Trevin Chow: Blog

My space is moving :)

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 04:38:05 GMT

My mirror of my blog is no longer kept here, but instead at http://trevinchow.spaces.live.com. Long story, don't ask :)

This shouldn't be affecting any of you since you should be subscribed to my new RSS feed and already got my new messenger request to add you to my buddy list for my new Live ID.

My portfolio is growing!

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 23:03:49 GMT

I’m nearly finished my customization of my photo portofolio and uploading a whack of images. I was previously using Flickr, but it didn’t give me a good way to sell my photos directly to people without having some wonky experience where the buyer would be kicked out to a third party website. Additionally, I couldn’t customize my page as much as I could with Smugmug so I could never achieve a really unique look and store-front.

The last 2 months have been filled with

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Instacalc Vista Sidebar gadget

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 00:33:43 GMT

I just noticed that the guy behind InstaCalc recently released a Vista
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6 hour outage?

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:08:05 GMT

You gotta love it when:

your blog server has a failure causing a complete outage
your webhosting company fixing it but coupling t
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Twitter. Why the hype?

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 01:35:41 GMT

Twitter launched over a year ago and has over 50,000 subscribers. I’ve signed up, tried it and discarded it along with dozens of other “web 2.0″ ideas that have sprung up in the last few years. To me, it didn’t provide any value that I didn’t already derive from IM, email, SMS and Dodgeball. I don’t have many connections on Dodgeball, but continue to check in on a semi-frquent basis because it has proved useful to know where hot spots for the

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It really leans!

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:49:47 GMT

It suffices to say that I thought Pisa was a dump when Colene and I went there on a day trip from Florence. A quick 1 hour train ride and we walked through one of the most pitiful cities on our
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B.C. goes green

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 04:42:12 GMT

It’s stuff like this that makes me proud to be both Canadian and from British Columbia.

The premier of British Columbia wanted to bring coal-burning plants and offshore oil rigs to this lush province, so environmental groups were ready for a fight as he prepared his government’s annual policy speech last month.

They were stunned when Premier Gordon Campbell delivered a list of green promise

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My next 10 movies

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:36:46 GMT

I’m a total modern movie nut so am frequently on Apple’s movie trailer site instead of sleeping at night.

Here’s a list of 10 movies that I want to see this year:

The Invisible – could be an exciting ride down a fairly typical storyline.
Slow Burn – Ray Liotta. ‘Nuff said.
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Answers that help you avoid relationship conflict

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 18:16:57 GMT

Fresh off the press from my pal Tony, on how to answer questions from your significant other:

“Without question.” - In response to, “Am I prettier than her?”
“No.”</s
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Chicago Hershey's store

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:16:33 GMT

I was in Chicago this past new year’s and did the obligatory walk down Michigan avenue. This street is a people watchers dream — all hours of the day the street is bustling with people of all ages and genders. The Chicago Hershey’s Store is a very popular tourist attraction and was just freaki

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Pearl Jam

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 01:32:34 GMT

Here’s a shot from a Pearl Jam concert when I was in Prague last September that I took hand-held with my
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I'm an Uncle!

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:46:53 GMT

I’m an uncle for the second time! My si

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Nightfall in Vernazza

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:29:17 GMT

I took this shot while traveling through the town of Vernazza in Cinque Terre, Italy. Since I was backpacking, I was really travel weight conscious so I took along the lightest tripod I had. This turned out to be a huge mistake. It was so flimsy that I had a ton of trouble c

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Admiral 1.1.1 released

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 23:09:47 GMT

The Mexircus.com guys just notified me that Admiral 1.1.1 was released. I discovered this neat app while I was previously hunting for a way to replicate the Mac Expose feature on Windows XP, and I’ve been using it read full story of "Admiral 1.1.1 released"»

Vista speech recognition

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:18:45 GMT

Prior to seeing this video, I thought Vista speech recognition was pretty good. Admittedly I didn’t use it for very long, but this user apparantly tried creating a perl sc

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The road soon to be frequently traveled

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:31:01 GMT

Over the holidays, one of the 2007 goals I set for myself was to complete the Seattle-to-Portland (STP) bike ride this summer over the July 14th weekend.

Last sunday, I took one step closer in my quest to complete this seemingly impossible task. I get tired driving 200 miles, and now I’m thinking of biking it?!

