Jim Clark recently put together an excellent series of articles describing some of the steps that Microsoft could take to educate the Average Joe about Windows Media Center and expand the market for WMC. Obviously, those of us spending our days perusing sites like We Got Served would not be the target of such an effort, but our lives are full of these Average Joes. Over the next several weeks I am going to be sharing my experiences as I essentially build a network from the ground up, tailored to implementing Windows Home Server and Windows Media Center together.

My ultimate goal in sharing my experiences with you is to provide insight into how you can maximize Windows Media Center and Windows Home Server in an environment of novice users. There should be points of interest along the way for users of all backgrounds though. Being a bit of nerd, I will be building or retrofitting all of the systems myself and sharing tips on what kind of hardware to select, but will also be providing tips on what to look for in retail systems for those WGS readers not interested in building their own systems. I will be detailing some of the specific software and hardware accessories that I recommend for maximizing ease-of-use and family life integration. I will also be extensively exploring how to use WMC in a home theater PC, or HTPC, and the pros and cons of dedicating a PC to the living room versus using Media Center Extenders throughout the house. Finally, I will be discussing some of the considerations that go into using Windows Media Center in a multi-PC environment and how to integrate multiple WMC machines, extenders, and WHS in a cohesive way that will remain transparent and user-friendly for even the least savvy of computer users.

The Ad-hoc Network

The issues involved in deploying Windows Media Center for novice users are nothing new for me, but I want to give some background into why I am going to explore this topic with you, the reader, through the lens of an entire network deployment. After all, I do not expect that most readers will be interested in undertaking quite such an extensive action simply to roll out WMC or WHS. However, if the following situation sounds familiar, you might just change your mind.

My family’s first Media Center PC was an HTPC that I put together shortly after MCE 2005 became available. It was such a success that it quickly supplanted our cable company’s DVR. This HTPC remained the centerpiece of our entertainment center for more than a year. It wasn’t always an easy arrangement. Being the only Media Center system in the house, it was also my experimental testing grounds for new plug-ins, registry hacks, and all around tech tinkering. While I learned a lot from this experimentation, the resulting instabilities, incompatibilities, and the occasional borked system tried my wife’s patience.

After more than a year of this arrangement, our home network went through an unparalleled round of expansion. We went from having two PCs, the family PC and the HTPC, to having four PCs, an Xbox 360, a laptop, and a NAS over the course of a year. PCs got shuffled from room to room as I attempted to give each family member their own PC, began migrating to Windows Vista, and switched to using the Media Center Extender in the Xbox 360 instead of dedicating a PC for use as an HTPC. The result of all this movement has been a situation that I am sure many WGS readers have encountered at one point or another: a disorganized mess of a network with inconsistent network setups, out of synch OS installations, and no coherent backup and monitoring strategy.

The plan is to reboot the network. I will start with the networking equipment. My router is failing and I want to make the jump to gigabit to take advantage of the Cat 6 cable I ran through the house a couple of years ago. It is overkill, but that never stopped me before. Next up comes the WHS machine to replace the NAS. I have been meaning to build a WHS since it came out, but have found one reason or another to put it off. Joining the team here at WGS and the recent release of Power Pack 1 means I have no excuses left. Tune in next time to learn more about how I went about building this server, prepped the new network, and prepared the existing machines for the new network.

• Salutations!
• Integrating Windows Home Server with Windows Media Center
• Wanted: Windows Media Center & Digital Media News Writers
• Media Center Integration With Windows Home Server - Your Ideas?
• Hello from Across The Pond

Rainald Tassler, one of OneNote's MVPs, had contacted me a while back asking to have the Table of Contents powertoy tweaked to show a button on the toolbar rather than a text string. The text strings tend to take up too much horizontal space on the toolbar and he wanted to replace it with his own image. Fortunately, there is a way to replace that command in the toolbar without writing code and only tweaking the registry. Here's how:

