If he knew how to use a computer that is. We all love Senator Ted Stevens, especially his views on net neutrality.

Just a heads up. You may see in the screencast that sometimes I would be clicking ‘invisible’ objects on the screen. This is caused by the screen recorder not picking up the drop-down menus in Office 2007. This is only an issue with XP’s rendering engine combined with Camtasia the screen recorder.

Click image to view video (Quicktime H.264 2:05min)

Warning: I am sending an enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. I am not responsible for whatever happens to your own personal internet.

In addition: If you want a proper overview/screencast of Microsoft Office Word 2007, have a look at this video I did in June. Oldie but goodie.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Does VirginBlue even want my business? If so, please don’t blind me. I really want to find out more about your generous fare prices, but my head feels like its going to explode. I don’t know how thousands and thousands of your customers deal with it, but I can’t. And there’s nothing blue about it.

Wouldn’t something like this work a whole lot better?

The last few days has been very exciting. I received an overwhelming amount of response for the speech recognition demo on Vista.

There were over 40,000 pages served on more than 550GB of bandwidth in the first 48 hours. Proudly beating my previous record of 200GB for the original Vista screencasts. Obviously over the next few weeks, thanks to the long-tail phenomenon, that page-view count and bandwidth will continue to grow. My host wants to sends me the bill, but deep down inside, he loves it. 😛

The Digg article currently stands at 1703 diggs. I don’t think it’ll reach 2000, but clearly beat any expectations I had.

I better be careful not to clog any tubes. Otherwise Senator Ted Stevens may not be able to get his internet.

Watch this space on Monday for a chance to win a prize valued at nearly $300.

for all you die-hard Minesweeper players!

Hover over the image, please wait patiently for the hover image to load. Click to view in full-resolution.

Almost like Sokudo Sudoku! I wonder what happens if I pick 4 8 15 16 23 42?

This guy caught me out. I quote, with editorials in italics,

Hey, I found a fairly slick blog (its flattering) claiming to be completely independantly produced by an 18yr old (still 18 today). However, it’s clearly a Microsoft site complete with Apple-bashing (an eye-for-an-eye), a NineMSN commercial (NineMSN sucks), a story title “MSNBC deceived the public: Vista’s speech recognition demo” and MS-critic bashing (so whats why I kept countless MS-bashing comments in my blog), with a few lame attempts to throw people of the the fairly rank scent of the Microsoft Corporation.

Microsofts Faux Blog [istartedsomething.com] (thats me!)

I thought you could do your part and call MS out on this one by leaving a comment to the effect of “We know this is a Microsoft astroturf advertisment that intentionally aims to mislead readers to beleive messages that benefit the corporations agenda (profit!).”

…Or you could just flame be and tell me how redundant this is.

Now that you’ve brought the subject up, I’d love to write the Microsoft Faux Blog. But it sucks that I have to study full-time at Monash University.

In my quest to find out the truth about Aero Diamond, I got the official word from a Microsft manager who worked directly with or overlooked the codename “Diamond” project.

Diamond was the codename for the Media Center functionality in Vista. Aero is the codename/feature name for the 3D desktop. Looks to me like someone jammed them together.

Technically, Aero Diamond did not exist. Aero did, and so did Diamond, but not as Aero Diamond. So what this ATI presentation slide was referring to was only to the Media Centre experience. Someone along the way must have combined the terms Aero and Diamond to describe the UI in Vista’s Media Center, but that mislead many Vista community members.

From that point onwards, people labelled Aero Diamond as an UI experience a tier above Aero Glass and began to speculate what it looked like. Of course, during the few years as a rumour, no one could ever discover what it looked like. This lead some to believe it was Microsoft’s secret theme for Vista, but no one could prove it. And now we now why.

Aero will ship. Diamond will ship. Aero Diamond did not exist and will definetely not ship with Windows Vista.

Update: In a later interview with Tjeerd Hoek, director of user experience for Windows Vista, details of a codename “Aero Diamond” were finally revealed. Whilst this does confirm the existence of an “Aero Diamond”, however it was never intended to ship with Windows Vista and basically describes a set of future UX concepts.