Today is a sad day indeed for the music world as we've lost one of the great rock keyboard players, Richard Wright.  This also ends any hope for a full Pink Floyd reunion, which probably wouldn't have happened anyway.

I've been a huge Pink Floyd fan since a friend gave me a copy of The Wall in 9th grade.  I quickly started amassing a collection of tapes from my local used music store.  Wish You Were Here, Animals, Delicate Sound of Thunder, on and on, then finally Dark Side of the Moon.  I'm not sure why I got that album so late in my Floyd loving career but once I got a copy I was hooked.  In my opinion Dark Side is the greatest rock album ever recorded and it might be the greatest album of all time.  I've probably listened to that album 10 times more than any other album in my life.  I've been fortunate enough to get to see Wright play with Floyd a few times and each time it's been an almost religious experience.  A truly amazing musician who will be sadly missed.

It's been a while since I've posted a recipe so I figured I'd share this one with everyone. This is very easy to make and tastes fantastic, in fact it's one of my all time favorite ways to prepare steak. So here goes:

What you need
1 lb flank steak
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup honey
2 tbsp vinegar
3-5 tbsp scallions

What you do
Combine all ingredients in either a seal able container or zip lock bag. Allow the steak to marinate for at least 4 hours, longer if possible (you can easily leave it over night). Turn it several times while marinating. Sear the steak on the grill over high heat for about 3 minutes per side (you want it medium-rare). Don't over cook it, it can dry out pretty easily. After you take it off the grill let it sit for about 5 minutes then slice into strips - if you have extra slice that up too for left overs (if you don't slice it up it'll dry out pretty easily). Enjoy!

It's not every day that you see a technology that could dramatically change the way we input data on mobile devices.  First we had just our 10 number keys for input.  Then came along T9 which made input on standard cell phones much faster and easier (supposedly some kids can hit 50-60 words a minute using T9).  For those of us that have had full QWERTY keyboards on our phones for a while we haven't used or needed T9 and have been able to type fairly fast (I can easily do 25 wpm on my Dash).  However with the abundance of touch screen only devices (iPhone, HTC Touch, etc) input has become difficult again - the virtual keyboards just don't come close to the speed you can get on a real keyboard.  That's all about to change.

Enter Swype.  Swype is from the inventor of T9, Cliff Kushler.  He has come up with a way to type on a virtual keyboard by swiping across the keyboard in a connect-the-dots fashion, just pausing on each character as you type.  With this method you never lift your finger (or stylus) as you type, you just slide around from letter to letter.  It's really much better to so be sure to check out the video below, it's impressive to say the least.

Swype technology is coming in Google's Android operating system and the SDK is right around the corner for Windows Mobile (where we'll see it first).  All bets say this will make it to the iPhone and just about every other mobile touch screen device on the market (T9 is installed on a staggering 2.5 billion phones in the world).  Maybe this will get my over my final hurdle with the iPhone, that stupid ass virtual keyboard!

Unless you're living under a rock today you probably noticed that Google launched their first browser, Google Chrome.  Rather than get into a bunch of details about Chrome I'll let you read through the comic book they created to explain it all (it's very well done).

In my opinion this seems to be Google's first entry to build a web based OS.  Without getting into all the details above Chrome handles each tab as an individual process.  The benefit of this is when one tab crashes the others are left alone.  This means that Chrome has it's own built in task manager to let you see what each of the processes are doing, sure sounds like an OS to me.  So here are my initial impressions.

• So far it’s fast.  Way fast.  Doing some simple tests using the Newsgator Enterprise web interface (which is notoriously slow) it’s showing pages about twice as quickly (if not more) than Firefox.  I haven’t seen the difference be that big in other pages so I’m guessing it’s due to all the javascript that NGES uses.
• I like the concept of a process per tab but the downside is I’ve now got an extra 11 processes running (since I’ve got 12 tabs open).
• The Chrome Task Manager works fine and shows some interesting stuff about what’s going on.  This I like but I don’t like that it’s fragmented this aspect into its own tool.
• Memory usage seems about double that of Firefox, at least right off the bat.  I closed Firefox so it would be fresh then reopened with the 12 tabs I had going.  I opened those same 12 tabs in Chrome to compare.  Firefox was using roughly 80MB of RAM where Chrome was using 130MB.  Firefox is notorious about leaking memory so this probably isn't a fair ding.
• Haven’t seen anything about plugins yet (but did read that it supports them).  I definitely already miss AdBlock.
• It’s got a nice clean look and works essentially like Firefox.  Many of the keyboard shortcuts are the same at least (for example you can press ctrl+3 to go to the third tab, ctrl+L takes you to the link bar and ctrl+K takes you to search).

