Life Stream

Planted my first tree at the new house. Lots more to do.

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 07:13 GMT

Planted my first tree at the new house. Lots more to do.

Male Boo; this video makes me laugh.

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 07:00 GMT

Male Boo; this video makes me laugh.

Flying home from Las Vegas.

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:17 GMT

Flying home from Las Vegas.

DC COMICS IN 2012 – SUPERMAN: EARTH ONE – VOLUME TWO

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:53 GMT

DC COMICS IN 2012 – SUPERMAN: EARTH ONE – VOLUME TWO

DC COMICS IN 2012 – BATMAN: EARTH ONE

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:41 GMT

DC COMICS IN 2012 – BATMAN: EARTH ONE

STAR WARS™: The Old Republic™ - Times Square Freeze Mob...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:51 GMT

STAR WARS™: The Old Republic™ - Times Square Freeze Mob 12.20.11

Orphan Android: Top Vulnerable Smartphones 2011

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:05 GMT

Orphan Android: Top Vulnerable Smartphones 2011

“I could never get a Samsung. I’m creative.”

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 02:57 GMT

“I could never get a Samsung. I’m creative.”

NEW DC ENTERTAINMENT STOREFRONT LAUNCHES ON AMAZON.COM

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:12 GMT

NEW DC ENTERTAINMENT STOREFRONT LAUNCHES ON AMAZON.COM

Microsoft, Apple part of consortium that wins Nortel patent bid

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:23 GMT

Microsoft, as reported earlier this week, was, indeed, part of a consortium bidding for 6,000 or so Nortel telecommunications patents being auctioned as part of Nortel’s bankruptcy process. And that group ended outbidding Google for them.

“Join The Party”

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:20 GMT

If you’ve already been to our main website today, you noticed our new page devoted to The New 52. Starting with the “Superman” family and going all the way through the “Young Justice” group, the page is a quick and easy visual guide to the 52 titles we will be publishing this fall beginning with [...]

Official Foursquare app is back, hits v2.0

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:11 GMT

First is was Facebook hitting v2.0 and now the official Foursquare is back (after being pulled). Now with a new look and complete overhaul, the app has a vibrant, more Metro feel to it including nicer graphics. New features included check in history (by date), tips, to-dos, shout button, most explored, recommend places and probably more (we're still figuring it out).

Over all the app is a solid effort by Foursquare, but we're still giving 4th & Mayor (which is hitting 2.1 today) the edge here for speed. Sound off in comments with your thoughts and observations.

Update: And yes, indeed there is a Live Tile. It shows the current rankings of you and your friends, giving a nice extra bonus to the app.

Grab it here in the Marketplace. (Thanks, Tahiti Bob, for the tip!)

DC Comics official app now in the Marketplace

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 08:06 GMT

It just won't end, will it? Yes folks, DC Comics now also has an official app for Windows Phone and it looks pretty awesome to these eyes:

"DC Comics is the biggest and best North American comics publisher, featuring a wide variety of characters and genres. Renowned for the World's Greatest Super Heroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash and many many more. DC has thrilled readers with fantastic tales from the DC UNIVERSE in dozens of languages around the world for decades.

Publishing more than 80 comic format titles monthly and over 1,000 comic books and graphic novels annually, DC also presents different flavors of graphic storytelling through its diverse imprints."

We're sure there's a few comic readers our there who will be exceptionally pleased with this app, which is of course free. Most comics are $1.99 and even have an option to buy in print right from the app. Sounds good? It's live here in the Marketplace. Go, go go! (Thanks, Larry B.!)

Apple vs. the world: App Store showdown looms

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:06 GMT

Big changes are coming to Apple's App Store on Thursday -- and they could mean big trouble for e-book sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Microsoft Security Essentials upgraded

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:14 GMT

A new version of Microsoft Security Essentials is available, upgrading the Security Essentials version from 2.0.657.0 to 2.1.1116.0, and the Antimalware Client version from 3.0.8107.0 to 3.0.8402.0.

