award tour

Microsoft launched a new set of ads to follow-up there Jerry Seinfeld sports. The new ads take the Apple “I’m a Mac” ads head-on. All three ads are linked up here in this techcrunch post. Essentially, the ads start with a John Hodgeman look-alike who says “I’m a PC” and then shows a mosaic of people who say they’re also a PC. It includes you’re average person, an astronaut, Bill Gates, Pharell, a hipster, a teacher in Africa, a guy in the Artic, etc.

It’s interesting that Microsoft took on the Apple ads head-on with a message of “Billions of people use PCs and you can be proud to be a PC”. Though I think the ad is well done the problem is that I have never really seen someone be passionate about Microsoft products. The only exception I can think of is game developers who use Visual Studio, people who use Excel for everything (and that’s just cause they’ve used it forever), and people directly or indirectly on MSFT payroll. That said, all of those cases pale in comparison to Mac and iPhone users.

That said, the ad is quite effective if all it does is give someone piece of mind while buying a computer that “Ya, it’s alright to be a PC”.

Ram mentioned on his blog that he’s looking for a “mouse that doesn’t suck“. I started writing a comment in response, realized it was getting really long, and decided I’d just post it here.

I also spent a lot of time looking for a good keyboard and mouse. The keyboard part got easy when Apple launched their latest keyboard but their mouse, the mighty mouse, was just not for me. It’s horrible small, which cramps my hand, and I’m not big on the tiny scroll wheel.

So my requirements was a mouse with bluetooth (i didn’t want a stupid dongle taking up a usb port), rechargeable (i didn’t want to deal with batteries), and preferably as large as possible to fit my hand. This left few options. I went with the Microsoft Laser Mouse 8000 and I’ve been very happy with it. Though oddly expensive at the time ($80 I believe) I managed to get it from the Microsoft Store (thank you Boris) for $50.

Configuring it on OSX Tiger was a real pain in the ass (you had to install it manually as a random bluetooth device) but when I upgraded to OSX Leopard it worked perfectly. The 4th and 5th buttons on it are off to the sides are rest perfectly under your thumb and ring finger. I use those buttons for OSX’s Expose and Spaces, respectively. The one annoying button on the mouse is the scroll wheel. It’s one of those scroll wheels that also has left-right scrolling (which i never use) so using it to click is near impossible (so I never use it).

I use the mouse at home (so not 8 hours a day like at the office) and since November I’ve probably only recharged it a half-dozen times. It comes with a recharging base so I don’t have to deal with batteries which is quite nice. The mouse is also a decent size. I’d still want it bigger but I didn’t any that were.

Basically, if you want a quality rechargable, bluetooth mouse I’d recommend the Microsoft Laser Mouse 8000 (what a terrible product name).

Seems Internet Explorer 6 is just out to screw me whenever possible. I just realized that all the posts I did recently which included album covers weren’t aligning properly IE6. So I assumed the images where the problem and after a horrible amount of edit-and-check cycles I realized that the problem was actually related to the italic text in the paragraphs. IE, for some stupid reason, won’t overflow italicized text properly so the width of the containing “p” or “div” is too wide. Luckily a quick search on google turned up a great summary of the IE and italics problem. I tried using the fix they suggested but I couldn’t get it to work. So what did I do? I turned off italics for “em” tags within IE6 or below (using this conditional comment trick) . So, if you like italics you should use firefox (or safari) or upgrade to IE7.

If you’re one of the idiots still using ie6, for the love of god, please use a different web browser. I don’t care what, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, lynx. Just make it anything else. I just spent the last 2 hours trying to figure out why something was so messed up in IE6. Turns out I came across the “IE6 double margin” bug. In short, if you have some css like this:

div#example {
    float:left;
    margin-left:100px;
}

IE6 will make the left margin about 200px, NOT 100px. So how do you fix it? Add “display:inline;” and, magically, IE6 decides that you want a 100px margin and not some random arbitrary number that you never wrote. And, yes, this works properly in IE7, Safari, and Firefox.

Microsoft’s second generation Zune is due out in 10 days. You can see photos and specs at Zune.net. And isn’t it crazy that Microsoft couldn’t get zune.com? And an additional side-note on that site, what is up with the orange links on the brown text? It’s genuinely hard to read on my screen.

But that’s beside the point. I actually got to use a new Zune the other day and was actually pretty impressed. Not so much that I’d buy one (not that they even work with Macs) but you get the point. The one thing I thought worth mentioning is how the main navigation button works. It allows you to scroll up and down in three different ways:

• Click it in a direction like a mouse button and it moves up or down by one item.
• Hold down and it scrolls continuously.
• Or slide your finger down the navigation and the menu will scroll and eventually slow down. You can also tap it to stop sliding at any point

I think this might actually work better than the iPod’s circular scroll wheel. Lately I’ve found that moving up or down just one item on my iPod can be particularly frustrating. This is especially so if you’re doing moving around (like walking somewhere) or can’t focus on the screen (like driving). The Zune’s nav button addresses this simple case.

I only got to use it for a couple minutes but the only other thing that struck me is that the font it uses is narrow which made it slightly hard to read. It’s definitely not as nice as the fonts used on the latest iPods (Myriad and Helvetica).

Another plus for the Zune, the weird-ass acid-trip ad campaign they’re currently doing features a Rogue Wave track.