My training started the second week of January with spinning classes at my gym to increase my aerobic fitness level and to see if I liked biking enough to actually complete STP this year. It was far cheaper to buy a 10-class punch card for spinning classes than to buy a bike just to decide I hated biking :) Besides, I think I’m a glutton for punishment with all my coworkers ridiculing me due to the padded spandex shorts.

After deciding I liked biking enough, I started on a quest for researching road bikes. I’m usually a research nut when it comes to PCs and gadgets, but road bikes were a completely new world to me. What made it worse is that there wasn’t a ton of online references, so I had to resort to asking friends and visiting bike shops in person to understand

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ReadyBoost on a Sony Vaio SZ notebook

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 02:14:24 GMT

Recently, I was researching trying to find the best option for adding flash memory to my Sony VAIO VGN-SZ381p notebook to take advantage of the Vista ReadyBoost feature.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any good information on which flash memory options were best for the Sony SZ. With flash memory being so cheap these days, it’s conceivable to get a 2GB USB or SD card for ~$40 and ideally leave it in my notebook fulltime.

According to the ReadyBoost information, you need flash memory that has at least 2.5 MB/sec for 4kb random reads and 1.75 MB/sec for 512kb random writes.

The Sony SZ series notebook have a few different options for connection flash memory.

First it has the conventional USB 2.0 ports so you can use simple USB keys. I don’t like this option since all USB keys would potrude from my laptop forcing me to remove it every time I shut it it down.

Second connection option is through the ExpressCard slot through a 5-in-1 memory card adaptor which supports Memory stick, Memory stick Pro, SD, xD and MMC.

The third option is through a dedicated Memory Stick DUO port on the left side of the notebook.

To do my tests, I used the built in Vista tool winsat which can be run from the command-line as follows:

Read speed:

winsat disk –read –ran –ransize 4096 –drive <drive_letter>

Write speed:

winsat disk –write –ran –ransize 524288 –drive <drive

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Would you eat a dog if your life depended on it?

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:59:40 GMT

Or more accurately, would you eat your girlfriend’s dog if your life read full story of "Would you eat a dog if your life depended on it?"»

Bread making experiments

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 14:17:16 GMT

A few months ago I was obsessed with the idea of making my own bread and waking up to the smell of freshly baked goodness. I started researching the snot out of bread making options and settled on the crowd favorite, a Panasonic YP-250. Thanks to the Amazon Prime program (for which I still haven’t been charged yet after 1.5 years), the bread maker was waiting on my door step 2 days later.

I didn’t make any b

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Donate to charities by using Messenger

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 02:01:16 GMT

Microsoft and the Windows Live Messenger team are doing something very cool to help us all donate money to charity in a very easy, low impact way.

Donate money to charities by simply using Windows Live Messenger!

All you have to do is add a special emoticon tag to your “display name” in Messenger and from then on, Microsoft will donate a portion of the ad revenue generated by your usage of Windows Live Messenger.

You can choose from only from 9 different charities, but the charities they chose cover such a broad spectrum that I’d be surprised if everyone couldn’t find at least one that stands out to them.

What do you need to do?

Download and install
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Seattle's 25 for $25 is back

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 20:15:11 GMT

Looks like Seattle’s Twenty-five for $25 is back and my mouth is already watering. Despite living here for over 5 years, I’ve surprisingly not eaten at quite a few of these restaurants. Here’s my hit list I hope I can make it to this month:

Earth & Ocean
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Callwave continues to impress

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:32:30 GMT

My love affair with Callwave hasn’t stopped. This free service continues to impress me.

Not only do I love their SMS voicemail notification feature, but I just installed their Vista Sidebar gadget which is completely and utterly sweet and makes the normally painful tasks of listening to voicemail so easy.

After you install the CallWave Sidebar gadget, it shows up in your sidebar uninstrusively with the # of missed calls in the lower left corner:

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Coffee shop etiquette

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:48:47 GMT

Here I am sitting at a coffee house in First Hill and beside the most annoying man on earth.

Reason #1: Loud talker

Does he really need to talk on his cell phone for 15 mins at a time at full volume? I really, really don’t need to know that you ordered a bicycle for your kid nor any details on why your order from Omaha Steaks is delayed.

