Year: 2005

Union Boss

mike 0 Comment Editorial

I want to be a union boss. Talk about an easy job:

1. Collect union dues all year round.
2. Instigate unrest and dissatisfaction within the ranks by complaining and fueling every small thing
3. Use a fraction of the union dues to take your members out to nice dinners and complain about management.
4. Once a year, bargain with management and ask for the unreasonable
5. Even though you don’t have any financial knowledge or training, tell the press that management is lying about how much money they have.
6. Every 2-3 years send them out on strike while you continue to collect union dues.
7. Go to the beach and don’t tell your members how much you are making!

What a life!

Domain Registry of America Scam Report

mike 0 Comment Technology

About a year ago, I bought a small domain for personal use. I registered it through a small ISP, who did the domain registration for an additional $5 or something cheap.

About 2 weeks ago, I received a letter in the mail from Domain Registry of America, saying that it was time to renew my domain. I want to keep it, so I filled in their web form for an additional 3 years. I knew it was more expensive than others, but I didn’t want to go through the headache of changing it.

About an hour later, I received a phone call from my credit card company stating that I had suspcious activity on my card – it was domain registry of america. I told them I authorized it and didn’t know quite what to make of the fact that this small transaction had been noticed by them.

But the next day, I received email from Domain Registry of America stating that I had to do more work to transfer my domain to them! ACK! Its at this point I realized I had been snookered. DROA was not my registrar at all! They were just some company that looked up my domain, noticed it would expire soon, and decided to try to steal my business. They flagrantly made their mail look like it was from my current provider rather than being up front about switching to them. Boy, did I feel dumb!

Searching on the net now, I realize there are many resources which also show them to be a fraudulent scam. They send out mail to everyone pretending to be your domain registry service, and try to just steal as much business as they can get:
From Domain Avenue

Pixagogo has pictures of the mail the send

And another one.

To their credit, I called up DROA and told them I felt duped and that I wanted my money back. Today, they refunded my credit card, and I’m back on my merry way. (I plan to renew through GoDaddy, who I’ve always liked quite a lot)

VS2005 Outlook Addin Support

mike 1 Comment Technology

With Lookout we spent a ton of time just figuring out what is the “right” way to extend Outlook with a .NET based addin. This was a time consuming process because there was a lot of misinformation out there, and documentation was sparse. So, it was a lot of trial-and-error and head-banging which finally got the product out.

This week, however, the MSDN/Visual Studio teams published a new product called the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System – Outlook (beta). Wow! That is quite a name!

Overall, this tool looks great! It makes a lot of things really easy, which Lookout had to stumble through. Here are some of them:

Creates the Shim For you
This is a great feature because your addin will no longer need to be loaded by .NET’s mscoree.dll. If you load via the “old way” (with mscoree), then your plugin inherently cannot be run in high-security systems, and mscoree is a generic loader and is not signed. By having a shim, you can sign the shim, and then be securely loaded into Outlook. A great whitepaper was published a while back on how to do this, but the new VSTO tools now do it for you for free.

Creates a Separate AppDomain for your Addin
This is a huge new feature. By creating your addin in a separate AppDomain, it is much less likely to have conflicts with other plugins loaded into Outlook. I can’t tell you how many times different plugins that didn’t properly implement the ReleaseComObject logic hosed Lookout and we had to take support calls. With AppDomains in place, these should be a thing of the past.

Handling of Outlook Shutdown Cases
Getting Outlook to shutdown when plugins are loaded can be tricky. Making it work in 3 versions of Outlook (2000, XP, and 2003) is a process of walking through a minefield of random bugs. Fortunately, Outlook 2003 works reasonably well, but there are still a few well-documented gotchas. The new VSTO IStartup interface completely unloads the AppDomain in the shutdown cases, which should make addins no longer need to hand-craft these solutions.

Overall, kudos and thank you to the VSTO team. They didn’t have to build these helpers and tools, but by doing so they will enable a fleet of new applications that can be much more robust and interoperable. This should be a great thing if you are interested in .NET-based Outlook development.

Political Correctness and the 49ers

mike 0 Comment Politics

When did our culture get so sensitive to every little remark, comment, or joke that might be interpreted as being offensive to anyone? Why can’t well all just recognize that not everyone likes everyone, and its actually okay?

The 49ers are getting blasted today for a PR-training video that leaked to the public. The video uses blatant politically incorrect humor and asks that the viewers embrace diversity. Its the contrast of the humor and the message which makes the video effective for its intended audience (mentally-underhorsepowered, arrogant, egotistical football players).

Groups they make fun of in the video:
– Chinese Americans/Immigrants
– Lesbians (including a rated-R scene)
– Homeless
– The SF Mayor (Gavin Newsom)

Want to see the video? Here is the link.

Oh well. Do we really need everyone to like everyone else? Can we no longer have the freedom to just get the say what we want? This video, while risque, aggressive in its approach, and definitely not a style I would ever use, does not encourage or condone hurting other people. So why do we care?