1. Exit OneNote.
2. First, create the image if you want to replace a string with an image. It needs to be a 16x16 BMP format image.
3. Save it in the same folder as the location into which you installed the addin. For instance, if you installed the addin to c:\program files\ microsoft\on table of content setup, copy your bitmap there. It doesn't really matter where you put it, just make note of where it is.
4. Now it gets a little tricky. Run regedit and open HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\OneNote\Addins
5. Highlight the addins key and right click it. Select "Export" and save the file to any location you want. This is now your backup in case the next few steps go awry.
6. You will see a bunch of GUIDS like {806AD7E…} and so on. For the table of contents addin, look for this GUID: {4FE3B6DF-28B8-41d0-A4F5-7010E236B4A2}. Expand its branch
7. On the right, you will see a string entry for "ButtonText" with a value of Table of Contents. Delete that key:

8.  Now add a new string value named "IconPath". For its value, enter the path you copied from step 2 and be sure to add the name of the file. Here's what mine looked like:

9.  Now exit regedit.

10.  Start OneNote. The "Table of Contents" button should be gone and replaced with the icon you created and pointed to!

You can also reverse these steps and make text strings show for any icons you want.

I followed the directions on page 11 of the "How to create toolbar addins for OneNote" PDF to come up with routine. Feel free to browse through it. You can even change which toolbar addin buttons appear on in addition to changing the icon. For instance, the task request addin I wrote for Outlook puts the icon for the addin on the Outlook toolbar (value == 9 in this case).

And if you want to change one of these values and get to step 4 and cannot find the addin you want to modify, be sure to look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Some addins install their keys there so all users can get the same experience.

Have fun tweaking the addins for OneNote!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

In his audio program The Art of Exceptional Living he says:

“Here’s what sharing does… makes room for more. Key question, if this glass is full of water can it hold any more? If the glass is full of water, can it hold any more? And the answer is yes, yes, if you pour some out. So jot that down. If you want more, you’ve got to pour out what you’ve got, then you have the opportunity to receive more.

Now, unlike the glass that remains the same size when you pour some out; not so in consciousness human beings. Your capacity will increase the more you share. You’ll get bigger and bigger and bigger. “

So in an effort to share, here are two articles I wrote for other sites I thought you might like:

6 Arguments for Embracing Hard Work and Avoiding Laziness at Dumb Little Man

How EOM Makes Your Email More Efficient at Lifehacker

I welcome your raves or criticisms in the comments below…

In 2000 I bought Cisco stock for, at the time, a low $56 per share.  It was my first chance to dip my big toe in the water of stock market investing.   Almost all analysts said it was a great investment - it had historically proven strong.  With the bonus incentive that Cisco had made many investors millionaires.

But then the Internet bubble burst and Cisco stock started dropping.  It went down to $50 a share.  Then dipped to $45.

I decided if it hit $40 I’d sell.  Well, it breezed right on past $40 to around $37 and I still didn’t sell because I wanted it to go back up to $40 and Then I would sell.  It never hit $40 again.  So I set a new figure.  If it hits $35 a share, then I’ll sell.  Sadly, I still didn’t sell.  I kept riding it out.  How far?  I’ll tell you in a minute.

But first, if you look at the behavior of riding out a dropping stock, you’ll notice it seems like irrational behavior, no?

So why would a seemingly rational person (me) make an irrational decision like ride out a falling stock for his first investment in the market?

Playing not to lose and losing anyway…

Irrational decision making by normal people is what Sway is all about.  After all, my Cisco investment experience went from a simple test of the market to losing my entire leg to the sharks of Wall Street.  And although I haven’t completed the book, the chapter about playing to lose is brilliant.  They call it the “Swamp of Commitment”.  I know that I must be careful with my commitments otherwise I’ll drown in that swamp.  It explains my behavior in my Cisco investment very well.

So why would I have continued such a mistake?  According to the authors Ori and Rom Brafman, in staying with my investment, I was chasing a loss.  Much like a gambler who sits at a blackjack table until the repo man takes his car, I went against everyone telling me to “Brad, for the love of God, get the F— out of CSCO!!”  I simply hoped to recover the money I had lost.  Sadly, I sold out in 2002 for approximately $16 a share.

