Dear Doug, (John’s boss)

Please stop keeping John out until 3am. If you were more handsome I would worry. I’m not saying you aren’t handsome. I’m saying Dominic has seen his Dad once since Thursday.
Love,
Caitlin

Holy crap if I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow I would be playing with Vista all night tonight.

It installs in about 2.5 hours on my old Barton 2500+ machine.  But with a nice graphics card still in here i definitely am loving this Aero experience.

Otherwise, I’ve already actually seen Vista for a while now but haven’t had the chance to drive it very much.  I’m very very impressed from the network administrator’s perspective, especially with the release of Exchange 2k7 and Office 2k7 at the same time.  I’m drooling over Exchange 2k7.

Tyler is a windows hater so I’ll post some of the great highlights here that most M$ haters will fail to mention:

1. Readyboost - simply add a thumbdrive to your computer (say it’s a 2GB jumpdrive) and you automatically have added 2GB of RAM to your computer.

2. Experience Rating - gives a scale from 1.0 to 5.0 that will analyze your computer to give you a rating of performance your computer will experience with computers. This will give manufacturers of computers to ability to list this raiting when selling a computer in the future, and puts more power in the buyer.

3. Command line function security - you can set security permissions for command line functions

4. Pen & input devices - now your stylus or pen or whatever will auto-load if you are using a tablet PC or writeable monitor or touchscreen. Nothing else required.

5. Bitlocker - drive encryption that can encrypt the entire drive (remember this feature is built in and it’s not 3rd party software) that requires you to have a TBM key or USB drive in order for you to unlock the computer. Example where it’s good? Your computer is stolen and it is completely useless unless they have the TBM key or a usb drive.

6. Defrag - now runs automatically and intuitively when it detects that it needs to, and only when disk use is low, making disk life last longer.

7. Reliability monitor - graphs events and event ID’s in a graph format with a line graph showing performace and most importantly, reliability.

8. Network & Sharing - now there is a “visio” view of sorts that shows all network topology and allows you to create connections with other computers on your network and view their shares. No more UNC pathnames if you don’t want to use them, because this gives you a nice pretty picture.

And probably the most scary of all,

9.  Parental Controls - not only can you log your childs email, passwords, web traffic and IM conversation, but now you can also lock them out of the computer at specified times (which was available in a business environment before via Group Policy) and even specifiy which games they can play according to rating.  It’s kinda like a keylogging VChip for a computer.  Scary.

I learned all of this last weekend while I was in Phoenix, AZ on a business conference with my company.  It was cool to finally see the end product and not just the R2 release.

Screenshots to come of the cool features.

—————————————————

Ok in other news, I took a trip to 60 person business conference for my company last Thur-Sun to Phoenix, AZ with my boss.  All of my presentations went really well on this huge project we’ve been undertaking at the corporate office and everyone at the conference seemed pretty impressed.  It was very odd standing in front of all those people, most twice my age, and instructing them on a technical level.  It just put more faith in me that I’m in the right field when it comes to my career. 

There were vendors galore and they treated my boss and I to quite the freebies while there, including a night out on the town and dinner at the nicest steak place in Phoenix, where we had $34 prime rib… not to mention… well… let’s put it this way….

Nick, I joined the mountain oyster club on a business trip like you.

Each Tuesday we have Wind Symphony rehearsal and since we moved we had to find a babysitter. At first we had no idea where to start, but I asked one of the women in the horn section and now I carpool with her and her daughter watches Dominic. She seemed like a pretty normal sitter at first, she played with him, fed him, and changed him. She even got him to go to bed earlier than he does for us (how?!?). But she wasn’t set apart from all other babysitters on earth until tonight. Tonight she left us a note, and this note gave her the title of Coolest Babysitter EVER. Preston always had a weakness for black eyeliner.

Guess who turns 6 months old today!

My little sister Kelsey is on the Johnson City Basketball team that they mentioned in this article.

When I visited I went to a few of her games and found the cheerleaders really annoying. Title IX and all that comes with it aside, I am not a fan of cheerleaders.