We weren’t able to access the upgrade directly from MSE yet, but you can download and upgrade by visiting the Security Essentials site, which itself has undergone a bit of an upgrade:

(we love the tagline, btw!)

If you’re not using Microsoft Security Essentials, and are looking for a simple, cheap (as in free) and yes, “anti-annoying” antimalware program, we highly recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. Once installed, you hardly know it’s there, and the same antivirus and antispyware definitions are used to power both MSE and Microsoft’s enterprise level AV offerings, Forefront Client Security, Forefront Endpoint Protection, and Windows Intune Endpoint protection.

(via Windows Valley)

Sikeston police department breaks ground on new headquarters

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:15 GMT

SIKESTON, Mo. -- After years of discussion and budget planning, the city of Sikeston and Department of Public Safety broke ground Monday for a brand-new facility, to be built at South Kingshighway...

Star Wars Books Going Digital Today!

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:30 GMT

As previously announced, starting today you can purchase Random House's complete catalog of Star Wars novels in digital format.

BioWare 'figuring out the right way' to continue Mass Effect after ME3

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:00 GMT

Speaking with business giant Forbes, BioWare founders/doctors Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka spoke on the possibility of life after Mass Effect 3, saying that ME3's universe of diverse alien races and planets has struck a chord with the series' audience. While their priorities and resources are currently focused on "nailing it" with ME3, the doctors maintain that possibilities in the future are wide open.

"We do have a desire to continue the Mass Effect franchise," said Muzyka, "and we're working on the details, figuring out what the fans want, figuring out the right way." Given the amount of codex text the series has generated over the years, we don't doubt that there are still stories left to tell in the ME universe.

BioWare 'figuring out the right way' to continue Mass Effect after ME3 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Introducing SkyDrive for the modern web, built using HTML5

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:11 GMT

We’re committed to making SkyDrive the best place to get access to your content from anywhere, collaborate on Office docs, and share photos. Mike recently talked about how we’re delivering access to your information seamlessly across devices – starting with Windows Phone.

But a key part to delivering on our goals is having a great web experience that works across platforms. While over 100 million people have tried SkyDrive on the web, we know that there’s a lot more we can do to improve the experience. So starting today, we are launching a new version of the SkyDrive website. We took advantage of modern browsers and HTML5 to make SkyDrive faster, easier to navigate, and more beautiful for viewing photos. The new SkyDrive will be rolling out soon, so check back if you don’t see it right away.

Here is a short video I’ve put together to give you an overview of the new SkyDrive.

An overview of the new SkyDrive.

Faster

Browser modernization has really opened up the window for us to rethink and re-architect how we build our websites. Whether it’s Hotmail or SkyDrive, taking advantage of the advancements in the browser space is critical to ensuring a fast and fluid experience. While we have always focused on improving the performance of our websites, it was clear that we had reached a point where the kinds of performance gains we were hoping for would not come without an assessment of our entire experience from the ground up. SkyDrive has been around since 2007 and was simply not built for the modern web.

We focused our performance investments in the following areas:

We improved many core tasks and scenarios. For example, clicking folders and navigating photo albums will go from 6-9 seconds down to 100-300 milliseconds, and we took advantage of hardware accelerated graphics to make it fast to click through photo slideshows. We’ll address additional core tasks in the future.
We focused on building a site powered by HTML5 so that we could include advancements like HTML5 Video, CSS3, and client rendered experiences, as well as making sure our slide show experience was great in all browsers without any special software.
We evaluated and removed anything that slowed the experience down or got in the way of a fast, clean site.
With Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7, you can pin SkyDrive to your taskbar for faster access to your files. You can create Word, Excel, or PowerPoint docs stored in the cloud in just one click.

Easier to navigate

SkyDrive has always provided access to your files on many desktop and mobile browsers. However, we’ve received a lot of feedback that it was hard to navigate with several entry points to your files (skydrive.live.com, office.live.com and photos.live.com) and with views that did not make it clear as to what was your stuff and what was shared with you. We’ve taken a fresh approach to solving this problem by providing a single place to see your photos, docs, files shared with you, and files in SkyDrive groups.