So far it's a great start and could actually catch on.  I'm disappointed they didn't use the Gecko rendering engine from Firefox (they used Webkit instead) as I'm sure this will hurt Firefox market share in the long term.  I wonder how long it will take Firefox to implement some of these changes, I'm guessing not too long.

Like Brad about every six months or so I check out many of the desktop operating systems out there to see what's new.  While I'm not an OS X fan in the least and have never been successful using it (like Brad due to lack of full Exchange support) that isn't the case with Linux.  Most of the major distributions come with Evolution which offers just about full Exchange support (Email, Contacts, Calendar and Tasks) and looks and works almost exactly like Outlook.  Sure there are some missing features but all-in-all it's completely workable (for me at least).

The good thing about Linux for me is there never has been one major deal breaker.  Usually I play with it for a few days and go back home to the Windows that I know and love (yes I think Vista is fantastic - there I said it).  This time could be different - every time I try this little experiment there are more and more reasons to switch to something like SuSE and fewer possible deal breakers.  All the apps I need are there: Evolution, Open Office (which reads/writes all MS Office file formats), Pidgin (for IM), etc, etc.  While I haven't done much multimedia with it yet the few things I have done (playing back MP3's and video files) has worked flawlessly.  Oh and the interface and graphic effects are pretty fantastic, Apple and Microsoft could both learn a few things from these guys.

I've saved the best part for last.  Those of you with iPhones know how great the App Store is right?  Well SuSE has a package management system that is extremely similar (actually it's been around for many years).  You just search for what you want, click install and let it do the rest.  Just like App Store it handles all the downloading for you, including installing any dependency packages you might need.  Very slick.

So if you're itching to play with the latest OS and Vista isn't your thing check out one of the Linux distros (I also plan to play with Ubuntu and Fedora soon).

As any iPhone user knows there aren't really any good options for syncing tasks to the iPhone.  OmniFocus will let you manage tasks on the iPhone and store them on a WebDAV server (which Exchange technically is) but it doesn't sync with Exchange.  It just uses WebDAV as it's storage medium if you don't have a MobileMe account so we'll knock that one off the list.  Enter KeyTasks.

KeyTasks let's you sync your tasks from Outlook (more on that in a second) to your iPhone wirelessly, over the air just like Mail/Contacts/Calendar - well sort of.  The catch is you have to run an agent on your desktop to pull the tasks from Outlook (and therefore from Exchange) which then pushes those tasks to Chapura's servers for storage then your iPhone grabs it from there.  They claim that the entire process is encrypted which I verified by doing a network packet capture just to be sure.  Being very anti-cloud storage as I am (for company data mind you) this was key for me. 

So far it seems to work well.  There are a few limitations (first being that you must have a machine logged in somewhere to do the sync), you're limited to 750 tasks (if you've got more than that, well, you may have other issues...) and you have to choose the sync interval on your PC (but after that it happens automatically) and manually sync on the device.  None of these are real deal breakers for most as tasks tend to be much more static than other PIM data.  Hopefully soon they (or someone) will start pulling/pushing the data directly to the Exchange server like my tried and true Dash does.

At $9.99 (per year) it's pretty cost effective too.  So if you're looking for a way to get your Outlook/Exchange tasks on your iPhone take a look at KeyTasks, it may be just what you're looking for.

So to make a long and sad story as short and funny as possible I give you my new car "accessory".  The short version is I ordered some car parts (exhaust and suspension) from a friend and one of the two boxes had four of these in it.  Not exactly what I was expecting to make my car faster.  DHL somehow switched the labels at some point during shipping (which we're trying to track down).  Now that my tears of sadness/rage have turned into tears of laughter I just had to share what I actually got. 

