I’ve been running the Windows 7 Beta the last month or so. Started out with build 7000, which was pretty good, and now build 7057 I think. The latter one is pretty good, but in the last few days my computer has had horrid stability issues. It would just hang every few mins. It didn’t seem like a “software” hang, as everything would absolutely freeze, and if it froze in the middle of playing a racing game, the sound would also hang. I’m on 3GB of RAM, 2GB of matched pair, and a 1GB stick that I got from somewhere I don’t remember. I took the 1GB of RAM out thinking, hey, worth a shot as the first line of troubleshooting. Halfway surprisingly, it fixed my problem, but DAMN my computer is a dog now. Windows 7 itself seems a bit slower, I guess it really liked that extra 1GB. Also, surprisingly, the racing game pretty much went to shit. I was getting great 60fps at 1280×1024 resolution, but with only removing 1GB of RAM, its struggling at 1024×768. Wierd. Had no idea only 1GB of RAM could have that big of a difference on system speed.

Guess its time to pull the trigger on 4GB of faster RAM. Its cheap now anyways

I went ahead and installed iPhone 3.0 on my phone despite of all the warnings I read about the instability of the beta software. I did want to play with some of the new maps APIs so I figured it was justified for development reasons, and it couldn’t be SO bad, even on my one and only phone.

So after running it for a few days, its really not as bad as all the blogs make it out to be. I’ve had it hang up maybe once or twice, but holding down the home button got things back on track. Copy and paste is pretty cool, although I haven’t had the actual need to use it other then screwing around the last few days. The MMS doesn’t work, but that’s AT&T’s fault. Not ready yet for prime time, but its not some deal where its constantly locking up and not usable. Quite the opposite in terms of dropped calls actually. Haven’t had one since!

I’m going to play with the tethering over the weekend, supposedly some others got it working and play with some of the APIs to see what all cool things I can do.

Never thought I would say this about something from Microsoft, but……Microsoft Office OneNote RULES!

I started using it about a week ago after promising myself that I need to start taking notes instead of keeping everything in my head. The thing is, I hate notepads and pens, my handwriting sucks, and if I have it on paper instead of on the PC, I’ll never actually “act” on it. I tried to find some software that was better then “Notepad” for taking notes for work, and Office OneNote came to the rescue.

The UI for it is fairly good, in that I can setup a Work notebook, monthly Tabs, and then daily pages. On the pages, I can take freeform notes in sections. You aren’t tied to a specific line, like in Notepad or Word. Once I’m done with a note, if I have a to do or follow up from that note, I can go ahead and create either an Outlook task, or a meeting request, straight from OneNote with that note’s content. Sweet! I usually create Meeting requests, as then I can assign a time and block off my calendar for that particular task, so I make sure it actually gets done.

The integration with Outlook gets even better. If I’m in a meeting somewhere w/o my computer, I can then use my iPhone’s built in Notes app to take a note down. Its very easy to email that note to yourself from your iphone. 2 clicks. Once I get back to my desk and am sorting emails, there is a 1 button “make into note” feature, so I can instantly turn that email into a new note. It would be awesome if there was some sort of App to integrate with OneNote, but there are no services or APIs to do that. Would sure be nice if that would sync over wireless straight to my OneNote DB. For now, I can deal with 3 clicks per note/meeting. Especially for free.

On a separate “note” har har, I’ve been using Toodledo to keep track of my personal to-dos. As with work, I always keep everything in my head and just start to forget to do stuff, like get my damn car registered, or sign up for the next semester for classes. Toodledo is pretty much free ($3 for the iPhone app) and allows me to always have my to-dos in front of me. I have the iPhone app, where I can view, enter, sort, assign dates, etc to all my tasks. I have the website, where I can do the same from any computer ever, and I have an iGoogle widget that sits on my homepage reminding me to get my damn car finally registered on Thursday. Now I just need to start actually doing the things I don’t want to do, and I’ll be set

So I’ve been on Facebook for a while, but I don’t seem to post on there often, even though I “mean” to. I do update my blog fairly frequently though, and crosspost all my photos to Picasa as it automatically pics those up from my home pc.

Since I moved to WordPress, there seems to be a cool app/plugin “Wordbook” that will take my blog posts and throw them up right on my Facebook wall. Also, I was able to integrate my Picasa account with Facebook as well. Super Nerd. Activate!

So after telling a couple of coworkers that I had my blog on an old blogger.com template, I got this weird look and “you don’t use wordpress.org?” comment. Checking it out for a bit got me interested, and as I played with it, I realized what they were talking about. WordPress rules!

The longest part of the conversion process was setting up all the 301 redirects for my old URLs to the new ones. The import of my blog feed, the setup of the template and blog was cake, and the admin interface is awesome. Even better, I control all the code through the php templates, so my blog is now proper XHTML where with Blogger service, there was so much invalid blogger code scattered, it wasn’t even funny.

Also, the more I use php, the more I like it. I was always an ASP guy, and with the vBulletin work I do running the RoadRaceAutoX forums, and now setting up WordPress, I’m finding that php rules.