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Thoughts on OpenID

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 05:14:41 GMT

There has been a ton of talk lately on OpenID, especially since it has seemingly gained inroads with a lot of major industry players such as Microsoft, Verisign and AOL. Heck, even Digg is planning on supporting it.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently said:

It’s definitely time to declare OpenID a winner and the hope for a single-sign on world a reality.

When you read commentary by supporters of OpenID and the resulting press you can’t help by get the impression that it’s the savior of the internet and finally solves the authentication problems for users on the web. Some of the stated advantages:

De-centralized — you don’t have have to trust a single authority like Google or Microsoft.
Tiered authentication — websites that require stronger authentication can get users to sign in with a strong credential. It’s built into the protocol.
URL-based — you can keep your email address private and it saves you time when trying out new sites and services (you already know your ID is unique since no one else is using your URL identifier)
Multiple identities made easy — you can have multi
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Restaurant checklist

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:47:55 GMT

I recently went to Pasta Freska with Jascha and Suraj and had an absolutely fantastic meal. Prior to going there, I had never heard of this joint which surprised me given it’s so close to where I live.

The awesome thing about this restaurant is their mission of your meal being the “Chef’s choice”. You pay $21 for your meal but you don’t order specific menu i

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My $1343.92 cell phone bill

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:00:27 GMT

Here’s 5 easy steps to getting a $1343.92 cell phone bill:

Sign up for a 900 min per month voice plan
Add on the Unlimited Data option
Add on 200 text message option
Cingular makes a mistake and forgets to add on the Unlimited Data option, charging me 1 cent per kilobyte<
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5.10a: I own you

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 05:29:37 GMT

I tried indoor rock climbing just over 2 months ago and fell in love immediately. Suraj and I started climbing together since it not only gave us an excuse to hang out more but also since we were at the same skill level (read: complete novices). We ended up li

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Open your snack hole

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:49:02 GMT

Last weekend, I was driving through the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle and noticed a crazy billboard with the slogan “Open your snack hole” and almost veered off the road.

Tur

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Paypal introduces Verisign security token

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:28:05 GMT

Paypal is one of the most frequently phished sites on the since the risk-reward ratio is so high for attackers. By harvesting only a few accounts, attackers get can get access to real money. Compare this to phishing for email account which hardly have any direct monetary value.

While these attacks are hardly untraceable, it has a definite real impact to affected users even if it turns out to be solely

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Banishing Nofollow for user content

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:15:22 GMT

Updated my blog at trevinchow.com with a blog post titled "Banishing NoFollow for user content".

Banishing "Nofollow" for user content

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 07:33:32 GMT

The NoFollow attribute for all user generated content was originally intended to combat blog spam. The theory was that a spammer could increase their page rank very easily on search engines by spam commenting hundreds of blogs. By adding a NoFollow attribute automatically to user contributed content, we would enable search engines like Google and Live Search to know which links to not follow and thus not count towards page rank calculations.

However, tod

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trevinchow.com has been updated

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 21:41:59 GMT

http://trevinchow.com/blog

How to get Vista working on your Sony SZ

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 21:37:32 GMT

Even though I got Vista to work with my Sony SZ notebook (VGN-SZ381p), my machine has still unstable due to the beta drivers I was using.

Thankfully, Sony finally released non-beta versions of all their utilities and drivers. Since some of the Sony utilities depend on others to be install beforehand, the install order is critical. I just wish sony would include a setup wrapper to do the installation in the correct order.

But since we don’t have that list, I thought it was worth giving the installation order that worked for me and direct links to all the installers.

Vista drivers and utilities Sony Vaio SZ available

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:03:59 GMT

Hallelujah! I just noticed that Sony released their driver and utility updates for Windows Vista.

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The photography bug has bit. Hard.

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:44:20 GMT

For a long, long time I’ve always loved photographs and way back in 1996 I got my first 35mm film camera that I used on a 3 week trip to South Korea and Japan. I always felt dealing with film was not only inconvenient but expensive since you were developing entire rolls of film and finding you only liked a fraction of the resulting photos.

In 1998, I saw a photography exhibit while walking about downtown Vancouver. The exhibit itself was unremarkable, and quite frankly, I don’t even remember the photographer. However, what did strike me was how some of the photographs were able to capture a moment, and even shape the way you perceived it. The photography seed was planted.

Over the next few years, digital cameras were taking the consumer market by storm, but being a starving college student, I was never able to get my hands on one. The promises of a digital viewfinder and no forced photo-finishing costs sounded like a dream come true!