There are times when we’ll all be offended. Its okay. Its part of life. Lets move on.

Update
By the way, the video was apparently made and used within the 49ers organization in August of last year. Until today, they never regretted the video or made any personnel changes. All of a sudden today, they are apologizing like they’d never seen it before or were shocked. So, clearly, they are only doing what they think we and the media want. Make sure they know its okay!

MSN Desktop Search Summary

mike 0 Comment Technology

A lot of really nice things have been written about the Windows Desktop Search product. Hopefully worth noting!

“Windows Desktop Search is a top notch product that will satisfy the needs and wants of most users… A big thank you to everyone on the MSN Search team responsible for this product…”

    – epiphany (this is an in-depth review)

“I think Microsoft has won this round against the rest of the competition.”

“I’ve used Google’s desktop search, and a few others, and I found MSN’s to be by far the best tool.”

“I saw Windows Desktop Search demonstrated on a co-workers computer, and I was blown away.”

“My personal favorite among this collection was MSN Desktop Search”

“Kudos to the MSN team… I can finally retire Lookout and use a single search tool across my entire system.”

Share the Road

mike 4 Comments Editorial

Ever heard anyone say, “I hate bikers”? Well, I don’t hate them, but I sure am angry about sharing the road with them.

“Share the Road” should be a two way street. When was the last time you saw a biker actually stop at a stopsign? These turkeys want the cars to slow down and stop for them, but then they don’t take their own turn at the stoplights. I think most of them are so clipped in via their toe-clips they probably don’t even know how to stop without falling over.

Today I almost took out half of a 10 man biking team. They were riding right through a stopsign that I had legally stopped and looked both ways at. They just decided that I was supposed to “share” my right of way. Urgh.

If you are a biker, please obey traffic laws.

Blackberry hit for $450M

mike 0 Comment Technology

If you read my blog, you know that I think most of our country’s problems ultimately come down to lawyers. This last month, RIM (makers of the Blackberry Wireless Email devices) lost a major patent infringement case to NTP, settling the case for $450M. Thats just ridiculous, when you consider that the NTP guys innovate nothing, and is just a group of lawyers. They bought the patent with the pure intent of extorting money legally from innovative companies like RIM through our broken software patent laws.

Well, at least RIM is in Canada and NTP is here in the US. It’s always good to stick it to the Canadians.

Social Security and the Time Value of Money

mike 0 Comment Politics

I’m really saddened by how political the social security issue is. Its too bad we can’t take this problem away from politicians that are more worried about their votes next election than about fixing the problem.

I usually don’t agree with President Bush. But his willingness to tackle this issue during his second term is valiant. Second term presidents have the opportunity to tackle the tough issues because they are unencumbered by future elections, and its great to see this 2-timer get to this phase of his Presidency.

What is Wrong With Social Security?
Well, the basic problem is that each year, we take a bunch of money in, and pay it out immediately to the benefactors. This works as long as the number of workers paying in greatly exceeds the number of folks taking out of the system. Unfortunately, our census studies show that the number of retirees is going through the roof compared to the number of workers, and there will be a shortfall. There are no politics to consider here – its just plain accounting.

Time Value of Money
What President Bush has been trying to say is that Private accounts inherently have the advantage of the time-value-of-money. Here, each individual paying into the system puts his money in the bank. Each year it collects a modest amount of interest or gains, and, after doing so for 30-40 years, that small initial investment is a sizable retirement asset.

The current system cannot take advantage of time, and will always have the problem of needing a growing population of workers.

“Means Testing” Out – Can’t Trust Government Anyway
Last night, President Bush introduced the notion of decreased benefits for the wealthy. I’m not surprised by this at all, and I’ve been expecting it for some time. As a 34year old ‘worker’, I pay into Social Security each year, but I have no illusions that I will actually get anything from the government when it comes time to retire.

The fact is that Social Security will be out of money. Taxes will either have to be raised, or some people won’t get any benefits. If, during any of the next 30 years of my life, the government “changes its mind”, I could be screwed. If I were counting on Social Security for my retirement, I would be financially irresponsible. These politicians are whimsical, and we just have no idea what they will do.

Private Accounts Provide Protection
Given that many of us are already being means-tested out, why shouldn’t we have a federally sponsored system which allows us to use the time value of money for our retirement savings? Doing so helps social security problem, because those individuals saving for their own retirement means that they will not need other government services when they get old. Further, it means that these people will be immune to political winds that could otherwise touch their retirements.

Some people say “well, what if the stock market crashes”? This is a fair question. But, when I weigh my own risks for retirement, I still think its more likely that I’ll get screwed by Uncle Sam than that the stock market will crash so intolerably that I’ll lose all my money.

It does mean that individual retirement planners need to be smarter than ever before. We need to understand asset-allocations and how to shift assets to reflect the amount of risk we want to take as we near retirement. Oh my goodness – do you mean we need to take responsibility for our own finances?