Now that Michelle and I both have the same phone (the awesome T-Mobile Dash), we need a way to tell them apart (having already had the embarassing problem of grabbing the wrong phone in the morning.) Since she bought hers first, Michelle has made it clear that this is my problem to solve.

Enter Tego, an online shop where you can make custom skins for tons of different devices including phones, computers, mp3 players, and gaming devices. The design process is simple and well-built. You just pick the template (they have tons including the Dash) and overlay your images. 

Once I decide what to make, I'll order one and let you know how it turned out. I might them for our Xbox 360, the kids' Gameboy DS Lites, and my laptop if they're cool. Slick.

Now that we finally have an Xbox 360, I'm also on Xbox Live. My gamer tag is Disco Flow (old fraternity story...) I'd love to have more (which is to say any) friends on Live, so feel free to send me an invite so we can get our frag on. (Note, I'll only accept invites from people I know pretty well.)

Two weeks ago (before the storm and such), I took another trip to Whistler, this time with friends (and no kids). Eric (Group Program Manager for Microsoft's Digital Memories team) has a place up there and invited me and Chris (architect-type dude on Live Platform or some such thing) up for a boys weekend. It must have been an unofficial Microsoft weekend up there. We ran into zillions of Microsoft folks, including a girls trip of folks from my team (Kristen, Kellie, and Kellie's non-MS friend Juli) and Eric's sister, Stacey (who is a developer at Microsoft). We wound up hanging out with the girls and skied some with a bunch of other MS guys too. 

  

It was really different skiing with adults vs. chasing Andrew (9) down the hill. My legs were definitely not ready for real skiing, plus I think my skis are simply too advanced and long for me. I was dying, but we had really good days for skiing. One of the fun things I did this time was wear my Garmin Forerunner 301 GPS while I was skiing. I used SportTracks (still one of my favorite apps) to pull the data off and then converted the tracks to Google Earth for a 3D rendering of the days' work. (You can see three tracks in the image above. The rightmost is the first day I skied on Whistler. The left tracks are on Blackcomb. The first track is me, the second track is Eric (who skied out down the mountain). Whistler Village is in the lower left corner.) 

We also enjoyed the great apres-ski scene Whistler has to offer including many beers at the Longhorn Saloon (the inspiration for the codename of Windows Vista too, btw) and a great dinner at the Bearfoot Bistro, complete with Eric sabering a bottle of sparkling wine open (which is super fun incidentally, if a little less dramatic than one might expect.

Fortunately, the drive home was much easier than last time. I'm ready for another trip any time, hopefully with some new skis (maybe the Volkl AC2...)

This is a test post from my T-Mobile Dash. I downloaded a nifty app called Phone SharpMT. It allows you to post to MoveableType and Typepad blogs from your Windows Smartphone. This could be cool!

Over the past few weeks, I've been playing with the beta versions of Windows Media Player 11. It's really a huge improvement over previous versions of WMP; the UI is much cleaner, focusing on being a great music player first vs. trying to be all things to all media types.

In particular I love the integration with MTV's URGE online music service. I played with the free trial of the service that allows you to listen to and download as much music as you want. It is incredibly addictive, finding old songs I'd almost forgotten, finding new music through their playlists (who knew there was so much great swamp blues?), and listening to current hits. I've spent hours and hours finding fun music online and enjoyed it enough to pay for a full year's subscription.

I also liked it enough to buy an iRiver Clix MP3 player. This is a very sexy little 2G music player (the terrible iRiver site does nothing to show off how slick this little guy is.). The whole screen is a big rocker switch, the UI is very swish in a Vista-like way, and the feature set is great (music, fm, video, Flash games, voice recording, photos). The Clix supports the DRM scheme from URGE, so I can download songs onto the player from the service as part of my subscription. It's been super fun listening to the songs on the Clix when I work out or in the car (through an FM transmitter I have).

The combination of WMP11, URGE, and the Clix is the first viable competitor to iTunes/iPod IMHO. I'm anxious to see what comes of the Zune player we're working on; in the meantime, I love this setup. (Note, I don't know anything about Zune aside from what I've read on the Internet and cannot vouch for the accuracy of the Wikipedia article I linked to.)

Try out beta 2 of WMP11 here.

I'm writing this post using the Windows Live Writer beta. This is a client application that hooks up to various blog services and allows a more word processor like. Normally, when I write my blog, I use a web form and have to hand-code a bunch of HTML to do things like lists or images. Live Writer makes all that easier.

The setup couldn't have been easier. I just gave it the URL for my blog and my username/password. It figured out what blog software I used, and it imported all my styles and categories automatically. When I write this, it uses the styles from my blog, so I can easily see how everything will look. There's even a view that shows the draft post injected into my blog, so I can see it context.

The spell checking will be a huge plus too. Right now, background spell checking (you know, the red squiggles) doesn't appear to be working, but I'm sure it will be before release. The build also has some bugs; it crashed on me on my Vista box at work and lost my post. Life in the fast lane, I guess.

