Going Pro

I received my first income as a musician today. While waiting for my six year old's piano lesson to finish, I sat in a shady spot outside the music store and practiced trumpet. After my second song (Misty) a family out for a bike ride came over and the Dad insisted on giving me some money. I tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted, saying it was one of his favorite songs.

Two bucks, cold hard cash, without even trying. Do I have to declare this on my 2010 taxes?

Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 shipped recently. I am a Microsoft employee in the Office division, but not a Rah-Rah  Buy Our Awesome Product kind of guy (shocking news to those who know me).

My elementary school kids use PowerPoint and Word (via Mac Office 2008), and their mother uses Word 2007 to write college reports. Away from work, I am not a frequent Office user. It is installed on my home computers, upgraded to the latest versions, but only because I get an employee discount. In my "tech support" role at home it is easier to have the same version I use at work. Office feeds my family, so it is painful to admit that it has become less and less relevant to me through the years I've worked on it.

One Office application I've wanted to use at home is OneNote. It's a cool app nobody seems to know about that first shipped in Office 2003. Among other things it captures free-form notes, screenshots, and web clippings in a single notebook file that can be easily searched and organized into sections and tabs. Hard to explain until you've played with it.

On our Microsoft intranet we have the ability to keep the OneNote file on a server, automatically synced back into the OneNote client on multiple computers. I work on several computers, so having my notes available on all of them without any special steps (and the bonus of my notes automatically backed up) is great. The downside has been that you have to have the OneNote client software installed, and I can't do that on some of my work computers.

I haven't used OneNote at home because I want my personal notes to roam seamlessly between multiple computers just like my work notes. I want my notes on my home PCs (Windows and Mac) and I want the same notes available up on my work computers. I am not willing to tinker around with Sync This or Mesh That to accomplish this. I could have accomplished a less-slick form of this via Google Docs, honestly, but I like the rich client; it's still a slicker way to edit, especially when dealing with images and other non-textual material.

Now for the infomercial part of our program. Office-2010 includes online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (yay!): the Office Web Apps.

A big part of this is to compete with Google Docs and other "good enough" productivity suites, but unlike Google, it also lets you work in the client applications or the web applications. For OneNote, this gives me (almost) exactly what I want. I can create a Notebook online, and view or edit it either in a web browser on PC or Mac, or I can use the OneNote 2010 client and sync the online notebook the same way I do on my corporate network. Sweet. I've created my new personal online notebook, and no doubt the FBI will be adding it to their watch list almost immediately. I'm not a privacy nut, I air my crazy out in plain sight for all to see, so the hosted aspect of it doesn't worry me a whole lot.

My only sad part is still no rich OneNote client for the Mac (or iPad or iPhone or iWhatever for all you mobile hipsters out there).

Huh, what?

Watching more than an hour of TV makes me feel icky. So does a minute-turned-into-hours session of pointless web browsing ("Hmm, I wonder what that actor from that 70's sitcom is up to...").

I'm not against entertainment of the mind, body, emotions, or taste buds. I don't aspire to be an ascetic. I have ascetic tendencies by nature and have to work hard to relax and enjoy myself (which rarely works out). Left to my own devices, I'd still be living in an apartment with a chair, a bed, a pot for cooking my Kraft Dinner, and the props for whatever hobby was my current obsession. Visitors would take one look and ask, "Oh, did you just move in?" "No. I've been here 18 years." Uncomfortable silence as they inch towards the door and wonder what I keep in the freezer.

I don't feel entirely comfortable criticizing popular culture, since it appears that everybody else is enjoying it, or at least accepting it, far more than I am. If it makes them happy but not me, do I have a right to be critical, or should I be jealous instead?

The Buddhist perspective would be that these distractions are just that, a way to learn to fly (making sense of life) by throwing yourself at the ground and missing (preventing yourself from thinking about it). Reality TV shows, religions (hmm, Reality TV Religions--note to self for future business opportunity?), mind-altering substances, or watching or reading "news" are distractions removing us from the current moment. Combine that with fretting about past indecisions, and pining for future acquisitions or conquests (new car, caviar, four-star daydream), and how much awareness do we devote to the present? Does the present exist?

Our economy doesn't need the present, because it doesn't encourage us to consume. We aspire to buy something, we buy it, and then we move on to dreaming about the next thing we need. The present pops up long enough for cash to change hands, or a computer to add and subtract, then vanishes again.

Whatever lofty philosophy I may spout, I am the poster child for the Age of Distraction, hence this blog post.

Not So Hotmail?

I've been lucky with Hotmail, had an account since 1998 and no significant problems until today. My account has been unreached for over 16 hours, with nothing but Eddie the shipboard computeresque "Hi! We're making improvements to make your e-mail experience more spiffy!!! Thanks!!!!! Try again later!!!!!!!!" responses to my login attempts.

I've witnessed others losing access for hours or days, and delayed incoming and outgoing mail. In one dramatic case, the same mail was sent to me and another Hotmail account; One received it immediately, the other over six months later. Yes, six months later. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself.