I got a bunch of “Comment: [entry]” emails this morning from .Text, indicating that there’d been comments posted on a some of the old posts (over a year old). Sure enough, lots of comment spam. Thanks, idiots. ‘preciate that.

The CAPTCHA thing seemed to be working well for a while, but ways around that are fairly common now… so I’ve turned off the Comments capability. It’s lame and I didn’t want to, but I’m not about to spend time each day going through the admin interface to delete some moron’s list of porn links.

If nothing else, this will probably hasten my move to Community Server or dasBlog, both of which are sure to have much better comment handling and anti-spam capabilities than this older version of .Text. I like the idea of having a file/picture gallery to go with the blog software, so CS is probably the first one I’ll look at.

Looks like the RTM bits for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 (Dev Edition) are up on MSDN now… time to fire up the downloaders.

We’ve got a number of MSDN Universal subscriptions and its now going to be “decision” time. In some cases, the Developer edition of Team System is fine… in others, Architect make sense. For still others, Test could be useful. I’m inclined to go the “Suite” route so we don’t have to decide at all, but it’s not clear yet to me what that’ll run us and what the process for making that upgrade looks like. We shall see.

But we’ve got a new ASP.NET project starting up so, in the meantime, we can run that version in “Trial Mode”… I’m not sure how it’s limited other than expiring at some point (180 days, I think) and the MSDN download page doesn’t seem to indicate what other constraints there may be.

As long as this new version runs painlessly side by side with VS 2003 for our existing stuff, it should be pretty easy to get this transition started.

My wife and I were out shopping one day and found a few books we were interested in… I surfed around on my phone and found that Overstock.com (not linked, intentionally) had them at a substantial discount. We didn’t need them immediately, Overstock takes PayPal, so we figured ‘what the heck’… we went home and ordered the books from Overstock.

Once again, you get what you pay for.

In this case, the fact that we paid less for the books entitled us to:

• Two of the three books showing up damaged (ripped, fouled with what looked like copier toner, and shabbily re-packaged). No packing slip, invoice, or other order details. Just two destroyed books wrapped in a sheet of cardboard (not to be confused with a box).
• The third book didn’t show up at all.
• We’ve had the runaround from Overstock.com for nearly three weeks.

You’d think that in a business as competitive as online book sales, that a company trying to make a name for itself would want to differentiate themselves on the customer service front. Apparently, not Overstock.com.

On the first phone call, we were told that return labels would be sent for the two damaged books, we were given RMA numbers, and the third book was being re-shipped. Sounds good, so we wait a week.

On the second phone call, we were told that nothing had happened and that apparently the first phone call was “handled incorrectly”. They would now send out return labels, no RMA was needed, and they had to refund us for the third book. Wait a week.

On the third (most recent phone call), we’re told that both of the previous phone calls were handled incorrectly. This time, we were sent printable return labels immediately for the two damaged books. On the third book, we’re now told that we have to wait for a “tracer” so they can see if the book is in a warehouse somewhere.

Asked for a supervisor… “none are available”. Asked for an address for customer service issues “I don’t have that, check our website”.

Later, we get seven (7!) more email messages with return labels… including a label for the book that never arrived.

It’s been three phone calls, handled by three people, so let’s check our math… two out of three customer service reps at Overstock.com are apparently unqualified for their jobs, while the third is merely ineffective. At this point, I’m not holding my breath that the refund will be processed correctly when the damaged books arrive at their warehouse, nor that anything will come of this “tracer” without us having to follow-up yet again.

I wish I could say that there’s a happy ending to this story… but for now, we’re out over $50 with Overstock.com and there’s no sign of this being resolved soon. That’ll teach us not to use Amazon, huh?

So with Overstock.com, not only do you get to “pay up to 80% less every day” (their slogan), you also get roughly 80% less satisfaction and customer service. Actually, back on the math front, it's more like 100% less satisfaction or customer service -- we have neither our money nor a single usable book. Avoid this place at all costs.

Update: Disappointing that it took a public web log posting to make it happen, but Overstock.com came through for us today. This post made its way to the right people and they processed our refund right away. Thanks go out to Dawn, from Overstock’s Office of the CEO, for handling the issue so quickly and and completely once it came to her. Whew!

As mentioned, I figured I’d start a category for Poker on the blog. It’s become more of a hobby lately and the craze seems to show no sign of slowing. Like lots of people, I got sucked in a year or so ago with the ESPN coverage of the World Series of Poker. Since then, I’ve hooked up season passes for both the WSOP and the World Poker Tour… and while I like Phil Gordon, I don’t need to see celebrities play like idiots on television.