Still, this seems awesome. The UI is straightforward and clean. I can't wait to try it out over time. Give it a whirl and tell me what you think!

I gave in to my need for geeky retail therapy a few weeks ago and bought a white MacBook. It's a lovely machine (although it runs really hot), and OS X has a lot of things I like. I enjoyed messing with Dashboard widgets, doing fun transitions with Keynote, and enjoying the lovely screensavers. But the thing I really wanted to do was run Windows on top of all that OS X fun stuff.

I started with Parallels Desktop for Mac, a virtual machine that runs Windows like an application within OS X. The trial installed easily and everything worked really well. I especially liked the swooshy 3D transitions between OSX and Parallels when I ran Windows in fullscreen.

Unfortunately, I had a hard time getting Windows in Parallels to connect to the Microsoft corporate network, so I resorted to running BootCamp to dual boot the MacBook into Windows. Apple did their typical smooth job with BootCamp, even though it's still in beta. BootCamp first asks you to re-partition the disk into Windows and Mac drives; the interface for this was simple and elegant, nicer than PartitionMagic on the PC side and certainly better than the nothing we offer in Windows. They then ask you to stick in a blank CD to burn all the drivers you'll need in Windows to run on the Mac hardware.

After that you reboot onto the Windows installation CD and start setup. (There were some weird messups here with the Mac not ejecting CDs at the right time, but otherwise no prob). After setup and first run you stick in the driver CD, run setup and everything is great.

I was able to join the Microsoft corporate domain and then the wheels fell off. There was no way to type ctrl-alt-delete to log in. (The MacBook doesn't have a Windows "delete" key.) I hooked up an external USB keyboard, logged in, and tried to figure out how to proceed. With some almost correct help from the web, I discovered I could use remapkey.exe from the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (a free download from Microsoft) to remap one of the keys (I chose the right Window/cloverleaf key) to "delete". Now I could log in.

I then set out to add a right mouse button (Macs only have one mouse button on the trackpad, although their zippy touchpad driver on the Mac side allows you to use two figures on the pad to indicate right mouse -- very slick). Yes, you could use shift-F10 to get context menus, but I think that's not very convenient. Instead, I found a scriptable input mapping utility called AutoHotKey that allowed me to write a logon script that remapped the Enter key (really the numpad Enter key) to right mouse.

To create the script after you've installed and run AutoHotKey:

1. Go to c:\documents and settings\all users\start menu\programs\startup
2. From the File menu, choose New and click AutoHotKey Script. (Normally, you could right-mouse in the window, but you don't have a right-mouse button -- which is why we're building the script!)
3. Name the file something like "Mac stuff".
4. Select the new file.
5. From the File menu, choose Edit Script.
6. At the end of the file, type "NumpadEnter::RButton;" (but without the quotes).
7. Save the file and exit Notepad.
8. Double click the file to run it.

Now, everytime you boot into Windows, you'll have a right mouse button!

The MacBook runs Windows well and there's something perversely fun about using a Mac at Microsoft. Not that I'd know. Michelle made off with the MacBook as soon as I got it working on the corporate network and is using now as her daily driver for work. Oh well.

In my post the other day about websites that reformat webpages for reading on phones, I pulled a bozo move and failed to include Microsoft's offering in this space. Fortunately, Ken pointed this out to me in the comments.

Apparently, it does local search (for places near you) and general web search. I'm having some problems with my mobile phone connection right now, so I can't test it, but you can try it out yourself. Let me know what you think!

http://mobile.msn.com/search/

Reading web sites on my phone is a bit of a pain. (Note: I'm not responsible for Pocket Internet Explorer -- that's another team...) Most sites simply aren't formatted for the little screens.

Google Mobilizer is a neat site that takes an URL and strips it down so it can be read more easily in a cellphone browser. The only thing I wish it did was create a new URL that I could set as a favorite, so I could immediately jump to the stripped form of all my favorite sites.

Skweezer does this as well and actually does provide the permalink to the stripped site. I like the smaller text (more on the screen), but Google did a better job hiding the navigation menus, letting me see the bulk of the text. Also, Skweezer removed the ads from the test site and inserted their own -- a bit annoying; Google didn't mess with the ads. Still, I like the name Skweezer a lot and may use it just because of that.

Thanks to Lifehacker for the link.

I just installed the v3.00 firmware upgrade for the Garmin Forerunner 301. In addition to some bug fixes, the major improvement in this release is the addition of support for MultiSport.

With this upgrade, you can configure the Forerunner for events like triathlons. You specify the order and type (run, bike, other) of each leg. After you start the event, you hit the "Lap" button to transition from one leg to the next. You can even have it record your transition times (hit the "Lap" button at the start of the transition and again at the end). I used this feature yesterday on my brick (run, bike, run) workout. Worked like a charm!

Click here for the upgrade. Click here for the updated user guide (Owner's Manual Rev. D)
Click here for a page describing the bug fixes and previous firmware upgrades. Good accessories too.