One principle in designing the new site is that SkyDrive should be focused on putting your content front and center. The old SkyDrive had a summary of your recent stuff, things shared with you, and activity in your social feed. We heard from many of you that this was confusing and it required too many clicks to get to a document or album. We also looked at the current advertising placement on SkyDrive and decided that this didn’t make sense in this experience. We removed ads to create room for a pane of info about your files, so you can do things like open a doc in Word or Excel on the desktop, directly from SkyDrive.

For many of you, this view will seem familiar because we decided to make the navigational elements and layout consistent with Windows. This has a couple of benefits: 1) Our 1 billion Windows customers will find the site to be familiar and easy to use, and 2) SkyDrive now fills the page, which really showcases your content using as much of the screen as you allow. This means that getting to your stuff will be more predictable and consistent with how you already work.

If you’re wondering what happened to things like your recent docs and your social feed, don’t worry; they’re still here. You can always get to your recent documents under the Quick views entry or by clicking SkyDrive in the header. You can get to your social updates by going to http://live.com and using the photos and documents filter to get the specific items you’re looking for.

For those of you who are using Internet Explorer 9, we’ve also provided a fast way to get to SkyDrive from your Windows Taskbar using Pinned Sites and Jump Lists. In doing so, you have even faster access to your SkyDrive and quick access to common tasks like creating Office documents.

But we’re not done, and we’re continuing to make SkyDrive even better. Since we take an iterative approach to building software, not all of SkyDrive has been redesigned at this time. There are parts of the experience like creating a new album, uploading, renaming files, sharing, and editing permissions that are also scheduled to get a makeover soon.

More beautiful and fluid for photos

One important area of focus for SkyDrive was on making your photos shine. For many of us, our photos represent our most cherished memories, and they deserve an immersive, fast experience that gets the browser out of the way and lets the photos speak for themselves. When you view your photos in SkyDrive, you get a clean, rich view that fills the browser.

When you select an album, the new mosaic layout displays your pictures in a way that lets you see all your photos in their original aspect ratio. We create thumbnails that reflect the way you took the picture, whether it be a portrait, a landscape, or a panorama shot.

Regardless of what screen you have, how big your browser window is, or how many photos you have, SkyDrive always arranges your photos in a clean layout that preserves the original aspect ratio. To do this, we use CSS3 Transitions, a new standard that lets us use subtle animations to rearrange the thumbnails when you resize the browser window. There are early levels of support already in Firefox 4+, Chrome X+, and in IE 10+.

With infinite scrolling, we’ve eliminated pages in the photo viewing experience. Now, you can just scroll the page and see your photos quickly fill in. It looks and feels like a native application.

To see the new photo album experience, just click a photo. The experience puts you in control of what you’re looking at and gets out of your way.

The album viewer is built using HTML5 and supports a variety of browsers. If your browser supports accelerated graphics, like Internet Explorer 9, you’ll notice things are fast and fluid. We also take advantage of the HTML5 video tag to support playback of H.264 videos (up to 100 MB), which is also new for this release.

Additionally, these features all work in your SkyDrive groups as well. So if you have created a group for your family, soccer league, or any other group, you have the same lightning fast, beautiful experience interacting with your shared photos and documents. And we’ve brought things like one click access to your group mailing list right in SkyDrive.

More to come…

The SkyDrive team hopes you enjoy these improvements. This release represents the beginning of a lot of things we’re excited to bring you, and we’re looking forward to shedding more light on those features as they take shape.

Omar Shahine

Group Program Manager, SkyDrive.com

First "Man of Steel" Image Hits Internet

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:39 GMT

Though filming on Warner Bros. "Man of Steel" has yet to officially begin, a photo of Henry Cavill and Amy Adams as Clark Kent and Lois Lane in Zack Snyder's Superman reboot has begun to circulate online.