In 2000, I was shocked when I got an Olympus 3030Z as graduation gift from my parents. This camera was just plain bad-ass with it’s 3.3 MP sensor and promises of producing stunning photos. Back then I didn’t know much about taking photographs at all, other than I knew I wanted to shoot photos all the time.

Admittedly, my photos back then weren’t all that great. The harsh reality was that the camera I ha

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Niels gets booted

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 09:05:15 GMT

I was in San Diego most of this week on a business trip with Jascha and Herman. Due to the timing of the trip, I missed this week’s episode of Beauty and the Geek. I purposely avoided any of the websites that might cover the outcome of the show, and even avoided signing into
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Voicemail mini-revolution

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:13:54 GMT

I’m bombarded with information all the time. It comes from email to blogs, and news headlines to stock tickers.

All this information fits neatly into my life and I use tools to help me triage it effectively. My work email gets pushed to my smartphone through Cingular where I can process it in between meetings, or even while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. I use Yahoo webmail for my personal mail so I’m able to access it from any machine, including pocketIE on my smartphone.

With blogs, I use the excellent Google Reader to aggregate all the blogs I follow through RSS. I can flag things for later review and even publicly share specific blog posts through their cool “share” feature.

The exception to all of this is voicemail. Voicemail has such an arcane method for accessing it. I have to press and hold “1″ on my cell phone, and listen to all the prompts including the timestamp of the message. I then chose to save or delete the message using the numeric keypad. I’m a big fan of SMS, but there are lots of people in my life that will never send me an SMS message (hi mom!). Generally, I think voicemail is a pain in the butt because:

Not easy to access
Inefficient when you do access it
No way to easily share
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The beauty of tags...

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 06:14:05 GMT

So far I’m loving wordpress and my move from Windows Live Spaces has been a great choice. Wordpress has done a phenomenable job in creating an extensible platform; the sheer amount of plugins, widgets, themes and advice on the web is utterly amazing.

Wordpress makes it very simple to get a blog up and running with features like themes, categories, easy “page” creation and even queueing up posts for automatic posting in the future.

Since migrating all my blog content over, I started to indicate which “categories” each post belonged to. It didn’t take long for me to notice that the way I was using the wordpress categories wasn’t how it was originally intended to be used. I was instead using them as tags, which normally don’t have an implied hierarchy, unlike the hierarchical category system that Wordpress offers.

The beauty of tags is that the origanization system is super flexible and allows you to link together content that is hard to do with other methods. Another reason I love tags is duality it provides for content crea

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My blog has moved!

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 10:11:38 GMT

I've officially moved my blog over to a custom Wordpress hosted solution. Took me awhile to finally migrate enough content over, but my new home is at http://trevinchow.com/blog.

You can subscribe to my new RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/trevin.

Moved from Windows Live Spaces to Wordpress

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 10:08:42 GMT

After debating for months on moving from Windows Live Spaces to my own Wordpress hosted blog, I’ve finally made the jump. The biggest reason was that I couldn’t get the flexibility out of Spaces that I wanted, in particular, page customization. I hated having a blog that looked so cookie cutter.

Since Spaces’ RSS feed only gives me the last 30 posts in my blog, I had a heck of a time migrating my content. Cem tried helping me out by writing a perl script to crawl my Space and

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Windows Live ID client SDK released

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 23:32:11 GMT

My old team, Windows Live ID, just released the much anticipated SDK for connected rich-clients in an alpha release. Strange that this big news hasn’t been mentioned on their team blog or on Dev.live.com yet.

“We are excited to introduce the alpha vers

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Windows Live ID Client SDK released

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 19:32:27 GMT

My old team, Windows Live ID, just released the much anticipated SDK for connected rich-clients in an alpha release. Strange that this big news hasn't been mentioned on their team blog or on Dev.live.com yet.

"We are excited to introduce the alpha version of Windows Live ID for client applications!
The Windows Live ID Client 1.0 SDK provides a managed API for Windows Live sign-in authentication. Included in the release is a sample application with its source code, so that you can build your own client applications.
The benefits of implementing the Windows Live ID authentication service include:

No need to worry about the technical details of authentication! The Windows Live ID authentication service manages this process for you.
Don’t bother worrying about how to store and retrieve user account information! The Windows Live ID service uses the same functionality as Messenger to cache the user name and/or password for use in subsequent user sign ins.
Forget about creating, storing, and maintaining user accounts! The Windows Live ID service hosts and manages the Web flows and account services to enable account sign up, credential viewing and updating, and profile management.
Gain hundreds of millions of potential users of your application! By enabling Windows Live accounts direct sign in to your application, anyone with a Windows Live ID can become a user of your product."

