Busted Laptop Screen -> Busted Relationship

My hardware issues remain unresolved. Apparently, HP has decided that my two month old laptop with the cracked display is not covered under warranty. Of course, since I have a wide variety of accessories compatible with this machine, I’m unlikely to scrap it even though they are charging my group a significant portion of the original cost (> 50%) to fix it.

As you can imagine, this is the last HP machine I will ever use. Granted, that doesn’t mean much to HP’s bottom line – I just got this machine when I switched jobs so I’m not due for a refresh for a while. I don’t run the lab, so I don’t have any say over the hardware they run in there. But I am in the market for a Media Center PC – luckily there are a variety of other OEMs who offer MCE (the Viewsonic looks cool).

People like Scoble scour the ‘net to find people who have “fired” Microsoft. We are doing a better listening to them (note, I’m not suggesting we’re done listening or that we’ve fixed all the issues – just that we’re improving). I hope HP has someone looking for people who have fired them.

SharePoint Syndication v0.5

I’ve finally updated the SharePoint Syndication project to support the RTM version of Windows SharePoint Services. Since I’m in process of updating my blog software, I haven’t updated the project page, though I have updated the GDN workspace with the release bits, source code and readme file. The workspace even has a freshly minted url: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/spsynd. Enjoy.

Who Let The Dog Out

My “dog” David White started a blog. And he blames me for “shaming” him into doing it. That’s a first – I’ve never shamed anyone into doing anything. I’m not sure I really shamed David – “pestered” may be a better term.

Developing for Media Center

The last session I went to @ PDC on Wed was on Building Media Center Applications (PPT). You can download the MCE SDK from the MCE Developer Center which isn’t on MSDN (go figure).

I’m Having Hardware Issues

In the space of a week and a half: my battery bay was damaged, my screen was damaged, and my external HD with all my backups on it came within a hair’s breadth of going belly up. Luckily, on that last one, a few reboots and XP was able to piece everything back together again. So I backed up my backup and now am going to make a copy of the backed-up backup on CDR. Given that the XP built-in backup utility has no support for CDR, I need a decent personal backup utility. Any suggestions?