Certifications

This week I passed the exams for two more certifications, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer on Windows 2000 and Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator: Messaging on Windows 2000.

       

Since it has been a while, I also updated my vitae.

More about betas

I have been running the Windows Vista/IE7/Office 2007 beta combo on my primary work computer for about a week now so I thought I would give an update on how that is going. The first thing to consider if you are thinking about running a whole suite of beta software on your primary computer is to make sure you have easy access to another computer to run any incompatible applications. Here is my top 3 list of reasons why I need to use a Windows XP computer fairly often:

1. There is no Active Directory Users and Computers for Windows Vista yet.
2. Outlook 2007 crashes every time I open someone else’s calendar.
3. A Java based web application we use here refuses to work on Vista, even with Firefox.

Speaking of Firefox, I did have to install it because our online course management system does not work well with IE7 (missing menus, displaying incorrect pages). Other than those issues though, I have been running completely in a Microsoft beta environment. This post I want to focus on Internet Explorer 7.

The first thing I noticed with IE7 was how different it looked. To paraphrase David’s comment, “Where’s the stop button?” I must admit it took me some time to get used to working in the new environment, but in this short time I have become so used to it I find myself feeling uncomfortable in Firefox. IE7 added (and in my opinion improved on) tabbed browsing. I frequently have many tabs open. The biggest difference between how IE7 and Firefox handle tabs is that IE7 puts a ‘x’ on each tab to close it, whereas Firefox has one ‘x’ at the far right to close the current tab. To me it seems far more intuitive to close the tab from that tab, and have found myself accidently closing the wrong tab in Firefox now. Here’s a look at the toolbar area:

You can see the Refresh and Stop buttons are now located to the right of the address bar. Not exactly what you would expect since the navigation buttons have been in pretty much the same place since web browsers existed. But overall I really like IE7 and have grown very comfortable with using it.

Beta Beta Beta

This post and possibly a few in the future are going to deal with by experiences testing the Windows Vista beta (which includes the Internet Explorer 7 beta) and the Office 2007 beta. My first time installing I performed an upgrade from my existing Windows XP install. This was a big mistake. I had crashes very frequently and found it nearly impossible to actually use the computer for anything. I also noticed that there was a new BIOS for my computer, but Vista would not let me install it. So I restored my backup (yes, I did a backup before I upgraded – you should too!) and flashed my BIOS to the latest version.

Next, learning from my horrible upgrade experience I reformatted the hard drive and installed clean. What a difference! Everything is stable, things that were crashing or just wouldn't work are fine now. *big sigh of relief* So I have been trying to immerse myself in the whole new experience. I have been using Outlook 2007 as my email client (first thought: finally RSS feed support!) and Internet Explorer 7 as my web browser (first thought: finally tabbed browsing!).

Without turning this into a gigantic post I am just going to talk about a few things about Vista with more posts to come. The first thing I noticed in Vista, as a dual-monitor user was the glitchy way Vista has been dealing with my second display. I have my desktop extended to the second monitor, but the background colors and images do not carry over. Also every time a security alert comes up the second monitor flashes off and on. I don't know if this is a driver issue with the ATI video card or what. Not that big of a deal, but slightly annoying.

The whole User Interface is pretty different. I have found myself hunting for things that I used to know where to find them. The most significant of these (since it happens the most) is the save file window. As with anything, I just need to get used to it, but I've been using the old file navigatin method for so long now that everytime I am confronted with the save file window I cringe. The taskbar and start menu have received a slight overhaul from XP. I like the changes made there.

The biggest new thing in Vista is the sidebar and the gadgets that go with it.  Right now there aren't too many gadgets available, but I imagine that will change quickly. I had been using the Google Desktop sidebar and do miss some of the gadgets that were available for that, but it seems very similar.

The only other thing I want to mention in this post is connecting a mobile device to Vista. I have a Dell Axim which connects via USB. The setup was very very easy. Vista has the Windows Mobile Device Center, which automatically detected and configured my Axim to share my Exchange calendar and contacts and allowed for further configuration. That seems to be the biggest advantage so far with Vista, everything seems to auto-configure and plug-and-play really well.

 

Conference Presentation

Last week I presented at the 15th annual Conference on Instructional Technologies, which was hosted by SUNY Fredonia this year. The title of my presentation was "Using Blogs and RSS Feeds for Effective Communication." I thought it went really well, I had a lot of fun doing it and I hope the people who attended found it worth their time.

One thing I did not mention in my presentation was something from a users perspective. RSS feeds allow me, the user, to stay up-to-date with more websites than I could possibly ever keep track of if I had to visit each one to see if they were updated. So a benefit I have experienced is that I have 45 subscriptions in my feed reader. There is no way I would manually keep track of 45 websites.

The conference itself was a great experience. It was a very busy week for all involved, but a lot of fun. I really wanted to take tons of pictures, but my camera broke about a week before the conference. So instead I will link to the pictures taken by John Olsavsky of SUNY Fredonia.