Wonder how many HP Jesus is good for? I'm guessing at least 20 or so...

Hopefully if you're reading my blog in a web browser you're using Firefox (and if you aren't you really should be).  If you haven't been reading the tech press today let me clue you in - today is Firefox 3.0 day.

I've been playing with the Firefox 3.0 betas and release candidates for a few months now getting ready for the upgrade to 3.0.  I've found them to be fast, stable and very feature rich.  One of the main issues with older versions of Firefox was memory usage - if you left it open for long periods of time (I generally leave it running for days if not weeks) with lots of tabs open (I generally have between 8-20 tabs at any moment) it would eat memory like a fat southern guy at an all you can eat BBQ buffet.  That is to say a lot, in the hundred of megs of memory (I've seen as high as 800MB).  Firefox 3.0 is supposed to fix all that.

There is however one huge problem with Firefox 3.0 - Google Browser Sync support has been discontinued.  For some reason Google has decided not to update the extension for FF3 and is going to discontinue support for the entire app at the end of this year.  To say this sucks is an understatement.  If you're not familiar with Google Browser Sync let me explain - it is easily the best, most useful extension ever written for Firefox.

What GBS does it take just about everything about your browser (bookmarks, cookies, saved usernames/passwords, history, etc), encrypt it and transfer that data to Google's servers.  Then any other machine you're on (regardless of the OS) now has all your browser data available.  This is huge if you use more than one machine - no matter what machine I use my browser is the same.  If I register for a site on one (and save my password) that information is synced across all my other computers.  Once you get used to this you can't live without it.  Well I guess I'm going to have to.

I haven't yet downgraded to FF2 but I probably will as this is already driving me crazy (after only 10 minutes).  My sincere hope is that Google will come to its senses, update the app and continue to support it long term.  Hopefully there will be a big enough back lash in the blogger community that they will be forced to.

As it's been quite a while since I've posted anything I've been looking for something that would get me started blogging again.  Given that I can be hugely critical of bad customer service I decided I should be equally complimentary when someone gets it right.  Men's Health (and their publisher Rodale) gets it right.

I've been a subscriber to Men's Health for about 8 months now and really enjoy it.  Easy to read, informative and very useful.  A few months ago I got a random letter from Rodale (their publisher from what I can tell) that I owed them $49.95 for the Men's Health Total Fitness Guide, something I never ordered nor received.  At the time I pitched it in the trash assuming it was some sort of error or way to get me to order the books.  When I got a second one that listed my account as delinquent I decided I better take action.

Today I called up the customer service number ready for a fight.  I explained to the rather polite lady that I'd never ordered these books nor had I ever received them.  She immediately apologized for the trouble, noted this in my account, canceled the order and confirmed for me that I was all set.  "Are you still there?" she said, as I sat there stunned that it was so easy.  As I thanked her she commented "it's nice to help cheery people" - to which I explained I was ready for a fight and stunned that I didn't have to have one. 

Not really sure what this book is but now I may actually want it.  Well done Rodale, well done.

If you know me fairly well you know I'm a big music fan (and was actually a jazz music major in college).  While I still play a bit for fun I haven't played seriously in many years.  Fortunately that isn't the case for some friends (and co-workers of mine) who have spent the last 6 years recording their band Soul Patch's latest album, Sooner or Later.  This is their second release, their first Summers in Rangoon is one of my favorite albums - Arabic Ska is a particularly fantastic song.

Sooner or Later is a more mature album than Summers in Rangoon was, you can really hear how much the band has grown in the playing.  Since Summers they've really found their own style and groove which I really enjoy.  The first thing I thought when hearing the new album was that it sounded like a modern day Steely Dan with flavors of some of the great jam bands of modern times (Phish, Widespread Panic, etc).  There are several guitar solos that clearly show Ryan's appreciate of Trey Anastasio (lead guitarist of Phish).  Jason's vocals on Lose My Mind are especially nice, as is his extremely skilled drumming.  While I think Soul Patch is definitely a band for musicians they do a great job blending that into something that just about anyone could enjoy.

So be sure to snag a copy on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon or just about anywhere else that sells music online.  If you're around Boulder feel free to swing by our office, I'm guessing someone will play you a few tunes if you ask nice enough!