Over the last year, I’ve started playing with co-workers and friends and also tried my hand at some (cheap) online games (try finding a $.15–$.25 game in a casino)… but I’ve yet to play in a live casino card room.

That all changes next month.

In any case, I figured I’d point out some of the resources I’ve been using to learn the game… The obligatory book list includes Harrington on Hold’Em, Small Stakes Hold’Em, Winning Low Limit Hold’Em. The first book I read was Phil Gordon’s Real Deal, which is a nice gentle introduction to the game, the history, the concept of pot odds, and so on.

I’ve also been a huge fan of the Lord Admiral Card Club podcast since the beginning of this year. Cincinnati Sean does an awesome job of putting it together and it’s the first podcast I play when I start my commute on Monday mornings. There are others out there, and some are really bad, but for my money this one is the top dog for poker podcasts. The only other one I’ve been listening to with any regularity is the Ante Up Podcast, which started up a few months back. It’s a little more focused on beginners and live games than it is on the “world of poker,” but they do a good job.

That about covers the basics… if we end up at the same table, be gentle.

Like a lot of people these days, I’ve been hooked into the poker craze. Watching it on television, reading books about it, and playing occasionally with friends and co-workers. I’m too cheap to play for any “real” sums of money, but that makes online poker more attractive… lots of cheap tables, making it very inexpensive to learn the game’s finer points.

In reading some poker blogs, I learned from Las Vegas Vegas about the PokerStars free tournament for bloggers. I hadn’t played there previously, so this will be a nice introduction. The section below identifies my registration and eligibility. 

I have registered to play in the
Online Poker Blogger Championship!

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 1375512

 That gets me thinking… might be time for a new category on the blog.

Just in time… my current keyboard in the office (an MS Natural Keyboard Pro ergonomic ) is just starting to get flakey. I think it’s time to move up to the new Natural Ergonomic 4000. I really like the idea of a zoom slider, especially if it works well with Photoshop.

What I can’t tell is if it’s possible to reconfigure that slider to be used for scrolling in certain applications. That would be a killer feature… I sent a suggestion in to the old “mswish@microsoft.com” alias years ago when mouse wheels first started appearing… the empty space between the two keyboard halves on the Natural series is ideal for a scroll wheel/slider. I saw it appear on the side of a Logitech keyboard a couple years ago, but couldn’t bring myself to switch. Anyway, for apps like Visual Studio and Word, scrolling functionality would be great.

I first tried the Natural keyboard (the one prior to the Elite with its goofy layout) in 1995 and, after a week of use, I was hooked. I also use the Trackball Explorer and (knock wood) have never had any type of wrist pain or discomfort. Using both products deters the casual office visitor from driving your machine, but it also makes it frustrating to use someone else’s machine with a standard keyboard/mouse.

Jeff Atwood put together a VS.NET macro that spills out all your VS.NET keyboard shortcuts as an HTML document. Very slick and the rendered “key caps” are a nice touch.

I put a shortcut to the doc it produced on my Firefox toolbar… combined with Firefox’s “Find As You Type” feature, it’s a very fast way to look up that one keyboard shortcut you can never seem to remember (Run To Cursor for me). Jeff also has a great (older) post on the whole “speed == keyboard” view that many developers (myself included) share.

The more shortcuts, the better!

I got this phone just about a month ago on my Verizon account and have been using it pretty heavily… in brief, I am in love with this phone. Slide-away keyboard, a decent amount of memory, nice bright screen, built-in Wifi, built-in Bluetooth, built-in EV-DO, and SD card expandability.

Some thoughts:

1. Samsung includes an extra “extended life” battery, which is good… if you use it a lot, you’ll see the battery drop off fairly quickly. I park it in the charger each night, though, and have yet to have a day where the standard battery (slightly smaller) didn’t make it through just fine. Then again, I’m not someone who’s on the cell phone for more than an hour or so a day. In addition to the extra battery, there’s the cradle, cables, belt holster, a CD-ROM with the Windows Mobile OS, and stereo earbuds that double as a microphone headset.

2. One irritant I’ve found is that the charging cradle has two cables — one for AC and the other for sync’ing via USB. The phone itself, however, will only take the AC cable directly. So you have to have it in the cradle if you want to sync. Not a big deal, you say, but I prefer to have the cradle on my nightstand and let it charge over night… during the day, the phone should be syncing with my machine in the office. To get around this, I picked up one of these for my desk at work and one of these for my laptop bag. Both work great for syncing, but they also charge the phone via USB power — makes battery life pretty much a non-issue for me.

3. It’s running Windows Mobile 2003 SE and I’m hopeful that a Windows Mobile 5 upgrade will be available at some point. No word yet that I know of.

