Why you should buy the XBOX 360

After having my XBOX 360 for over a year, guess what happened to it last week? In the middle of an intense game play the system crashed and we got the Red Ring Of Death. So I called the XBOX support 1800-4MyXBOX and they were very helpful. I had to go through first this automated voice system name Max. To get through directly just say :"Supervisor". When I finally got through, the customer support rep informed me that my warranty has expired and I have to pay $138 to fix and it will automatically give me 2 years of extended warranty. I told him how wrong this is especially even though we have had the system for over a year, we only used it for the last three months and how our PS2 that we have had over 4 years is still running nicely.

After speaking to the supervisor I was granted a one time deal free repair, with an optional $50 2 year extended warranty, which I will get for sure.

Therefore, I highly recommend anyone to buy the XBOX360

Jeff Hawkins (of Palm) idea behind Foleo sounds convincing

http://news.com.com/The+best+idea+Jeff+Hawkins+ever+had/2008-1041_3-6188188.html

iPhone will be released June 29th

Checkout the new iPhone Ads

MbUnit: Comprehensive .Net Unit Test Framework

MbUnit

------ Test started: Assembly: MbUnitTestSamples.dll ------
Info: Test Execution
Info: Exploring Test.Example, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null
Info: MbUnit 1.0.2445.37068 Addin
Info: Found 1 tests
Info: [success] ConfigTest.GetValueFromAppSettings
Info: [reports] generating HTML report
TestResults: ....\Test.Example.Tests.html
1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped, took 4.07 seconds.

More on Microsoft Surface From Channel 10

Watch this 18 minutes video:-
http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/

Scratch the Surface and iPhone

Amazing new technological announcements were made this week. Most interesting the Microsoft Surface. This technology opens the door for endless opportunities in the future, and Microsoft has been working on Surface for over 6 years. Imagine this will be your experience when you get a phone from T-Mobile (watch this)



Scratch is another amazing announcement this week. Its a programming language teaching tool for 8 year old and above.

And last, my name is on the waiting list for the iPhone. BTW, I need to sell my Cingular 8525 and 30 GB iPOD video Gen.5.5, anyone interested let me know! :)

Advance Query Sytnax - AQS Part 2

This is a follow up to the first post Advance Query Sytnax - AQS Part 1

To search for file based on it's kind, you use the kind property. For example:

• 
  kind:Music ... you can also use song, songs
  Kind:email ... you can also use mail, message, messages, emails
  Kind:document ... you can also use documents, doc, docs
  Kind:Meeting ... you can also use calendar, appointment
  Kind:Picture ... you can also use Pic, Pics, Photo, image, images.

The terms can be combined using the OR operator
Kind:Music OR Pic will return all your music and pic files

You can also combine other conditions:
Kind:Music AND Artist:Prince
or
Kind:Music Artist:Prince since AND is implicit

Enabling NQS (Natural Query Syntax) will simplify the syntax

• 
  Music artist Prince
  Music by prince
  Pics taken last month
  email received last week from John about presentation

You can search on all the properties any kind of file can have. For example. you can search for photos based on the Taken property. You can search for document based on it's author. For eample:

Kind:Document Author:David Johnson

or you do an exact match

Kind:Document Author:"David Johnson"

or you can take it further

kind:Document Author:="David Johnson"

The difference here: the first one is searching for author that contains "David Johnson". The second using the equal sign is searching for author with exact match.

I will be covering the Advance Query Sytnax - AQS Part 3 soon

Back in Portland

The Wii Experience

I want to share with you my experience with the "Wii".

I played on the Wii with my nephews and I have to admit, I am impressed. The game play experience is amazing. The bowling is out of this world. I even had a strike on the first shot, can you believe it? Playing these games with my three nephews was an outstanding experience, it was a perfect opportunity to spend time with my nephews and all of us enjoy one common activity. We all had good time

I am going to be hunting one down from this point :)

Two problems with the Apple iPhone

Even though the iPhone is revolutionary I think Steve Jobs is making a huge mistake by not opening up application development for 3rd party. This can be done by providing Apple certification program which ensure the quality of these 3rd party applications. Then its up to the consumer to buy apple certified program or take the risk in running into problems. But to make this a closed system is a huge mistake.

Another limitation that Apple put itself by going through Cingular is not opening the opportunity for Voice Over IP (VOIP) solutions such as the popular service of Skype.

Other than that, I think this is going to be a phenomenal product. Check out this video:

Apple iPhone is revealed

I know which phone to get

This is a perfect phone. Has everything I want:

• Built in GPS
• 5 Megapixel Camera
• 3.5 G support, which is 10 times faster than GPRS
• Big screen
• Light weight
• MP3 player
• Gaming device
• and more ...

Can you guess what phone it is? It is NOT any of the ones I mentioned in my previous post.







Its the Nokia N95.

Check it out: Watch this video

My future Smartphone

I have been thinking recently about what will be my next smart phone?

I am currently using the Cingular 8125, which I really like. However, I have a problem with it's performance. Also, the camera can be better.

I used to be a SonyEricsson P900 owner. My 3 year old daughter one day decided to see how it would float in my cup of hot coffee. Since then I haven't been able to get it to work. I really liked the P900 as it provided an amazing performance.

So here are the options what I am considering:
SonyEricsson P990, Cingular 8525, or RIM Blackberry Pearl

Closer look at Vista new shell - Part I

The new shell has a totally improved list view with new capabilities to help organize the files. For example, you can click on any of the column header and either sort or group by that column. Also, you can do sorting on multiple columns.