Nelson - 18 Months In

Our good friend Nelson, AKA The Xerox Phaser 7760DX, has just turned the ripe old age of 18. . .months. To celebrate we are having a contest. In the past 18 months, Nelson has printed over 160,000 pages, and saved over 45,000 pieces of paper (that's over 90 reams) through duplex printing.

Here's the contest:

The first person to answer this question correctly via blog comment will have their srg.com mailbox increased by 50mb. (Members of the SRG Biz-Ops BPT and their families are excluded as well as people who don't work at SRG)

As previously stated, Nelson has printed over 160,000 pages in the past 18 months. How many service calls that have required an on-site technician has Nelson had in that same period of time?

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Do You Send Email?

Do you use Outlook 2007? Do you send email? Do you add attachments to those emails? If you answered yes to those questions, then you need the Outlook 2007 Forgotten Attachment Detector. Quite honestly, I'm unimpressed as this has been a labs feature of Gmail for over a year now. But since we're all Bill Gates' whipping posts in some form or another, I thought a lot of you would find this worthwhile.

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History of Social Media

What people don't realize is that social media has been around for over 30 years, as this article points out. Since the days of my Atari 400 (and then 800, and then Apple IIc) I have been social networking in some form or another. Pirate BBS's, early dialup chat rooms, and even my first BASIC programming class back in first grade, all had elements of social networking. To get a better sense of the history of this trend, check this out.

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Live Phish via Ustream

One thing is for sure, Phish phans LOVE their phavorite band. So much so that since the dawn of the internet phans have used it as a tool to spread the word of Phish. In the very early days of the public internet, there was a predecessor to message boards and social networks, Usenet newsgroups. In 1990 only 4 bands had Usenet groups, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, and a small but popular college band from Vermont, Phish. There was so much chatter on The Grateful Dead Usenet group about Phish, that phans started their own Usenet group. Fast forward 20 years and Phish is now a cultural phenomenon whose growth paralleled the growth of the internet. Both the band and their phans have continually pushed the limits of technology to share music, pictures, and stories about the music and the community that surrounds it. Starting with their summer 2009 tour someone in the crowd has been using a jailbroken iphone and the live streaming service Ustream to stream the shows live. The Ustream page has both live video stream as well as a twitter feed of all Phish related tweets and twitpics. Go Phish!

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Semantic Search Revisited - Microsoft Bing

Late last week Microsoft unveiled it's newest search product - Bing. Bing is exactly what I was describing with Wolfram Alpha; a search engine that actually understands your search query, rather than just matching search terms against indexed content.

Here is a perfect example. I searched for the query "who won the first super bowl?"

Here is the Bing response:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=who+won+the+first+super+bowl%3F&go=&form=QBRE

Here is the Google response:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=SAy&q=who+won+the+first+super+bowl%3F&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Right at the top of the Bing search results is the answer:

Green Bay Packers win the first Super Bowl in 1967

Very cool!

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Windows 7 Coming October 22

Thats right! The next Windows OS is coming October 22nd. Some of you may be asking yourself, "Is this another Vista?" No, it is not. It's sleek, it's fast and it's saucy. Many have been beta testing it the last few months, myself included, and I can tell you it's pretty awesome upgrade from XP or Vista.

If you buy a computer in the next year, chances are good that you will receive a free upgrade to Windows 7. That is if it's not already loaded on your machine when you buy it.

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Get Your Head in the Cloud. . .and the Game

Google is at it again with a virtual scavenger hunt that demonstrates the ubiquitous nature of cloud computing, and more importantly Google's cloud services. Check it out.

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Ride the Google Wave

Last week Google announced a new product that is possibly the most innovative tech product since the iPhone. Google Wave is a new messaging platform that could change electronic messaging and communications forever. I highly recommend you check out this website. If you have the time, I also recommend watching the video below.

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