So far I have done all of my Vista beta testing using the ultimate edition but I finally decided to install and work with the Home Premium Edition. I am assuming that this will be the version loaded on most machines sold after the general availablity on the 30th of this month so I wanted to see what it would look like. The big project I tried out was creating a movie and display it. My wife works with the children aged 18 months - 12 years old in our church. She had lots of pictures taken from various activities that they had throughout the year and wanted to put them together as a movie and show them on the 30th. Of course that meant that I was responsible for contacting all the people who had taken pictures, getting them together, organizing them, and then making the movie.

I started off by setting up the machine. I installed the OS and then set up another user who is not an administrator to do all the work. I wanted to see what the end user experience would be like. Just to make things more interesting I turned on the parental controls for that user as well. I set them kind of strict just to see if they would get in the way of my video editing. I knew I wouldn't get any bad pictures so what I was really interested to see was if I would be forced to rate the pictures I was looking at or if I would get a lot of prompts.
Overall I was very pleased with the experience. I was able to preview and work with all of the pictures. I only ran into the parental controls one time when I clicked on some music and was told that I would have to provide an adiminstrator password to play the song. What I really wanted to do was download the song so I cancelled out and used the context menu to download the song instead.
I was impressed with Movie Maker. I hadn't spent a lot of time making home movies before and I found it really easy to use. I especially liked the auto movie feature where I could select a bunch of pictures and then have it make them into a movie segment with a title, trailer, and random transitions between the pictures. I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't do it for clips that would end up being less than 30 seconds (10 pictures in my case) in length. I guess they figured I could do it myself but I could tell where I was choosing the transitions because mine all seemed to be the same and not as random as the ones they generated.

All in all I think that Vista Home Premium will be a good replacement for the XP Home Edition we are running now and I will probably end up buying a machine around the first of February with it installed. I will continue to play with it until then trying to find anything that will break in my home network. One thing that I am really liking is the User Account Control. It is annoying but less so than my current situation where I have to run a batch file (makemeadmin.bat) that I got from Aaron Margosis' blog to go and do administrative tasks since I am not an administrator. Now the OS just prompts me when I need to have elevated privileges and I don't have to worry about going and doing something first.

Here it is the first day of 2007 and the new year is full of promise. As I stated last year I have given up on making predictions (at least in public) about what the new year will bring. I am still looking forward to another great year. With MIX07, TechEd, and PDC along with the local launch events for Live, Office, Vista, and Exchange and all the user group presentations I am sure this year will be a busy one for me. I look forward to learning and discovering new things and doing my best to share them with you, my loyal readers.

May 2007 be a happy and prosperous year for you as well.

I have been missing out on a lot of blogs lately. It is not the usual excuse off not enough time but instead it appears that my "software" is not working. I have tried several different programs for reading blogs but for one reason or another have abandoned most of them. The ones that integrate with Outlook have held my attention the longest but even then I have always had problems with them and given up on them. Here is my wish list for the perfect reader:

1. Work with software that I am already using (Outlook, IE, etc.). I really don't care as long as I don't have to open a separate program to get the information.
2. Show me a view with subject and the first few words. There are blogs that I always read just because I know the person posting them or because they have always had good information. There are others that I scan. I also subscribe to a few that I mostly don't read but they sometimes have some gems in them so I want to see what is posted and make a decision on whether or not to read it.
3. Allow me to mark items for follow up. If I read a particularly good post I might want to refer to it later or do what the author suggests. I want to be able to find those posts quickly and act on them.
4. Allow me to customize when I see new items. I don't really need to check every hour, once a day is usually fine with me.
5. Allow me to categorize blogs. Referring back to item 2 I like to have "folders" for always read, sometimes read, scan, etc.

I don't think I am being that demanding in what I want. I thought I had found the perfect solution in squeet. With squeet I could ask it to go out and scan the blogs I am interested in and e-mail me the posts. I liked it because it met my first 4 criteria. I could see the items in Outlook where I got the title and with the reading pane could see a few lines to quickly decide whether the rest of the article was worth reading or not. I could flag items for follow up and even use different colored flags for different meanings. I could also use Outlook rules to dump the e-mail into different folders if I wanted to.

So why this post? Well over the last few weeks the mail delivery has been lacking. I have missed some posts, others have been delivered several days late, and all the time the page that shows my account doesn't have any indication that there is an error. I will still stay subscribed to squeet while I look for something I like better but I have about given up on them. Maybe it is time to try IE 7 and see if I like it's RSS handling. I might also look into using one of the many SharePoint add-ins to see what they are like. If you have a favorite reader that meets my requirements I would love to hear about it. Please post a comment or drop me an e-mail.

I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas. At this time of year my thoughts
turn to family and friends and I am very grateful for each and every one
that has touched my life this year. I wish you all the best at this time of
year and hope that the love of our Savior will be with all of us. My heart
goes out to the men and women in the armed services and I pray that peace
will prevail and they will be able to return home.

Back in March I posted about taking the Microsoft 071-553 and 071-554 exams. At the time the exams were in beta and I had to wait a while to find out how I did. After about 5 months (OK, it wasn't really a priority to find out my scores) I realized that I hadn't heard anything from Microsoft about them. I started trying to track down my scores. I contacted Microsoft and they told me that the test provider would have that information. I tried the test provider and they told me that Microsoft had the information. To make a long story short there was a lot of finger pointing and nobody knew what happened to my test information. The best that I could get was that they could tell I had registered for the tests.

I decided to retake the tests. If I had one word of advice it would be to stay away from the testing center when I go in to take a test. When I took the first test I had computer problems. The machine they put me on would spontaneously reboot. It was saving my answers and starting me over again so I wasn't loosing any work, and the countdown didn't seem to be affected but it was a little unnerving. They moved me to another machine that would hang periodically until the first machine was rebooted. When I went in to take the test today it would bring up the screen and ask me for my testing id. I would enter it and click on the enter test button, I would then see a screen saying the test was initializing and then a please wait screen and then back to the screen asking me for my id. The nice lady at the test center ended up calling the test provider for support and talking to someone in England who knew what long drawn out process needed to be followed to get the test working. Interestingly enough the guy on the phone said it used to be documented but wasn't used that much any more so they dropped it from the documentation.

I did eventually get into the test and finished taking the second one. I passed the test so now I am officially upgraded to the MCPD certification. The thing that was most surprising to me is that the final tests seemed to mirror almost exactly what I remember from the beta exams. In the past I have taken beta exams and then seen the exam objectives for the final exams and they seemed to be very different.

A lot of times when I introduce myself I will say that I am a Senior Principal Consultant with Keane, Inc. and a Microsoft Regional Director. I joke that the job with Keane is my 9 -5 job and that being a Regional Director or RD is my 5 - 9 job. I find sometimes that people do not understand what the job of an RD is. Mostly because the title is so confusing. I don't work for Microsoft. I don't really have a region I am responsible for (although living in Utah I tend to focus my efforts here). I also do not direct anything. Now fellow RD and columnist Jonathan Goodyear has written a column titled Demystifying the Microsoft Regional Director. He does an excelent job of explaining what we are supposed to be doing.

As Jonathan says in the article, Microsoft expects me to be communicating with the community. I hope that this blog is one way I am meeting your needs. Also if you would like to have me come and talk to you I would be more than happy to do so. You can leave a comment or contact me at Scott_J_Golightly at keane dot com and we will schedule a time and topic. (Sorry for the semi-obfuscated e-mail but I figure I shouldn't make it too easy for the spammers :)