Before you put on your best Fred Sanford impression and scream “You big dummy!”  I’ll note that playing to lose in this instance isn’t confined only to me or my actions.  It’s quite common.  

• A salesman who takes actions against his company’s best interest so he won’t lose a customer - instead of trying to win more customers. 
• A wife who says things she’ll regret later to her husband so she won’t lose an argument instead of playing to win by formulating a solution where both would win.
• A group of Harvard MBA students who traded $200 for a $20 bill instead of cutting losses at $10 and going home (example from the book.)

Loss Induced Stress

Losing what we have is stressful.  We not only experience a gap, we often have to deal with remorse of losing in the first place.  Friends question us about the loss.  For me, on each successive downturn of the stock, it made the loss greater, thus, the pressure to recover was even more intense.

This leaves me with a number of questions. First and foremost:  If we have a tendency to act irrationally at times in order to avoid loss and we know in hindsight that it’s not good for us, how can we tell ahead of time whether we are acting out of the irrational fear of loss or not?

For instance you know I am persistent, it’s the name of my blog!    I think sticking with things is one of the cornerstones of success. But how do you know what to stick with and what to drop? I am hoping Sway answers these questions for me.

Avoid Playing Not To Lose

Here are five of my ideas based on experience on how to avoid acting irrational out of fear of loss:

1.  Plan before major investments of time, money or energy - Considering an investment in hard earned money?  How about investing months of your life into a new project?  I think it’s crucial that there’ll be a plan in place. How long do you expect to stay in before the payoff happens?  What is an acceptable loss?  Be it time, money or energy, how much can you stand to lose in this investment?  

Example: A lot of people want to start a blog but they give up after the first month. That’s definitely not enough time. But what is enough time?

2.  Set a deadline for progress - Decide on how long you will stick with the investment for it to show a return and stick to it.  On the date of your deadline, take an accounting.  Are you showing the expected progress or is it more or less.  In investing money are you showing more money?  In the investment in a project, is the project close to completion?   

Example:  If you have started a blog and your 6 month deadline was up.  You would want to see the results of your dedication.  Do you see a profit in ad revenue or have you reached your goal 500 readers? Are you at least close to your intended results?

3.  Simply ask yourself if you are taking actions to avoid loss - This step will take some soul searching.  But here is a tip.  Think of all the times you have said “I have to do… or else____ will happen.”   If you are taking a compulsive action to avoid something from happening, you are likely playing to lose.  

Example:  We all have a “whipped” friend or two who jumps through seemingly crazy hoops to please their significant other.  We wonder how a guy can baby talk on the phone 5 times a day.  We wonder how a woman will put up with a cheating husband.  I am sure the thought “I have to do this or they will leave.” has crossed their minds.

4.   If it’s not working, consider restructure - if you created something like a blog for people who like jaywalking and you find that you have absolutely no readers. What else could you spin your idea into that would be successful? Perhaps a blog on walking for fitness would be more successful.  In my stock investing example, I could have traded Cisco stock when it hit the emergency level of $40 for something outside the technology sector.

5.   Give up gracefully and learn - At the end of your deadline, you may decide what you are doing is not working.  Also, there is no satisfactory way to restructure it.  Many business partnerships work this way.  One person wants out the other doesn’t.  One person does the bulk of the work, the other is a lazy jerk.  In the case where your deadline comes and you are showing no progress and it doesn’t appear progress in on the near horizon.  Give up gracefully.  

Giving up gracefully means not beating up on yourself or others.  It also means not giving up on yourself.  Take your loss in stride and learn from it.  While many people will stick with a long failing business because of the fear of loss, they never consider what they gain by letting it go.  They don’t consider the free time they’ll have to do other things.  They don’t consider the money they’ll recover since it’s no longer going into a bottomless pit.  They don’t consider the valuable knowledge that can come from failing at a business.  Only through failing can they know at a reflex level dozens of actions not to take in their next venture.

I’m sure you have some ideas on diagnosing irrational behavior and stopping it.  Please share your ideas in the comments.

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