You can download the SDK here: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=347. Send me links to any cool applications you create with it!

The best TV quote. Ever.

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:57:17 GMT

The best quote ever comes from tonight's episode of Beauty & The Geek where my buddy Niels is starring. Niels, I cannot believe you said:

"If number one were a booger, I'd pick it first."

Niels, why, oh, why, would you say that on National television? But if you didn't, I guess I wouldn't be able to quote you. Then again, who am I to be giving advice on what to say on television, remember my application to Survivor was denied :)

The best TV quote. Ever.

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:57:17 GMT

The best quote ever comes from tonight’s episode of Beauty & The Geek where

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Download Vista and Office now!

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 05:22:02 GMT

After slagging away countless months, weeks, days and hours, our team has finally shipped our latest, and definitely most important release to date. Woohoo!

Prior to joining Microsoft on the Windows Live ID team (known as .NET Passport back then), I was part of a startup and a few "side" projects. When I decided to ultimately move from Vancouver to Seattle and accept the Microsoft offer, a part of me was sad that I was leaving the "start up" environment behind me. There is something I find exciting about those moments right before you "hit the button" and your service hits the web for millions of people to see.

In Windows Live ID, I was the Lead PM on the team responsible for a whack of things including the login user experience and platform programmability. That team helped me learn what it meant be a great Program Manager and I was truly sad when I left for Windows Marketplace last November.

I've been on the Windows Marketplace team for a few months, and now that we've shipped, it's like my professional life has come full circle. I'm back in a startup-like environment, working at a frenzied (but fun) pace, with people that I absolutely love to work with. I absolutely love coming to work each day and it's days like today that make all those crazy long days worth it.

You can now buy and download Windows Vista and Office 2007 on WindowsMarketplace.com. Run, click, crawl, buy, drool and download your copy today.

The months leading up to tonight have been crazy, but nothin crazier than the last week, where our team:

Racked up a crazy amount of food bills for late night dinners, including weekends.
Have an ongoing set of jokes that you only laugh at when you spend 80+ weeks with the same people
Had A "sexy pants" contest, that was won by Derek who made cowboy chaps with iron-on 3M reflective tape.
Ate a hot dog and margarita dinner tonight -- nothing but the best for us!

Here's the obligatory marketing shots which I snagged from our site:

Download Vista and Office 2007 now!

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:22:28 GMT

After slagging away countless months, weeks, days and hours, our team has finally shipped our latest, and definitely most important release to date. Woohoo!

Prior to joining Microsoft on the Windows Live ID team (known as .NET Passport back then), I was part of a startup and a few “side” projects. When I decided to ultimately move from Vancouver to Seattle and accept the Microsoft offer, a part of me was sad that I was leaving the “start up” environment behind me. There is something I find exciting about those moments right before you “hit the button” and your service hits the web for millions of people to see.

In Windows Live ID, I was the Lead PM on the team responsible for a whack of things includi

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read full story of "Download Vista and Office 2007 now!"»

Link for free T-Mobile Hotspot accounts

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 05:39:12 GMT

Looks like the T-Mobile and Windows Vista promotion is alive and kicking. I just stumbled upon this link which takes you straight to the sign-up page after which you can enjoy 3 free months of T-Mobile HotSpot lovin.

Link for free T-Mobile HotSpot accounts

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 21:39:49 GMT

Looks like the

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Vista error: "The specified print monitor is unknown"

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 01:15:30 GMT

Yesterday, I tried mapping 2 new network printers at work on my Sony VGN-SZ381P Notebook running Windows Vista RTM. When it connected to the printers, it attempted to install new print drivers but failed with the error message "The specified print monitor is unknown". The install would fail and I was left printer-less.

After trying a variety of things, I finally stumbled upon the solution.

My blog has moved.. rest of this post can be found at the new perma-link: http://trevinchow.com/blog/2007/01/27/vista-error-the-specified-print-monitor-is-unknown/

Vista error: "The specified print monitor is unknown"

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 17:15:52 GMT

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