I work in the technology field and I haven't heard anyone express any real excitement for the release of Vista. I only know of one guy who has installed Vista on his machine, but in a virtual machine instance. He wasn't brave enough to actually install it as his main operating system.

I’m still on the fence with the Q. I like the form factor, but Windows Mobile Smartphone and the built-in applications are terrible. I should have expected as much from Microsoft. Palm’s software is vastly superior. I don’t know why people were waiting for a Windows Mobile version of the Treo. You can’t even sync Windows Mobile devices to a Mac without buying third party software. Microsoft’s Active Sync is inferior to Apple’s iSync. As far as I can tell, the only thing Active Sync can sync to is Outlook. This makes it impractical to sync my Google Calendar with my Q. There’s a utility out there that lets you sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, but I’ve yet to get it to work properly. Active Sync also does not seem to allow you to choose which Outlook calendar to sync with. I have a work calendar that Active Sync syncs with and I don’t want to put my personal events on that calendar. Basically, Active Sync ties you into Outlook and Outlook is far from the most open and standards compliant software out there. iSync syncs with applications that store their data in open formats (i.e. iCal and Apple’s Address Book).

I made a pretty big reduction in the number of minutes in my calling plan when I switched from T-Mobile to Verizon because Verizon is so much more expensive. Paying for an unlimited data plan doesn’t help matters any. So, I try to be much more cognizant of how many minutes I have left in my plan now. Whereas, before, I didn’t worry about it at all. Winston Huang has created a Firefox extension that shows you how many minutes you have used in your status bar. Now I can tell, at a glance, how many minutes I have used. There’s also a T-Mobile version of the extension for those of you who are on T-Mobile. You should all switch to Verizon so we can talk for free!

Samsung unveiled a new line of ultra-slim phones that best Motorola’s offerings. The thinnest one is only 6.9mm thick.

Backlight Visualizer for iTunes on MacOS X: Makes your keyboard backlight pulse to the beat of the music. Here’s a video demonstration.

Video of a comcast installer falling asleep during an installation while waiting on hold with the Comcast home office. This is just one of many reasons to hate Comcast.

Continuing coverage of reaction to This American Life‘s policy against creating podcasts of the show.

I suppose this is what happens when capitalism runs amuck. You get companies like Microsoft and Walmart that wield all the power, control the market, raise the overall cost to the consumer, deny the consumer choice, retard innovation and just generally piss people off.