Scott Hanselman

I picked up an Aliph Jawbone Bluetooth Headset for the iPhone last week. I want to be able to be on conference calls while I drive up to Seattle every month. My current el-cheapo-brand headset is complete crap and you can hear the wind and road noise, and consequently I spend most of the time muted, and the rest of the time yelling.

I'm very happy with this purchase. You can pick one up at Amazon for a decent discount. Do read the reviews, but I am happy.

Pros

• Fantastic noise-canceling feature.
• Cool style (if you like that style, but I'm only wearing it while I'm talking on it.)
• Light, comes with many optional ear things for left/right large/small.

Cons

• Comparatively Fragile. Not something you'd want to just throw in your pocket.
• Kind of hard to remember which button does what.

Take a listen to this uncompressed WAV file of me talking on the Jawbone. (I called my voice mail at Vonage while driving , then downloaded the WAV, if you care.)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

OK, so I'm lame. We know this. I'm weak, but I did it. I spent my blog advertising money on iPhone. Sue me. ;) The WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) on this phone is low. Low as I've seen it, so the phone may end up going back to the store - I've got 14 days.

But first, here's what's happened so far.

• It doesn't work on Vista 64. At all. You can't activate an iPhone on Vista 64 today. Full stop.
• While I was able to get iTunes installed on Vista 64 last week with a clever hack, there was a new update recently and the Apple Software Update will not run. Also, I can't burn CDs even with the existing install because Daemon Tools x64 and iTunes' Gear SPTD Driver hate each other with the heat of a thousand suns. But, this is iTunes, not iPhone, so I digress.
• So, I fire up the free Mac Mini and run iTunes, expecting it to prompt for an upgrade. Crash on start. What? A crash on a mac? Seriously, first one for me. I blame iTunes, not the Mac. Reboot, run, crash, reboot, run, crash, uninstall, install (upgrade? waa? I uninstalled...whatever), continue, run, it runs. Whew. Ridiculous.
• I plug in the iPhone. I get the Activate screen. Cool.
• I have an account from AT&T that I've had for over 6 years. I currently move the SIM card between my HTC Dash running Windows Mobile 6 and my Blackberry 8600. AT&T thinks I have just the Blackberry, bit the DASH gets to use the same unlimited SMS and unlimited data plan I have. Nice...but...
• iTunes says "iPhone activations aren't available at this time." Waa? Lame. Try again...
• Now I get "We're sorry, AT&T has determined that your current account cannot be used with the iPhone."
• It appears (I can't call support because they aren't open 24 hours...seems odd) that AT&T thinks that my old employer still owns this phone and pays for it, which is odd because I paid the bill for the second month in a row after taking over responsibility for the number.
• If and when I DO get this thing activated, on the Mac, I have no way to sync my contacts with it.
• Will this phone be forever tethered to this Mac? What about my OTHER iPod?
• What about my music?  Can a Mac iTunes installation share the same iTunes Library with Windows?
• What about contacts? I've got 2038 of them, and I'd like them to sync? Perhaps Plaxo to OSX?
• What about my Calendar? I use Google Calendar...how's that going to work?

I think my life would be easier with a Windows Mobile Phone sync'ed to Exchange. Sigh. I never thought I'd say that. I am historically not a Windows Mobile fan.

Needless to say all this trouble has frozen my use of iTunes. iTunes 7 become unresponsive and totally unusable upon its release and we're almost a solid year later and my less than 10 thousand songs can't be browsed. I can't use my Audible.com account. I'm screwed. I guess I could copy everything over to the Mac and just keep my Apple interactions entirely in the Mac world because it's clear that Apple and Windows just despise each other. Shocking! ;)

At this moment, this iPhone is a brick. Bummer. Of course, the WAF is in negative numbers as well. Sigh. That's what you pay when you're an Early Adopter. Really Early Adopters pay an extra US$200. ;)

Steve Job really stuck it to me on this one. You should have seen the look in my face when I opened the box. The OOBE (Out of Box Experience) was exquisite. You should see my face now.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

My eightieth podcast is up. In this one Carl and I talk about our experiences with Vista 64. 

• Subscribe:
• Download: MP3 Full Show
• ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley! Digg us at Digg Podcasts!

If you have trouble downloading, or your download is slow, do try the torrent with µtorrent or another BitTorrent Downloader.

Links from the Show

• 3rd Party Vista 64 Forums (sgr)

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer, I now present the fourth in an infinite number of a weekly series called "The Weekly Source Code." Here's some source I'm reading this week that I enjoyed.

