it to my friends, coworkers, clients, and family for many years to come.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aAFgqtwU4K2Y

I’ve mapped out a quick plan to achieve my goals of MCITPs for Database Administration and Business Intelligence in both SQL Server 2005 and 2008.

MCTS – SQL Server 2005 – Exam 70-431

The first step on my path, and my introduction to many of the technologies that I’m weak with.  This one will take me a few weeks of study and practice.

MCITP – Database Administrator – Exam 70-443 (database design)

This one should be pretty easy.  Designing DBs is what I do, and I don’t think I’ll have much of an issue here.

MCITP – Database Administrator – Exam 70-444 (optimizing and maintaining)

 Basic database administration here, simple stuff.

MCITP – Database Administrator 2008 – Exam 70-453

 The upgrade to 2008, I’ll likely spend more time on this one, since it will cover the new technologies in SQL 2008 that I haven’t had much exposure to in the real world.  I’ll be forced to learn things like geospatial and temporal data handling, filestreams, and other bleeding edge technology.  I expect this to be one of the more enjoyable studies, but it may take me 2 months to get a hold of the material.

MCTS – Business Intelligence  – Exam 70-445

 This one should be difficult, as I am quite well versed in reporting services, but have almost no experience with SSIS and Microsoft’s ETL.

MCITP – Business Intelligence – Exam 70-446

 More of the same here, lots of new technology to learn with respect to Data Warehousing and Data Mining.  I don’t even know how much MDX I’ll have to learn to pass this one.  

MCITP – Business Intelligence Developer – Exam 70-455

 Since I’ve been quite interested in the capabilities of SQL 2008’s data warehousing, this one should be a really fun study.

MCAS Excel 2007 – Exam 77-602

The cherry on top of my certification stack, this will give me the basic Excel chops to extend my BI work on the desktop.

Once these are complete, we’ll have a look at the MySQL CMA exam, and possibly the Database Developer MCITP track.  Someday, maybe even the $20,000 3 week Master Certification for SQL Server 2008.  Has anyone looked deeply into this certification?  I’d be very, very interested in talking with you!

Born December 16th, at 5:35am, 7 lbs 12 oz, Mara Isabelle Harris, my lovely new daughter!

Wrong.

DLNA doesn’t really stream every format (MKV anyone?) and it has issues with large libraries of MP3s, which are becoming quite common these days.  It also doesn’t support Internet content like youtube videos, or hulu.com.

There are a few things you can run on your server that can help with this issue.

The first is tversity.  This amazing product allows for podcasting, vidcasting, live transcoding, and support for big libraries and custom folder interface on your PS3.  This product runs on windows, and streams to any device, invluding your cell phone, any web browser device, your Wii, your PS3, and on and on.  You can use it to stream out to the Internet, too, getting full access to your entire media library from anywhere in the world.

The second product is a new one, right out of beta, which supports Hulu, CBS, ESPN, Netflix online streaming, and Youtube.  This one is great, and I’m really excited to see it.  It will cost you $30, and is worth every penny.  It is called PlayOn, head on over to MediaMall’s site and check it out!

Another neat one is uSirius, a neat little app to interface your tversity software with Sirius satellite radio’s streaming online content.

Update : check out Krynsky’s post, which is everything mine should have been!