yes folks its 2008, there are much better ways, and cheaper ways, to get together and share ideas. With gas climbing above $4.00/gal its hard to justify a short ride across town to get together for a meeting. The solution, Mikogo. Mikogo is a free, yes thats right I said the F word, online screen sharing tool.

How will screen sharing help you? Easy. Say you need to give a presentation, just open your presentation software, start a Mikogo meeting and give folks your meeting ID. Once they have your meeting ID all they need to do is go to www.mikiogo.com and click in upper right hand corner where it says “join a meeting.” Once they enter in your meeting code and their name they will be able to see you screen. For security purposes you can be selective about which parts of your desktop, or programs you choose to share with your clients/friends/co-workers.

Once connected you can give your presentation or perhaprs work on a document together. You can even give mouse and keyboard control to folks who come to your meeting allowing them to add their two cents to the document. You can also share photos with family and friends.

Now, it is 2008 afterall (as I stated previously) and I’m sure you are wondering about security. Well have no fear. Mikogo uses the industry leading standard of 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) to secure all the connections to and from the Mikogo servers. This should give you great piece of mind when sharing those documents that have company trade secrets or those pictures you really don’t want anyone else to see! (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

All joking aside you really should check out Mikogo. Extremely easy to use, can be used in some MANY situations, safe & secure and of course its FREE!!

Special thanks to Andrew for providing me information on Mikogo and introducing it to me.

Cheers!

AJ

So I was just looking at all my posts and realized that I haven’t blogged about Beer very much, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense considering the name I gave this blogg…. Anyway! As I was looking over my blog also have in my hand a Blackberry Wheat from Long Trail Ale and man is tasty and a hot summer day! Hell its tasty any day! This Wheat ale has some great golden color, filtered and of course some great flavor! As soon as it hits your tongue you get great bitter flavor and the after taste is amazing. The bitterness is complemented with some great, yet subtle, blackberry flavor.
Now this, in the past, was traditionally a summer ale put out by Long Trail Ale, but because of it popularity Long Trail is going to be selling year round. Good things really do come to those who wait.

Long Trail Ale is a Vermont based brewery located in the southern part of the state. If you ever get a chance I highly recommend stopping by their brewery, inside you’ll find a self guide tour, a brew pub and a great little store where you can buy lots of cool Long Trail items, from pint glasses to t-shirts and of course beer.

Stay tuned for more beer and brew reviews, including more from Long Trail Ale.

Cheers!

I recently found a new website/product called Cross Loop. Whether you are looking for assistance, or looking to be able provide assistance, cross loop is what you need. Cross loop is safe, secure and easy to use. If you need asssistance you can just go to www.crossloop.com, click on ‘I need help’ and search for people that may be considered experts on what you need help with. If you think you are an expert and want to provide help you can also go to www.crossloop.com and click on I can help and go from there.

What exactly is cross loop you say?

Well as I said before it is simple, safe and secure. What does it do? Well if you need help it will share your screen with your tech support person and will even give them control of your mouse and keyboard. If you are tech support you can take control of a user’s computer and fix things for them. You can also teach them how do anything on their computer.

Why cross loop? Well that is simple, its free!! There are other products out there that will share screens and control of the mouse and keyboard, one such program is called Go2Assist made by Citrix. Now, I use Go2Assit at work and i love it! Its makes helping people at remote sites very easy, much easier than sometimes trying to guide someone over the phone. However Go2Assist is not free, and unless you have some extra income or a good source of income from its hard to keep paying monthly for products like go2assist. Why pay? Why not just use Cross Loop? Good question! There are a few extra things you can do that Cross Loop does not enable you to do, like have multiple sessions going at once and Go2Assist uses a different type of encryption to secure the screen sharing session.

I recommend you try it next time you need help. See my Tech Support page, which you can find a link for on the right side of my blog here. For more answers to your questions and to see a demo video check out www.crossloop.com.

Cheers!

AJ

Thats right just yesterday FireFox 3 was released. I am using it to write this very post and I have to say I really like it. If you haven’t yet switched to firefox you need to go do that right now!!

Power Pack 1 for Windows Home Server has been released by the WHS team at Microsoft this past Tuesday, June 10th. This is a welcome site as PP1 fixes some bugs found in the original release of WHS. It also adds some additional features. Among the new features are support for x64 clients and the ability to backup the server itself. it also fixes some of the data corruption issues while working with files across the network that were encountered  in the original release.

I myself will not installing PP1 until it was completed its beta testing and is released via Windows Update. I do not have a second server I can setup and this server is far to important to me to risk using it for beta testing. I will try to keep my eye on the WHS team blog and see how the beta testing progresses and post note worthy information back on here.

Cheers!