4. I haven’t yet built any apps for it, but I have started to read more articles on the .NET CF… now I just need to come up with some cool ideas to build on. I’m thinking of a “Soccer Coach Assistant” to keep track of players, rosters, track goals/assists during games, etc. If the UI is done well (meaning minimal taps for in-game tracking), it could be a great way to keep statistics for a season (something young players love to hear at the year-end party). Plus, it would get me some exposure to SQL CE, which I know nothing about. Or maybe I’ll build something poker-related, I don’t know… any ideas?

5. The included apps are great… VoiceSignal is a voice-command application that seems to work very well. “Call Home” and it does “Open Excel” and it does, etc. There’s “Launcher” which is a configurable app for one-handed launching of various apps. I also like Picsel Browser, which is a web and document browser that’s very slick… it zooms in and out, pans around, and allows for lots of cool navigation options. It reads Excel docs, Word docs, PDF, images, etc, but I also prefer it over Pocket IE for general surfing. There is also a There’s all the usual Pocket PC apps, including light versions of Word, Excel, Outlook messaging, etc.

6. Combined with Verizon’s EV-DO high-speed service, it’s amazing for on-the-go connectivity. I’m regularly getting 600kpbs or better for downloads. The EV-DO isn’t available everywhere, but the Denver/Boulder area was turned up a few weeks ago and I’ve been lovin’ it. I can stream video into the mobile Windows Media Player and get great, fluid video images. If you’re gonna go with a device like this, I think you pretty much have to get the “Unlimited Data” plan… I did and don’t regret it a bit.

7. The form factor is perfect for me. It may be on the large-ish side for some, but it compares well with the Palm Treo. I like that I get a nice, large (for a phone) screen and then can slide the keyboard open/shut as needed. The keyboard keys take some getting use to because of their size and proximity, but they stick up nicely from the device and have a solid “click” to them.

8. The built-in wifi has been great, though I’m thinking of adding a 3rd party app to manage the wifi. The built in handling for scanning, connecting, and authenticating is just a little unwieldy. Handango has a number of apps that seem to manage wifi connectivity for PPC devices, so I’ll give those a try.

9. No chance to use the built-in Bluetooth yet, though I may have to grab a wireless headset one of these days.

10. I stuck a 1GB SD card in the side and have been installing apps to that (to save space in the built-in RAM)… I’ve also downloaded some WMV video files to watch when I’ve got dead time. There are some “DVD to PocketPC” apps out there that can apparently fit a feature film into 128MB of space, which could be pretty cool. For now, it’s been things like some Channel9 videos and some of the .NET 2.0 GrokTalks.

Finally, Verizon’s service has been awesome. I’ve been with them for about five years now… back in 2002, I got screwed when I moved my account from a company name into my personal name. Nothing changed but the account name, but the way they did it made it appear as a new account — meaning I lost all my existing customer benefits like cheap phone upgrades, etc. Try as I might, nobody could fix it for me. Given that and their previously-crappy selection of PDA style phones, I was pretty sure I’d be jumping ship and heading to T-Mobile or Cingular.

So I checked out this phone when it first came out and really was impressed… I called Verizon customer service a number of times beforehand, with questions about upgrade pricing, various data plans, EV-DO capabilities, family-share minutes (for my wife’s phone), and so on. Without exception, the people I spoke with were friendly, knowledgeable, and very helpful. Obviously, something’s changed over there… so their improved customer service and improved selection of higher-end phones did it for me.

I love this thing.

… you’re going to get better about blogging regularly, you lose it altogether. My “Things To Blog” bookmark folder is overflowing, things are settling down with the new arrival, so let’s try this again…

Oh yeah… and the “I just saw something cool, but can’t tell you about it” blog posts are multiplying in the run-up to PDC. Please let it just be over so the breathless anticipation can end, the hype can die down, and the pragmatists among us can just look at what’s new.

Larry Osterman (long time MS Employee) has a good post today about how peopls within MS have started "nounifying" the word "ask". Like Larry, I think it sounds pretty silly but it got me thinking about a similar pet peeve I’ve got.

Verbifying the word “architect”. You see this a lot on technical blogs, with usage along the lines of “the last system I architected had…” or “we’re currently architecting a distributed widgetizer…”. What’s wrong with the word “design”? Do you think Frank Lloyd Wright ever said to anyone “I had a great time architecting the Guggenheim… ”? Did I.M. Pei ever tell anyone “I architected the crap out of the Javits…”? No — they were designers. Architects design and engineers build. It’s been that way since the dawn of the t-square.

I’m pretty sure I’ve got some others along these lines, but I’ll need another meeting to jog my memory.