Kurt Shintaku's Blog

This is how it all begins. An adventure that will reveal the truth about our galaxy, A path from which a true hero will emerge. Follow the signs to victory.

——————————-

HISTORY CIRCLING
BACK UPON US.

The gears of the Universe spin further
and further apart.
Ever greater grows the gulf between souls,
And distance gives false hope of safety
But for the grim tidings this messenger bears:

The enemy is almost upon us.

Closing in from all sides,
Moving faster than the light
it snuffs with its passage,
Time echoes with the news of destruction.
History winding back upon itself.

Waves of an army march this way in unison, Suffering and corruption are its battle cries.
For I have known this darkness
and felt its embrace once before-
Horror best laid to rest

Yet a Journey must commence.

Look for the signs, the keepers of the flame.
They will lead you to war, and perhaps, to victory.

Why do you care? It enables the sequencing/packaging of Office 2007 and a bunch of other current generation applications.

This includes updates for the SoftGrid Service, the SoftGrid Sequencer, SoftGrid for Terminal Services, and the SoftGrid for Desktops client.

DOWNLOAD:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938497/en-us

A note to aspiring TV show producers…
(From

The 2007 New York Television Festival and Xbox Presents the 2007 "Xbox LIVE Originals" Contest. Create your own original pilot and have a chance at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. One grand prize winner will be awarded a $100,000 deal with Xbox LIVE to create six-episode series based on their winning entry!
The "Xbox LIVE Originals Contest" will invite a wide range of artists and Xbox users to create a 5-15 minute pilot episode introuding an original series. The pilots may be live-aciton, animated, or both. A selection of standout finalists will be featured exclusively on Xbox LIVE Marketplace starting in July. The winner of the contest will not only receive the $100,000 deal to create a six-episode series, but also an exclusive screening event at the 2007 New York Television Festival.

DEADLINE TO ENTER IS JUNE 29th

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE ENTRY FORM

Each submission must be accompanied by a $25 processing fee.

Eligibility

1. Programs created or funded by broadcast networks, cable networks or studios are ineligible to compete in the Xbox LIVE Originals Contest but may be submitted to the NYTVF for consideration as a specialty screening.
2. Entrants must be 18 years of age or older. If under the age of 18, entries must include written parental consent.
3. Entries will be accepted from all countries where Xbox LIVE is currently available. Click here for full list.
4. Foreign language programs must be dubbed into English by entrants.
   For questions about Eligibility, please email xboxsubmissions07@nytvf.com

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE ENTRY FORM

FOR A COMPLETE LIST OF CONTEST GUIDELINES, PLEASE CLICK HERE.
FOR QUESTIONS, PLEASE EMAIL US.

Get it while you can:  The creator, James Clarke’s web site is getting HAMMERED.
http://www.clarkezone.net/

If you have a blog AND you have videos that you like to put on said blog, JetFuel is a Windows Live Writer plug in that enables uploading of videos through free Silverlight Streaming services and publication of that video to your blog. (Unfortunately this won’t work with LiveSpaces because we don’t support Javascript)

JetFuel plugin – for Windows Live Writer:
http://www.clarkezone.net/getattachment.jhci?id=6e3b03af-a340-4c1f-b3e5-165c6925c29d

You can download the free trial of Microsoft Expression Media Encoder from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/products/overview.aspx?key=media

This is a really really cool product folks:  It provides universal encoding and stream quality/bandwidth tweaking, along with editing capabilities to allow you to trim in/out content.

For example:  You can take Quicktime .MOV files and convert them into Windows Media .WMV files so that when you share video files with your friends, they won’t HATE YOU for forcing them to install Quicktime version 93.3 or whatever it is they’re up to and you can trim out the content you don’t want to save space on the file size.

Now let’s say you want to take your video content and easily post your video to your blog.  You can download the free JetFuel plugin for Windows Live Writer which provides a handy wizard which provides automated upload of your video to the free Microsoft Silverlight Streaming service, and then automatically links the video into your blog. 

Why would you want to do this?  Well check this out:

• post near DVD quality video to your blog which is WAY higher than YouTube
• store video for free with virtually no limitation on bandwidth usage

No comment on this except to bring it up as interesting and something to take a look at if you have your own Windows Vista DVD handy.

Some guys in Spain took our Windows Vista Business DVD and put it under a microscope and discovered something unexpected: 
There’s a photograph of 3 people embedded on the holographic disc image.

Lots of photos on the original site:
http://inicia.es/de/kwisatz/index.html#
2878790462939498204

Wanna see something cool related to real estate?

Let’s say you’re interested in buying a house with certain criteria… cost, age, etc.  One of the issues people always have is that they have to search based on a pre-defined geogrpahical zones like "city" or "zipcode" instead of the geographical boundaries they want.  After all, doing a search for a property in the "city of Los Angeles" is asinine, being that the city covers hundreds of miles.

Wel, John L Scott Real Estate now allows you to create your own geographical boundaries to define your own real estate search area… all using the power of Microsoft Virtual Earth!

http://www.johnlscott.com/SearchInteractive.aspx?State=0

The beta of our connector between Outlook 2003/2007 and Windows Live Hotmail (mail.live.com) has been released.  The software synchronizes mail & contacts between the online service and your Outlook client, while keeping your existing Outlook configuration intact.  (Usually this is between Outlook and Exchange, or Outlook and some POP3/IMAP4 service)

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7aad7e6a-931e-438a-950c-5e9ea66322d4&displaylang=en&tm

Basically, your email from Windows Live Hotmail shows up in a completely seperate folder from other email however all the content is synchronized upon bringing up the Outlook client on your laptop making it available offline.  Outbound messages are also queued up and transmitted when a connection to the Internet is established, after having been offline.

NOTE:  It states that you can also purchase a subscription to enable the Outlook Connector Beta to sync your online calendar, tasks, and notes with Outlook. 

Personally, I have no idea what they’re talking about… I assume they’re referring to our older service called Windows Live Hotmail Plus which was a $19/year fee.  It used to be for "extra space" and "extra large attachment sizes"… and at one time it provided POP3 synchronization between your Hotmail account and other clients like Eudora.  Available here:  http://get.live.com/mailplus/features

This is a video about one of our Executive Enterprise customer liasons, Bob McDowell.

http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf
Video: Microsoft’s Bob McDowell talks about Enterprise Computing

I’m blogging about this because Bob says something very important at 3:30: 

The big issues tend not to be about technical.  They tend to be politics, people, bureacracy, turf battles… people issues tend to be the biggest impediments.  Technology is an agent of change and and can have a profound effect on how things are done – often changing the way businesses have been run for decades in the name of optimization.

Have you ever wanted to inspect/export your Outlook auto-complete “dictionary file”?  This is useful if you have a lot of annoying, irrelevant entries that keep popping up in autocomplete, or maybe you have email addresses with domain names in them that you don’t actually have contacts objects for that you need to “retrieve”.

NK2.INFO
There’s a free tool called NK2.INFO that will read your Outlook auto-complete file and let you manage those addresses.  It basically opens up the databases of auto completion dictionary entries and allows you to edit them, delete them, and export them.
DOWNLOAD:  http://www.nk2.info/