And by here I mean in my pocket! Thats right, on Saturday just a mere day or two after Verizon released the Blackberry Curve I walked into a Verizon Wireless store and picked one up! I gotta tell you I love it! 2 mega pixel camera, video capable, expandable storage, full QWERTY keyboard, bluetooth enabled brilliant screen and the list goes on. This is by far the most incredible phone I have ever had! Weather you’re a Blackberry fan or not once you pick up this phone you will be!

Thats right, the CDMA curve is here! I’m sure if you’re a true Blackberry (aka Crackberry) fanatic then you probably already know this. I am a crackberry fanatic but I havent had a whole lot of time to blog about this because I’ve been to busy reading other blogs trying to figure out when it was coming out! I don’t exactly have insider knowledge…

Anyway, the plan is that I will eventually get a Curve, since I am a Verizon customer, and I will post all my feedback on it here. If you have a curve I would love to hear what you have to say about it.

So late last month Microsoft officially announced that they are indeed going to stop selling XP, however Dell has probably found a hole in the plan. Dell plans to continue to sell Windows XP. To do this they will claim to sell Vista by selling the computer with Windows XP but ship it with a Vista Upgrade disk, what customer choose to do with the disk after that is up to them! We’ll see how long this lasts…

I, for one, am embracing Vista. However since I work in an Enterprise IT environment and see that some of our important applications don’t work on Vista. Now this really isn’t the fault of Microsoft and Vista. These companies have known for a long time that Vista was going to be coming, and now its been out for nearly 2 years. Its time to move forward.

On June 30th of this year Microsoft, and OEM companies (such as HP and Dell), will stop selling Windows XP. Is this really a smart move? I know of two companies, both my current and future employers, that have software that is not yet Vista capable. Now at this point is Microsoft’s fault or is the fault of the software vendor?

Well one might argue that its Microsoft’s fault for not making Vista backwards compatible with software and hardware. To that many critics are responding that its very hard for Microsoft to move forward and innovate when it has to keep coming back to support older software and hardware. I, for one, completely agree. How can Microsoft move forward and create new and interesting things when it has to keep code that supports older devices and software? Keep in mind this code that makes Vista compatible affects and limits what programmers can do to make Vista better, a perfect example is security. Because so many people wanted Vista to be compatible, instead of everyone upgrading to Vista, we are left with User Access Control. If Microsoft moved forward like it had originally intended too we would have much better account security controls than UAC.

Also the other side of this argument might be that its the software vendors fault for not patching or releasing a newer version that is Vista compatible. Vista has been talked about for many years prior to its release to the business market in November 2006 and the consumer release in Early 2007. Seems like something should have been done before now.

I, for one, welcome Vista. I have been a Vista user since its release early last year. I run it on my laptop, and when I build my next desktop that too shall run Windows Vista. There are many features of vista that I find myself missing and wishing I had when I go back to an XP environment. I find myself now very rarely using my desktop and picking up my laptop. I urge anyone out there who hasn’t tried Vista yet to go ahead and try it out.

On a side note, Vista has been so unwelcome and hated that it has been dubbed the Millennium Edition of the new age. For those of you not fortunate enough to have used Windows ME, trust me you didn’t miss anything. Windows ME was on my very first laptop that I got when I was 18. It was a p3 900MHZ processor with 120 MB of ram, its actually still kicking today as I use it for miscellaneous side projects. Anyway I saw the blue screen of death more times with ME than I ever have before. I have never seen Vista blue screen. As soon as XP was released I rushed out and grabbed a copy to throw over ME, that was the best move ever.

Well its official, the high definition format war is over. I’m certainly happy its over, but I’m not very happy about the outcome.

This all started earlier this year when Warner Brothers decided they were no longer going to support the HD-DVD format. Originally they were producing both HD-DVD and Blueray movies. This came just days before CES. This, of course, burst the bubble of many of HD-DVD’s supporters.

Recently major retailers, such has Wal-Mart and Best Buy, have decide to no longer support HD-DVD and push the sale of Blueray players and discs. When you consider that those two stores alone account for the majority of movie sales alone, thats another pretty big blow to HD-DVD.

Now finally, according to an article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/technology/20disc.html?ref=technology), Toshiba has announced that they will no longer produce HD-DVD players. Good-bye HD-DVD.

I, of course, am upset about this because last year it seemed as if HD-DVD was a sure fire winner. HD-DVD was much easier to produce, there were more duplication facilities available so it would be much easier for film companies produce HD-DVDs for sale. Also it was cheaper. I personally have the HD-DVD player add-on for my XBox 360. Also, before the end, Toshiba was selling players for as low as $100!

Oh well. This time Sony wins. The good news is that for the rest of us (who didn’t jump the gun and invest 100s of dollars in the wrong format) we can now go out and confidently buy blue-ray players and movies without fear of blue-ray being washed away.