• PoshConsole - This is a PowerShell console replacement written in WPF (.NET 3.0) with C#. Best feature? PowerShell "QuakeMode", totally. This source was fun to read.
• Koolwired.IMAP - The beginnings of an IMAP implementation. Not sure why I like reading Mail Protocol implementations, but I also love...
• Lesnikowski Mail.dll - This is the POP mail library that DasBlog uses, although he's updated it considerably and now charges a bit. The OLD OLD source is in DasBlog still and worth reading.
• C#.NET del.icio.us API - I use the http://del.icio.us social bookmarking service and this is a C# API for that service. Simple, but fairly clean. I don't usually take the time to abstract thing this much, I'm a bit (a lot) more sloppy, and I'm always impressed when folks take the time.
• WPF Contrib -The start of a WPF Controls project...this first release includes lots of Helpers and Utilities, as well as some panels that you wish you had in WPF.
• Wintellect Power Collections - An oldie but a real goodie, the Power Collections formerly hosted on Wintellect have moved over to CodePlex for future development. Some of the collections included are the Deque, MultiDictionary, Bag, OrderedBag, OrderedDictionary, Set, OrderedSet, and OrderedMultiDictionary. It'll be interesting if the community takes up the codebase and moves it forward. This code is a gold mine. It's well organized, clean, well-documented and has a fine set of Unit Tests. I should write code this clean.
• NLinq - I don't have to agree with the concept to think the source is cool. Inspired by this blog post, these guys are kind of reimplementing LINQ for .NET 1.1 and 2.0 by putting the LINQ expressions in a string, like this. Very clever as they are tunneling LINQ expressions through their stuff as a 3rd class API. But what price their immortal souls? ;)

 query = new NLinqQuery(
                @"  from m in methods
                    where !m.IsStatic
                    orderby m.Name
                    group m by m.Name into g
                    select new { MethodName = g.Key, Overloads = g.Count() }");

Feel free to send me links to cool source that you find hasn't been given a good read.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Hello! Perhaps you've just arrived at my blog after watching us today on Good Day Oregon from 5am to 9am.

Please do visit the Diabetes Category on this blog and read my personal story about my Type I Diabetes. If you can, please do Donate to the American Diabetes Association. If their site is down, do try again!

If you want to spread the word or email this to your friends, just send them to http://www.hanselman.com/fightdiabetes. We're trying to raise $50,000 and the folks on Team Hanselman and this blog have raised $25,000 so far! Thank you very much to those who have donated! Your money will go directly to diabetes research funded by the American Diabetes Association.

Video: Step Out for Diabetes on KPTV's Good Day Oregon

Here's some potentially interesting Diabetes Links for you to read:

• Scott's Diabetes Explanation - The Airplane Analogy - If you read one link from this post, read this one.
• Twitting my Diabetes - I was on NBC11 in the Bay Area when I blogged my Diabetes every few minutes for an entire day.
• Team Hanselman and Diabetes Walk 2007 - My Personal Story about Diabetes and information on how to join us on October 20th for the Walk to Fight Diabetes. There are also banners and badges you can add to your blog or MySpace page.
• A Call for Good Design - One Guy, an Insulin Pump, 8 PDAs and an iPod - A post about the sad state of design around Diabetes Equipment.
• Arusha Tanzania 2006 Day 14 - Travelling as a Diabetic - Here's how I travel to a different country in Africa each year or so and all the things a diabetic has to deal with when out and about.
• The First 12 Hours - The Medtronic Minimed Paradigm REAL-time Continuous Glucose Monitor - This is some information about the Continuous Sensor I use as well a brief history of Diabetes.
• Diabetes Walk 2006 - The Day of the Walk - We raised $12000 last year. Here's some pictures of Team Hanselman at least year's walk.
• Type 1 Diabetes will likely be cured in my lifetime - and just in time - Will Diabetes be cured in my lifetime? I hope so, as Diabetics die of Diabetes.
• Symlin plus Insulin equals new Diabetes Therapy - I am not only on an insulin pump, but I still take shots. (A lot of folks don't know that.) Here's why.
• What is the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes- - Here's my definition. Be sure to read the comments.
• Technology and the first insulin pump - Here's a picture of an early insulin pump.
• Garrick Neal's Ten Commandments of Diabetes - My good friend's tips for good control.

Thanks for visiting! I'll chop up the video and post it here when I'm back. We're on Good Day Oregon theoretically every 12 minutes, during the weather update, from 5am to 9am.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By