I have been using AT&T for TV and Internet for about a year and the service has been great. I consistantly get 5.7MB down and it is always on. Cable and even DSL often have issues with storms, rain and will bump my VPN off, but not UVerse from AT&T. I have been very happy. But they promised whole house DVR months and months ago.

Okay I just bought my first iPod spring '07, so I am not a huge adopter of Apple's toys (6 months later the 8gb video iPod came out!!!). But I am really loving some of the features of Apple's new iPhone. The email looks great with inline images viewable, the browser is Safari and auto sync to your desktop browser sounds great!

DVDs, and many other forms of digital content, use a technology called Digital Rights Management that allow producers to control when and where you watch their protected content.

If a president of over-protection is set, then what at first is just DVD movies and commercial music, could soon become any form of digital information. While it may not happen over night, locking down all content could result in a environment where commercialized content is placed ahead of innovation and open thought.

Yep, Microsoft is handing out free software. No not IE7, because most of us wouldn't want it anyway. MS is giving out an express version of its Office Accounting 2007 product. They hope that you choose to upgrade to the full version which is not free.

Blackberry Instant Messaging

BlackBerry now supports the following instant messaging platforms:

• Yahoo!® Messenger
• IBM® Lotus® Sametime®
• Novell® GroupWise® Messenger
• Windows® Messenger / Live Communications Server 2005
• Google Talk™ for BlackBerry Devices

This is great news because I have access to IM lists typically only available on my desktop client. Faster than a Blackberry email and in certain cases better than a phone call. It is perfect for getting information via IM while already on a phone call.

Here is a great overview site of various alternativess to windows explorer. Many of them are free and the article includes screenshots for a quick review.

15 Windows Explorer alternatives compared and reviewed

Here is a chart with direct links to the site's review

I would like to make some obsevations on usability, or rather the lack there of in product design. For the past 12 months I have been working on a web-based electronic signature service. I sat on every meeting, discussing design, layout and usability. Making sure that our product 'made sense' was very important to me. What's very frustrating is seeing a huge company with very large developement budgets just simply fail to think things through.

This is an amazing new AJAX powered search engine for finding snipets of code. It is very fast and extremely slick. I searched for drupal source code and on the right side of the browser it displays the layout of a traditional drupal installation. Click on the files and it displays their source! Well worth a look for every web-based design team. Beautiful and simple layout.

Letter from Krugal:

We're very close to the end of our beta program, and have only one more critical test before we go live. We'd like to verify we can handle the load that thousands of simultaneous active users will put on our system, and so avoid the dreaded "We got slashdotted" syndrome.

Now you can sync Google's CL2 Calendar with your cellphone! gCalSync has a Jar file that you can either import via USB/Bluetooth or visit http://wap.gcalsync.com with your phone's browser to install.